staggered onto the back porch where I lay gasping. Mom swept from the house, apron over print dress, hands white with flour, crying Help him! My father took one look and knew what had happened. He’ll be all right, just give him a moment. Looks kinda like a fish, doesn’t he?
The door was answered by a man wearing, I swear (I’d never seen one before, outside of movies), a smoking jacket. Dapper indeed, even if upon closer inspection the jacket’s felt proved to be worn smooth, the tie beneath to be spotted with historic fluids and foodstuff. And while the glass in his hand held milk rather than a martini, the effect was much the same.
Actually, I later learned, it wasn’t milk but something called a milk punch compounded of bourbon, milk and sugar. Easy on the ulcers, he’d tell me.
“Bubba!” this apparition said, blinking at the light. “What an absolutely marvelous surprise!” Heavy stress on marvelous, tiptoe pauses before and after. “And you’ve brought friends!”
“How’s it going, Billy?”
“Please do come in. Come in, come in. All of you.”
Ushered into a lavender living room, we stood there like de-bused campers uncertain what was expected of us. Purple vases, cobalt pitchers and violet-hued glasses sat about. Still-life paintings featuring bowls of fruit and fresh game, in the classical style but obviously new, hung on two walls. Above a mauve leather couch, the massive photograph of an erect penis, blown up to such point and such graininess as to become almost abstract, took pride of place above a mauve leather couch. On the opposite wall hung a poster of women’s vaginas, like exotic fruit.
“We have company?” a voice piped from above.
“Henry Lee. And friends.”
“Oh.” Disappointment audible in the voice.
“What can I get you all? Perhaps some champagne? Always a couple bottles chilling in the fridge. One never knows who might drop by, what possibilities for celebration the day could bring. Or mimosas! We’ve a sack of some of the biggest, juiciest oranges you’re likely to see. From last weekend’s farmer’s market on the square?”
“Billy, this is Sheriff Bates. Mr. Turner’s a detective down from Memphis.”
“Oh, I love Memphis.”
“I know you do.”
“Good to meet you, Billy,” Lonnie said.
Our eyes met, Billy’s and mine, and we shook hands. His was surprisingly warm, his grip firm.
“Coffee sounds good,” Lonnie went on, “if it’s not too much trouble. Little early for anything else, for me.”
“We have that. Coffee. Out in the kitchen somewhere.”
He’d set his milk punch on a polished ebony table just inside the door, African origin from the look of it, in order to embrace Sims. Now he looked longingly towards it. So far away. He went to the base of the stairs and called weakly upwards: “Help!”
“Be right down.”
“Sit, sit,” our host said. “We don’t often get company.”
Lonnie glanced at Sims, who nodded.
“Something I need to ask you, Mr. Sims.”
“Actually it’s Roark. Henry Lee and I had different fathers. But please call me Billy.”
“Billy, then. You used to direct movies, right?”
“That was a long time ago. All the sweet silly birds of our youth, surely they’ve flown by now. Mine have, at any rate. Yours?”
Lonnie smiled. “Occasionally they still come home to roost. When they do, I try to make sure they get fed.”
“Good for you. Speaking of which: I haven’t served you all yet, have I? I really should attend to that.” After gazing out the window for a moment, he went on. “It was a much smaller world back then. Everything was simpler. You had this feeling anything was possible-anything at all. I think I fancied myself a modern Shakespeare, half- owner of the Globe and running it, directing and acting in the very plays I wrote. I could do it all, create my own world. Create and inhabit it.”
“He hasn’t seen or thought of those movies in years. They have nothing to do with who he is now. You should not be bringing this in here, into our home. You know that, Henry.”
All our heads turned to the source of the voice.
Sammy Cash stood at the foot of the stairs.
Chapter Thirty-five
He wore loose khaki slacks, a pink oxford-cloth shirt from which the left collar button was missing, oxblood loafers, possibly Italian, without socks.
“Billy’s offered refreshments, I assume?”
“He did. But then he kind of got off track.”
“He does that. I won’t say it’s good to see you, Henry, it never is. Who are these people you’ve brought?”
“I’m the sheriff who answers to Henry Lee,” Lonnie said. “Mr. Turner here is a consultant, helping me with an investigation. No reason you’d know this, but someone’s driven murder right up on our steps and parked it there.”
“In which case you should be off doing your job.”
Lonnie glanced down at sockless feet, up to the missing button.
“I appreciate the fact this is your home, sir,” he said, “and that I’m an intruder here.”
Cash nodded.
“What you have to appreciate is that this is a murder investigation. Statutes give me a lot of latitude. Take me about eight seconds flat, for instance, to have you down on that polished wood floor in cuffs.”
“Lonnie, surely-”
“You shut the fuck up too, Henry. Obstruction of justice’s a big door. Don’t make me open it.”
“Oh dear,” Billy said.
Lonnie sat beside him on the mauve couch. He’d snagged the milk punch on the way, and handed it to him. “I agree completely. Now.” He looked from face to face. Mayor Sims, Billy Roark, the man we only knew as Sammy Cash. “Who’s going to tell me what happened?”
Billy Roark was fourteen years older than Henry Lee, out of the house and gone by the time Henry Lee was coming up, but always a role model-for that very reason if for no other. Because he’d reached escape velocity, you see, escaped the drag of the town they’d both grown up in, left behind the broken, near-mute mother and the fathers, gentle but long absent in Billy’s case, violent in Henry Lee’s. Billy Roark had gone up to Memphis at age nineteen and bluffed his way into selling furniture at Lowenstein’s. Third day on the job he sold a houseful of it, a whole goddamn houseful, prime quality all, to an older, balding man and a magnificently stacked young blond. A runner was sent to the bank with the check and came back to report it was good. “I could use a man like you,” the customer told him. A week later Billy found himself in a bright red Fairlane, coursing between El Paso and Dallas, flogging movies to drive-ins and main-street theaters with names like Malco and Paramount. He was a natural, able to turn on a dime, become whatever the customer seemed to expect of him. Theatre owners loved him and took whatever he had to offer. Soon a Cadillac replaced the Fairlane-a used Cadillac, and one day in of all places Fate, Texas, Pop. 1400, it broke down. Not much to do in Fate. He had breakfast at Mindy’s Diner, lunch there a few hours later. Then he found himself at the Palace watching a film about a woman’s prison. Jesus, he thought, this is what I’ve been selling? It was awful. He sat there watching, running numbers in his head. Obviously he was at the wrong end of the business. By six P.M., when he drove out of Fate with a new distributor cap and fuel pump, into a blood-red sunset, he’d blocked out what he was going to do. He found a place he could rent cameras, lights, the whole works, then some kids at a local college who’d been doing stage plays and figured how different could it be. Talked his current girlfriend, Sally Ann of the dirigible, gravity-defying breasts, into starring. Then over a weekend in
