Chapter 16

“Gutless?” Harry said as we climbed back into the car. “Bailes creeps into a guarded hospital, fights a duel with a security guard, tries to hop out a window when cornered? Nuts, maybe. But not gutless.”

The computer in the car beeped and displayed an address. I shielded my eyes against the sun and studied. “Bailes’s mother, current surname Teasdale,” I said. “I’ll go tell mama her baby boy is gone. You want me to drop you off first?”

Given that Harry had fired the fatal shot, I didn’t know if he’d want to be there when I informed Bailes’s mama. He’d stay in the car, of course, but it’d still be an uncomfortable nearness.

Harry considered my offer for a couple of beats. “Thanks for the thought, bro. But I’ll be fine in the car. I’ll call the hospital for the latest on Noelle.”

“That’ll do the job, I suppose.”

Mrs Bailes/Teasdale lived in a scrofulous bungalow along a drainage canal. Vehicle carcasses lined the street, waiting for repairs the owners could never afford. The yard was dirt and weeds. A silver GMC pickup sat in the drive, tool chest in the bed, not generally a lady’s kind of vehicle.

I waited for a pair of motorcycles to roar down the street, knocked again. For a split-second I noticed a strange sensation, like my knocking made a kettledrum sound. I looked around, making sure no one was playing a big drum nearby, but nothing. I knocked harder, but the drum effect was gone.

“Who the hell is it?” a male voice barked from inside.

I held my ID to the window on the door, saw the curtain slide, eyes inspect. The door opened to a big muscular guy in his early forties, with sunbronze skin and a Fabio-style hairdo. The guy pulled a red crushed-velvet bathrobe around him, hair still wet. The bathrobe was probably an XX-Large and seemed to fit just right. I didn’t like him on general principles.

“Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Does LaVernia Teasedale live here?”

He began swinging the door shut. “Never heard the name before.”

I put up my hand to stop the door. “Records show she pays utilities on this house. If Miz Teasdale is here, I need to speak to her. If she’s not, I’ll be back.”

“What would a cop want with LaVernia?” the hulk growled. His biceps rippled like fluid stone.

“That’s between me and her.”

“She ain’t here. I dunno when she’ll be back. Maybe next week.” He tried the door-close again, I did the one-finger doorstop. I looked across the room, saw the ashtray and pretty much knew by the smell what I’d find. I slipped under the guy’s arm and across the floor.

“Hey!” he barked.

“Wrong,” I said, holding up the half-smoked joint plucked from the ashtray. “Not hay, sport. Grass.”

“Aw fuck,” he said. “You gotta be kidding. An’ I ain’t never seen it before anyway.”

I pocketed the doob. The house was dark, curtains drawn. I saw discount furniture in the living room, a couple of porno mags on the couch. I heard giggling in a back room, female. It sounded like a voice on the phone.

Didja like it?” the voice asked. “Was it all in focus?”

I could see into the dining room. Instead of a table and chairs, there was a king-size mattress on the floor, a couple pillows. A movie camera was tripoded in the corner. There was a still camera on a table. In the opposing corner a black tripod held a floodlight, also angled down at the bed. Wires ran from equipment to a laptop computer on a low stool near the bed.

The guy saw where I was looking. “Now what? You got a problem with people making home movies?”

I’ve never been opposed to sexuality. I’ve celebrated it with gusto when time and companion are right. And I don’t give a tinker’s damn what anyone does in the privacy of their home. But the keyword is private and beaming intimacies out over the internet for the entertainment of thousands of viewers seemed to defeat the word “intimate”. Plus, given the appearances of most who mingled body parts for viewing, the programs were an affront to aesthetics as well.

“Here’s the way it is, star,” I said, tiring of the repartee. “Either get Miz Teasdale, or tell me where I can find her. Elsewise you are gonna find your ass in jail.”

He sneered. “My lawyer will pop me in ten seconds.”

“Indeed, star,” I agreed. “And I’ll happily put your ass in there for free. But your lawyer will charge five hundred bucks to get it out.”

He started to say some smart-ass thing. I was about fed up with star-boy. I waggled a no-no finger with my right hand, said, “Get the lady.”

He scowled but folded, looking to the back of the house. “Vernia!”

“What?”

“A guy wants to talk to you. Some cop.”

A door opened in a back room; bedroom, I assumed. A petite teenaged girl stepped into the shadowed hall wearing a white blouse and short plaid skirt, the kind of dress worn by parochial schoolgirls. She had on blue knee socks and patent-leather loafers. I was about to turn and bust bathrobe boy for statutory rape when the girl stepped into the living-room’s light.

I saw her youth was a façade of make-up, a lie of cosmetology. Squint and she was fourteen, open your eyes and she was forty-something. The effect was freakish, like a mummy with ten coats of pink paint, or something from a Ray Bradbury sideshow.

“I ain’t done nothing wrong,” the girl protested. Her whisky-soaked voice was three hundred years older than her appearance and suggested she’d done plenty wrong, but was pretty sure I wasn’t currently catching her at it.

“LaVernia Teasdale?” I asked, still spooked by the carnival face. “Formerly Bailes?”

“It was Bailes for four fuckin’ months. That was twenny-something years ago. Whadya want?”

“You’re Terry Lee’s Bailes’s mother?”

She lit a cigarette and let the smoke drift from her nose as she talked. “I ain’t seen that chickenshit kid in forever. Two years, mebbe.”

“How long did he live with you?” I figured there wasn’t much to be gleaned here, information-wise, but I tried for a bit of background before I laid the ugly news on her.

She shrugged. “’Til he was fifteen, sixteen? He kept running off, nothing I could do. So one day I just didn’t call the cops to look for him any more.”

“That was the last time you heard from him?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He calls mebbe once a year. He gets his ass in jail for some pissy-ass thing and calls me whining for bail money.”

“You ever give him any?” I asked.

“I don’t steal the shit. Why should I pay his bail?” She grinned. “Terry Lee still got a face like a squished basketball?”

The casualness of her words roiled my stomach. I breathed down anger and let a few seconds pass.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, ma’am,” I said, “but your boy’s dead.”

A look of mild confusion. “You mean like…dead?”

“Yes, that’s the dead I mean.”

She frowned at the news. Stubbed the cigarette dead in the ashtray.

“What am I s’posed to do now?”

“You might ask how he died,” I suggested, feeling my jaw muscles clench. “Or grieve. Or pray for his soul.”

None of my proposals seemed appealing. She looked to Fabio Hair for a second opinion. “What am I s’posed to do, Sweets?”

“Sweets” looked at me, a frown of concern on his broad face. He stepped close for a man-to-man conference. “This thing with Terry Lee,” he asked. “It gonna cost her anything to deal with?”

“He was over twenty-one,” I said, hearing drumbeat thunder in my head. “There’s no paternal obligation, legally. If the State drops Terry Lee into an unmarked hole, it won’t cost a penny. But she might consider a small service, something to honor his life.”

Vernia Teasdale nee Bailes was eavesdropping.

“I ain’t got money for no fancy services and shit,” she brayed. “I got a tough life.”

The drumming in my head ramped into a roar, like an overloaded dynamo. From beside me the coffee table launched from the floor into the smelly little room to the side, taking out the camera and the lights and causing sparks to pop from a junction box on the floor.

The action seemed in slow motion. I remember a lot of yelling, but by the time I walked out, Mrs Teasdale and Sweets were nicely quiet.

When I got in the car Harry looked between me and the house.

“You OK, Cars? You’re kind of red in the face.”

“It was warm in there.”

He raised a curious eyebrow. “But everything went fine, right?”

“Hunky-dory, bro. How ‘bout we get a move on?”