museum.
In another cell was a crude little motor that plugged into a wall with a needle and vial at the end. I thought it must be something for junkies and hopheads, but one of the Guard boys who’d been in the Navy said it was for giving tattoos. We wouldn’t know for a while exactly why they’d be giving out tattoos in a jailhouse.
We’d been up all night, and everything seemed foggy and light. Jack Black set a coffeepot on a hot plate. General Hanna had upended Sheriff Matthews’s desk onto the floor, where all his junk was being hustled into cardboard boxes and tagged.
He offered me a cigar like the ones he smoked with Jack Black. I thanked him and pulled out a Kool instead that I smoked with the first cup of coffee. I kneaded my temples with my thumb and forefinger and sat on top of Matthews’s desk, something I’d still think of as Matthews’s desk until weeks later when I had it taken out into the county landfill and burned.
A few minutes later, little Quinnie Kelley was hustled into the sheriff’s office, and I stopped talking with Hanna and Black and introduced Kelley. He still wore his courthouse coveralls and clutched a thick, clothbound book in his arms.
He didn’t shake hands with the men, only laid down the book on the table and said he’d taken it from Bert Fuller’s office shortly after he’d been hurt. He kind of smiled and cut his eyes over to me when he said it.
“I didn’t trust nobody, and I figured that someone might try to burn it up. But people should see it. See the shame of it.”
I opened the book, and it revealed a pasted photo album, the kind you kept for the family, only these were black-and-white pictures of girls. Some of them nude, some clothed. Mostly just of their heads with a little pasted rundown on their measurements, color of eyes and hair, weight, height, any scars or deformities, quality of teeth, and special sexual skills. All of the women had been given numbers.
I looked up at him. “These were girls Fuller arrested.”
Quinnie shook his head. “Y’all are slow. That’s the registry, the goddang book, Lamar. That’s Fuller’s handwriting plain as day right there.”
The familiarity of using my first name made me blush a bit, and I turned back to the book and studied the pages and noted the details about where they worked and what they did and various sexual perversions the women were willing to do. In the back pages was a ledger showing amounts owed and earned.
“He got twenty-five percent off every girl.”
I nodded and set down the book.
“Thanks, Quinnie,” I said, shaking his hand.
He reaffixed his Coke-bottle glasses and nodded, and then turned to Hanna and saluted him. Hanna just looked at the odd little man as he passed, and pulled the book over to him and flipped through the pages.
“Urination?” he said. “What in the hell? This is the filthiest, most vile town I’ve ever known. We should just burn it to the ground and let y’all start over.”
“Make sure you skip over my house when you do,” I said.
“How could you stand it?”
“You can’t see what’s hidden under the rocks.”
Jack Black returned to the room and reached for his shotgun he’d left on the desk. “There is some kind of trouble in the county. You ever hear of a whorehouse called the Hill Top?”
I hadn’t.
“There’s been some shooting out there.”
I looked to General Hanna. And he looked over to me and smiled. “You tell us, Sheriff.”
13
WE PARKED DOWN the road from the old Victorian, the windshield wipers keeping our view clear, and watched the two lights from the upstairs windows. A dark figure appeared up in the turret and then was gone. The old house was unpainted, with a sagging porch and crooked columns; a red bulb light rocked in the light wind. A couple cars were parked down the road, but it was growing late and raining, and I could barely make them out where we’d parked. Major Black sat at the wheel, with me in the passenger’s seat and Quinnie Kelley behind us. Since we’d left the sheriff’s office, Kelley had talked nonstop, in between the occasional directions out to the Hill Top. His big bug glasses were fogged, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.
“Now, don’t be thinking that I know this place ’cause I’m a customer. I’m a married man.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Quinnie,” I said.
“I mean, I knowed plenty of men who’d gone out here. But, see, the house used to be a place where this old woman lived when we was kids. We called it the Spook House, on account of it looking broken down and all. You know, like a haunted house?”
I nodded and looked over to Black. He wore no expression.
“When that old woman died, me and my brother used to play games outside there, and we’d bet each other that we couldn’t last five minutes in that place. I took the bet one time, and I promise you it was the longest five minutes I ever spent in my life. I walked up to the stairway and, when I reached the bottom step, I felt a cold spot go through me. I’m not saying it was a ghost or nothin’. I’m just sayin’ it scared the piss out of me.”
“What do you say we ride down by the cars?” I asked.
Black cranked the jeep and we bumped along the dirt road, and hit the high beams on a Cadillac coupe and a brand-new Hudson. I’d seen the Hudson before.
“That the one from the other night?” Black asked.
I nodded.
Black killed the engine.
“You wait here,” Black said.
“Hell with that,” Quinnie said. “I ain’t scared.”
“It’s not on account of those ghosts,” Black said.
“I knowed what you meant. But I ain’t scared, just the same.”
Black told him to wait in the jeep, and, if he heard shots, to call it in on the radio. “It’s important.”
Kelley nodded, a serious expression on his face. “Yes, sir.”
We mounted the old creaky steps and knocked on the front door. We heard movement inside and shuffling, and Black knocked again. His shotgun rested in his left hand while he knocked with his right.
There was a window in the top half of the door, but some yellowed lace obscured a good look inside. Black knocked some more and then finally stood back to kick it in.
I held up my hand, moved past him, and tried the knob.
The door opened.
Black grunted and moved inside, calling into the big, vacuous space and twisting his neck up to a wide staircase that stretched far and high along the right wall.
He called out again and then mounted the steps. He pointed me to the parlor and a long hallway that led to a swinging door.
THE WHORE HAD ABOUT BIT THROUGH JOHNNIE’S FINGERS, as he held her tight in the upstairs bedroom, listening to the boots on the wooden landing. She shuffled and cried in his hands but didn’t make a sound, only bit down hard and tried to wriggle free.
There were two more whores down the hall and another downstairs with Fannie.
The door to the bedroom opened, and Johnnie waited there behind it. Through the crack between the door and frame, he saw a big man in a khaki uniform pass and then move out of sight.
As the man walked slow through the room, the young whore tried to twist free. But Johnnie held her there until the heavy boots passed and the rhythmic thumping was gone.
He let out his breath. The damn twisting and gyrating kicking up the pain in his shoulder something fierce. He twisted the whore’s hair into his fingers and pulled out his wet fingers from her mouth.
Into her ear, he whispered: “You scream and I’ll plug you a brand-new hole. You got me?”
