“It’s all right. It won’t change him and it won’t change her.” She smiled at me and drove away.
I went upstairs and took off my clothes and closed the blinds and put on my pajamas and got in bed. It was early afternoon and still bright out. But not with the blinds drawn. I lay back on my pillow and pulled her pillow to me. It smelled like she smelled and I liked it.
51
When my cell phone rang, I woke up and didn’t know where I was for a moment. I rolled out of bed and pulled it out of my coat pocket and flipped it open.
It was Cason.
“You and Leonard ought to get together with me and Mercury,” he said.
“Got somethin’?”
“Yeah. Leonard with you?”
“No. But I can hustle him up.”
“When can we get together?” Cason said.
“I don’t know. I’ll call him, we’ll call you, and we’ll get together.”
“Tell Leonard not to wear the hat.”
We showed up at Cason’s apartment, way he said. Mercury was there with him. Leonard didn’t wear the hat.
As we went inside I gave the place a once-over. It was sort of thrown together with home-made bookshelves and an old couch and a coffee table that looked as if it had been salvaged from the dump. It had so many glass and cup stains on it, it almost looked designed.
I could see the kitchen from the middle of the room, and the sink was full of dishes. Through an open doorway I could see an unmade bed and clothes on the floor. It reminded me of every place either I or Leonard had lived until Brett and I got the house. As much as was possible, she had civilized me.
Mercury had a laptop with him and he placed it on the coffee table, and we all found a place to sit. Cason asked if we wanted beer. Leonard took one; so did Mercury and Cason himself. I passed.
Mercury turned on the laptop, said, “You don’t need to see this ’less you want to. I can read off my notes and tell you what I got.” We agreed this was fine.
“Kincaid’s daughter died of an overdose,” Mercury said. “That much you know. But she died in Oregon. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Guys that got killed and had the devil head painted at the site were all drug dealers. You startin’ to see a pattern here?”
“Kincaid’s daughter died of a drug overdose, and the drug dealers she dealt with are the ones found dead with the devil heads,” I said.
Mercury nodded. “And his son is killed by crazies, and the crazies die. I think the one in jail, Gonzello a.k.a. Godzilla, was the subject of a hit, but she was tougher than the hit. But when she gave the knife back, thinking she was immortal, well, she messed up. And the train accident. Who knows? Maybe that was some kind of rig too. The Christopher boy… Wrong place, wrong time. Probably caught and killed him and Mini somewhere else, tried to make it look like rape and robbery. However, they just couldn’t resist leaving their mark. Right there in the open, thinking no one would see the connection. But they would know, and it would please them. That’s what conspiracy theorists like myself call a pattern. A pattern of deaths, a pattern of markings-a signature, if you will.”
“So it all does go back to Kincaid?” I said. “He wanted revenge, so he hired Devil Red to do the deed, but Devil Red couldn’t resist leaving his mark. I guess someone killed my son and daughter, I’d feel pretty vengeful.”
“Thing is,” Cason said, “Devil Red seems to put a lot of people to sleep, all over the country. They can’t all be people who’ve done something to the Kincaids. What Mrs. Christopher wants is whoever killed her son. She wants Devil Red, and I’m sure, if possible, she wants whoever arranged it, so the Kincaids aren’t off the hook, no matter what.”
52
When we arrived at my place, we were hungry. I decided on chili.
I got a wide and deep cast-iron frying pan out from under the cabinet and put hamburger meat in it. As it fried, I black peppered it.
Leonard cut up half an onion and a jalapeno, scraped that off the cutting board into the meat. I stirred it while he got the chili powder out of the cabinet and shook some of that in.
I let it cook for a while, and we got soft drinks and sat at the table and smelled the chili cooking.
“So, what do you think?” Leonard said.
“I think Mercury is probably right,” I said. “It’s all connected, and the thing now is, how do we get enough evidence to nail Devil Red, and find a way not to nail Kincaid and Ms. Clinton.”
“I’m not sure I care as much about them as you do,” Leonard said. “There’s something about this whole thing still bothers me. It’s like an animal called Not Quite Right crawled up my ass and is wiggling around.”
“I thought you enjoyed that kind of thing.”
“Wrong kind of animal.”
“All right. How about we try to find evidence to nail Devil Red, not make an effort to stick our vengeful couple, but if things shake out that way, and we can’t keep it from happening, we let it. Him in that chair, and she his former wife, they might get off with something light.”
“She might not have anything to do with it,” Leonard said.
“Oh, she did somethin’, all right. She’s still in love with him. That much was easy to tell. And if anyone knows his business, it’s her.”
“He dumped her, and she’s still moonin’ over him like a preteen,” Leonard said. “I don’t get it.”
“I think love is hard to explain, brother.”
“Yeah. Well, I think it’s made up.”
“You do? What about John?”
“I think I was attracted to him, and him to me, and we had certain things in common, both being queer was right up there, and-”
“He made you laugh, right? That’s what everyone always says.”
“You and Brett make each other laugh. Me and John, not so much. But I think our basic attraction created love. I think love is real, but I think it’s created, kind of like a smoothie.”
“You are such a romantic.”
“No. No I’m not,” Leonard said.
The chili cooked for a long time, and we were starved when it was ready. We ate quickly, devouring huge bowls of it with crackers, and then we did seconds. Between it all, we made some general plans about going back to Houston to shake Kincaid’s and Clinton’s tree some, see we could get them to make a mistake, wiggle something out of the woodwork. It wasn’t a plan up there with Patton, but it was a plan. We had plenty of clues now, plenty of circumstantial evidence. Thing to do was to see if our knowing what we knew made them nervous.
And then the worm turned.
53
Leonard had a lot of his stuff at my place, so we decided he could easily pack and go from there. Some of his
