“I ain’t surprised at a dead body. More’n one came outta this neighborhood over the past few years.”
Sergeant Elvin Briscoe of the local constabulary spit tobacco juice on the ground and leaned against his dusty cruiser with thick arms crossed and his mirrored shades low on a gin-blossomed nose. He was a barrel-bodied man in his mid forties with a ruddy face and equine teeth stained with tobacco.
A dozen feet away, two techs from the Medical Examiner’s office photographed the torso prior to pulling it from the debris. Behind them, the forensics team scoured the surrounding land for evidence.
“This was a violent community?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Got worse once the white folks left.”
“White folks?” Harry said.
Briscoe looked at me. “Used to be a shrimper’s community, white people mainly, until a few years back. Then the Vietnamese pushed in and the whites moved out.”
“Why’d they move?” Harry said, knowing the answer, just wanting to hear it confirmed.
Briscoe shrugged and spat a second strand of tobacco juice into the weeds. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at a hawk circling above, a black dot in a blue sky.
I thought maybe Briscoe didn’t hear. “Why’d the Caucasians leave?” I asked.
Briscoe turned his gaze from the sky to my face. “Guess the whites wanted to be with their own kind. Plus most of the, uh, Orientals didn’t speak English. Just jabbered monkey-speak.”
Harry said, “And all these years I thought they spoke Vietnamese.”
Briscoe turned away and spat juice. Rubbed it into the sand with his boot.
“This fire happened recently,” I said. “Since last Friday.”
“No way you can know that,” Briscoe scoffed.
I nodded downward and kicked a pile of ash. Watched a plume float away on the breeze.
“Friday’s when it last rained. The ashes are unsettled.”
Briscoe feigned a yawn. “Guess that’s why you’re a detective, Detective.”
“You know who lived here?”
“We never patrol back here cuz no one lives here any more. Or I didn’t think so.”
“You never got a call about a fire?” Harry asked.
Briscoe gazed with amusement at the surrounding desolation. “Who would call one in?” he said, like talking to himself. He belched and looked at me. “You were saying something about a kid found in a boat?”
“Launched from here, maybe. That pier.”
“How about you move your ass a couple feet?” someone said behind us.
“How about you fuck yourself?” came the response.
We turned our heads to the voices. A chunky, fiftyish guy from the Alabama Bureau of Forensics was jabbing a finger at the deputy who’d arrived with Briscoe, a hard-muscled man in his early thirties wearing a too-tight uniform shirt to emphasize the swollen biceps. The deputy slapped the finger away.
“Whoa,” I yelled, spinning from Briscoe and running to the altercation. “What’s the beef?”
The red-faced guy from forensics, Al Bustamente, pointed at the deputy’s spit-shined black Wellingtons. “Bubba here’s standing in the middle of what appear to be footprints. I guess no one told him that professionals don’t put their feet in evidence.”
I saw the county cop’s eyes tighten. “What are you saying?”
The cop was a collection of granite muscles, but Bustamente had a fast fuse and hot mouth. And as a member of the state’s department of forensics, he also had jurisdiction. “I’m saying I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re ignorant, all I want is to make a cast of the prints. Is that too tough to understand, you hick moron?”
I saw the deputy’s jaw clench and his arms ripple, the punch cock. I jumped in front of him, knocked the punch aside with my forearm, like blocking an incoming missile. I was left staring into the deputy’s eyes from a foot away.
“Get outta my way,” he snarled. His words smelled like unwashed teeth. His breathing was shallow. Veins bulged on his forehead and he seemed dangerously close to unhinged.
“Get hold of yourself,” I said. “A man’s been killed here.”
“I don’t give a fuck if –”
“Baker!” Briscoe’s voice from behind me. “Git to the car and you git calm. Now!”
I stepped aside, made an effort to keep from massaging my forearm, aching from the deputy’s sledgehammer blow. The guy mouthed something at Bustamente, turned and walked to the cruiser like a programmed robot. Bustamente shook his head, knelt, commenced pouring compound into one of the footprints he’d spotted. Crisis averted. I returned to Briscoe. He was picking his teeth with a thumbnail.
“Your man always such a pain in the ass?” I asked.
Briscoe nodded toward Bustamente. “Seems lardass over there called Baker ignorant, a hick and a moron. You take that kind of talk yourself?”
“If I’m an ignorant hick moron,” Harry interrupted from a dozen feet distant. “But since I’m a professional, I don’t generally plant my shoes in the middle of evidence.”
Briscoe looked into the distance. I saw his jaw clench, his eyes tighten. He turned them to me.
“Looks like we got everything under control here. See you.”
I said, “You’re planning on checking ownership of this house, right, Sheriff? Track down whoever was inside?”
“Sure. Have a nice drive back to the city, Detective.” He winked. “Hope you get that lost pup returned to its kennel.”
Briscoe ambled away to talk to his deputy. The festivities seemingly over, Harry and I climbed back into our car and left the scene to the medical and forensics teams. We could drop the case back into the arms of Jimmy Gentry, since it was in Dauphin Island’s jurisdiction. Jimmy, unfortunately, would have to deal with Briscoe.
We drove a couple miles, Harry strangely silent. Usually he wanted to kick around details while a scene was still fresh in his head even if it wasn’t our jurisdiction or case.
“Can you believe Briscoe?” I shook my head. “A pity Jimmy’ll have to coordinate an investigation with that rube.”
“Besides the banter about monkey chatter and pups,” Harry said quietly, “what did you notice about Sheriff Briscoe?”
I ran the interaction through my head. “He was semi-literate, a heavy tobacco user and probably a heavy drinker…”
“Did you notice he never looked at me when I spoke?”
“What?”
“Just like I wasn’t there. The invisible man.”
“Briscoe did that?” I said, looking at Harry.
“During the introduction phase, he shook hands with everyone but me. He turned away, faked a sneeze and moved to the next guy.”
I recalled Briscoe’s big howling a-choo. Pretending to wipe his hands, moving to me with a big hand but a wet-rag shake. I replayed the scene and only in retrospect saw the slight.
“Shit,” I said. “It went by me.”
“Briscoe was having a great time fucking with me, him knowing it, me knowing it, the muscle-bound deputy knowing it. I got the impression Briscoe was showing off for his deputy.”
“I’m sorry, bro,” I said. “I didn’t see what was happening.”
“You weren’t meant to.”
We moved down the road another mile, me thinking about the small and ugly drama that had sullied the air at the crime scene, a display of racial condescension I’d missed totally.
“How much do they piss you off, Harry?” I finally asked. “People like Briscoe?”
Harry was silent for so long I thought he hadn’t heard my question. After a mile of farm fields, hawks and watermelons our only audience, Harry turned my way.
“Pull over.”
“You mean now? What are you –”
“Pull over, Carson. Right here.”
I braked to the sandy berm. Harry pushed open his door. By the time I got out, my partner was striding into the field. He appraised a head-sized sugar-baby melon, knelt, snapped it from the vine. He balanced the melon on a rotting fencepost and returned to the car.
“Harry?” I asked.
In one sweeping motion, Harry snatched his nine millimeter from the shoulder rig, pointed one-handed at the target, snapped off three shots. I saw a spray of pink from the rear of the melon, and it toppled to the ground, cracking open to reveal red innards.
Harry replaced his gun and got back in the car. I pulled back on to the road. He thumbed replacement rounds into his clip and returned the weapon to the holster, staring out the window at the cotton fields.