Waltz of Shadows

17

I decided I’d go in and talk to the lawyer alone. I called Bill at the motel, explained my position and told him to hang tight.

I called Griffith’s office. His secretary connected me to him.

“Hey, que pasa, buddy?” Virgil said. “It’s been some kind of time. How’s the ole tallywhacker swinging?”

“It isn’t swinging all that good, actually.”

“Yeah? Then this isn’t just a touch base with a friend call?”

“No. It’s business.”

“Bad business?”

“Pretty bad business. Not directly my business, but close enough.”

“In other words, if life ain’t fucked enough, you got friends and family to help out?”

“Good guess.”

“That’s the way it us

“I’d like to come in and talk to you about my problem. I don’t think I want to talk to you about it over the phone.”

“Sure. But you can’t right now. I’m heading out. Told my partner and everyone here I got business to attend to, but what I got to do is go home and get a beer. It’s been one of those days already. I want to put my feet up and watch some ignorance on TV. What you got wait until tomorrow?”

I thought that over. I could go to another lawyer, but I felt Virgil was the man I preferred to deal with. We could cut through all the legal shit and get right down to it. On the other hand, a day’s delay might make a big difference.

“It’s pretty important,” I said.

“Well, hell, if it’s important, we’ll do ’er. Why don’t you come out to the house though. We can tell some lies about all the women we’ve had and how there isn’t anyone we can’t whip.”

He gave me the address and I drove over there.

It was a pretty nice part of town and Virgil’s house was large, if plain looking, with a slightly yellowed lawn decorated with a chipped, stone duck on which someone, probably Virgil, had drawn in black marker, a pair of glasses.

I rang the bell.

The glass panel on one side of the door had been knocked out and patched with cardboard and masking tape. I was examining it when the door opened and Virgil smiled at me. He had gotten bigger, way we all had. His blond hair had thinned considerably and was cut short. He had a slightly blushed complexion, highlighted by his orange sports shirt and yellow tie. He was in his briefs and was barefoot. He and Fat Boy could have modeled together.

“Get your ass on in here,” he said. “I was just slipping into something more comfortable. Sit the hell down and I’ll finish and get us a beer.”

“I’ll skip the beer,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

He disappeared into a back room and I sat down on the couch. The place looked as if it could legally qualify as a disaster area. Newspaper strewn from one end to the other, dirty paper plates all over the coffee table, a greasy paper sack overflowing with beer cans. There was a smeared reddish stain on the wall over the TV, and something dark, small and round was stuck in the middle of the stain. I got up for a better look and had to peel a sticky paper plate off my shoe. I dropped it on the floor, went over and examined the wall.

I was pretty certain it was pepperoni.

Virgil came in. He was wearing a pair of blue and white Bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt with Kill All Lawyers written on it in black.

“Nice shirt,” I said.

He used both hands to pinch the shirt away from his chest, held it a moment, then let it go. “Stenciled that on there myself. That’s pizza on the wall, by the way.”

“I thought I recognized a pepperoni. How are the other rooms decorat romyself. ed? Cheese and sausage?”

“Wife threw that at me.”

“Carolyn, isn’t it?”

“That was number one. I’m on the fourth. This was Meg. Came home last week and she was banging my law partner. They broke a couple slats on the bed.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I tugged him out of the bed and shoved two dollars at him and told him to buy himself a good piece of ass, then kicked his butt down the hall and threw him into that panel by the door and bounced him around the room some. Sonofabitch took out of here naked. Had him a spare key under the bumper of his car, I reckon, ’cause he drove off not wearing a goddamn stitch.”

“That’s rough, Virgil.”

“Yeah, guess we’ll get a divorce. I’m in the right business for it, aren’t I? I can lawyer the hell out of a divorce… Hell, that isn’t why you’re here, is it?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t think about getting a divorce would you?”

“No.”

“Change your mind, I’m your man. Sure you don’t want a beer?”

“No thanks.”

I sat back on the couch and Virgil disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a beer. He sat down in a gouged leather recliner and kicked his feet up.

“Meg wasn’t much good at nothing, ’cept fucking,” he said. “In bed she could make a pig speak French. Put her in the kitchen to cook dinner, she usually cooked a couple of pans or managed to catch the goddamn stove on fire.”

“I see you’re a liberated kind of guy.”

“Hey, we all got our cross to bear.”

“How long were y’all married?” I asked.

“About a year. We were pretty happy till she started accusing me of fucking around. Things went downhill after that. Then she started cheating on me.”

“Were you fucking around?”

“Hell, I’m a lawyer. We fuck everybody.”

“That doesn’t reassure me much. Guess you’ll be cutting out on your own.”

“What?”

“Your own law office. I mean, I’m inclined to believe you and your law partner might be on shaky ground.”

“Hell no. I was screwing his first wife and he caught me at it. Me and him got an understanding. I can get another wife easy enough, but a good partner like Tim is hard to come by. I took the sonofabitch out to lunch today. What happened to your face?”

“Kind of a fight,” I said. “It’s not important.”

“What’s your probleUs tom, then, Hank?”

I told it slowly and carefully, leaving out Bill’s present location and the fact that he and Arnold helped me break into the apartment and steal the video cassettes. In fact, I left Arnold out of the story altogether.

“Goddamn,” Virgil said when I finished. “That’s some situation. The videos. That photo album. You got ’em?”

“In the truck. The cassettes are copies. I’m playing it safe.”

I went out and got the cassettes and the album. I showed him the album first. “Shit,” he said. “I recognize some of these people. All unsolved cases, I think. Ones I know were killed within the last year or so. The last ones. Those the folks Bill told you about? The Disaster Club?”

I nodded.

“Let’s take a look at the cassettes,” Virgil said.

I gave him the cassettes and we watched the one with Fat Boy and the Doc, then the one with Bill and the Disaster Club. We didn’t talk until he had seen them both.

I said, “This gives Bill some kind of evidence. Right?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I recognize the one you’re calling Fat Boy. I know him as Oscar Caine. Know what he does?”

“I bet he’s with the cops,” I said.

“Close. How’d you know?”

I explained about the cars being put in Bill’s carport to make it look like the Disaster Club had driven back there and had fallen out. I told him about how the police came at such a perfect time, as if someone had been watching for Bill to show up. I told him that I thought the true killers had been a little too confident that their plan would work. It all pointed to inside knowledge of the police department.

“Well,” Virgil said. “Oscar isn’t a cop, but like I said, close. He’s in a peculiar position. He’s what you might call freelance. Started out as a freelance narc, and since then has gotten involved in a wider scope.”

“They have freelance narcs?”

“Yeah. They want ’em, they got ’em. Ole Oscar is an ace manipulator. He’s been under investigation, I bet, oh, half a dozen times, but he’s like shit that flies won’t light on.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Let me give you a scoop here. Oscar has been around since Methuselah was growing pubic hair. He’s older than he looks. Mid-sixties. Tough as a baboon’s ass. Knows how things work, and knowing how things work is even more important than being innocent or honest. Innocent and honest aren’t enough, you got someone like Oscar working against you.

“I’ve probed into Oscar’s affairs on occasion, and I know a lot about him, ’cause I’m nosy and an old lawyer who showed me the ropes hated him and filled me in on stuff a lot of people have forgotten or never knew. Like Oscar started out as a country lawyer over in Busby. One of his earliest cases involved the murder of a thirteen-year-old black girl. She was raped and murdered by a white bo bythe y named Cal Vincent. The Vincents over there are bigwigs. Got money. Position. This was back when a lot of white folks held a black person in slightly lower esteem than a pile of pig shit.

“This little gal was raped and murdered and the murderer took her home and tied her naked body to a tree out in her Mama’s and Daddy’s front yard, stuck a coon tail up her asshole, hung a sign around her neck said, ‘Niggers, your baby coon’s home.’

“Every goddamn body over there knew it was Cal Vincent killed her, cause he bragged about it. Said he’d fucked her so hard she died. Course, thing did her in was he strangled her.

“One of Cal’s friends had been involved in the rape, taking his turn, but he wasn’t for killing, just raping. Murder was too much for him. His conscience got him and he squealed and got so he was squealing outside of Busby and the whole thing came to trial. Guess who was hired to defend Cal Vincent?”

“Oscar Caine.”

“He painted Cal as a good, upstanding, white citizen, accused of killing a loose little colored gal, and everyone in the all white jury started out with the sincere belief that the gal, being black, was fucking around anyway. Oscar even made jokes about it. Jokes, mind you, about this murdered thirteen-year-old gal. Jokes about her and her Daddy. And the judge stood for it. Her own people couldn’t even come into the courtroom proper. They had to watch from a little balcony, listen to this sonofabitch, Oscar Caine, talk about that gal like she was bitch dog in heat.

“But the final tack in the billboard was when Oscar laid out a scenario that had this retarded black man accused of the crime, and he ended up being brought in and convicted on the basis of nothing but some slick bullshit from Oscar. They not only convicted that retarded fella, but a crowd got worked up enough a lynch mob was formed, and this black guy, who didn’t have a clue what he was being jailed for, was fed to the crowd by the Chief of Police. Chief claimed later he couldn’t stop them, and couldn’t identify any of them. Crowd took that poor black man, castrated him, hung him from a telephone pole with his pants around his ankles and watched him choke to death.

“Town was even proud of it. Until the early sixties, you could buy postcards at the drug store made from photographs of that poor man hanging, his pants around his ankles. There’d have been a magazine in that store so much as showed a white woman’s bare chest, or even a man in tight pants, the Baptists would have screamed loud enough to have knocked the President of the United States off his toilet. But the same store proudly sold cards of this castrated, retarded fella dangling like a grape.

“Point is, Oscar was made out like a hero. He was the one had gotten Cal Vincent off, and given them the opportunity to ‘hang ’em a nigger,’ and nobody in the white power structure gave a shit.

“A side note. The boy who admitted to rape, but not to murder. One who had seen Cal do it. He never came to trial for anything. But a month later he turned up drowned in the river. Fishing accident they called it. Could have been, I guess. Story is, he wasn’t known to fish.

“Oscar quit lawyerin’ in the mid-sixties, so let’s move up to about nineteen-seventy, and about this time, the Chief of Police in Busby, who was near ready to retire came up with a problem. Hisa p, s daughter was hanging out with some hippie types. Drug users. Came in from the big city. Rode bikes. Bought some land together and lived in some kind of weird religious commune in the woods outside of town. Had them a dome. Or an ashram. Some such thing. All that shit’s the same to me. This bunch laid around most of the day, sold and took drugs and fucked each other and were proud of it. They came into town now and then, parading themselves, and the locals couldn’t take all that tie-dyed shit and the long hair. They figured they were Manson types. My guess is they were just a bunch of kids going through a phase, probably into smoking a little grass. Nothing heavy. Hell, I smoked grass myself back then.

“Busby’s Chief of Police had his tally whacker in the wringer over all of this. He couldn’t bring the hippie types in, ’cause his daughter was involved, but he wanted to keep face, check out of his job with his pension.

“Chief mentioned his problem to a friend of his, our boy Oscar, and lo and behold, there was a terrible drug-induced slaughter out there at the hippie hut.”

“I remember reading about that,” I said. “You and I were in college then.”

“It happened on one of the rare days the Chief’s daughter wasn’t there. Was home getting her hippie duds washed or something. The Chief went out there and did some investigation of the slaughter, determined it had been all self-inflicted, and Busby was rid of its hippies. The chief’s daughter came home, started wearing underwear, went off to business school and learned to type and blow the boss. Chief retired, Oscar got the job.”

“Oscar was a Chief of Police?”

“Yep, for a bit. And everyone above the age of twenty-five knew he was the one went out there and killed those kids, but it couldn’t be proved, and wasn’t much of anyone in Busby cared. They thought a good deed had been done. Fact is, that was part of the reason he became Chief, that and his connection to the old Chief.

“I could tell you Oscar Caine stories all day. Some of them might just be stories, like how he killed a classmate of his during his high school days, buried the boy and got away with it. How when he was Chief he stuffed a bar of soap down a black woman’s throat and said she committed suicide.

“Simply put, this asshole is dangerous. Primarily because he’s gotten away with some horrendous shit and has never had to pay any consequences. Let me move up to more recent times. Things I can pretty well verify. He got out of the policing business, went freelance in the seventies. Way that works is he had enough law enforcement background he decided he’d come to Imperial City and help out the law here. Guess he didn’t like any restrictions. Freelance like that, he didn’t really have anyone to answer to. Back then he took on a motorcycle biker look. Don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of trying to imagine Oscar in black leather straddling a hog.

“He helped make a record number of busts, and law enforcement agencies throughout East Texas put him on the payroll and he got quite a rep. Been at it ever since, even branched out from drugs into other areas of undercover work. But there’s been some problems here and there.

“He never wore wires during his surveillance and there were no videotapes of his busts. It was his word against the people he was busting. And becauseg. t"› he generally busted folks the cops knew were assholes, they let Oscar get away with it. And it stood up in court. Which, considering most of the scum he brought in, didn’t make any difference. They didn’t do what he accused them of, they did something else. ’Course, if I were defending them, guilty or not, I’d like to see them get off. Makes me look good.

“But, that’s Oscar’s technique. He hammers down tight a few righteous cases, nails a few crooks for something they didn’t do, but would do, then starts making a few cases that aren’t righteous. Puts more feathers in his cap, and his kind of work gives him a chance to settle petty scores, and make a little dough on the side. Ain’t nothing that guy wouldn’t do. He’s wrecked the lives and careers of people in this town you wouldn’t imagine could be wrecked. And the law believes him. Or feels obligated to believe him. New Chief is worse than any of them. You see all this good shit about him in the papers, on TV, what a slick motherfucker he is. He’s not so clean. He’s had some problems. He was on the force over in LaBorde for years. Had a little scandal here and there, and some shitballs were thrown at him. All of them hit, but none of them stuck. In his own way, he’s got some of Oscar’s talent, and Oscar works for him. Price admits Oscar’s crooked on a couple of cases, they got to throw all their cases out, cause he can’t be trusted. How’s that gonna look? How’s it gonna make this ambitious Chief Price look? It won’t matter Oscar was there before Price, it’ll matter Price is Chief when it all comes down. I think Price is the kind of guy would let his own son hang rather than let it be known he fucked up or someone worked for him fucked up. And with Oscar working for him, you can bet there’s some fuckups.”

“What about the one Bill calls Cobra Man?”

Virgil shook his head. “No bells or whistles on that.”

“What’s my next step?”

“Give me the videos and the album. They don’t necessarily prove anything by themselves, but they’re a start. It’s pretty damn obvious that the law doesn’t know Oscar did the Doc’s wife in, or those kids, but you can bet they know Oscar’s part of the story. The Satanism shit. The drug nuts. That sounds like Oscar. Cops and locals love that shit. If they don’t think it’s true, they want to think it’s true. Man, I nail Oscar on this, think of the publicity I could get.”

“That’s nice Virgil, but I got my nephew’s life at stake here.”

“Sorry. The lawyer came out in me. As of now, I’m officially your attorney. Give me some money.”

I didn’t have but a few bucks on me, and he took those as down payment and wrote me out a receipt on the back of a catsup stained hamburger bag.

“That’ll do until we can make it more official. We’ll get Bill on the client list next. I think the both of you are gonna need a lawyer. Now, let me think on this a bit and I’ll get back to you. Meanwhile, go ahead and move Bill you want, but you get caught, you got harboring a fugitive hanging over your head, and remember I didn’t give you the advice to move him. I like you, but I’m not getting fucked for you.”

“All right,” I said, and got up to leave. As I was going out the door I turned back to Virgil. “That stuff about the two dollars, telling your partner to get him a good piece of ass. Tiec tohat really happen?”

“No. I didn’t have anything but a five. But I thought telling you two made her sound cheaper.”

I left Virgil, uncertain if I felt better or not. I folded up the hamburger bag receipt and put it in the glove box of my truck and drove home.