Bobby Byrd: Lone Star Noir

Mrs. Toups stuck her reddened face back in the door, a last plea on it. But at the sight of Phelan taking the phone, she ducked her head and left.

“Tom Phelan,” he said. Crisply, without one um or you know, the woman on the phone told him she wanted her husband followed, where to, and why. She’d bring by a retainer. Cash.

“That’ll work. Get back to you soon. Please leave any relevant details with my… with Miss Wade. You can trust her.”

And don’t I hope that’s true , he thought, clattering down the stairs.

The band was playing when Phelan pulled up to French High School. God, did he remember this parking lot: clubhouse, theater, and smoking lounge. He lit up for nostalgia’s sake.

A little shitkicker perched on the trunk of a Mustang pushed back his Resistol. He had his boots on the bumper, one knee jackhammering hard enough to shiver the car. Phelan offered him a smoke.

Haughtily, the kid produced some Bull and rolled his own. “Take a light.”

Phelan obliged. “You know Georgia Watson?”

“Out there. Georgia’s in Belles.” The boy lofted his chin toward the field that joined the parking lot.

“What about Ricky Toups?”

The kid tugged down the hat, blew out smoke. “Kinda old to be into weed, ain’t ya?”

“That why people come looking for Ricky?”

Marlboro-Man-in-training doused the homemade, stashed it behind his ear. Slid off the trunk and booked.

Phelan turned toward the field, where the band played a lazy version of “Grazing in the Grass.” The Buffalo Belles were high-kicking, locked shoulder to shoulder. Line of smiling faces, white, black, and café au lait, bouncing hair and breasts, 120 teenage legs, kicked up high. Fondly remembering a pair of those white boots hooked over his shoulders postgame, he strolled toward the rousing sight.

After their routine, the girls milled sideline while the band marched patterns. Phelan asked for Georgia and found her, said he wanted to talk.

This is who Ricky Toups thought hung the moon? Georgia Watson had an overloaded bra, all right, and cutoffs so short the hems of white pockets poked out like underwear. But she was a dish-faced girl with frizzled hair and cagey brown eyes. Braided gold chain tucked into the neck of a white T-shirt washed thin.

She steered him away from the knots of babbling girls. Her smile threw a murky light into the brown eyes. Black smudges beneath them from her gobbed eyelashes.

He introduced himself with a business card. “Ricky Toups’s mother asked me to check up on him. He got any new friends you know about?”

She jettisoned the smile, shrugged.

“C’mon, Georgia. Ricky thinks you’re his friend.”

She made a production of whispering, “Ricky was helping this guy with something, but I think that’s all over.”

“Something.”

“Something,” she hissed. She angled toward some girls staring frankly at them and fluttered her fingers in a wave. Nobody waved back.

“This guy. Why’s Ricky not helping him anymore?”

Georgia shook her head, looking over Phelan’s shoulder like she was refusing somebody who wasn’t there. “Fun at first, then he turned scary. Ricky’s gonna quit hanging out with him, even though that means-” Her trap shut.

“Giving up the green,” Phelan finished. His little finger flicked out the braided chain around the girl’s neck. Fancy G in twenty-four carat. “How long y’all had this scary friend?”

The head shaking continued, like a tic now.

Phelan violated her personal space. “Name. And where the guy lives.”

The girl backed up. “I don’t know, some D name, Don or Darrell or something. Gotta go now.”

Phelan caught her arm. “Ricky didn’t come home last night.”

White showed around the brown eyes. She spit out a sentence, included her phone number when pressed, then jerked her arm away and ran back to the other girls on the sideline. They practiced dance steps in bunches, laughed, horsed around. Georgia stood apart biting her bottom lip, the little white square of his business card pinched in her fingers.

11:22. He drove back to the office, took the stairs two at a time. Delpha handed him Mrs. Lloyd Elliott’s details neatly typed on the back of a sheet of paper. Phelan read it and whistled. “Soon’s she brings that retainer, Lloyd better dig himself a foxhole.”

He flipped the sheet over. Delpha Wade’s discharge from Gatesville: April 7, 1973. Five foot six, 120 pounds. Hair brown, eyes blue. Thirty-four. Voluntary manslaughter.

“Only paper around,” she said.

Phelan laid a ten on the desk. “Get some. Then see what’s up in the Toups’s neighborhood, say, the last three months. Thought this was a kid pushing weed for pocket money, but could be dirtier water.” He told her what Georgia Watson had given him: the D name, Don or Darrell, and that Ricky brought other boys over to the guy’s house to party. “I’m guessing Georgia might’ve pitched in with that.”

Delpha met his eyes for a second. Then, without comment, she flipped through the phone book while he went to his office, got the.38 out of a drawer, and loaded it. Glanced out the window. New Rosemont’s ancient proprietress, the one the fan had gonged, rag in hand, smearing dirty circles on a window.

When he came out, Delpha had the phone book open to the city map section. “Got a cross directory?” she asked.

Phelan went back and got it from his office. “Run through the-”

“Newspaper’s police blotter.”

“Right. Down at the-”

“Library,” she said. She left, both books hugged to her chest.

Just another girl off to school.

The parole office nudged up to the courthouse. His buddy Joe Ford was in, but busy. Phelan helped himself to a couple donuts from an open box. Early lunch. Joe read from a manila file to two guys Phelan knew. One took notes on a little spiral pad. Phelan, toting the long legal pad, realized he should have one of those. Neater, slipped in a jacket pocket. More professional. Joe closed the folder and kept on talking. One guy gave a low whistle; the other laughed.

Joe stood up, did a double take. “Hey, speak of the devil. Tommy, come on down.”

Phelan shook hands with Fred Abels, detective. Stuck his hand out to the other, but the man bear-hugged him. “Hey, Uncle Louie,” Phelan said. Louie Reaud, a jowly olive-skinned man with silvered temples, married to Phelan’s aunt. Louie boomed, “ Bougre, t’es fou ouais toi! T’as engage un prisonnier .” Which meant Phelan was crazy for hiring himself a convict.

Who said he’d hired anybody?

Abels, sporting a Burt Reynolds ’stache and burns, only not sexy, studied Phelan like he was a mud tire track lifted from a scene.

Phelan zeroed in on Joe, who raised his eyebrows, pulled down his lips, shook his head to indicate the purity permeating his soul.

“Okay.” Phelan set hands on his hips and broadened his stance. “All right. So my friend here appeals to my famous heart of gold. So I interview his girl. So she stuck some baddoer. So what.”

“Minced that one, yeah. I worked that case.” Louie wagged a finger. “I’m gonna tell you, cher , lock up the letter opener.” He punched his nephew’s arm, nodded at Joe, and he and Abels ambled off, chortling.

“Loudmouth bastard,” Phelan said to Joe. “Give me the dopers and perverts north side of town.” Commandeering Joe’s chair, Phelan reeled off some street names.

“That’s confidential.”

“Could have my secretary call you.”

“Hand full a ‘Gimme’ and a mouth full a ‘Much obliged’-that’s you.” Joe squinted, put-upon. “Not my territory, but old Parker lives in the can.” Joe stalked over to his coworker Parker’s vacant desk, the one next to his, and rambled through its file drawers.