Mucho Mojo

32.

When I awoke it was early morning and I was lying on the glider and my back ached. Where I’d caught those punches hurt too. My wrist ached from the shock of the blow I’d dealt Mohawk on the side of the head.

There was a blanket over me and a pillow under my head. Leonard, the one constant in my life, had been out to check on me. I hadn’t even felt him move my head or cover me. Bless him.

I sat up slowly, feeling the stiffness. The air was intense with the charred aroma of next door. The sunlight was beautiful. It was still cool. I missed Florida.

Before we left the station last night, Leonard told Hanson about the Hampstead place and what was under it. Today, late morning, Hanson and a hand-picked crew would be out. He was also bringing in a friend from Houston, a retired coroner.

In spite of his talk, Hanson wasn’t ready to turn what he knew over to the police chief after all. He wanted to make sure everything we told him was as we said, wanted to make sure we’d translated the evidence properly.

I think he knew too, if he told the police chief what he had discovered, told how Illium was linked, the chief would take the case away from him for not coming forward sooner. But if Leonard and I were right, if Hanson could get all his ducks in a row and solve this case, no matter what the chief thought, things were going to turn out OK. It’d be pretty hard for the chief to fire Hanson for solving a multiple child-murder case, considering the publicity that would surround it.

And I was pretty certain Hanson knew we were still holding out on him. That we had an important part of the puzzle we weren’t showing.

So, Hanson was going to get a court order, quickly and quietly, not hide it from the chief, but not announce it either, and he and his crew were coming out.

His crew was going to be Charlie, the retired Houston coroner, me and Leonard, and a couple other folks he thought he could trust. It wasn’t a morning I looked forward to.

I stood up and stretched and checked out the remains of the crack house, felt a rush of adrenaline from last night. I also felt a rush of shame.

Violence and anger against another human being always made me feel that way, no matter what my justification. I lost it, I always feel somewhat diminished. But I would have felt even more diminished to have done nothing. That little boy, dying up under the house like a dog with a belly full of glass… It’s hard to figure why it has to be that way.

But had it been just that? Had I done what I did, followed Leonard because I wanted vengeance for that child, all the children they infected with their slick talk and drugs? Or had my willingness to lose it also been part of my problem with Florida? Was I finding a way to self-righteously vent my disappointment and rage? I didn’t like to think about that kind of snake inside me, crawling around, waiting to strike.

Across the street I heard a screen door slam, and looked to see Hiram out on MeMaw’s porch. He had a cup of coffee and was wearing blue jogging pants, a blue T-shirt, and dirt-tinted white tennis shoes. He walked to the edge of the porch and hacked up a big wad of phlegm and spat into the yard. He looked up and saw me.

“Hap,” he called.

I walked out to the curb, talked across the street. “Thanks for last night,” I said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

“What else could I do? How’s the boy?”

“Dead.”

Hiram nodded. “I’m not surprised. He didn’t look none too good. He had that look about him, like he wasn’t long for this world.”

The screen door opened and MeMaw started working her walker outside. Hiram grabbed the screen and held it open. “You don’t need to come out here,” he said.

“But I want to,” she said. After a full minute, she was in the center of the porch, leaning on her walker. She said, “I’m glad you did it. I’d been younger, I’d did it. Lenny up?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, you come on over,” she said. “I’ve got breakfast cooking.”

“Ma’am,” I said. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“Biscuits, eggs, and bacon,” she said. She turned her walker slightly, then slightly again, until she was facing the screen. Hiram opened the screen for her. She worked her way inside, called over her shoulder, “Don’t let it get cold.”

Hiram smiled at me. He said, “I think you better come on to breakfast.”

MeMaw looked extremely frail that morning, but she was radiant just the same. Happy about the crack house being turned to smoke, happier yet her baby boy Hiram was home. The breakfast was great. The bacon was thick. She’d gotten the meat from one of her sons who raised hogs, and we spread real artery-jamming butter on the biscuits and dipped them in the sun-yellow yolks of farm-fresh eggs acquired from a friend of hers who had his own chickens.

After breakfast, MeMaw entertained me and embarrassed Hiram with stories about when he was a child, told some cute incidents, explained what a good Christian child Hiram had always been, and when Hiram had had all of that talk he could take, he said, “Hey, what’re your plans today, Hap?”

“Not much,” I said, not prepared to mention that I was going to exhume bodies.

“You ought to work out with me.”

“After last night, I’m pretty bushed. What kind of workout?”

“Boxing.”

“I hate that boxing,” MeMaw said. “Two grown men hitting one another in the head for fun. You’d think Hiram and Reverend Fitzgerald would be old enough to know better.”

“Reverend Fitzgerald?” I said.

“Yeah. I come in once a year, we get together, do a little boxing, talk old times. Play chess. I do it mostly to please MeMaw. She thinks I ought to know the right hand of the Lord. Not that we didn’t get drilled with religion all the time we were growing up.”

“When I was able,” MeMaw said, “I saw that this family lived in the church.”

“You know Reverend Fitzgerald pretty good then?” I said.

“Didn’t you meet him the other day?” MeMaw asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “just briefly.”

I gave Hiram the Reader’s Digest version of that, leaving out all the tense stuff between him and Leonard. I was getting to be a pretty good liar.

“I’ve known Fitz for years,” Hiram said. “We used to go to his daddy’s church. Me and him played together. His daddy taught the both of us how to box. Fitz is a little older than me, but I’m a scrapper. ’Course, he still beats hell out me. Or has in the past. I’m kind of hoping age will catch up with him.”

“It hasn’t so far,” I said. “I saw him working a bag. He’s in shape. He can still hit hard. He drags his back foot in the bucket a little when he moves, but that could just be the way he works a bag.”

“You know something about boxing then?” Hiram said.

“A little.”

“Another man likes to get hit in the head,” MeMaw said. “I can’t figure it… By the way, how’s that little boy?”

It took me a moment to shift gears and know who she was talking about. Then it came to me. I said, “He died, MeMaw. We found him too late. The drugs snuffed him out.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. A child like that, in that den of wolves, he ain’t got no chance. What I’d like to know was where his mother was.”

I’d found out a little about the boy last night from Charlie and Hanson, and I told MeMaw what I knew. “He was a street kid, MeMaw. Name of Ivan Lee.”

“I heard of the Lees,” MeMaw said, “but I can’t say I knew nothing about them.”

“Ivan lived with an aunt,” I said, “but apparently there wasn’t much going on there in a family way. He was on his own. Wasn’t even going to school, hung out on the streets most of the time. He’d been picked up for little crimes here and there. He fell through the cracks.”

“Over here,” MeMaw said, “lots fall through the cracks. There’s always somethin’ pushin’ in on a person here. Bad people and bad things from all sides. A baby has got to have a shield from the world. Got to learn how to shield themselves. I’m lucky I raised all my chil’ren without none of them gettin’ messed up.”

“Don’t fret, Mama,” Hiram said. “That little boy was a goner from the start. Ain’t that right, Hap?”

“I don’t know anyone’s a goner, you get to them in time,” I said. “But there’s a line you can step across that puts you on a path of no return. In little Ivan’s case, I don’t know he stepped across so much as got shoved over it.”

“Maybe so,” Hiram said. “But if he runs with the dogs, he, well. .. ‘becomes like them that go down into the pit.’”

“I presume that’s biblical,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess it’s a way of saying birds of a feather stick together. Or if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. Whatever

… whatcha say, Hap? You gonna work out with me? We won’t be there long.”

I considered a moment. There really wasn’t any clear evidence, other than circumstantial, that Fitzgerald had done the things Leonard and I thought he had. There was still the possibility that Chester Pine and Illium Moon were what we thought they were being framed to be. Another look at the Reverend might be of interest.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m game.”