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

“You’ve got a good lawyer. Tell him your story.”

“I did, and he reamed that fat Arkansas detective a new one, but something ain’t right here, Charlie. Someone’s setting me up. Given the fact that you and Willie Boyd seemed to be best buddies, I started thinking it might be you.”

“You should have given him time, Ray.”

“Time?” Brady said. “What are you talking about, Charlie? You got cotton in your ears? Willie Boyd didn’t owe me any money. You think I’d be stupid enough to front a line of credit to a deadbeat degenerate gambler like Bad Luck Boyd? The reason I threw him out of here was because we got a history, you know? We had a run-in over a personal matter a couple of years back. I think it’s over with, but about a week ago he comes in here half drunk, starts screaming at me, waving a gun around.”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

He laughed. “Right. That little runt comes in here waving an unloaded gun in my face and I’m the crazy one.”

“What happened?”

“I took his gun away, found out it wasn’t loaded, slapped him upside the head, pitched him and his frigging gun out the front door.” He refilled his glass. “You’d think that would be the end of it, right? But no. Couple of days ago he comes in here babbling about seventy-five grand. Then you call me warning me if anything happens to Willie a tape’s going to the police.” He gulped his whiskey, let his breath out in a rush. “Now, I’m giving you a warning. I don’t know what’s going on, but you don’t want to play games with me, Charlie. If you don’t believe that, drive up to Millington, pay a visit to a guy named Ron Tompkins who tried to get cute with me a few years back. Way I heard it described, his face looks like hamburger that’s been run over by a pickup truck.”

After Willie Boyd’s funeral, a few dozen friends and family members gathered at the Boyds’ house, their cars parked along the curb, in the drive, and in the weedy and soggy yard. The funeral had been quiet and concise. There were no wails of grief, no moans or sobs. Willie’s son Eric sat in the front row of the church looking grim and determined in a suit that seemed a couple of sizes too small. Linda Boyd sat beside him, holding his hand. I didn’t spot a teary eye in the entire crowd. In my days on the force, I’d attended a lot of services for a lot of murder victims, but Willie Boyd’s funeral felt like none of them. The atmosphere that hung over the small Baptist church wasn’t one of shock or outrage or horror but one of relief, as if Willie Boyd had spent years suffering from a terminal disease.

Now, a bleary-eyed woman with hairspray-stiff hair and deep wrinkles greeted me at the door and led me into a living room crowded with red-faced, middle-aged men and women balancing paper plates heaped with sliced ham, fried chicken, potato salad, and rolls. The woman patted my shoulder absently and told me to help myself to something to eat. It was only after she’d slipped away that I realized she was Willie’s aunt Theresa. When Willie and I were in high school, I’d been half in love with her and spent torturous afternoons staring out of Willie’s bedroom window at his aunt and his mother sunbathing in the backyard. For a second it seemed impossible that the wrinkled, weary woman crawling towards her seventies could be Theresa Parrish. Then I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in a hall mirror — receding hairline, hollow eyes, and beer gut — and I knew it wasn’t impossible at all.

The kitchen was warm and cheery despite the occasion, the table piled with baked ham and turkey, platters of fried chicken and cold cuts, bowls of mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green beans, and collard greens. Apple pies, peach and blackberry cobblers, and chocolate cake lined the counters, and there were gallons of coffee and tea and coolers filled with soft drinks and beer. Linda Boyd leaned against the stove, her smile tight and thin, her eyes wary. I hugged her and she patted my back, told me to help myself to something to eat or to a beer, and then excused herself to go lie down. I grabbed a bottle of Sam Adams, passed a few words with people I vaguely remembered from my childhood, and then went back to the living room.

People were telling Willie Boyd stories. I listened for a while and then tuned out when I realized that all of the stories of Willie’s good humor, his determination, his practical jokes took place when he was a kid or a teenager. It was as if the real Willie Boyd, the one that people wanted to remember, anyway, had died the day he graduated from high school and we were holding his wake twenty-four years too late. I was guilty of that, too. The memory that I kept replaying was of Wee Willie dragging himself onto the football field in suffocating heat, ignoring the ridicule of the coaches and the players, to spend a couple of hours being pounded by two-hundred-and-sixty-pound morons who thought there was no better sport than unloading on an undersized but determined kid who wanted to be one of them. Thinking about it depressed me, so I finished my Sam Adams and decided to head for home. Before I could get up, a balding man with a beer gut and a thick brush moustache hauled a chair beside me and asked how I was doing these days. It took a minute for me to recognize him as Buck Greenwood, Willie’s best friend in high school.

“Shame that something like this has to happen for people to see each other again,” he said.

I agreed that it was, asked questions about his family, and answered questions about my own. Buck said he’d heard I was a private detective. I admitted that it was true.

“Just like Magnum P.I., huh?” he asked.

I said sure, except the surfing was lousy in Memphis, I drove a 1985 Firebird, and Magnum got a hell of a lot more girls. Buck laughed and handed me a business card.

“Insurance is my game,” he said. “Home, auto, health, and life.”

I thanked him for his card and prepared myself to deflect a sales pitch. But it didn’t come. Instead, Buck shook his balding head and sighed deeply.

“Poor old Willie,” he said. “God forgive me for saying it, but Linda and Eric are going to be better off without him.”

He went on to say that it couldn’t have been easy for them. The casinos were bad. Willie had outstanding markers in nearly every casino in Tunica. But the bookies were worse. In the last ten years, Willie had maxed a dozen credit cards, took short-term loans on their cars and then defaulted on them all. I told him I’d heard as much, and tried to think of an excuse to get away from him.

“Only thing they owned free and clear was this house,” he said. “Linda inherited it from her mom. Then Willie took a mortgage on the place six months ago. Seventy-five thousand from one of those semi-legal outfits that charge four times the bank’s interest rates. I told him he was crazy.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Seventy-five thousand?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I told him just because they were willing to loan him half the house’s value didn’t mean he needed to take the money. God forgive me for saying it, but maybe everything worked out for the best. At least now, Linda and Eric will still have a roof over their heads.”

“Willie had a life-insurance policy,” I said.

“Half a million dollars.” He nodded his head sagely. “You ask me, it was the smartest thing he ever did.”

Then he sighed and shook his head and went for a fresh beer. I said my goodbyes. Outside, I stopped at the front door. A black Lincoln idled at the curb on the far side of the street. Ray Brady leaned against the rear fender, his head bent forward as he talked with Linda. Ray said something but she shook her head and stepped away from him. He glanced at me, scowling. Then Linda hurried back across the street and Ray’s shoulders sagged; he climbed back into the car, and sped away.