Teresa recognized Jocko Cannon immediately. She had already noticed the poster Brutus Mayes had pinned to the bulletin board in his office: SEE DICK DRINK. SEE DICK DRIVE. SEE DICK DIE. DON'T BE A DICK.
It should say “dickhead,” Brutus, Jocko Cannon said, sweating and heaving on the rowing machine, shaking his head so vigorously that his perspiration sprayed Teresa and me. Don't you think so? he said to Teresa.
The posse arranged around what available space there was in Brutus Mayes's small office giggled.
Only one other thing you do with this kind of motion, Jocko Cannon said as he continued rowing. In, out. In, out. In, out. The posse exchanged high fives.
Teresa concentrated on the photo blowups of Brutus Mayes as a Detroit Lion that covered the walls of the office.
Gatorade me, Jocko Cannon said. One of his retainers reached into a cooler, produced a bottle of Gatorade, and passed it to him.
The whole team wore Parlance doodads at the Orange Bowl, Jocko Cannon said between gulps, as he drained the bottle of Gatorade. We all wrote the letters
EP
in Magic Marker on the inside of our helmets.
Goddamn, what a swell thing to do, Jocko, Brutus Mayes said.
Jocko Cannon looked at me. That referee was a homosexual, you know what I mean, counselor?
Name of Cohen, Brutus Mayes said.
Relative of yours, was he? Jocko Cannon asked in my general direction.
More giggling from the posse.
We'd like to see where Mr. Parlance lived, Sheriff, Teresa said.
Why? Brutus Mayes said.
Teresa handed Brutus Mayes the court order allowing us to examine Edgar Parlance's rooms above Claude Applewhite's garage.
That Duane Lajoie broke up this jail when he heard Gover had ratted him out, Brutus Mayes said, not looking at the court order.
Should've taken care of him then, Brutus, Jocko Cannon said. He seemed to be evaluating Teresa's sexual potential. That would've saved the state a lot of trouble. But then I never would've met Miss What's-Her -Name here, comes down to Regent to defend Duane Lajoie. Her and her friend. Mr. Cline.
He was standing astride the rowing machine, wiping his face with his sweat-soaked guns-and-glory T-shirt. My daddy tells me you used to work for Gerry Wormwold, Jocko said. Until he fired you.
The posse looked to see if Jocko Cannon would get a rise out of me. Not a chance. Teresa had nailed him. An ape with a pea-sized brain.
Gargantua. I have to say I loved the touch about Gargantua.
Goddamn court order, Brutus Mayes said. I had dealt with him when I was with the A.G. THE BIGGEST LAWMAN IN THE STATE was his campaign slogan. He hated court orders. His first instinct was always to balk, like the linebacker he once was. You had to push back. Explain it was not Lions
v.
Cowboys. He thought it was like making him say, Yeah, Marse.
Reta! Brutus Mayes shouted.
His secretary peeked into the office. Reta was wearing drop earrings shaped like handcuffs.
Get the key to Gar's place, Brutus Mayes said. He looked at Jocko. You go with them, Jocko, make sure they don't mess with anything.
They mess with anything, they mess with me, Brutus, Jocko Cannon said. And then to his posse: Uniform me.
Jocko Cannon took up most of the space in the tiny spare room above Claude Applewhite's garage where Edgar Parlance had lived prior to his murder. In his custom-tailored sheriff's uniform, five-gallon hat, and mirrored sunglasses, he looked like one of the guards in
Cool Hand Luke.
The room had a sink, a daybed, a portable heater, and a bedside table on which was a lamp with a three-way bulb, a pencil, and a notepad from Regent Pharmacy: YOU CALL, WE DELIVER. One of Edgar Parlance's odd jobs, according to the Kiowa
Times-Ledger,
was working as a delivery boy for the drugstore, “a chore that brought Gar into homes all over Regent, where he'd stop for a cup of coffee and exchange the time of day, one reason why his death was so keenly felt in this rural community.” There was a small refrigerator and a wooden drying rack on which he apparently hung the clothes he washed in the sink. There was a mirror above the sink and a medicine cabinet containing a plastic water glass, two toothbrushes, a package of five Gillette MicroTrac disposable razors, a can of Barbasol shaving cream, a bottle of Scope mouthwash, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, and a tube of Tuck's hemorrhoidal ointment. The toilet was at the foot of the stairs leading up to the spare room. There was a closet with no door except a sheet, and in the closet two pairs of jeans, four denim shirts, three pairs of heavy-duty yellow work shoes, a fleece-lined red-and-black-checked winter lumber jacket, and two baseball hats, one with a logo that said ZIV CHEMICALS, the other with a USM rhinoceros. A pair of earmuffs hung from a hook in the wall. In a green wooden military locker at the foot of the daybed there were several pairs of underwear, some socks (the socks and underwear freshly laundered and neatly folded), two pairs of worn work gloves, a Bible, a hand iron, and an overdue book of Ansel Adams photographs of Yosemite from the Regent public library.
I got the look of the room immediately. It had the anonymity of a prison cell maintained by a particularly fastidious inmate. There was no hint of personality anywhere. No sense of who Edgar Parlance was. Or what had led Duane Lajoie and Bryant Gover to skin him alive.
The only objects out of the ordinary were thirteen twisted votive candles on a serving platter placed on top of the refrigerator. It was as if they had been melted and then sculpted into strange otherworldly shapes by a demented artist whose medium was wax.
I had a hunch about the candles. They were included on the sheriff's inventory of the apartment, but not the exact number. Approximately ten, the inventory said. You could count on Brutus Mayes not to do things right.
Jocko picked up one of the candles and began playing catch with it. Throw it up with one hand, catch it with the other. He flipped it over his shoulder and backhanded it without turning his head. Teresa was reflected in his mirrored sunglasses. He snatched a second candle from the plate and began to juggle the two, and then without missing a throw, grabbed a third.
The juggling seemed to be Gargantua's mating call.
Teresa scrutinized the contents of the medicine cabinet. It was as if nothing interested her more than the Scope, the Barbasol, and the Tuck's hemorrhoid ointment. What did not interest her was Jocko Cannon.
Jocko was so close to her that his knee was grazing her hip. I was the Jew fag. I was not there. I took advantage of the opportunity.
I pinched a candle and put it my pocket.
Let's move on, Teresa, I said. There's nothing more we need to see here.
Merle Orvis had a teardrop tattooed under her right eye.
She had been in and out of juvenile detention since she was twelve.
Her last detention report said that she was five feet three inches tall and weighed one hundred fifty-nine pounds.
Merle Orvis and her son Boy lived in the Wuthering Heights Mobile Home Park, suggesting that someone had a sense of humor (not likely), an affinity for Emily Brontë (even less likely), or had simply appropriated the name as classy after seeing one of the many film versions of the book available on the cable movie channels. The park was across from the Regent town dump and next door to the VFW post (BINGO WEDNESDAY AND SATURDAY, PUBLIC WELCOME) and a topless bar called Bob's. Bob's had originally been called Boobs, Merle Orvis said, but the fucking town council, a bunch of limp dicks, forced it to change its name. The sign outside now said B OBS, without the apostrophe and with the first
o
painted over. Merle Orvis had danced at Boobs until the owner discovered she was only fourteen, and it was a penal-code offense for a minor to be engaged as a lap dancer. A pall of smoke hung over the dump from the small fires that burned trash day and night. Most of the mobile homes, including Merle Orvis's, had wind chimes, and when a breeze came up it blew the smoke and fetid fumes from the dump over the court and rustled the chimes so that the effect was like listening to a concerto for xylophones as you were choking to death.
Inside, Merle Orvis's trailer was a pigpen of dirty dishes, unemptied wastebaskets, open garbage bags, ashtrays filled to overflowing, and moldy French fries that seemed to be growing out of the sprung couches. Boy had no other name, although occasionally Merle Orvis called him Baby. After Baby was born, she said, she had made arrangements for him to be adopted by what she called a couple of muff divers from San Francisco, but then decided that lesbian parents would not give Boy the kind of upbringing she thought he deserved. Boy's birth had never been registered, and officially he did not exist. On Merle Orvis's rung of the societal ladder, birth control was seen as a dreary restrictionâmessy, expensive, unspontaneousâand because babies conferred a kind of status on teen mothers with nothing else going for them, abortion was regarded with disfavor. Women as well as men seemed to accept rape as an irrevocable clause in the sexual contract; Loomis County had not prosecuted a rape in seven years, or secured a rape conviction in the twelve it had been operating as an independent legal entity in the state court system. Boy wore no clothes and was not yet toilet-trained, although he was almost three. He piddled constantly, and was still being nursed. Titty, he would say to his mother, and Merle Orvis would hoist a flabby breast from under her T-shirt. Boy would line up the nipple and pop it into his mouth, picking his nose and viewing his surroundings as he slurped his mother's milk, sucking until he was full. Shitty, he would then say, and squat and crap. His legs and his ass were stained with dried excrement. The only other word Boy seemed to know was “Lester.” Lester was Merle Orvis's current boyfriend. Lester Ray. Lester Ray, as it turned out, was the son of Clyde Ray, who had seen Duane Lajoie's 1989 Ford 4x4 with the four-pin trailer-tow harness making tracks down County Road 21 the night that Edgar Parlance was murdered. Like his father, Lester Ray never made eye contact. Nor did he volunteer a single word all the time Teresa and I were talking to Merle Orvis. I do not think Teresa in her wildest fantasies imagined that she would separately meet two members of the Ray family in a single day.
“You actually know Carlyle?” Merle Orvis said. “I mean, you met her and all?”
“We should get back to Duane,” Teresa said. “It's Duane we need to find out about. Everything you can tell us. You never know what can be helpful.”
“She told me she's coming out here to do a book.”
“You talked to Carlyle?” I said.
“To her assistant. Consuela. Carlyle wants me to be an extra, Consuela said. You know, like one of the people Duane knew, she wants all Duane's friends and stuff. I told Consuela I could be her stand-in, all those famous people have stand-ins, I could be a very good stand-in, or I could do her nails, I always wanted to be a manicurist, maybe she could send me to manicurist college if it works out. I shadowed a manicurist once when I was at the Learning Center in Kiowa trying to get my GED, so I know all about nails and cuticles and that shit.”
Teresa hesitated. I knew she did not wish to deviate from the subject of Duane Lajoie, but on the other hand Merle Orvis seemed to be speaking an idiom she did not understand. It was as if Teresa felt that she needed to get a working grasp of the local dialect before she could proceed. “What do you mean by âshadowed'?”
“You shadow people in some job to see what the requirements are,” Merle Orvis said. For her entire life people in authority had been asking Merle Orvis questions, and every response was tinged with an automatic truculence. “Like if I wanted to be a lawyer, I'd shadow you, you know what I mean? Don't they have shadowing where you're from?”
“I suppose they do,” Teresa said.
“I suppose they do,” Merle Orvis said, in a passable imitation of Teresa's tone. Then, staring at her: “I told Consuela I used to date Kile Purdy's brother Beau, Beau said Kile was so in love with Carlyleâshe was Alice then, but just as pretty as she is now. The shit she and Kile did. You ever see
Taxicab Confessions
on TV, people who aren't real famous talk to taxi drivers about what they want to be in life, about fucking and stuff, I think I'd be a natural on
Taxicab Confessions,
I mean, the stuff I know about Duane, and shit.”
“The night that Edgar Parlance was killed . . .”
“Who says they did it?”
“Bryant Gover,” I said.
“They didn't mean it. It was like a plane crash or a car accident. It just got out of hand. Duane is such a nice person. Most of the time.”
“What time exactly did Duane arrive here that night.”
“That fucking sheriff asked me that same thing. He treated me all snotty like. He's so hateful. He ain't going to get my vote next election.”
“One o'clock? Two o'clock?”
“Three. Four. I can't remember. You sound like that fucking sheriff.”
Boy said, “Titty.”
“Fuck you, Baby. You're not hungry. You just like fooling around with my boobs. Go see Lester. Lester, turn on the TV, watch it with Baby, do something fucking useful for a change around here. I'm talking to these people going to send me to manicure college.”
“Let's say it was four a.m.,” Teresa said.
“Closer to three,” Merle Orvis said.
“And what did he say?”
Merle Orvis mouthed the words. “He wanted to fuck.”
“Did you?” I said.
“No fucking way. I had the rag on.”
“So what happened?”
Again Merle mouthed the words. “I gave him a blow job.” And then in her normal resentful voice, “It took like fucking forever. It was like sucking spaghetti, you know what I mean?” She made a slurping noise as if she were drawing spaghetti strands into her mouth.
I wondered if Teresa would nod, but her expression did not change. She waited until Merle finished her slurp, then asked, “Is there anything he wanted you to say?”