Jackrabbit Smile Read online

  I was surprised Brett hadn’t found Sebastian’s death notice on the Internet, and I said so to Jamesway.

  “It was just this week he was confirmed dead, but they figured he’d been dead for a couple weeks, give or take a weekend. No one went to the trouble to put an obituary in the paper. I didn’t bother with it either, I’m ashamed to say. I don’t know why I even came to this church. I like to think God had plans for me.”

  “What I want to know, is there any money in it?” Leonard said.

  Jamesway laughed a little. It wasn’t something that would turn contagious, but there was humor there.

  “Not that much. Not unless you want to be a giant blowhard like some evangelists are, always assuring you of a place in heaven if you’ll send them money. People can be easily conned out of their possessions and their common sense if you use religion as a lever. I don’t believe like that. Sebastian made a deal with me to buy the place. I got a loan, and I’m paying it off. Got it for a song. He had my money when we left the real estate agent’s office, or the check, anyway. When they found him, he didn’t have a check, or any money at all. Hey, let’s go up front to the office. I got coffee there, and I’m ready for some.”

  8

  We tagged along through the side door that led out of the main part of the theater and into a lobby that seemed so much smaller to me than in my memory. Fact was, the whole theater seemed a miniature of how I recalled it. I missed the smell of hot buttered popcorn and the way drinks fizzed in paper cups and made your nose hairs twitch. I missed being ten years old.

  In Jamesway’s office, which was a bit tight, we sat on some foldout chairs, and he settled in behind a cheap desk after he started the coffeemaker. The desk shook a little when he put his arms on it.

  “This place, Hap, remember the black folks had to go up into the balcony, weren’t allowed on the bottom floor?” Jamesway said.

  “Of course I remember,” I said.

  “Black people wanted to go to the restroom,” Jamesway said, “they had to leave the theater, walk across the street to a concrete bunker with a sign painted over it that said COLORED.

  “In high school, I heard from a guy, older than both of us, Hap, that had been a part-time usher here, back when they had ushers, and he said the carpet in the balcony stank of urine. He was angry about it, people peeing on the carpet. He said, ‘That’s how those people are. Animals.’ But he didn’t have to cross the street to pee. Didn’t have to miss a big chunk of the movie.”

  “Suppose all this nostalgia you’re giving out is because Sebastian wasn’t as forward-thinking as you,” Leonard said. “We got the idea he left his family because his views had become more mainstream, but you say that ain’t so.”

  “If he was more mainstream than they liked, then they must be way on the far edge of the cliff.”

  “Right there at the very edge,” Leonard said, “looking into the abyss. And I’m wishing they’d fall in, except we gave our word we’d work for them.”

  “That means something to you, giving your word?” Jamesway asked.

  “It means a lot,” Leonard said. “I keep my word until the people who I gave my word to break theirs.”

  “Fair enough,” Jamesway said. “Let me tell you, Sebastian was crazy, talking about lizard men and the apocalypse on the horizon. Worse, he had folks listening to him. For a time, this was a kind of place where people who hated anything different in the social order since 1950 could come and say things they might be reluctant to say out in the open. They hated immigrants, black people, and anyone they considered liberal or progressive. They thought women were deemed by God to be of service to them.”

  Jamesway got up and grabbed some cups out of a cabinet, poured us some of the coffee, asked how we liked it. We told him. He used artificial creamer and artificial sweetener to fix it up. The coffee tasted like someone had steeped a dead gerbil in it. I drank more than I wanted so as to be polite. I hoped the gerbil had clean feet.

  “And what exactly is your denomination?” I said.

  “Church of Jesus,” he said. “It’s new.”

  “You mean you made it up?” Leonard said.

  “Pretty much,” he said. “All religions are made up, or they’re modifications of what’s gone before. I try and teach what some might call a progressive view of the Bible, what others might call blasphemy. There are more people moving in a positive direction than a negative, and I founded my church on that.”

  “You must not pay attention to elections,” I said.

  “I believe in people.”

  “That must take a real job of work, plus overtime,” Leonard said.

  “It’s kind of what my job is,” Jamesway said. “Believing and hope. I don’t think Noah sailed around with an ark full of animals or that Moses parted the Red Sea, and I’m not even sure Jesus was divine, but I like his message. That’s what I believe in.”

  “And that works for your congregation?” I said.

  “I leave out that part about not being sure of Jesus being divine because I think the rest of it is worth it. I don’t teach from the Old Testament at all, only the New. But you want to know about Sebastian?”

  “Only so we can look for someone else,” Leonard said. “His daughter.”

  “Ah, Jackie,” he said. “Called her Jackrabbit.”

  “That’s the one,” Leonard said.

  “She’s the girl I mentioned who came around—well, woman. Interesting character, Jackie. Grew up with Sebastian and her mother and her brother, who, and I shouldn’t say such a thing as a servant of God, but if he was a lightbulb he wouldn’t light up the inside of a frog’s ass. I’m basing this mostly on what Jackie told me, of course, but he and his mother came here asking about Jackie, Sebastian too. I told them a lot less than I’m telling you. I got bad vibes from the brother. Felt what Jackie’d told me, he confirmed. He was really irked she had been with black men. He felt the family honor had been diminished.”

  “Their honor was diminished when they were born,” Leonard said.

  “Well, mother and son have their heads firmly up their asses, but in their own way, they have a code they live by,” Jamesway said.

  “Hitler lived by a code,” Leonard said. “But that didn’t keep it from being a bad one.”

  “Point taken,” Jamesway said.

  “You didn’t say you knew Jackie all that well before, but now you’re saying you did,” I said. “Before she was just a girl that came around.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t know her,” Jamesway said. “I was trying to say I didn’t know her when she was first coming around to see Sebastian. She came back later, after he left. Ended up confiding in me soon as she figured out I wasn’t someone who was supporting the nonsense Sebastian had been preaching. Jackie was different from her people. She was smart as a whip with numbers, helped me with some tax returns and the like a few times.

  “As far as her father was concerned, she could have been a stray dog with the mange. He ignored her, wouldn’t pay attention to her. Me and her went out a few times. Nothing serious. Grabbed a burger, went to a movie. I learned she had been with a man named Ace, and she said there was another fellow had a serious crush on her, and she kind of liked him. He had money. I hate to make Jackie sound like a gold digger, but I think she was looking for security. She didn’t grow up with much of that. That’s why it was best she gave up on Sebastian as a father, if for no other reason than he became obsessed with death.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “You can fix this idea up with roast nuts and fill the air with incense, and it will still seem messed up and stinky. He wanted someone to murder him. Wanted it done in a specific way. And considering how his body was found, how it was worked over, he certainly convinced someone to help him out. That’s what I meant earlier when I said I had some idea.”

  “A form of assisted suicide,” I said.

  “I really don’t know how to split that hair,” he said. “Helping someone buy the rope isn’t
quite the same thing as putting it around that person’s neck and then cutting him open and busting his ribs out of the way to take his heart and a key.”

  “That’s what he asked you to do?” I said.

  “That’s what he asked. Said he’d pay me to do it. Told me what he wanted to do and said he was going to have a grave ready in Davy Crockett National Forest, wanted to put his hands in his pockets while I strangled him to make him weak, and then he wanted me to cut him open while he was still alive, use a hammer to break his ribs so I could get to his stomach. He was going to swallow a key right before he was to be strangled. He kept talking about how he wanted to see his guts steam in the air. He was obsessed with that. Seeing his intestines. Wanted them laid out on his chest so he could see them as he died. Said the key in his stomach would go to a bank box, and the box would contain half the money he promised; other half would be given to me before killing him in the manner he asked. Craziest thing I ever heard of. I didn’t take the bait and tried to counsel him, but he wasn’t having any of that. His mind was made up. Still, I never thought he’d find someone who’d go through with it. I thought he would drop it in time.”

  “Tell the police this?” I said.

  “Right after Sebastian was found.”

  “And?”

  “Chief didn’t think anyone would pay someone to murder them. But they were curious about how I would know about the body, how it was found. Had their eye on me for a while, since I knew things that hadn’t been released to the news. I think they’ve given up on me now. I don’t even own a car, so how would I get out there to kill and bury him?”

  “I don’t understand why he didn’t just kill himself,” Leonard said.

  “Isn’t merely about suicide,” Jamesway said. “There’s a name for it, but I don’t know what it is. People like him are looking for someone to make them suffer. They get off on it sexually. Suppose it has something to do with self-loathing. I don’t know. No expert on that kind of thing.”

  “How much did he offer you?” Leonard said.

  “Ten thousand dollars. Said he’d give me five up-front, the rest would be in the bank box at the bank here. There’s only one. He was offering me some of the money I had used to pay for this place. Maybe he thought that would be an incentive. Getting part of my money back.

  “I told him, ‘What if you give your killer the first half and they don’t do it? Or what if they just shoot you in the head and ignore the ritual?’ That didn’t deter him. He was willing to chance it. I think the fantasy was so intense he couldn’t shake it. That was his idea of the ultimate orgasm.”

  “Damn,” Leonard said.

  “Was a key found inside of Sebastian?” I asked.

  Jamesway shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Did they check the bank box?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that either, but my guess is yes. Maybe the police chief has five thousand dollars in his bank account now, or maybe whoever did it got the key like they were supposed to.”

  “That’s some messed-up shit,” Leonard said. “Jackrabbit, do you know where she is?”

  Jamesway shook his head. “Not anymore. Last time I saw her, she was in deep despair. Tried to talk to me about it. I tried to listen. But she could never get it out. It was as if she were trying to cough up an anvil. She sat right where you’re sitting, Hap. She opened her mouth but nothing would come out. I suggested therapy, told her I might know someone. Haven’t heard from her since. She was an odd duck, but I like odd ducks, unless they’re as odd as her father. He was less like a duck and more like a vulture.”

  “What was Jackie’s job?” I asked.

  “She kept books for a local company,” he said. “New Paradise. I think she did accounting, but she wasn’t an accountant. Just good with numbers. She told me once her mother thought she might be a witch, way she could figure things with numbers. Math, like gravity, is hard for those kinds of folks to grasp as reality.”

  “Do you happen to have a recent photo of Jackie?” I said.

  “No…wait. There’s a photo we took of the congregation at Christmas. She was here, trying to get in with her dad, trying to find some connection, you know. You think something happened to her?”

  “We don’t have any opinions right now,” I said.

  He opened his desk drawer and took out a stack of photos. He thumbed through them. “Here it is.”

  He handed the photo to Leonard, who looked at it, then leaned over and showed it to me.

  There were a dozen people in it. I spotted Jackie right off. She was on the left side of the photo. It wasn’t a great picture, and she might have been a little too thin, but she looked quite pretty. She was dressed up, high heels. Her hair was longer, falling below her shoulders. She was smiling. I could see those jackrabbit teeth for sure, but they fit her somehow.

  “Pretty, isn’t she,” Jamesway said. “Unusual-looking. Believe me, I was hoping for more for us than there was. She was so worried about her father, about connecting to him, we couldn’t find solid ground to stand on together. She wanted friendship, and I wanted something else. That said, there was always something about Jackie that made me think if you stood on ground too close to her, it would shift.”

  All the faces in the photo were white except one. A big black man with a shaved head and a smile so forced, all that was missing was a gun to his head.

  I put the photo on Jamesway’s desk and tapped a finger on it. “Who’s this?” I had an idea what the answer might be.

  “Ah, that’s Ace. An old boyfriend of hers. Wouldn’t have been in Sebastian’s congregation, I can promise you that. Ace and Jackie had a thing once, when this was picture was taken. She outgrew him. She was outgrowing everyone she knew from the old days. Was about to start at Tyler Junior College, go on to the University of Texas branch there. Least that’s what she said. Thing holding her back a little was a connection she wanted with her father. My guess is that’s what she wanted to talk about the day she was here and couldn’t do it. That and the baby.”

  “Baby?” I said.

  “Yeah. She didn’t want to stay with the father. Guess it was Ace’s kid. I held Jackie while she cried about it all, and then she went away, and later she wasn’t pregnant, but there wasn’t any kid. I don’t know what happened there. False alarm, maybe. Miscarriage.”

  “Could she already be in Tyler, for college?” I said.

  “Said she was registering this fall, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t there already. Could be anywhere, I guess.”

  “Do you know about someone named George?”

  “Nope, can’t say I do.”

  “She lived with him for a while,” I said.

  “Never mentioned him to me,” he said.

  “Could we get an address where she lived?”

  “I suppose that would be all right,” Jamesway said. “I can tell you where she lived. I don’t even know if the landlord knows she’s gone yet. It’s near here. I walked by her place, just in case she might still be around, knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. Truck wasn’t there. I peeked through a window. Looked abandoned.”

  “Could she have just been out?” I said.

  “I doubt it. I went by a couple times after that. No one was there. I think her rent is still paid up.”

  He wrote her old address down for us, the make and color of her truck as well.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said, and me and Leonard stood up.

  “We have services during the week,” Jamesway said, “if you want to sample my style of preaching.”

  “Nope,” Leonard said. “I got enough misery in my life without adding religion to it.”

  9

  As we left the church and drove to Jackrabbit’s address, Leonard said, “What do you think?”

  “About Jamesway?”

  “No, about the price of wedding dresses. Yes. Jamesway.”

  “He seems all right, and that story about Sebastian is so wild, I believe it. Who’d make up shit li
ke that? But I don’t know if everything he said was true. Guy walks into a racist church, and next thing you know he’s running it, minus the racism and lizard men? I don’t know. As for Jackie, yeah, I think he had a crush on her, but where is she? How much did he really know about her?”

  “Here’s what I got to consider, Hap. What if Jamesway did take Sebastian up on his offer? That money would be a real boon to a fellow who is obviously living on a shoestring. Doesn’t even own a car. That coffee we had, it had been run through the filter more than once.”

  “Maybe he likes it that way,” I said. “And if he had the money, don’t you think he’d buy him a fresh batch of coffee?”

  “What about Jackrabbit? Where is she? Maybe she and her dad weren’t so far apart on things. Maybe she’s the one did him in for the money, and to please her crazy papa. Might be why she was upset when Jamesway spoke to her last, upset over what she’d done.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Shit, man. I don’t recognize the world anymore.”

  The place where Jackie had been living was a little blue house on a clean street with simple houses of varying sizes and colors. The blue house was a nice enough house. The cobblestoned walk was lined with untrimmed shrubs, and a fat black cat was squatting in between a couple of them, taking a dump. The cat didn’t bother to scamper as we came up. It gave us the cold eye as we moved along the walk past it, like we were the royal wipers falling down on the job.

  We stopped under the porch overhang and I knocked. No one answered.

  Leonard walked over and looked in the empty carport, knocked on the door that led from it to the house. No one answered that knock either.

  We walked to the back of the house and found another door, knocked there. Nothing.

  Looking around, we saw there was a backyard fence. It was the neighbor’s fence, not one that belonged to Jackie’s rental, but it blocked easy sight of us at the rear of the house. To the left were shrubs and another house. On the other side was a grassy section, and beyond you could see a street, and beyond that the old red-brick Piggly Wiggly that had closed down when I was in high school. No other business had replaced it. An old car motored by on that street, coughed around a corner, and moved out of sight.