Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Exposure by Tim L. Williams

Memphis private eye Charlie Raines, a recurring character in a number of Tim L. Williams’s short stories, including a previous tale published by EQMM, is back this month in another morally ambiguous outing. His creator is a college professor whose work has appeared in numerous literary quarterlies, as well as in crime magazines such as Plots With Guns, Murdaland, and Red Scream.

Despite my better judgment and the nagging pain in the pit of my stomach that I called indigestion but knew for a fact was guilt, I went to visit Mark McAllister in the Memphis city jail. I didn’t want to be there. Early spring in Memphis is the best time of year, maybe the only good one when you consider the smoke-gray chill of winter, the rain and mud of fall, and the smothering heat of summer. As I passed through metal detectors, signed forms promising not to sue if I were unlucky enough to be killed by one of the inmates, and nodded hello to a sprinkling of deputy jailers who remembered me from my days as a Memphis homicide detective, I told myself that if I’d had the good sense to ignore McAllister’s call, I would have spent the afternoon fishing on the Mississippi or taking a long walk through Riverside Park. Those were lies, of course. If I’d hung up on McAllister, I would have been at the Refugee’s Lounge in Whitehaven, drinking draft beer, getting my elbows grimy on the sticky bar, and betting on the wrong teams in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

A three-hundred-pound deputy jailer with horn-rimmed glasses, acne scars, and hair the color of pipe rust grunted instructions. By the time he finished, he was wheezing, and his face had turned the color of his hair. I remembered him. Gil Brewer. A diabetic and closet alcoholic with a three-pack-a-day Marlboro habit. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was cruel and stupid, I might have felt sorry for him.

“Some deal, huh, Charlie,” he said as he unlocked a green metal door. “Kid spends a lifetime looking for his old man just so he can pop him.” His gray eyes twinkled merrily. “Hey, that’s pretty frigging good. Pop his pop.” He wheezed laughter, coughed, and spat on the floor. “I hope you collected your fee up front.”

Brewer led me down a walkway lined with cells to a small holding room in the back. In every prison movie I’d ever seen, inmates greeted a new arrival by catcalling, hurling insults, and hanging on the bars of their cells, but as a cop and then as a private investigator I’d visited a few dozen jails and half as many prisons, and that had never happened. Ninety percent of the inmates barely registered anyone’s presence. The few who did watched quietly from their cells, their eyes either trapped and hopeless or cold and appraising. The only sounds that followed Brewer and me were a few coughs, a sneeze, Brewer’s wheeze, and the echo of our footsteps on the stained concrete floor.

Inside the holding room, Mark McAllister sat at a scarred picnic table that had been bolted to the floor. He wore handcuffs, shackles, and a standard-issue orange jumpsuit. When he looked up, I noticed a half-dozen cuts and scratches on his face and an ugly bruise just below his cheekbone. He looked smaller than he had in my office, younger, defeated, terrified. He should have been. He was charged with first-degree murder in the death of his biological father, the man I’d helped him find.

“I appreciate your coming, Mr. Raines,” he said, his voice as shaky as his smile. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

I sat across from him at the table. “I’m not sure why I did.”

Brewer snorted, dropped his bulk into a chair in the rear corner, passed gas, and scrubbed at a mustard stain on his chin. Then he reached for a National Enquirer and rattled the pages.

McAllister ignored him. “I know what they say, but I didn’t do nothing like that. I couldn’t do nothing like that, Mr. Raines, not to anybody, but especially not to my own father.”

Pure Missouri hills and as twangy as an out-of-tune banjo, his accent grated on my nerves and brought another sharp pain to the center of my gut. I’d hit middle age and had the paunch, the crow’s feet, and the receding hairline to prove it. I wasn’t happy to have been duped by a nineteen-year-old punk from Carlsbad, Missouri.

“Mr. Raines, you got to help me here...”

“You can drop the mister. Anybody who hires me under false pretenses and makes me complicit in a murder has earned the right to call me Charlie.”

He lowered his head, touched one of the cuts on his cheek. “I lied to you. I’m not saying I didn’t, but I figured if I told you everything, you wouldn’t take the job. But lying and killing are completely different things.”

When McAllister had shown up in my office to hire me to find a father that he hadn’t seen in seventeen years, he’d fed me a line. His mother had recently passed away. He was a welder at a factory in Missouri, took classes at a community college at night, and was just a month away from marrying his high-school sweetheart. Since he was an only child and had only a sprinkling of relatives, he’d decided to find the father who had deserted his family and fled to Memphis. The thought of the bride’s side of the church being packed with family while his side was completely empty made him sick to his stomach. I’d bought it all, even cut him a discount when he said he was using part of his mother’s life-insurance policy to pay me. Maybe it was because he seemed naive or maybe because my own father had left when I was ten and McAllister’s story touched a nerve.

The morning after I gave Mark his father’s address, Don McAllister was found dead, and I found out that most of what my client had said was fantasy. He wasn’t a welder or a community-college student or engaged to his childhood sweetheart. He was on parole for assault and battery, had spent half of his teenage years in reform school, and made his living by dealing drugs in his hometown.

“You’re wasting my time,” I said, angry all over again. “You lied to me, made me look like a fool at best and an accomplice in a murder at the worst. The only thing that’s keeping me from whipping your ass is that I don’t relish the idea of spending a week in lockup.”

He breathed deep, winced as if he’d taken in a lungful of needles. “I didn’t kill him, Mr. — Charlie.” He licked his lips. “I got drunk before I went to see him. Real drunk. I told myself I was just going to have one or two to calm my nerves, suck up my courage, you know? But two didn’t work so I kept drinking. Then I showed up at his house. When he opened the door, it took him a little while to realize who I was, and then he called me son.” McAllister closed his eyes. “He had no right to call me that. Not as soon as he saw me, not after what he did to me and my momma.”

“Listen...” I said.

“It made me want to cry,” McAllister said, his voice breaking. “And then it made me mad. I hauled off and hit him in the mouth.” He held up a scabbed and dirt-streaked right hand to show me the teeth marks. “Then I ran back to my car bawling like a baby. I remember pulling off the side of the road to throw up and stopping at a liquor store for another bottle. I guess I blacked out, because I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in my hotel room covered in puke and stinking like an outhouse.”

“Call a lawyer.”

“I didn’t kill him,” he said again. “Jesus, I just wanted to know him and know why he ditched us. That’s all I wanted. Now, I reckon, I’ll never know.”

I felt a tremor of sympathy and warned myself not to be a sap for a second time. Still, the tremor didn’t stop. What if the kid was telling the truth? What if it was just his bad fortune to find his old man on the night that somebody decided to shoot him? And hell, even if he had killed his father, who was I to judge? There’d been plenty of times I’d wanted to shoot my old man since he’d blundered back into my life.

“I know a good attorney, okay? I’ll contact him, have him come see you,” I said, cursing my own stupidity as I spoke the words. “That’s the best I can do.”

The kid beamed. Brewer lowered his National Enquirer, gave me a look that said I was the world’s biggest sucker. But that was all right. He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.

Later that afternoon I walked into the Alligator, a Union Avenue dive with pretensions of being a sports bar, and found my former homicide partner hunched over a mug of draft beer at a small table near a pinball machine. The day shift had just given way to the night at the Midtown precinct. Young patrol officers with crew cuts, swollen biceps, spotless uniforms, and freshly shined shoes shot pool, flirted with dyed-blond waitresses, ordered pitchers of draft beer, and gunned shots of tequila with the good-time abandon of college frat boys. Older plainclothes cops from Robbery — Homicide and Vice sat in smaller groups, their cheap suits rumpled and smeared with ash or damp with spilled beer. They were quieter than their younger colleagues, and both their eyes and their rare smiles seemed hard and weary. Nate Randolph, who’d recently been promoted to lieutenant, sat by himself, his dark brown forehead beaded with sweat, his eyes bloodshot, his posture that of a hungry bear protecting a fresh kill from scavengers.

I crossed the room, elbowing my way through the crowd, ignoring the stares. For most of the cops in the Alligator, their hostility wasn’t personal. I was just an outsider who’d blundered into their world. But there were a few who remembered me, and their expressions were a mixture of contempt, pity, and barely restrained anger. In a lot of ways, quitting the police force is like leaving a cult. Your walking away isn’t just a personal decision, it’s a repudiation of everything your former brothers are willing to die for.

I took a chair at Nate’s table without waiting for an invitation. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“Leave a five-dollar bill and I’ll send you a thank-you note tomorrow.”

“It’s good to see you’ve developed a sense of humor. It isn’t much of one, but at least it’s a start.”

He tried glaring and then glowering, finally gave up and settled for looking morose. I flagged a waitress, ordered a round of beers, asked how his wife was doing. Mistake. They’d divorced a year and a half ago. I apologized; he grunted.

“What do you want, Raines?” he asked after he downed a quarter of his beer in a single swallow. “Spit it out and then get out of here.”

“You’re grumpier than usual.”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I’ve pulled two double shifts in the last three days. The one damn chance I get to have a drink in peace, you show up like a mangy dog begging for scraps.”

“Mark McAllister.”

He raised his head a little, smiled. “The kid who killed his long-lost father. You got egg on your face on that one.”

“What do you know about his case?”

He belched, winced, washed down his indigestion with another drink of beer. “You lose your ability to read people or are you so hard up for cash you don’t bother to check out your clients anymore?”

“I bought his line.”

He emptied his mug, slapped it hard on the table, and raised his eyebrow. I took the hint, waved at the waitress, and held up two fingers for another round.

“Your boy went to his father’s house, punched him around a little, stormed off. Sometime later, he came back with a .22 automatic, shot dear old dad four times at close range, and took off again. Neighbor heard the original commotion, got your boy’s license-plate number, phoned it in. Next morning he was found in a whore’s motel off the I-40 loop, still half drunk, beat up, with blood and puke on his clothes. When officers searched his Firebird, they found a half-dozen .22 shells scattered in the floorboard under empty beer cans and cigarette packs. End of story.”

“I read the police report.”

He accepted another beer from the waitress and brought it to his lips without letting it touch the table. “Then why bother me?” He stifled a belch. “What do you care?”

“I’m curious by nature.”

“You want the God’s honest truth? I don’t give a damn about your curiosity or McAllister or his old man. Last week and a half, four of Little Vinnie Montesi’s bagmen have been robbed and killed, one of them at three in the afternoon in a public park.”

I mumbled a wow because that was all that I could think to say. Little Vinnie Montesi ran the mob in Memphis. He’d replaced his uncle, Fat Tony, a couple of years ago. Fat Tony had been tough, ruthless, as dangerous as a Bengal tiger when someone infringed on his territory, but essentially a rational and loyal man. I’d had an occasion to work with him once and owed him my life. But he and his nephew had little in common other than their last names. A coke-head with the facial tick and the megalomania that plagued long-time addicts, Little Vinnie was known for being smart, high-strung, and relentlessly vicious.

“Last thing we need in this town is a gang war with a bunch of Elvis-loving tourists caught in the middle. That happens, the chamber of commerce, the mayor, and the police chief are going to be as unpleasant as wasps on crank.”

“Wasps use speed?”

He glared at me. “A figure of speech. What I’m saying is, I got my own problems to worry about. You want to know anything about your boy, ask the guys working his case.”

He turned his chair, bellowed for Elswick and Johnson to join us. They were a little younger than Nate and I, but I remembered Elswick as a rookie uniform. He was tall, blond, broad-shouldered, and sunburned. His partner, Johnson, was a whip-thin black man with a thick moustache and razor bumps on his jaws.

“You guys know Charlie Raines?”

Johnson stroked his moustache like a guy who hadn’t had it long. “By reputation.”

“We know one of your clients.” Elswick smirked, took a sip from a glass of what looked like bourbon and water. “We had a few questions for you.”

“Ask away.”

“No need now,” Johnson said. “We figured out the answers.”

“And?”

“We’ve got his prints, a witness who put him at the scene, blood on his clothes, shells in his car, a motive for murder. We also got him on record as telling one of his buddies up in Missouri that he was going to find his father in Memphis and might have to stick around long enough to help put him in the ground.”

“You still working for him?” Elswick asked.

“No.”

He ignored my answer. “The best thing you can tell your client is to cop a plea. If he’s lucky, the D.A. might settle for murder without premeditation.”

“Did you find the weapon?”

“None of your business,” Johnson said.

“You check any other suspects?”

“Again, none of your business,” Elswick said.

“I’m not trying to undercut your case.”

“This conversation is already an unpleasant memory,” Johnson said, turning towards Nate. “We’ll send you a drink over, Loot. Join us when you’re ready.”

I gave up, threw a five-dollar bill in front of Nate. “Thanks for your help.”

He took a deep breath and let it out through his nostrils. “Your boy’s guilty, Charlie. But if you’re looking for other suspects, check out Don McAllister’s private life. Who knows? You might find something to help you.”

“His private life?”

“Memphis is an old-fashioned place. Once you get out of the pink zone downtown, life can be hard for a middle-aged fairy.”

“Don McAllister was gay?”

“Arrested back in the mid ‘nineties for lewd behavior. Evidently, McAllister and a truck driver were getting amorous outside a nightclub on Summer Avenue.”

“I owe you one.”

“You and the rest of the world.” He drained the rest of his beer and picked up the crumpled, beer-soggy five I’d thrown on his table. “The problem is, all you bastards want to repay me on an installment plan.”

Three days later, I was convinced that Nate had developed a perverse sense of humor and had intentionally pointed me in the wrong direction. I’d spent the better part of seventy-two hours drinking German beer in trendy downtown bars, waiting in line outside the office of an AIDS activist who seemed to know every openly gay man in Shelby County, cruising rest areas in the greater Memphis area, and giving away cigarettes at bus stations all over town. No one recognized Don McAllister’s picture, knew his name, or seemed particularly bothered that he’d been killed.

From the work I’d done before the murder, I knew that McAllister had been an assistant manager at a Sycamore View Kroger. After I gave up haunting the local gay scene, I decided to talk to his coworkers. I spoke to the cashiers, the stock boys, the dairy manager, and the butcher, but all that anyone knew about Don McAllister was that he was never late, that he was a stickler for straight shelves, and that he ate pimento cheese on whole wheat every day for lunch.

“He was just an odd guy,” the head butcher, a gray-haired man with thin lips and thick, work-scarred hands said. “We took our lunch together for ten years, and I could count the amount of words he spoke on one hand. He just sat there, eating his sandwich, reading his photography magazines, until it was time to clock back in. Don was the last man on earth you’d suspect would end up murdered.”

“Photography magazines?”

“He had a slew of them. Kept them in his locker so he could read them at lunch.”

“They still around?”

“Probably.”

The lockers were just open storage crates with nametags. I hunkered in front of McAllister’s box, pulled out a couple of dozen photography magazines, and flipped through the pages. Most of the articles were technical, way over my head and way beyond the interest of a casual photographer. A few receipts for films, lenses, photo docks, and memory cards fell out. At the bottom of the crate was another receipt, this one from the Shelby County Photography Club, for a year’s membership dues. I stuck the receipt in my pocket. I wasn’t sure it was the right place to start looking, but at least it was some place to start. Besides that, it was the first indication I’d found that Don McAllister had had a life before someone took it away from him.

To my surprise, the Shelby County Photography Club seemed to be just that. Back when I’d spent a long and very unhappy year in Vice, “Photography Clubs” served as fronts for prostitutes, nude models, and groups of pedophiles who tried to pass their perversion off as art. But the Shelby County Photography Club seemed legit. Housed in the corner space of a strip mall on the edge of Cordova, the club was clean, orderly, its walls decorated with framed black-and-white photographs taken by its members. A sign over the reception desk announced the prices for camera rentals and advertised a workshop on documentary photography that was to be held at the end of the month. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved that the world seemed to be a slightly better place or disappointed that what might have been a real lead was fizzling like a wet firecracker.

The man who stepped from a back room to greet me was in his late forties or early fifties, sun-tanned, gray-haired, with very blue eyes. He wore spotless khakis, an olive-green polo shirt, John Lennon granny glasses, a thick gold wedding band, and a nametag that identified him as Blake Roberts, manager.

“Are you looking to become a member or just looking?”

I took a card from my back pocket and laid it on the desk. “I’d like to talk to you about Don McAllister.”

His smile faltered. “Oh,” he whispered. “Poor Don.”

Fifteen minutes later, I finished a cup of very good coffee while Roberts finished praising Don McAllister’s ability as a photographer, his virtue as a friend, and his overall decency as a human being. I was more than a little surprised. It wasn’t just that Roberts was the first person to say something truly nice about McAllister. He was the only person I’d talked to who had anything to say about him at all.

“So he was a serious photographer,” I said, cutting him off before he launched into another monologue. “It was more than just a hobby to him?”

He puckered his lips a little and then shrugged. “He had a lot of talent, a lot more than I have and a lot more than most of the professionals who teach workshops here have. But he had no interest in trying to make a living at it. I know for a fact that he turned down at least three offers to show his photographs in galleries. Photography was personal to Don.”

I nodded as if I understood and thought about the police report; there hadn’t been any mention of cameras or photography equipment in the evidence catalog from McAllister’s house. “His cameras,” I said. “Did he own them or rent them here?”

Roberts recoiled, the expression on his face the same as it would have been had I spilled my coffee on his plush white carpet. “Our equipment is strictly for amateurs. Don wouldn’t have been caught dead using one of those rentals.”

“Do you have any of his work here?”

His expression looked pained. “Yes,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Could you show me?”

“I’m not sure I should. I’m not sure you’ll understand.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering, he opened his desk drawer, picked up a key, and then walked out of the room, his shoulders slumped as if I’d beaten him somehow. A few minutes later, he came back, handed me a leather portfolio, and then dropped back in his desk chair.

I don’t know a lot about photography, but I knew that Don McAllister had talent. His photographs throbbed with color and light. Then, as I kept flipping through the portfolio, I stopped thinking about Don McAllister’s talent and focused on the subjects. Children. Every single photograph was of a child or a family with children. They were taken at municipal parks, at playgrounds and schoolyards, at Liberty Land and the Memphis Zoo, and at the River Walk Park. All of the photographs were candid, none even slightly risqué, and most seemed taken without the children or their parents being aware. I stared at the last picture in the album. It was taken at Riverside Park on a sunny afternoon. The park was packed. There were a half-dozen faces in the background but they were white noise, unimportant. Don McAllister’s camera had been squarely focused on a towheaded boy of six or seven. Looking at the picture made me uneasy.

“Were all of his pictures like this?”

“Good, you mean?”

“Of children.”

“Families and children, yes.” He took the portfolio away from me as if I were unfit to handle it. “Can’t you feel the love he expressed in those photographs?”

“He was a pedophile?”

Roberts closed his eyes. “You’ve no right to say that. Don was a decent, decent man.”

“He was obsessed with children.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t dirty.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“I do,” he said, opening his eyes to meet mine in a challenge. “I most certainly do.” He stood from behind his desk. “Everything isn’t dirty, you know? You’ve no right to come in here and say it is.”

“You’re in denial about your friend.”

His face reddened and his eyes bulged until I thought he was either going to leap across the desk or suffer a stroke in his effort not to. “He took those photographs because he didn’t have a family of his own. That’s what his art did for Don. It gave him back something he’d lost.”

“He had a family. A son. He walked out on them, never went back.”

“He had no choice.”

“Everybody has a choice. Sometimes it’s convenient to believe we don’t.”

“You don’t know anything, Mr. Raines.” He shut his eyes and took another deep breath. “Now, please, please, please get the hell out of my office.”

“Look...”

“Get out!” he bellowed.

Then he started to cry. He didn’t weep or wail or bawl but tears ran in a zigzagging line from beneath his glasses. I watched him for a second. Then I left, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

At the Union Avenue precinct, I found my way to the evidence room, bribed a desk clerk with two twenties for another look at the catalog of possessions removed from Don McAllister’s home, and then went to the fourth-floor Robbery — Homicide bullpen. Elswick and Johnson shared a cubicle, their desks pressed against each other. They were lounging, Elswick drinking a Dr Pepper, Johnson eating microwave popcorn. When they saw me, they exchanged smiles as if I were a private joke between them.

“If it isn’t the pot-bellied Sam Spade,” Elswick said.

“Did you know that Don McAllister was a serious amateur photographer?”

They exchanged looks and then Johnson shrugged. “So what?”

“None of his cameras and equipment are in the evidence locker or in your report. Were they at the scene?”

“Listen to him,” Elswick said. “He talks like a cop.”

Johnson stroked his moustache. “If they were at the scene, they would have been in our report, wouldn’t they?”

“Robbery might be the motive for McAllister’s murder.”

“You think so, huh?” Elswick finished his Dr Pepper, belched, crumpled the can, and pitched it in the trash. “You’re wasting your time, Raines.”

Johnson tapped a Manila folder on his desk. “Autopsy report. Pancreatic cancer, late stages.”

It was my turn to ask so what.

“Mark McAllister had another motive for murder besides having his heart broken by his deadbeat dad,” Johnson said.

“The kid wanted his inheritance quicker than his father wanted to die.”

“How was Mark McAllister supposed to know that his father had cancer or that there was any inheritance at all? He hadn’t heard from him since he was two years old.”

Elswick winked at Johnson. Johnson grinned at me.

“Talk to your client, Raines.”

“Meaning?”

Elswick gave me a hard look. “Meaning get the hell out of here and quit wasting our time.”

Instead of listening to their advice, I went to Riverside Park, where the last picture in Don McAllister’s portfolio had been taken. Something about that photograph troubled me and chafed at my nerves, although I didn’t know why. The subject was no different from the others. Maybe it was the intensity of his focus on the little boy, a reaching desperation that seemed as vivid as the trees, the sunshine, and the shadow, or maybe it was the bland faces in the background, anonymous, unconcerned onlookers to what felt like a horrible crime.

It was nearly a perfect spring afternoon. The skies were rich blue, the clouds lazy and puffy, the breeze from the river just cool enough to take the bite out of the afternoon sun. Harried mothers sat along the edge of the playground, talking quietly to each other as throngs of children ran towards the swings, the jungle gym, and slides. A few suited and bright-faced professionals from the offices downtown drank Starbucks coffee or ate their lunches in the shade of oak trees. Lovers, young and otherwise, held hands. I showed McAllister’s photograph around, asked if anyone recognized him. A few of the regulars did, but none knew his name, just that he’d come to the park to take pictures. There was no sense that anyone had been alarmed by his presence or aware that his camera lens had been focused on their children.

It was a useless trip but a gorgeous day, so I lingered in the park, enjoying the sounds of laughter, the fresh green grass, the clean smell of the air coming off the water. These days I spent most of my life in dive bars, low-rent strip clubs, grimy jails, and trash-strewn ghettos. It was nice to know that there was a different, brighter world to which I belonged. I found an empty park bench, stretched my legs, told myself for the hundredth time that I needed to get outdoors more often, start taking walks or jogging. I was still telling myself that I was going to start tomorrow when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. My first reaction was to slap at a bug. I’d owned the phone for six months but still forgot that I had it.

“What the hell’s wrong with you, Charlie?” Bernie Koskov, the attorney I’d contacted for Mark McAllister, yelled. “You forgot how to return a phone call?”

“I forgot to check my messages.”

“No wonder you’re a nickel away from declaring bankruptcy.”

Koskov was a good friend and as good a defense lawyer as could be found in Memphis, but the man nagged even more than my ex-wife had. “What’s up?”

“What’s up, he asks,” Koskov said. “I just wanted to thank you for throwing me a dog of a case for which I’m not going to get paid a penny. You keep it up and I’ll be as poor as you.”

“Tell me.”

“Our client got a heartfelt letter from his father about three weeks ago. No return address on the envelope. But you know what was inside?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “A letter from Don McAllister explaining that he had cancer and only a few months to live. The letter went on to explain that our client was going to inherit a decent sum of money. There was also a certified check for three thousand dollars, good-faith money or a peace offering, I guess. That means our client had a financial motive for killing his father. It means I can’t play the abandoned-son card to get him a lesser sentence, and it means that I’m going to lose a murder case, something that I never, ever do.”

“Jesus.”

“Him, I could have gotten off.”

Then he hung up. I sat in the park another second, my face burning, feeling as stupid as I ever had in my life.

“I should have told you,” Mark McAllister said. “But I figured you’d think I was guilty if I did.”

I balled my hands into fists to stop myself from slapping him. “You were right.”

“I ain’t no saint, but I wouldn’t kill my own natural father.”

“The only reason you came to find him was the money.”

He scratched at a scab on his knuckle. “I owed some people back home, and they weren’t happy about it. These were some real tough old boys.”

“How much?”

“Twenty grand.” He smiled and then I really wanted to hit him. “I sort of lifted some of their product and put it to my own uses.”

“Why did you punch your father? He refuse to give you the money?”

He looked down at his hands and his face reddened. “He told me he was gay,” he said, his voice genuine for the first time since I’d met him. “He said that’s why he left my mother. The thought of it... I don’t know. I lost my temper.”

“You went back and killed him.” I held up a hand to stop him before he could spin another web of B.S. “Forget it. I’m through with you, but why me? Of all the private investigators in Memphis, why did you pick me?”

He smiled again. “Your ad in the phone book looked cheap. I thought I could afford you.”

I promised myself that I was just going to stop by the Refugee for a quick beer before heading home, but I walked through the door at six o’clock and was still there when the late local news came on at ten. A quick drink had turned into a dozen slow ones, and I squinted at the fly-specked and beer-splattered television, trying to focus my eyes. The first five minutes of the news was the usual drone of disaster — roadside bombings in Iraq, earthquakes in Indonesia, a plane crash in Italy. Then the anchorman cut to breaking local news. Two men had been gunned down outside of a Brooks Road strip club. The cops were withholding the victims’ names, but both were said to be associates of the Montesi crime family. The reporter went on to point out that these men were the latest victims in a series of murders and speculated about a brewing gang war, the first in Memphis in thirty-five years. Then the story ended. After a couple of appropriately serious headshakes, the anchorman brightened and teased a story about an Arkansas pig farmer who hit a half-million-dollar jackpot at the Horseshoe Casino down in Tunica.

I pulled myself from the barstool, lurched towards the door, decided I was too drunk to drive, and then stumbled back to the bar. I dug around in my pocket for my cell phone, finally found it, and squinted at the number of the cab company that was pinned over the cash register. One of the cocktail waitresses, a haggard-faced brunette who was twenty-five going on fifty and who’d once offered to sleep with me if I’d pay her past-due electric bill, put her hand on my shoulder and her mouth next to my ear. I shivered a little, wondering if she had more utilities that needed paying and if I were drunk enough to take her up on the offer this time.

“That little red light blinking on your phone means you have a message,” she whispered in my ear.

“Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Right.”

Then she patted my shoulder and moved away, her hips twitching beneath her cutoff denim shorts. I squinted down at my cell phone, finally managed to push the button to listen to the message. It was from Koskov. He didn’t sound any happier, and he wanted me to call. I thought about letting it wait until morning, but then I figured I might as well find out the bad news while I was drunk enough not to care.

“What did you say to Mark McAllister when you went to see him,” he said instead of hello. “The kid hung himself in his cell. You know how that looks? It looks like a confession.”

“McAllister’s dead?”

“He might as well be. He’s at Baptist Memorial, ICU, and if the little jerk survives, a jury’s going to hang him.” He coughed into the phone and then the coughs gave way to curses. “So far the only thing he’s been able to say is ‘I want Charlie Raines.’ Go down there if you have to, but for God’s sake, try hard not to make things worse than they are.”

After he hung up, I called a cab. But I didn’t go home.

Gil Brewer, rumpled, red-eyed, and coffee-stained, and a young patrol officer stood guard outside the ICU door. The patrol officer’s presence wasn’t a surprise, but Brewer’s was, and I didn’t like it.

“New jail policy,” Brewer said, scratching a red smear on his chin that might have come from a jelly doughnut. “One of ours leaves the jail, one of us has to go with him.”

“I thought you worked the day shift.”

“Rodriguez called in sick, menstrual cramps or some such nonsense, so I had to pull a double shift.” He hooked his head toward the ICU. “Then this asshole decides to hang himself on my watch, so guess who gets to stand on his feet all night?”

“Tough world,” I said, stepping past him.

He followed me into the ICU ward and parked himself beside Mark McAllister’s door. The kid looked as small as a ventriloquist’s dummy in the hospital bed. A half-dozen tubes and wires were connected to his nose, his mouth, and his arms, but he was awake.

“Charlie,” he said, his voice a ragged hiss coming from his damaged vocal cords. “Didn’t do it. Not my old man.” He hissed and coughed, and the machines beeped crazily. Still, he managed to lift a hand and touch his swollen throat. “Not this, either.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not this.”

“Take it easy.”

I didn’t have to tell him twice. He shut his eyes and went to sleep.

The next morning I woke on my living-room floor, hung over, stiff, stinking like a skid-row bum. By the time I’d left the hospital, taken a cab back to the Refugee for my car, and driven home, I was sober, a condition I’d remedied by finishing the last eight beers in my refrigerator and then breaking into a bottle of Ten High bourbon. I’d sat at my kitchen table, drinking, chain-smoking Kools, my brain chasing itself in circles. Something about the day had stuck and was grating at my consciousness but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Like most people who drink too much, I told myself that booze helped clarify my thinking, but I’d worked so hard at achieving clarity that I’d passed out.

Now, I smoked my first cigarette of the day while I waited for coffee to brew. When it did, I took a cautious sip, gagged, sipped again. I closed my eyes, letting everything run through my brain — the missing camera equipment, Blake Roberts’s passionate defense of his friend, the photographs I’d seen in Don McAllister’s portfolio, Mark McAllister’s insistence that he hadn’t tried to commit suicide. Then I squeezed my eyes tighter. It was the last photograph in Don McAllister’s portfolio that was still bothering me. Kids on the playground. A family having a picnic. The towheaded boy, a figure of longing and desperation. But it was the faces in the background that came back to me. They were unimportant to Don McAllister. His focus and the composition made that clear. They were just faces, men and women in the park, irrelevant to him in his obsession. He was a good photographer, and his picture demanded that you follow his eye, his focus. Now, I shut my eyes, tried to pry my mind free of what McAllister had wanted the picture to capture. I focused on the background, saw a heavyset black woman in a bright orange blouse, an elderly man walking a terrier, a man staring at the camera with a look that was either fear or surprise. I opened my eyes. I hadn’t recognized the figures in the background because I’d been too quick to latch on to the subject matter. The belief that McAllister was a pedophile had blotted everything else out. I made a phone call to an old friend who worked as a fact checker for the Commercial Appeal and when I hung up, I knew I’d made a mistake.

Blake Roberts had stopped crying, but it looked as if he might start again. He was sitting behind his desk with a USA Today open in front of him. His glasses had slipped down his nose, and his eyes were bloodshot and watery.

“You’re not welcome here,” he said, his voice raw but his words precise. “I made that clear yesterday.”

I held up a hand to stop him. “I’ve come to apologize,” I said, which was at least partially true. “I jumped to a conclusion I shouldn’t have.”

He wasn’t a man accustomed to being angry and didn’t seem very good at it. Still, he tried to hold on to his hostility for a little while before he gave up and slumped back against his chair.

“I can see why you thought what you did, Mr. Raines. But I can guarantee you that it was wrong.”

“You cared a lot about him.”

His expression grew wary. “We were friends.”

“You were lovers.”

He lowered his eyes. “I’m married. I have children.”

“And you were in love with Don McAllister.”

“No.” He sagged a little further into the chair and then waved his hand dismissively. “He was a good man, courageous.” He took a gulp of air. “More courageous than I could ever be. He loved his family, loved his son, but he left them because he couldn’t live as someone else. I’ve never lived anything but a lie. You want to know how much of a coward I am?”

“It’s not necessary.”

He wasn’t listening. “I didn’t even go to his funeral. I loved the man for ten years, and I was afraid to attend his funeral because my wife might suspect that there was something between us.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hands. “He was dying. Did you know that?”

“He wrote his son.”

“Don missed his family like a part of him that had been amputated. That’s why he took the pictures. He was trying to capture what he’d lost when he left his son.” He lifted his glasses, rubbed at his eyes. “Don was an artist, and if the world had been different, he would have been a great father. I knew he didn’t want to die without reconciling with his son. That’s why I encouraged him to write the letter.” His shoulders completely crumbled and his chin bobbed to his chest. “And I got him killed, didn’t I?”

“I don’t think so.”

He lifted his head, wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “You don’t believe his son did it?”

“I did, but now I don’t think so.”

“I hope that’s true. You have no idea how I’ve blamed myself, how guilty I’ve felt.”

“The photographs. Did he date them?”

“Most photographers do.”

“Did he?”

He puffed his cheeks as if he were trying to figure out a complex equation and then nodded. “Yes, I’m certain he did.”

“Bring me the portfolio.”

Three hours later, I found Elswick and Johnson at the Alligator, drinking their way through their lunch hour. Elswick glared; Johnson wiped his mouth on a paper napkin, balled it up, and dropped it on a plate smeared with barbecue sauce and ketchup.

“You guys are going to have to find a new patsy,” I said.

Elswick glanced at Johnson and then back at me. “Are you drunk or just stupid, Raines?”

I sat at their table, reached into the pocket of my windbreaker, clicked on a microcassette recorder, and then pulled out my pack of Kools. “Mark McAllister is going to walk for his father’s murder.”

“Both,” Johnson said. “He’s drunk and he’s stupid.”

“I found the kid an alibi. As it turns out, while his old man was being murdered, Mark McAllister was in the process of being robbed by a Whitehaven hooker and her pimp.”

“That’s a good one, Raines. You keep saying it enough times, someone might believe you.”

“But not us,” Elswick added.

I lit a cigarette, ignored their frowns. “Her conscience was bothering her. Hooker or not, she didn’t want to see an innocent kid go down for a murder he didn’t commit. She’s already given her statement to Nate Randolph. Now, her pimp’s a different story, a hard case who drifted into town a few weeks ago, drifted out right after the murder.”

“This is crap, Raines,” Elswick said.

I blew a lungful of smoke in his face. “You guys didn’t find what you were looking for. You killed Don McAllister for nothing. He didn’t have the photographs and had no idea what they meant anyway.” I smiled. “A friend of mine blew up the picture. I could even see the latex gloves you guys wore to cover the gunpowder residue when you knocked off Little Vinnie’s bagman at Riverside Park.”

“Man, you’ve lost your mind,” Johnson said, but neither of them made a move to walk away.

“My friend found the film, went back, developed a couple more pictures. You guys are never the stars but you’re there in three of them.”

“Waste of time,” Elswick said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I snubbed my cigarette, went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “With computer enhancement, I bet you could read the serial numbers on the .22 that Johnson dropped in that trash can next to the tulip bed. You seemed surprised. That’s when you realized you’d been photographed, right?”

“To hell with you, Raines,” Elswick said.

“Something needs to be done about corruption in the police force. You have any idea how many desk-sitters were willing to let me look at your logs when I waved around a hundred dollars?” I lit another cigarette, changed my mind, and dropped it into Elswick’s glass. “You two were unaccounted for every time one of Montesi’s men got robbed and killed, and you caught the McAllister case because you were the first to arrive at the scene. Just happened to be in the neighborhood, huh?” I leaned forward. “Your witness put Mark McAllister on the scene earlier. When you found him, everything fell into place.” I met Elswick’s clear blue eyes. “But now it’s unraveling. It’s not going to take a lot of leaning on Gil Brewer before he rolls over on you two for hiring him to hang Mark McAllister in his cell.”

Something passed between them. I had a good idea that something was an unspoken agreement to rid the world of Gil Brewer at their first opportunity. But that was all right with me. I didn’t see that the world would be any worse off with his passing.

“You think you can prove any of it, take it to Internal Affairs,” Elswick said. “After they clear us, maybe we’ll have a long talk with you about slander.”

“Or maybe we won’t bother to talk,” Johnson said.

“Just stay away from Mark McAllister. The kid’s a jerk, but he doesn’t deserve to be framed for murder. When he gets better, let him walk away. If you do, you’ll save yourselves the grief of an I.A. investigation.”

“Let’s pretend this crap is true, and let’s say that the kid walks, you wouldn’t go whispering a bunch of nonsense in Lieutenant Randolph’s ear?”

“Right.”

“And this photograph that doesn’t exist...” Elswick said.

“Would stay in my lawyer’s safe. We’ll call it protection against any bad decision you might make.”

“That’s pretty good,” Johnson said. “You ought to write for television.”

They stood in unison. “Thanks for your help with everything, Charlie,” Elswick said. “I hate to see a case come to a dead end, but better it go Cold Case than an innocent kid spend the rest of his life in prison.”

“We’ll see you around,” Johnson said. “Give your client our best wishes and tell him that we’re sorry for the misunderstanding.”

A week and a half later, I sat on a bench at the Riverside Park, smoking a cigarette and waiting. In the last couple of days, the weather had warmed and the air had gotten muggy, a reminder that summer heat was hunkering on the horizon. Still, I wore a windbreaker and sweated as I watched kids run helter-skelter through the playground. It was the kind of day that Don McAllister would have loved.

When Mark McAllister was released, Blake Roberts went with me to pick him up and drop him at the bus station. It was awkward. Roberts kept looking at the kid as if he wanted to grab him, kiss him, and remind him to eat his vegetables. McAllister didn’t have a lot to say, but the sneer on his lips and the hardness in his eyes said he knew exactly what kind of relationship Roberts had had with his father. Still, when Roberts told Mark that his father had loved him, truly loved him, the kid managed to smile and shed a quick tear that I hope was genuine.

Later that evening, I finished my last two obligations to the McAllister case. The first was easy. I found Loretta Hampton trolling for tricks outside a Whitehaven nightclub, slipped her an envelope with five one-hundred-dollar bills, her price for providing Mark McAllister with an alibi. The second was harder. I spent an hour and a half sitting in my car, nipping from a half-pint of bourbon and telling myself that I wasn’t going to do what I had in mind. Then I picked up an oversized envelope with Don McAllister’s photographs, copies I’d made of the police logs, and the microcassette tape that I’d recorded at the Alligator. None of it was solid evidence or had a chance of holding up in court, but I was parked outside of a strip club on Brooks Road, not the hall of justice.

Now I finished my smoke, ignored frowns from a couple of health freaks who were jogging the River Walk, and then spotted the man I’d been waiting for. He looked as out of place in a park filled with toddlers and their adoring parents as the Pope would have looked in one of the strip clubs or massage parlors that the man operated. He was tall, muscled, in his early sixties. He wore jeans, a black leather jacket with studs, dark glasses, and lots of rings — a habit that had earned him his street name. Johnny Rings. I’d known him off and on for fifteen years. In that time he’d risen from a part-time bookie to captain of one of the Montesi crews.

“Nice day, huh?” he said, sitting beside me on the bench and slicking back his hairspray-stiff hair. “I need to get out of the office more, enjoy the weather.”

He unzipped his jacket, glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and then pulled out a thick envelope and stuck it in my hand. I stuffed the envelope in my windbreaker without bothering to open it.

“Five g’s,” Johnny Rings said. “And Vinnie says to pass on his thanks.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll see you around, Johnny.”

“The last guy those two jerks popped was my sister’s stepson. I took it personally.” He smiled a vacant smile that would have made a polar bear shiver. “And then I took care of it myself. When we got finished with Elswick and Johnson...”

“I don’t want to know, Johnny.”

He seemed offended but then relaxed. “Oh sure. Loose lips, right?” He slapped my shoulder. “You take care, Charlie. You ever need a favor, call.”

Then he strutted away, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. I touched the envelope in my pocket. I hadn’t tipped Montesi for the money. And as much as I would have liked to pretend that it was true, I hadn’t gone to him out of a relentless desire for justice. It was a matter of survival. I’d rattled Johnson and Elswick, and sooner or later, they’d have made a move on me. I’d told Vinnie Montesi that I didn’t expect money, but he’d insisted that I take a finder’s fee and Little Vinnie was a man who didn’t like to be told no.

Now, I patted the envelope. Just because I’d taken it, didn’t mean I had to keep it. I sat on the bench for a few minutes, watching kids play and thinking what I could do with the cash to make myself feel better. I could give it to charity, drop it in a donation box at Saint Michael’s or make a gift in Don McAllister’s name to my friend the AIDS activist. But none of that was going to happen. I had bills to pay. In the end, Vinnie Montesi’s money would spend as easily and cleanly as anyone else’s.

I lit a cigarette, zipped my jacket, and headed out of the park, doing my best to ignore the wary expressions of the clean-scrubbed and bright-eyed parents I passed on my way to the car. My jacket, my bloodshot eyes, the stale whiskey sweat that seeped from my pores made me suspect, and I knew that despite the lies I told myself, I was as out of place in this bright world as Johnny Rings or Little Vinnie or Elswick and Johnson had ever been. It struck me then, no matter what the reason, if you get dirty enough, it’s damn near impossible to ever get clean. Still, on my way to the car, I slapped a twenty into a panhandling bum’s palm. Then I headed for the Refugee Lounge, where a tired waitress could use a tip large enough to pay an electric bill and the lights were dim enough that no one would notice a few stains that might fade with time.

© 2008 by Tim L. Williams