“Girlfriend or client?” he asked.
“Both,” Julie said.
“Okay,” he said, and looked at me. Maybe it was the look on my face. I don’t know. “You want to talk, don’t you?”
“You have the time?”
“Sure.”
Hank preferred his own kitchen to a restaurant; one of the little quirks I’ve never understood about him. Go figure. It was getting up toward lunch and a quick poll from Hank showed three hungry people.
We ended up following Hank the thirty miles back to his home in Killeen. Every now and again Hank would attempt to sink his foot through the floorboard of his ’69 Ford Fairlane, and shoot ahead of us by a mile or more, then he’d slow down and let me catch up.
The land rolled by, the sun beat down relentlessly in the Texas spring, that spring like all others that I could ever remember. A spring, a week, a day of pure hell and beauty. I suppose that when I was a kid, I must have held a fervent wish that my life would go just the way it was going now, and to that kid, if he were watching, all this must seem about perfect.
CHAPTER FOUR
I parked my Mercedes across the street and Julie and I walked across a front lawn that was a couple of weeks overdue for mowing. The weeds slapped at our ankles and shins. By and large the whole place was pretty much as I remembered it.
The front porch was rickety, the paint peeling back in places, and there was a front porch swing that had the various parts of an old carburetor laid out on a large piece of torn cardboard, waiting for re-assembly at some future date. The screen door was off and leaning up against the side of the house. The remnants of abandoned mud dauber nests seemed to be everywhere. The doorbell appeared to be out of commission, hanging out several inches from the door-facing with wires going this way and that. Yep, some things never change.
Hank held the front door open for us.
“Come on in. Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.”
We followed him through an undulating pathway to the kitchen. Hank had become a collector over the years. The house looked like it had survived an endless series of failed garage sales, but only just barely.
Julie walked ahead of me, turning around a couple of times with arched eyebrows and a twisted, sardonic expression on her face. I almost laughed out loud.
We all sat down at the kitchen table. There was far less clutter in the kitchen.
We looked around as we took our seats. Up on the windowsill above the sink was a line of glass telephone pole wire insulators from the early twentieth century. On the counter stood an ancient toaster oven from about 1950.
Hank opened his refrigerator, reached in and brought out three Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and set them in front of us. While he was doing this I found myself wondering if the refrigerator was actually an icebox, one of the kind that required an actual block of ice from a deliveryman with a set of ice hooks. But then the transformer kicked in with a deep, gravelly, electric hum.
Hank sat there at his kitchen table with us in his antique-store house with a shit-eating grin on his face and basked in the glow of my green-eyed client. He shifted his innocent, blue Paul Newman eyes my way and dropped a knowing flick of a wink. I wondered what the hell that was all about.
“So. What brings you here, Bill?”
“Her,” I said.
*****
Julie’s story was believable-so believable, in fact, that the sheer detail of it had me re-creating it visually in my mind as she walked me through it.
Archie Carpin lived on a three-thousand acre ranch in North Texas along the bank of the Red River. There he kept quarter-horses and ran an underground still operation that could have rivaled any of the smaller commercial distilleries in Dallas or Milwaukee in sheer quantity of output. But he kept himself respectable in the eyes of his neighbors, which were few in number. He liked it that way. “The less seen, the less said,” was one of the little one- liners that he was likely to drop at any given moment.
Julie had met the man at a strip-club in Vegas, just off the main drag. After her show he’d motioned her over, bought her a series of watered-down drinks, engaged her services for the evening and once she was ensconced in his hotel room proceeded to ply her with drugs. And she was all too willing. Whatever it was he was after, it apparently wasn’t sex, as he hadn’t so much as laid a hand on her.
No. What the man was into was domination: the subjugation of the spirit and the life of a person-and like the fly to the Venus Flytrap, Julie was drawn in. He dripped money and played a covert game of mental and emotional warfare that in a short space of time drained enough of her life force to make her little more than his personal slave. She’d stayed with him for six months, leaving behind her life in Vegas and following the playboy to Miami- where he kept his drug connections-and Houston, where he kept his offices in a downtown high-rise oil company building, and finally to the North Texas ranch. Then, two months before our first breakfast together, Julie did something that only Julie could have done. She pulled the rug out from under Archie Carpin, robbed him blind, and didn’t bother hanging around to take his temperature afterward.
That first morning in my office I had wanted to break into a fit of uncontrolled laughter when Julie had told me what she had done. What I hadn’t known at the time was how she’d done it. After she was finished this time I no longer felt so much like laughing. For the first time I began to see things from Carpin’s point of view. And let me tell you, if it had been me, after the stunt she’d pulled, I’d have found her and very quietly shut her up for good, money or no money.
Here’s what she did.
A fellow cannot amass a great deal of ill-gotten wealth without making some enemies along the way, and this was definitely a fact in Archie Carpin’s case. Also, I have met few men who do not have a weakness of one kind or another. Carpin’s weakness was horses, and his chief enemy was a fellow named Ernest Neil, his chief competitor. Neil ran a quarter-horse ranch just south of Navasota, Texas and like Carpin, he ran some of the best horseflesh on the hoof. Neil and Carpin had been at each other’s throats since the 1970s when the only pari-mutuel horse-betting to be had was across the state line in Shreveport, Louisiana. On about the same day ten or more times a year during the spring both men loaded their horses onto their sleek trailers and trucked them two hundred miles across Texas and over the Louisiana border to compete against each other.
All this Julie had gleaned from Lefty and Carl.
And, of course, before I could ask it, Hank was asking her himself: “Who are Lefty and Carl?”
Julie loved horses. While she was at Carpin’s North Texas horse ranch she spent a good deal of time down at the stables, within spitting distance of the ruddy waters of the Red River. She loved to ride and it was the one bit of freedom that Carpin allowed her to enjoy, probably because he cared for the animals more than he cared for Julie, and she was kind to Carpin’s horses. She very soon learned all of the horses by name, and they, in turn, became used to her. She made it a point to get friendly with Carpin’s jockeys who were a pair of short yet irascible men named Lefty Jorgenson and Carl Sanderberry. Lefty and Carl soon had her giving them a hand mucking out the stables, keeping the horses’ hooves clean, feeding and watering them, grooming them, and the sundry other chores that are an everyday affair at any well-run horse operation. They had no way of knowing she was up to no good.
And, of course, she nosed around the still. When Carpin caught her at it he beat her within an inch of her life and confined her to his walk-in bedroom closet for a week and put her on rations of little more than water and cocaine.
After a week of pleading with him for freedom, she clammed up. The next morning Carpin let her out.
Thereafter, Julie spent even more time with the horses and, consequently, in the company of Carl and
