Briar Patch Boogie: A Hap and Leonard Novelette Read online

  MONDAY…4 A.M.

  His name was Marvin Hanson.

  He was black as a pit and ugly as sin. He was a police lieutenant. Plainclothes. Homicide division. He had short arms and abnormally large hands with fingers as thick as frankfurters. He was five feet, ten inches tall, but due to the width of his shoulders, the thickness of his body, he didn’t look a fraction over five feet, seven inches. His closest friends, all three of them, called him Gorilla. There was nothing racist about the tag. It was a name based on his power and size, and with some reluctance, Hanson embraced it. Everyone else called him Marvin, Mr. Hanson, or Sir. A few close associates called him simply Hanson. This was none of Hanson’s doing. He was just the sort of person that demanded respect; begrudging respect perhaps, but respect, nonetheless.

  Right now Hanson was in one of his least cheery moods. A two A.M. phone call had rung him out of Rachel’s arms, out of his warm bed and out into the night. That, he supposed, was part of the price you paid for being a cop. Constant interruption, discomfort and aggravation. Not to mention ulcers, hemorrhoids and bunions.

  In spite of his mood, as always, Hanson was an efficient cop, if a bit on the rough side. He was street–wise and back alley mean. He was also surprisingly well–educated, most of it self–acquired. This was a trait that often surprised people. From the looks of him, he seemed like the type to spend his life turning over the big rock and bursting dirt with a shovel.

  Hanson had been brought up in The Fifth Ward, but as he was fond of telling his daughter, JoAnna, he had escaped and made of himself what he always wanted to be. A cop.

  Sometimes he regretted that decision, regretted being a cop.

  Tonight was one of those times. But it was a way of escape. A way out of The Ward, out of the slime and into the mainstream of life.

  But maybe he hadn’t managed to escape at all. Sure, he no longer lived in that filthy squalor, but his assignments were most often located there. He was from The Ward. He knew The Ward, and therefore, he was the right cop for The Ward. That didn’t make him like it any better. He had their grudging respect, but on the other hand, he was still an Uptown, Uncle Tom, Nigger Cop to them. He thought it odd that the blacks complained about the ghetto, wanted out, but when one of their number made it out, he or she was immediately an Uncle Tom. Catch 22.

  There were two other men in the hot, smoky room with Hanson. One was his partner; a tall, rawboned white man with orange–red hair, green eyes and a Howdy Doodie face. Not to mention poorer taste in grey suits than Hanson had. His name was Joe Clark. He had been a plainclothes detective for just over three years. Before that a city cop, and before that a criminology major. Hanson started off being suspicious of criminology majors, and with good reason. Most of them were about as helpful as a plugged revolver. They were good at technical things, like getting fingerprints off paper or analyzing hair and blood, but they couldn’t read the truth or a lie in a man’s face any better than they could read a blank wall. They all interrogated their prisoners just alike—or nearly all—and that was in a manner that said: Nothing personal, it’s just my job. I know society has treated you rough and the world has shit in your face, but see, this is what I do for a living. I’m supposed to ask questions. Nothing personal.

  Bullshit!

  It was always personal. There were two sides to this business. There were the good guys and the bad guys. Oh, sometimes you had to get down on their level, but the result was the black hats behind bars and the white hats triumphing. It was as simple as that.

  Clark, criminology major or not, was an exception to the rule. He, like Hanson, took it personal. Being a cop was part of his fiber, the sinew of his soul. He wasn’t afraid of death or dying. He wasn’t afraid of going all the way. Not striving to nail a guilty party, not really caring if he got a confession out of a murderer or not, was like putting a bloody rabbit between a hound’s jaws, turning your back and saying ever so politely “Please don’t eat the rabbit, Mr. Dog.” It just didn’t work.

  Clark was a good partner. Both Hanson and Clark were deeply hurt by the wholesale corruption associated with the Houston Police Department.

  Hurt most because most of it had proven true. It was rampant and blatant. But he and Clark tried. They got rough occasionally; more often they threatened violence—not exactly legal, true, but very effective. The mere sight of Hanson’s massive paws clenching and unclenching was enough to make a person feel very confessional.

  The third man in the room, Smokey, was twisting his faded, blue baseball cap in his hands as if it were something alive he was trying to strangle. He was sitting in a hardback chair, slightly slumped forward, legs spread defensively. He looked up at Hanson with rheumy eyes; milky swirls crowding blue, a white man’s eyes in a black man’s face.

  “I knowed I’d been better off to let that ’ho’ lay,” Smokey said.

  Hanson, standing, hovering over Smokey like The Sword of Damocles, said, “Nobody’s hasslin’ you. Start over.”

  “Man,” Smokey whined, “I done told you.”

  A little less patient than before, Hanson said, “Start over. I’ve known your sorry ass all my life, Smokey. You ain’t worth a damn and you know it, I know it, and anyone that’s ever heard you run your mouth long as five minutes knows it. But I don’t think you killed Bella. That take a load off your mind?”

  “But I look good for it, don’t I, Cap’n?”

  “That’s lieutenant, not captain. And no. You don’t look good for it. If you’d cut that gal like Higgins says she was cut, you’d have…”

  “You ain’t seen her?” Smokey interrupted.

  Hanson shook his head. “I was assigned to this case, instant like. A phone call and Higgins says the Captain wants me on this one. So I’m on it. That’s all I know. Higgins said it was messy. Okay, Smokey? All your questions answered? I’m supposed to ask the questions here. Got me?”

  Smokey nodded.

  Hanson took a bulky King Edward from his coat pocket, fired the cigar with a paper match and sucked smoke, blew it out his nostrils lazily. “Like I said, it doesn’t look like you did it, but…” Hanson paused and made a production of puffing his cigar.

  “But what?” Smokey asked dryly.

  Hanson leaned down close to Smokey’s face, smelled the rotten teeth and stale wine breath. “You could be made to look good for it. I mean if you don’t give us all you know, and give it straight, it could really start to look bad for you, Smokey. Real bad. Savvy? Now let’s run through this one more time, and you answer my questions straight and don’t try to con me, ’cause you ain’t got the good sense to con me…and don’t think them rubber hose days are completely behind us. You’ve heard what happens to folks that want to get smart with us. Haven’t you, Smokey?”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  Clark could just manage not to laugh. It was a cruel trick for Hanson to play on the old man, but it was one that would garner immediate results. Because, unfortunately, the Houston Police Department had a reputation for following up threats.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” Hanson asked Smokey.

  “I get your drift.”

  “You’re going to tell it straight?”

  “I’m going to tell it straight, Mr. Hanson.”

  “That’s nice. I thought you were,” Hanson said standing upright, removing the King Edward from his mouth and holding it cupped in his huge, bear–like paw. “I never thought differently. Not for a minute. Not for a second.” Hanson turned to Clark, said, “Turn on the tape recorder, Joe.”

  “Ready?” Clark asked Smokey. It was one of the three words he had said during the entire interrogation. The other two words had been, “Sit down.”

  Smokey nodded that he was ready. He gave the twisted ball cap a breather, put it on his knee and looked down at it like he had just discovered it perched there.

  Clark turned the recorder on.

  Hanson said, “State your name, please.”

  “Smokey.”

  �
��Your full name, please.”

  “Clarence Montgomery. My daddy gave me that name, Smokey, and that’s what folks call me mostly.”

  “Tonight you claim to have found a body. A woman you knew named Bella Louise Robbins. Could you tell us where that occurred?”

  “I don’t claim nuthin’,” Smokey said. “I did find Bella all cut up…”

  “Could you tell us where?” Hanson interjected.

  “Hell, Mr. Hanson, you know where.”

  To Clark, Hanson said: “Will you turn off the tape recorder, please.”

  Clark turned off the tape recorder.

  Smokey fearfully stretched his thick lips over his rotten teeth, said, “I fucked up, didn’t I?”

  Hanson nodded his head slowly. “You fucked up. Just answer the questions when I ask them. Make it short and sweet like. Like you’re telling somebody that hasn’t ever heard it before. You got that?”

  Smokey nodded.

  “I said, have you got that?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “I don’t want to have to cut off the recorder again and explain it over.”

  “No sir.”

  “If I have to cut off the recorder again, I send Joe out for the rubber hoses and a pair of wire pliers.”

  “Wire pliers. What for? What’s the pliers for?”

  “You don’t want to know. Gonna do it right?”

  Smokey nodded.

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah what?”

  “I’m gonna do it right.”

  “Turn it on, Joe.”

  Clark clicked the recorder into service again. Smokey gave his story, straight this time, brief and without interrupting the flow of the tape. When he was finished they let him go. They could have held him, but saw no reason to. Smokey had been little help, other than turning in the body in the first place, and Hanson admitted to Clark that that surprised him.

  “Why do you think he turned it in?” Clark asked.

  Hanson shook his head. “Don’t really know, but I got this feeling.”

  “Alright, Sherlock. What’s the feeling?” Joe shook out a Kool and lit it with a Bic lighter.

  “It’s just a feeling.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No evidence for it.”

  “Tell me. You and I have talked about cop feelings before. We put some stock in them, right?”

  Hanson blew out some smoke. “Yeah right.”

  “Right now, tell me quick, gut reaction. Why did he do it? Why did he come in when normally he wouldn’t have?”

  Hanson put his hip into the long table that the tape recorder was perched on, puffed his cigar until his head was swarmed in grey smoke. “I think he turned it in,” Hanson said, “because he senses something. Something that you get from living on the street. You heard how he described the body. He was almost ill. I know for a fact that Smokey’s seen quite a few stabbings and cuttings. Even done one or two minor surgeries himself. He was scared because it wasn’t, in his mind, or mine either, for that matter, the work of a spontaneous killer.”

  “I’ll agree with that,” Joe said.

  “It was premeditated and done for pleasure. Smokey said Bella looked like a butchered hog, only messy. It was deliberate mutilation, if his description was accurate.”

  “Lot of folks in The Ward are like that. Hell, Gorilla, you of all people know that.”

  “Mean, yes. I’ll buy that. But this is something else. If Smokey’s right, if it’s as he says, I’m afraid we just might have something nasty on our hands.”

  “Something like a black Skidrow Slasher?”

  “Maybe. Not many of you honkeys are going to cruise around The Ward after midnight, not unless you’re selling a little white powder that some of the folks down there think they have to have to get up in the morning.”

  “Maybe it’s a pusher that done it, disguised the killing to make it look like a nut murder. That’s an angle. Bella could’ve been pushing drugs on the side, I mean her record shows that she’s been picked up as a user before, nothing concrete in the eyes of the law, but you and I know. That’s an angle, too. A pusher could have done it and covered his tracks. Or Bella could have been pushin’ and someone decided they didn’t need to pay for it, so they took it and did Bella in. Whataya think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Come on, Gorilla. What do you think?”

  “I think it might be a good idea to start by seeing the body.”

  “Oh cheery,” Clark said. “Let’s go.”

  · · ·

  The morgue is open twenty–four hours a day.

  There is always someone on duty. It doesn’t close for holidays. Not Christmas, not good ole George Washington’s birthday. It is the palace of death and examination. It is more constant than the city. It always has customers. They drop by at all hours of the night, most often arriving in white wagons with blue and red lights.

  Tonight the morgue has a new customer. This customer is allowed special privileges. The head of the Houston Medical Examiner’s Office is called from his sleep.

  There has been a terrible death, they tell him, an unusual death, and tonight, as soon as possible, he must make a preliminary examination of the body, and tomorrow after he has rested (and don’t sleep too long), he is to perform a detailed autopsy. The autopsy is not to find the cause of death, that is obvious, but to determine if the murderer has inadvertently left behind clues to his identity: blood not matching the type of the victim; skin beneath the victim’s fingernails; pubic hairs; seminal fluid and the like. Not an overly complicated job. A job many at the morgue could perform. But in a case like this, a suspected “nut murder,” the authorities want the best, and Doc Warren is the best.

  Doc Warren arrives, slips into his work clothes: white smock over lapped by green plastic bib–apron. With the assistance of a long, lean, similarly–dressed attendant, he rolls out the body for a look. The refrigerated air from the storage compartment spits its cold at the pair. They slide the body onto the rolling table with professional ease. The white sheet covering the body is stained with splotches of red. The pair hardly notice.

  They wheel the body to one of the metal autopsy tables in the room that Warren affectionately calls “the slicing room,” and even after all these years, Doc Warren once again bumps his head on the specimen scale that hangs at the head of the table, says his now classic line, “I’m gonna remember that one of these days.”

  The attendant makes with a dutiful smile.

  The rolling table has a tilting device. They use it to shift the body to the autopsy table. Doc Warren reaches out and pulls back the sheet.

  The attendant’s eyes widen. He has seen much these last two years, but he has not seen the likes of this.

  Doc Warren says flatly, “Ugly.”

  Without another word he begins his preliminary examination.

  · · ·

  “Next stop, the morgue,” Hanson says as they start for the downstairs mortuary, a place they had both been many times.

  “All out for blood and guts,” Clark announces. “Please try not to vomit on the floor and don’t trip over a hacksaw.”

  But for all their exterior toughness and sandpaper approach to police work, they were not looking forward to this little jaunt. Never did. But this trek was particularly distasteful. Smokey’s words concerning Bella’s appearance kept rotating in their minds. Like a butchered hog, he had said, only messy.

  It would, of course, be easy to wait on the autopsy reports and read them, or talk to the man on the scene, Higgins, in great detail. But they would not wait. Words on paper did not drip blood. Words from the mouth of another officer, no matter how reliable, did not paint the same picture as the eye could deftly, and permanently, engrave on the brain.

  Hanson had thought, and Clark had agreed, t
hat if this was the sort of murder they suspected, they should see the results of the killer’s work, the brutal art of his sharp bladed insanity. Not so much out of curiosity—there was, of course, that morbid element—but more to see what sort of lunatic they were up against, if in fact it was a lunatic. Sometimes—more often than not—witnesses to a crime, or crime scene (even trained police officers) remembered the incident in a far more dramatic fashion than what they had actually seen. And often, eye witnesses who had seen the same thing would give drastically conflicting accounts.

  Hanson, however, knowing Smokey for so many years, and knowing all that Smokey had seen and done in The Fifth Ward, doubted that in this case. Besides, there was nothing like a first hand view; nothing like a little senseless slaughter and mayhem to bring the cop blood to a boil and get it pumping so that when the trail got cold and the brain got fuzzy, they could always turn on the memory wheels and recall the slab scene, and maybe that alone could keep them going. Going until the killer was in the jaws of the law, weak–hinged as those jaws might be.

  Hanson and Clark went downstairs to the morgue with faces set in stone, hearts on hold. For a little while, the humor stopped.

  Old Doc Warren, white–haired, sallow–faced and ill–tempered, showed them the body: a mess of red whipped into black; a grotesque chocolate and cherry pudding of death. It barely resembled anything human, and it was worse—far worse—than either had suspected. Smokey had under played it. The pair, by later agreement, thought it the worst crime of the sort that either of them had seen, and Hanson had been on the force over twenty years.

  Doc Warren, leading the pair with his stiff walk (Clark often joked to Hanson that Warren’s vulture faced appearance and stiff walk were due to the fact that he was just one of the corpses that got bored down there and applied for a job), directed them to the lounge, and after the men were seated, he told them this about the corpse:

  “It’s unofficial, mind you, until I’ve made an autopsy, but from preliminary examination, I’d say the slash on her throat was the one that killed her. No Sherlock Holmes here. Nobody lives with their head dangling by a string—not unless they’re the Frankenstein monster. I think he cut her throat and hacked on down to the bone in a frenzy.”