Joe Lansdale: Bad Chili

“And there’s always new films,” Leonard said.

“That’s right,” Jim Bob said. “It’s not like they got to have a Francis Ford Coppola behind the lens.”

“Could King and Pierre be together on all this?” I asked.

“I thought about that,” Jim Bob said. “It’s possible. But I don’t think so. I think Pierre gave us King’s name pretty easy. They were partners, he’d have held out.”

“What gets me is it’s gays doin’ it to gays,” I said.

“Welcome once again to the real world,” Leonard said.

“I suggest we have a little talk with Pierre,” Jim Bob said. “Pretend to have taken Raul and Horse’s place as blackmailers, make him push a move. Then we gift-wrap him for the cops.”

We went in Jim Bob’s car to Antone’s. Pierre wasn’t there.

“Well, where is he?” I asked the lady in charge.

She was a heavyset blond lady whose hair looked as if it had been the recipient of many an experiment, the most recent being an incredible rat job that revealed pink patches of skull. She was badly made up with too much powder and lipstick, false eyelashes thick enough and long enough to support a transport plane. She was outgoing and windy as hell; had a mouth like a leaf blower. No doubt she had given phone death to many a listener.

She said, “Well, I don’t rightly know where that little Frenchy is. He kind of comes and goes, you know. I’m in charge most of the time. Name’s Delores. Pierre has other things goin’ on I don’t know much about. Quite the little entrepreneur. Sometimes he’s here all week, sometimes you don’t see him for a week. I ain’t seen him for days. I open up, do hair, teach some of the students how to do hair, then I go home. You smell them peroxide fumes all day, you get so you can’t wait to get out of here. I go home and drink lots of goat’s milk. It’s supposed to help get rid of all kinds of toxins in the body, or at least that’s what my herbal medicine man tells me. He’s this Mex’kin lives on the other side of the railroad tracks. Hear him tell it, there ain’t a goddamn thing that goat milk can’t cure. ’Course, at four dollars a gallon, that shit ought to make you younger, tighten up your love sack, and put your cherry back in it. You boys want to leave a message?”

“He comes back,” Jim Bob said, “just tell Pierre three fellows came by to extort some money out of him, but not to worry, we’ll be back.”

“That’s a hell of a message,” she said.

“Ain’t it?” Leonard said.

“He got a home address?” Jim Bob asked.

“I can look it up,” Delores said. “You know, I been workin’ for that little French twist for a full year now, and he ain’t never invited me or anyone here over to his house.”

“Maybe he hangs his underwear on the doors,” Leonard said.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Delores said. “One thing I can do without is lookin’ at stains in drawers. My husband was terrible about that. I figure he wiped his butt, it was an accident, or his shorts got sucked up his crack. Way I figure, when he died, the undertaker had to use a hose and a putty knife to get him clean.”

“Soul mates, huh?” Jim Bob said.

“Hell, only thing that bastard had any soulful connection with was Championship Bowlin’, a beer, and a bag of taco chips, which is what I figure killed him. I’d have known that, I’d have kept a bigger supply around.”

We followed her into Pierre’s office. She got out the phone book, flipped it open, found his name. “There it is,” she said.

When we were outside in the parking lot, I said, “Gee, Jim Bob, right in the phone book. You’re quite the detective.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Jim Bob said.

Pierre’s house was easy to find. We drove over there and parked at the curb and sat for a moment.

“Are we waiting for Pierre to come out to the curb?”

Leonard said.

“No,” Jim Bob said. “We’re gonna go up there and intimidate him.”

“Intimidation is good,” Leonard said.

“We don’t push in,” Jim Bob said. “We don’t go past the door. We just intimidate. We put him in a position where he wants our asses dead.”

“He already wants our asses dead,” Leonard said.

“What we’re gonna do is let him know we’re on to him,” Jim Bob said. “We’re gonna make him so nervous his shit will be nervous. Then we’ll leave. Let him think a while, see if he makes a play.”

“If he doesn’t?” Leonard asked.

“We’ll come back on him like ass rash in a few days,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll keep it up until he’s got to scratch.”

We walked up the drive. It was a nice drive. The lawn was well clipped. There was a sprinkler system going, which, considering we’d just had a lot of rain, seemed wasteful. The garage was locked up tight. The houses on either side were nice and well dressed. Suburbia, U.S.A.

We went to the door. Jim Bob rang the bell.

We waited.

Jim Bob rang the bell again.

“Maybe the bell doesn’t work,” Leonard said, and he knocked.

We waited some more.

“You boys stand here,” Jim Bob said, and he slipped around the side of the house.

Leonard said, “Watch that sonofabitch move? He’s like a ghost.”

“You think he moves good going around the side of a house, you ought to see him blow up a car, kick down a door, shoot two thugs to death, and run Big Man Mountain into the woods. Then take me out the back door with him. He may actually have been eating dinner while he was doin’ that.”

Few moments later Jim Bob came back. He said, “Back door is opened. Been jimmied.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Uh-oh.”

“What now?” Leonard asked.

“Well,” Jim Bob said, “ain’t nobody seems to be lookin’, and since we don’t need a search warrant…”

The back door had that distinctive Big Man Mountain look. It appeared a crowbar had been inserted, and with a heave, the door had been snapped free of its lock. Even with a crowbar, that took some muscle.

Jim Bob kicked the door with the toe of his boot; it swung open, and we slipped inside. The air-conditioning unit was humming nicely. It felt good. Sunlight crept through the cracks of the living room curtains. Place looked like a magazine shoot. Expensive furniture, carpet, and paintings.

Jim Bob knelt, pulled up his pants legs. He reached inside his boot, took out a little leather zippered case. He unzipped it. There was everything in that case but a change of clothes.

Jim Bob removed a small wad of plastic from it. He replaced the case and unfolded the plastic. The plastic was several paper-thin gloves. He gave us each a pair. We put them on. He said, “Let’s look around.”

I took the kitchen. There were food dishes on the table, some kind of leftover Chinese was my guess, but I couldn’t tell for certain. What was left of it was long spoiled, gone black and full of flies that had come in through the cracked back door. There were two smeary plates on the table, two wineglasses, a half bottle of red wine. Flies skated over the greasy plate and sat around on the mouth of the bottle, making small talk, I presumed.

Jim Bob opened a bedroom door, peeked in. “This is sweet.”

Leonard and I took a look. The decor had gone from Better Homes and Gardens to Elvis on drugs. It was a big bedroom with a round bed and a mirrored ceiling. The covers, crushed red velvet, were in a wad. There was a huge television set and a VCR. A glass bedside table with books on it. The books were photographs of nude men. On the walls were paintings of nude men making love to one another.

We slid into the room and Jim Bob went around the bed and stopped and said, “This, however, isn’t so sweet.”