“How old is the boyfriend?” I asked.
“Twenty-five or so,” Marvin said. “I don’t know exactly. Old enough to be a better person than he is. Old enough for me to kill him and drop his body in a hole somewhere.”
“So you beat him with your cane, and now you want… what?” I said. “Sounds like to me you took care of the problem, gave him an attitude adjustment. Did you leave the old cane up his ass and you want us to fetch it?”
“Deal is,” Marvin said, “he didn’t like it much, that beating, and he has friends he can go to. And my leg, it’s just getting good, but it’s not that good. I can whip one ass easy enough, but multiple asses, not so sure. And I’m only up for one ass at a time, maybe once a week during certain hours after lunch and well before sunset when the stars are aligned just right… I was lucky I caught him alone, without his posse.”
“Call me foolish,” I said, “but since you used to be a cop, did it occur to you that you might want to call the law and maybe have them go over there and do the domestic violence thing?”
“Therein lays the Shakespearean rub,” Marvin said.
“That sounds like something I’d like on my middle leg,” Leonard said.
“You see, my granddaughter, Julia, we call her Gadget, this guy she’s with, he’s kind of a drug dealer.”
“Kind of?” I asked.
“Okay,” Marvin said. “Absolutely he is. And if the law gets involved, well, she could get involved.”
“I’m not loving this at all, Leonard.”
“I was being facetious.”
I turned to Marvin. Fearing I already knew the answer, I asked, “Why would she get involved if the law got involved?”
“Because she is selling grass out of their trailer, and they, as I said, are drug dealers. As for the law, they are in the drug dealer’s pocket, in there with the lint and the pocket change. So it could really turn out bad.”
“I probably should know this already,” I said, “but what about Gadget’s father? Maybe he can do something.”
Marvin shook his head. “No reason you should know. I don’t make a point of talking about him much. He ran off when she was a fetus, and now her mother is at her wits’ end.”
“So what you need from us is…?” I asked.
“I need someone to do some serious ass whipping, and bring her home. If you can get by without the ass whipping and just bring her home, that’ll do. But I’d like to think there will be an ass whipping. Not meaning her ass, of course.”
“What if she doesn’t want to come home?”
“I think she will. I think she would have the other day, but at the last minute she didn’t. I’m not up to snuff. I burned myself out and didn’t have any energy left, so I had to let her go. There wasn’t anything I could do. I bluffed my way out to the car and got out of there. But you two, you can do it. You can bring her home.”
I studied on this a moment, looked at Leonard. He gave me a small nod. I said, “We’ll do it, but she doesn’t want to come home, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the case, we bring her back, she’ll just run off again.”
“I understand that,” Marvin said. “But I saw something in her eyes before she got pulled away. She wanted to come home. I’m not sure she knows it outright, but I could tell.”
“I don’t trust things you see in people’s eyes,” I said. “You might be seeing your own reflection.”
“Me neither,” Leonard said, “but I’d sure like to whip that guy’s ass. We could make it a weekly tradition.”
“You mentioned that he has a posse,” I said.
“He does. My catching him alone … I understand that’s rare.”
“How many?”
“From my sources, I hear four, sometimes less, sometimes more. But generally, four. They stay in a trailer out in the woods. That’s where I caught him. I wasn’t using my head. Had they been there with him, my picture would probably be on a milk carton, people out beating the bushes, digging up anything looked like a grave. I don’t think they’re all that rough-and-tumble, but I don’t want you to think they can’t be dangerous they catch you just right.”
“Who are your sources, far as the size of his posse goes?”
“Formerly bad people gone straight. Or so they say. They may still be bad people. But I trust them on their head count.”
“Four is a lot,” I said.
“Hey,” Marvin said, “you two against a trailer full of scum, that’s not fair to the scum.”
“Don’t blow me, Marvin,” I said.
“I wouldn’t think of it. But you show up in that robe and bunny slippers, you’re bound to have them licked. They’ll laugh themselves to death.”
“You’re kind of nasty for a man wanting a favor,” I said.
Marvin grinned at me, then his face let loose of the smile and his eyes narrowed. “Look. I need your help. I’m asking … Hell, I’m begging a little, just not so that you can tell, all right?”
“This guy, what’s his name?”
