Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery Read online

  The rain refused to slacken, but I poked around nonetheless, humming the melody to an old Elmore James song to keep the willies at bay. The old, rotten place carried a tune of its own, and that tune was harrowing, but there were no more shenanigans with the piano, so I was able to fail at being a detective in quiet solitude .

  I was looking for a tree with a bullet lodged in it. Or bullet shards. All I got out of the deal was wet. There also were no footsteps in the corner where the stranger had shot at me, so it turned out to be a real bust for me.

  Only, I guess it really wasn’t. Coming out here had reinforced my belief that the Boogie House was haunted, though I didn’t actually see any ghosts this time. A slightly supernatural piano chord would have to do for now.

  At a certain point, I thought I heard slide guitar, but it was never definite enough for me to feel put off by it, not like what happened with the piano. This was something else. Could have just been me thinking about Elmore James again. Guy could play a slide guitar that made you not even want to pick up the damn instrument when you heard it.

  By the time I was done puttering about, trying to do something miraculous with my less-than-stellar detective skills, the rain had soaked through my clothes. I walked back to the house and reluctantly called the police station.

  I was told not to step foot in the station until the mess I had created blew over, and even though my first instinct is to ignore direct commands, my legs were still too shaky for me to even drive into town and face down my boss. (He might have described me as his former boss, but we have differences of opinion we’re always trying to work out.)

  "Lumber Junction Police Department," said a smoky, heavily-accented voice.

  "Hey, uh, Dara. D.L. around?"

  Dara Gibbons, not normally short for words, popped her gum. She wanted to dispose of me without me knowing. She started up chewing again. Too late.

  "Mayor’s in there with him,” she said in explanation. “Can't have any phone calls. Take a message?"

  "Mmm hmm," I replied. "Important stuff, or are they swapping bullshit back there?" I tried to make it known that it was most definitely the latter. It was always the latter.

  "Language," she said. "He said not to let anybody through. That includes you. Especially you, and especially right now."

  I rolled my eyes. "So does that mean D.L's not back there with the mayor, or he's making you lie because he didn't want to do his job?"

  "And talking with you is his new job description?"

  "Got nothing to do with me, D. I promise I won't give him a coronary. Just a minute. Sixty seconds. After that, you can transfer me back and pop gum in my ear until I hang up."

  Her sigh could have curdled milk. I waited, holding my breath, until at last she said, "Oh, all right. Hold on a sec." There was a momentary pause, then, "You know, if you get him riled up, I'm gonna say you were posing as his golf swing coach or a Guns & Ammo editor or something."

  "The only thing could help his golf swing is a gun." I thought of last night and cringed. Something sharp plunged through my guts. “It sounded funny in my head, right before I said it.”

  "I’m sure most things do, Rolson." I thought I sensed her smiling on the other end, but it could have been wishful thinking.

  The line clicked over a moment later. Before D.L. could muster the breath to scream at me, I cleared my throat and said, "D.L., listen to me. I got something to tell you that has nothing to do with my case or how full of shit I am."

  D.L. grunted, a hard, weary sound. "What is it? I actually am in a hurry, for once. Got lunch with the wife in ten minutes, and they dock her pay if she ain’t back on time."

  "Chief of Police should have influence over that stuff."

  "You'd think that, but flower shops aren’t intimidated by strong-arm tactics." I measured his voice. So far it was dry, non-committal. D.L.'s knack was for conversational banter of a certain kind.

  I ignored the lie about the mayor meeting and dove right into an explanation. I said, "You know that shack that used to be a juke joint, over on the land the Brickmeyers bought some-odd years ago?"

  "Not too far from your place? I s'pose I do. Brown Jug? Something like that?"

  "The Boogie House. Brown Jug's the bar from that old Skynyrd song."

  "Right, right. I get it. The Boogie House." He spoke quietly, in a measured tone. There was a question in his voice, but I wasn't about to answer it, not the way he wanted.

  I said it bluntly.

  "There's a body in it."

  It was D.L.'s turn to sigh. I imagined his impossibly bushy eyebrows sliding up his forehead. "You drunk again, Rolson? Or did you run over somebody in the woods this time?"

  I kept my voice level. "Nope. Sober as a judge."

  "Round here, that's not saying much." It was a joke, but he said it distractedly, like he was also looking for a lost note on his desk.

  He sucked his teeth and made that familiar Mmmn-mmm-mmm-mmn-mmn sound parents use when they are so incredulous that words fail them. "Jesus Christ. A body in the Boogie House. Sounds like an old blues number, doesn't it?"

  He snorted, as if something horrible occurred to him. He paused again. "For a minute, I thought you were calling to tell me something had happened to Vanessa."

  "D.L."

  "Sorry. Wait until you have a child that breaks your heart like Vanessa did ours. And, as a wife, broke yours."

  "Ex-wife," I said. Quickly changing the subject, I added, “Listen, D.L. In all the drama surrounding my...meltdown-”

  "Let’s be clear, Rolson: I did what I had to with you. These fucking - 'scuse my language - but certain people in town, well, they smelled blood in the water. They would have sent me out of town on a rail if they thought I'd shown you any preferential treatment. Far as reasons for calling, I figured it had something to do with Vanessa."

  "I haven't seen her in forever."

  "Don't suspect so. I keep waiting for the call, for them to tell me they found her face-down in a dumpster. Too bad you can't force sobriety on people." I could tell he resented the last sentence. "Anyway, Rol, I'll get a cruiser and ambulance out there. You sure it's a dead person? Not a squatter sleeping off a mean drunk?"

  I readjusted the phone to the other ear. Shit, now that he mentioned it, I wasn’t sure of much. "Pretty certain."

  "I'll go ahead and call the medical examiner as well, then."

  I waited, grasping for something to say. D.L. must have sensed it, because cut in with, "Take care of yourself. You ever need anything, you give me a call. Hear?"

  * * *

  Neither the cruiser nor the ambulance seemed to be in much of a hurry. Both vehicles crept along the road until the drivers saw me. The faces of officers Bullen and Harper turned to scowls as I directed them into the woods. Spooner, the ambulance driver, didn’t react one way or the other.

  The path was just wide enough for vehicles, and I followed them to the Boogie House on foot and then went wordlessly inside after them. Above us, the clouds had given a respite from the rain, and in the humidity and rising temperature, the odor was particularly vicious.

  Ronald Bullen stepped through the front door, spat. "Great fucking day to be out here," he said. "So goddamn great, the boss even refused to show up. Don't you think so, Harper?"

  Harper, eyes averted, shook his head. “D.L. wanted to...keep his distance from, well.”

  He didn’t say it, but Harper’s eyes flicked in my direction, and I knew what he meant.

  Unlike Bullen, a bearded, redneck John Goodman, Harper was slight, like a scarecrow with the stuffing all yanked out. And while Bullen should have been holed up in a biker bar with his fellow outlaws, Harper, on the other hand, could have just as easily been the store manager at a cheap department store.

  "Body's been here for awhile," I said to the back of Bullen's head, ignoring the way he was sneering at the whole scene. "Laid up back in that corner. Think he might've been tortured something awful. There's trauma to the neck, but I couldn't ma
ke out much more."

  "Hell, that sounds good. If you wasn't out of a job, I'd recommend you for promotion, Dee Wee." He was pleased with himself for the DUI reference, even if nobody talked that way anymore. His laugh could strip the bark off a tree, and he used it exclusively to get mean with people. I’d never seen the man smile when there wasn’t something vicious behind it.

  I backed off, raised my hands in mock surrender. I promised D.L. I'd play it cool, and D.L. was a man I wanted to keep in good with. I said, "You're right; it's your scene. Being the guy who discovered the body, I thought it would be nice to help. Give a report like a normal citizen."

  Bullen almost tripped over one of the loose floorboards but caught himself. Under the weight of the man, the juke almost seemed to bow inward on him.

  "So this is the Boogie House, eh," Bullen said, ignoring me and stepping farther inside. "Somebody could have saved us the trouble of coming out here if they had just bulldozed this place years ago."

  He sucked his teeth and grunted.

  It was not in my nature to be conciliatory, but I was already treading on wet paper, so I needed to try another tack to keep from slipping. I said, "When I was real little, before I knew music, my mother told me Blind Willie McTell played Statesboro Blues in here, before this place had electricity. Just him and a couple people and an acoustic guitar, them all huddled around a bottle of whiskey and scattered candles. For this place, that's history, man."

  The whole floor seemed to groan under Bullen as he crossed over to the body, and I could practically hear his brain working as he fished for a comeback. To himself, he said, "I reckon your mother, she’d know, wouldn’t she?"

  He turned and winked, not snickering really, but pretending to laugh nonetheless. His bloodshot blue eyes gleamed. The temptation to kick him in a hole in the floor was hard to ignore. Just kick him in and cover him up, let him rot under this place. I had to clench my jaw to keep from acting on the impulse.

  Harper laughed thinly. His eyes darted between us, wide and scared but not happy, as his laugh might have implied.

  “Men like you give the blues meaning,” I said. Bullen raised an eyebrow but pretended to be looking at the piano, inspecting it.

  “Fuck ‘em” was all he said by way of reply.

  It was a stupid, petty thing, saying that, and it certainly didn’t hurt Ronald Bullen. The corner of his mouth twitched upward, the ghost of a smile. In that man was the representation of the south, mean and defensive and sweaty. Still, whatever racism and misogyny soaked him through, he was good at his job. Thankfully. Every man’s got to have a redeeming attribute.

  Bullen clopped the rest of the way through the building to the other side. He and I weren’t on good terms - not that anybody ever got beyond ‘asshole’ distinction in his book - but we weren’t really enemies. He just didn’t like for me to talk or move or be in his line of sight.

  Harper must have felt the heat coming off the both of us, because he was actively looking for something to say to bring the temperature of the room down.

  "This ain’t nothin’ to get heated over, y'all," Harper stammered, looking nervously in the direction of the ambulance, behind which Spooner McCovey was futzing around with some brand of medical equipment. "Jeez, where the heck's Spooner with the body bag?"

  Bullen hawked and spat again, laughing. "No matter. Sum-bitch'll need a ladle to get all of him up off the floor."

  Third Chapter

  People have learned not to bring up my mother within earshot of me. When I was in school, the first boy to make the mistake of calling her a ‘nigger lover’ had to get his nose reset and four teeth replaced. Since I lived most all my life in the Junction, I never really had to explain my displeasure about being teased on that subject to anyone else.

  Occasionally the talk surfaces in conversation, I’m sure. Some think I blocked out what happened back in nineteen eighty-two, and so they give me furtive glances when they think I can’t see them, but I know. The way I’ve lived my life has given plenty of people reason to run me down, but none as interesting as why I ended up getting raised by my great aunt Birdie.

  What the town sewing circles don't understand is that my mother's death is not a secret to be kept, and the rumor mill is the rumor mill, so it can’t be changed. I was a witness to some of what happened that night, so I have no reason to wonder why blue-haired church ladies sometimes treat me like wet plaster.

  My mother lived - and, without protest on her end, died - under the weight of my father’s thumb. He didn't kill her, but she would have, no doubt, lived a fuller and healthier life without him. It was a quick rise and slow descent, but out of their intense but flawed love came a son, so I guess it wasn’t totally wasted time.

  My father built relationships without foundations, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to him that they never lasted. He treated anyone he had a passing connection with as if he that person owed him something, as if giving a piece of himself were some sort of contract.

  Eventually, it broke down. Sooner or later it was bound to happen. The old man didn't realize the arms he thought he'd been using to control others were instead wrapped around his own neck and slowly strangling him. And though he was a high school dropout, he wasn’t a stupid man. He understood immediately why he hadn’t been told about the pregnancy, why my mother had worn loose clothes to hide it from him, why she broke down crying when he confronted her about it.

  My mother had finally called his bluff, and his response was to watch everything burn down around him, while he sat drunkenly in his recliner. He must have realized some dark truth about the pregnancy, though he never really said much of anything out loud about it.

  I don’t remember him actually hitting her, but my memories of the time - what little I remember - are punctuated by loud sounds and broken furniture. She didn’t wear sunglasses and never wore makeup (never had to), so if he ever struck her, it wasn’t in the face.

  I was too little and too frightened by the old man to do anything about it except cry. I suppose I cried a lot, but that, too, could be me laying my own current feelings about the situation onto the past. It mostly feels like I’m watching the whole thing happen from a distance, like it’s my own personal Christmas Carol, and I’m forced to think about what impact those nine months have had on the trajectory of my life.

  When the baby came due, the doctor made a house call, trundling through the house with my father perched on his ear, demanding him to explain what had taken so fucking long, and, Jesus, aren't we paying you for a service and on and on and on. The good doctor, unaware of my father's interpersonal practices, offered a million apologies before readying the bedroom for delivery.

  I wasn't allowed inside.

  It was like an exorcism. I knelt on the floor at the end of the hallway and listened, pivoting over to the wall anytime I thought somebody might walk out and catch me.

  There were loud sounds the whole time, but they changed, became something else entirely. Even at that age, I could tell they weren’t what proud parents should be uttering.

  Then there were screams of rage and then panic and then despair. I nodded off at one point and found myself, upon awakening, staring right at my dad, who stood in the doorway to their bedroom.

  I couldn't read the number of emotions on my father's face as he pleaded with me to get the fuck into my room, before something awful happens to you too, Rolson. I was sent to my room when the complications became apparent to the adults.

  It wasn’t raw anger. He suddenly had the look of a man whose entire life has been one long series of Twilight Zone episodes. I tried to peer between my father and the door frame, but all I could see was my mother's body, still damp with sweat.

  She was very still.

  I couldn't hear my mother or the baby, and I couldn't be certain if they were both dead by then or not. To this day, the hours that followed are a strung-together mess of images.

  It’s like a collage. Part of me thinks I have included movie i
mages and old, distorted dreams into my memories, but even then I can’t quite put all of that night into a single narrative. I can piece together some things, but mostly I just remember sitting on my bed, picking at the shoelaces on my Keds. I would lie down and try to look up at the ceiling, but something about it just didn’t feel right, so I sat up again. That felt like it was helping, somehow. It must have been the beginning of my weird sense of superstition.

  It could have been a few hours I sat on that bed, or it could have been a few days. Either way, I didn’t move, and it got so bad that I peed my pants instead of going out there. The thing my father became shortly thereafter was not unlike a monster, and I think the full transformation happened that night. I distinctly remember him banging drunk around the house, screaming, “You can hide from the devil, but you can’t hide from God.” Just like that. Over and over.

  For the life of me, I can’t remember if he came to check on me at all. Whiskey was his dark companion from then on, until that other thing happened.

  Maybe the old biddies of the town are right. Maybe I have blocked some things out.

  * * *

  Watching what it took to get that young man's remains out of the Boogie House pried something loose in me I may never get back, something I did not realize I even had in me anymore.

  Spooner proved ineffective at resuscitating the body, so Billy Margolee, the coroner, had to be called out, causing a series of setbacks. Margolee, a drunken, irascible sack of a man, complained nonstop. Not just about the stink, but about the bugs and the heat and the moisture and anything else that kept him from his daily pint of Old Bushmill's.

  I stood around, mostly, and nobody seemed to mind. I kept one eye on the officials and another on the body, wondering if a chorus line of corpses would break out in an impromptu version of the Charleston for me. Nothing happened, though, and once the befuddled locals dispersed, so did I.