Leather Maiden

28

I opened the car door and was getting out, but before I could, Jimmy was over by the car.

“While you were out screwing around,” he said, “I been sitting here waiting on you. Do you know how late it is?”

“You sound like Mom.”

“Have you seen the news?”

“Unless you’re upset they’re not going to be filling potholes on Lufkin Street anytime soon, I’m going to surmise you’re here about the murdered kid and the kidnapping.”

“Smartass.”

“I left you a message, you know.”

“You didn’t say about what.”

I shouldered past him and unlocked the door, and we went inside. I went straight to the refrigerator, got out a bottled coffee for both of us. I wanted whiskey straight, a beer chaser to tamp it down, but I knew better. Besides, I didn’t have a drink in the house. I had purposely tried to make sure it wasn’t handy.

I brought the coffee over and gave it to him. Jimmy twisted off the top. “Whoever got to those kids, what if they told them about us?”

“We don’t know they did,” I said.

“Got to figure, whoever did that to him, they didn’t borrow Tabitha to take to the prom. They’re asking her some questions. They could be coming for us right now.”

“Chief of police thinks she killed Ernie and is on the lam.”

“The chief is an idiot,” Jimmy said.

“That’s what he said…Isn’t Trixie going to miss you this time of morning?”

“I have learned to be quite the liar.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“This thing, with Ernie and Tabitha. It’s got me chilled to the bone, baby brother.”

“You were wishing them dead before,” I said, and sat down in my most comfortable chair, twisted the top off my cold coffee and drank.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I was wishing them dead. And I thought about doing it myself. But I didn’t. They got hit by a truck, something like that, I don’t know I’d feel real bad. They’d be out of the way. This is different. It’s not that they’re dead, it’s that them being dead could somehow connect to us if they talked.”

“For a minute there I thought you’d got Jesus, but no, you’re still the asshole I thought you were.”

“I know. I’m a shit. It’s all about me.”

“Agreed,” I said. “As for what they might have talked about to whoever did this, my guess is there wasn’t a lot of talking. Least not with Ernie. I visited with the chief of police today, and I went over there and had a look for myself tonight.”

Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “You went in the murder house?”

I nodded. “I snuck in when it got dark. I don’t know exactly why, but I did. I looked around, and what happened there was pretty damn brutal. I think Ernie was taken by surprise, in his sleep.”

“And the cops think Tabitha did it?” Jimmy said.

“Chief likes her for it, but even he thinks he’s got crummy detecting skills. Right now, a case this big, he’s probably wishing he had a job jacking off sailors. Here’s an oddity among many. In the house, on the wall, in blood, were crude paintings of birds. Or maybe it was supposed to be one bird, different views, rising up toward the ceiling, each one slightly off center of the other.”

“Birds in blood?”

“Someone took time to stand on the bed, in the blood, near the hacked-up body, and draw those birds on the wall. It had to be important to them.”

“Birds don’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.

“You got me there, but I’m sure that’s what it was.”

“You think it was a taunt of some kind?”

“I think whoever did it has some kind of agenda we can’t begin to figure. And there were more than birds. There were words too, and they mentioned birds. The words were written in blood.”

“What kind of words?”

I told him.

“You think it was one person?” Jimmy asked.

“No.”

“How many do you think?”

“My guess is at least two. There were bloody prints and some drag marks. I think whoever did it had a stun gun of some kind. One person stunned the girl while the other hacked the boy. They dragged the girl out the front door. That’s what the prints indicate anyway. Carried her out the front door and put her in a van parked in the drive and drove off.”

“Surely someone saw the van.”

“Next-door neighbor. Said it was a dark color and they didn’t think anything about it when they saw it. I don’t think the neighbor got the year or model, and I’m sure he didn’t get a license plate.”

“They were just lucky.”

“I think playing poker online isn’t near enough for these folks. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re not afraid to do it. They gamble big. They’ve maybe been doing this awhile, or something like it, and they’re getting bolder.”

Jimmy took in a deep breath of air. “Trixie has been wanting to try out that lake house we bought with Mom and Dad. And she’s off for the summer. I’m finishing up the first summer session tomorrow. I just decided. Supposed to go two days beyond that, but I’m going to end the class early. Give everyone an A on the final, and then I can go.”

“I want you to get Mom and Dad to go with you. They’ll go easy. Dad has already mentioned it to me. Just don’t tell them why.”

“Of course not,” Jimmy said. “Do you take me for an idiot…Don’t answer that.”

“Just take them,” I said.

“I will,” Jimmy said, “but I advise you to saddle up the old pony and go with us until this shit storm blows over.”

“I’ll join you in a few days,” I said.

Jimmy lifted his eyebrows. “A few days? I’m thinking maybe I don’t even need to teach one last class. I’d rather get a reprimand from the division chair, or the dean, than end up cut up like fish bait, and I’m telling you, you ought to go with us. That place is pretty isolated.”

“I think it’s best someone is on the ground here, paying attention. And I think I’m in a better position to do that than you.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Jimmy said.

He stood up, said, “Look, there’s phone service out there, isolated as it is. You need me, call. I can give you directions there.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“You’re crazy to stick around.”

“Probably.”

Jimmy gave me a hug. “Trixie calls, alibi me. Say you had me over to talk about Gabby or something. Sorry to bring it up. But, you know, I got to have some reason.”

“And why not pick one that makes me feel really shitty, right?”

“It’s something she would believe.”

“Does everyone know how nuts I’ve been about Gabby?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Sometimes me and the grocer talk about it.”

“That’s funny, Jimmy.”

“So, I got the alibi?”

“How and when did I ask you to come over?”

Jimmy took some time to consider, said, “You didn’t ask. But today, talking to you, I was worried about you, got so worried I got out of bed and came over and we talked. Big brother trying to cheer you up, get you on the right course. Does that work?”

“Well enough.”

Jimmy went out and I listened to his motorcycle roar away.

I went outside and cleaned my gas and brake pedals of blood, went back inside and sat down at my computer and tried to find the words that had been written on the wall in blood. I typed them in and clicked the mouse. The words came up. There was a site for Jerzy Fitzgerald. He had come up before in connection with Caroline. He was a poet and an occasional writer of prose. Mostly Internet poetry, and a lot of it, but he had done a couple of self-published books. He had a strong cult following. Some took him seriously; others looked at him as a kind of Ed Wood figure, bad but totally unaware of it. This Bird Has Flown was one of the books he had published, and one of the poems inside was of the same name, and part of it was what I had seen written on blood on the wall of Ernie and Tabitha’s apartment.

I had a feeling that this whole thing was part of some bigger picture, and to borrow from one of Jerzy Fitzgerald’s poems a terse fragment: “All of life is framed in fear.”