Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Copyright (c); 2005 by John H. Dirckx.

Short stories by Timothy Williams have previously appeared in several literary quarterlies, including the Greensboro, Colorado, and Texas Reviews; and his story “Something About Teddy” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). The author lives in western Kentucky, where he teaches English at a local college. This is his first contribution to EQMM.

The day that Willie Boyd died was as gray and tattered as the sheets on the motel bed where I found him. I stood outside room nineteen, smoking and watching sheets of rain roll towards the Mississippi while a couple of state troopers and a West Memphis homicide detective tromped around in the room, grousing about the late-November weather. This morning the Trucker’s Paradise Motor Lodge was short on bliss but loaded with truckers. Their eighteen-wheelers sat nose to tail in the parking lot like cattle heading through a slaughterhouse chute. One cockroach shy of being condemned, the motel’s coffee shop was packed with burly, pot-bellied long-haulers and truck-stop hookers who seemed to think white boots, pastel-colored miniskirts, and imitation-fur jackets were suitable breakfast attire. The rooms themselves offered vibrating beds, puke-stained carpets, rusted tubs, and “premium” pay-per-view cable that showed adult movies twenty-four hours a day. All in all, the Trucker’s Paradise seemed to be a suitable place for a man to die with a half-empty bottle of Gordon’s gin on the nightstand, a .22 revolver on the floor, and bullet holes in his chest and head.

I smoked one Kool to its butt and lit another, wondering idly if the ache in the pit of my stomach was grief. Then I decided that if I had to wonder, it probably wasn’t. Back in high school, Willie Boyd and I had been friends, but I’d turned forty-two just a couple of weeks earlier. High school seemed a lifetime away, and the freckled, undergrown kid we’d called Wee Willie at Southaven High didn’t have a lot in common with the pudgy, moon-faced corpse inside room nineteen.

The two state troopers stepped from the room, their felt hats in their hands, nodded briskly at me, and then hurried to the cruiser. They looked almost like identical twins with their brush cuts, broad shoulders, and narrow waists, and I wondered if there wasn’t a secret lab in the middle of Iowa where scientists genetically engineered batches of them at a time.

I pitched my cigarette away and stepped back into the room. Harry Jewell, a West Memphis homicide detective I’d worked with a few times before leaving the Memphis City Police to start my own private investigator’s office, grunted and shook his head.

“Bad Luck Boyd,” he said. “I reckon the poor bastard lived up to his name.”

“You knew him?”

“Every cop in the Tri-State area knew him. Not a bad guy, really, but his name’s always turning up in the Rolodexes of bookies and loan sharks.”

“People have Rolodexes these days?

“In computers, then. Way I’ve heard it, the guy hasn’t been on a winning streak since the first Bush was in the White House.”

“We called him Wee Willie in high school,” I said. “He was a runt but a tough runt, you know? Tried out for the football team in our freshman year and, Jesus, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred fifteen pounds.”

“How’d that work out?”

“He got knocked down a lot. Big guys loved to cream him.”

“But he got up?”

“He got up, spitting blood and dirt, lowered his head, and tried again. He finally ended up with a broken collarbone and a concussion.”

Jewell shook his elephantine head and grimaced. “He ain’t getting up this time. Bad Luck Boyd. The name fits,” he said sourly. “Looks like a professional hit, doesn’t it? One in the chest and one in the head, with a throwaway .22.” Jewell had a coughing fit and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “I’m taking this one personal, though. If the jerk had just shot Bad Luck once, I could have written this off as a suicide and been back in the office with a hot cup of coffee and a cheese Danish by now.” He shook his head. “Why in God’s name did Bad Luck drive across the bridge to get himself killed in my jurisdiction three weeks before I retire? And what in the hell are you doing here, Raines?”

“Willie was lying low over here, waiting for me to handle a problem. When I called his room a couple of times this morning and he didn’t answer, I got worried and decided to check up on him.”

“Oh yeah? Y’all were that close.”

“Used to be.”

Four days ago, Willie Boyd had walked into my office with change jingling in his pockets and a line of b.s. as long as an I-40 traffic jam trailing behind him. I’d heard bits of news and gossip about him over the years. Somehow Willie had managed to marry Linda Pate, a cheerleader and the dream girl of half the football team, the summer of our high-school graduation. That she’d settled on Willie seemed unbelievable. The fact that she hadn’t left him was nothing short of a miracle. I’d heard stories of his gambling — Willie being banned from the casinos down in Tunica; Willie dropping hundreds at the dog track; Willie taking loans and blowing the money on college football, professional baseball, and boxing. But until four days ago, I hadn’t really talked to him in twenty-four years.

“He was a client,” Jewell said. “Wife cheating on him?”

“No,” I said. “He needed protection.”

Jewell’s eyes twinkled. “Oh yeah? Looks like you did a real first-class job.” He coughed and then wheezed that he was just joking. “Who wanted to scramble Bad Luck’s eggs this time?”

“Ray Brady,” I said. “Willie was into him for seventy-five thousand.”

“Razor Ray Brady? Tell me you got something, Raines. Something that we could use to put that stone-cold psychopath away for good.”

“I’ve got a tape,” I said. “Willie wanted to wear a wire. He thought if he had Ray on tape threatening him it might buy him some time.” I shook my head at Willie’s wide-eyed, staring face. “Doesn’t seem like it worked.”

“Razor Ray, huh,” Jewell said. “I’ll be damned. Maybe old Bad Luck Boyd did me a favor after all.”

After I left Willie Boyd’s body to the West Memphis coroner’s boys and his soul to whatever spirit looks after chronic gamblers and hustlers, I drove back across the bridge into Memphis and then south to Mississippi and the Boyds’ two-story frame house just a few blocks from the neighborhood where Willie and I had grown up. With its green shutters and flecking paint and small yard, the house was indistinguishable from a dozen others on the block. Linda Pate had inherited the place from her mother twenty years ago, and as far as I knew, the house was the only thing Willie hadn’t managed to gamble away.

Linda answered the door so quickly that I thought she’d been waiting. She wore jeans and a sweater, had her jet-black hair pulled into a ponytail. Despite a handful of wrinkles and the bags under her eyes, she was as beautiful as she’d been in high school. From the bleariness of her eyes and the blankness of her expression, I knew that her phone had already rung.

“Charlie,” she said softly, as if it had only been a few days instead of a couple of decades since we’d last met. “Did you see him? He didn’t suffer, did he?”

“No,” I said. “It was quick.”

She nodded solemnly and then stepped back to let me inside. The house was warm and comfortable with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. I followed her to the kitchen and sat at the table while she filled two mugs and then stood still as if she’d momentarily forgotten what she was supposed to do next. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then turned around, a twitchy smile on her lips. She set my mug on the table and glanced at the refrigerator.