The Bird Boys Page 15

  Delpha’s salary was sixty-four dollars a week, room and board fifty-five. “Do you take layaway?”

  “What is your name?”

  “It’s Wade. Delpha Wade.”

  “Mrs. Singer.” The lady’s glancing handshake was a pantomime. “Yes, Miss Wade, we offer a layaway plan.” She reached into a drawer behind the counter and came out with a pad of forms. “Now, each week, how much will be your payment?”

  Delpha pressed her lips together. Then said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t. Pretty as they are.” The reluctance in her own voice sounded false. But she wasn’t acting. She’d run out of breath at the end of that sentence.

  Mrs. Singer continued to study her a second longer. The trace of a smile on her narrow face did not signify offense, possibly calculation. “Today, it’s not necessary you decide. Come back anytime. Seventeen years, Wertman’s is here.” She placed the pearls in their velvet box and set the little box back into the display case, where they gleamed from behind the glass. “Everyone should have something that is lovely forever.”

  She wrote down Delpha’s full name on the form and then tucked the form tablet away. By the time the shopkeeper looked up at her again, the roundabout speech Delpha had planned in order to extract information had somehow dispersed. Her head was dizzied from considering such an outlandish purchase.

  She asked Mrs. Singer directly about other shops of this kind in New Orleans. Years ago. Told her, straight-out, that she was searching for someone for her employer, who was a private investigator. It was a matter of two brothers and a business. Delpha had thought there might be resistance to questions some would consider prying or time-wasting, but she found none.

  “On behalf of this family, you are searching. I see.” The woman swiveled on the stool and called, “Herschel, come here. Help me remember the stores in New Orleans.”

  A thin man older than Mrs. Singer appeared in an open doorway holding a cloth, his eyebrows raised in anticipation of helping his sister.

  On hearing the name Delpha was interested in, Anderson, Mr. Wertman exclaimed, “How old do you think we are?”

  “And how wicked?” asked his sister.

  XXIX

  EXITING PHELAN INVESTIGATIONS, Ben almost ran down Delpha. He excused himself three or four times and was gone. She entered, her blue-gray eyes snapping.

  She and Phelan were looking straight at each other, and funny, for a second his view rippled like there was no office but a walless, placeless distance they were looking across. He shook his head. Heat mirage? TV commercial? What kinda mind-slipping shit was this?

  As Delpha passed him, he closed his hand around her upper arm. Damn, meant not to do that again, just couldn’t help it. “Listen, I’ve got some news on Cheryl’s case. But Ben’s was even better. Ten’ll get you twenty, the kid’s found Rodney.”

  Delpha looked at his hand on her arm. “Been longin’ to tell you. So’ve I.”

  “Well, hell,” Phelan said, grinning, “this calls for a road trip.” He suggested a conference—somewhere out of this oven of an office.

  They took highway 69 and then 96 South toward Port Arthur. He thought of a remark to say, but he didn’t say it, and she didn’t talk either. Quiet was nice. Tires singing on the road. Rushing air. The AC was running on high and car window was down, too, wind whipping Delpha’s hair. When they got into town they cruised through a couple neighborhoods of small houses, nothing tall, like a big hand had evened every house down to the same low height. Some well-used boats in the yards, some camper trailers edged with rust. They curved around, took the avenue that led only to the refinery, broad as the brown road to industrial Oz. Phelan pulled off on the shoulder, giving them both a full-on, full-on view. The oil pumped by the deep-sea rigs Phelan had worked—this was its destination.

  The refinery rose behind its wide-opened gates, the metal skeleton of a majestic smoking city. Connected by a network of gray pipe as concentrated and looping and linking as a body’s exposed blood vessels. Square, woven formations like unfaced, unwindowed apartment buildings. Gray towers ringed by successive platforms only wide enough to hold a man or two, rows of squat round tanks, close to the ground, higher tanks oranged with rust, derricks, towering cranes, flares flagging out flame and black smoke.

  Without the refinery, Port Arthur might be a village with a little fishing, people selling to day-trippers down to dabble in the water or serving the bankers whose sailboats snugged into the marina. Refinery gave you hamburger and chicken five nights a week instead of macaroni or collards and cornbread, gave your family a pickup truck and a sedan, sent your girl to nursing school and your boy to college with a slipstick in a case.

  Phelan U-turned and drove, stopped the car by a grand old house not far from the seawall. All white like a wedding cake left in the freezer for fifty years, its pillars and wraparound porch salt-air-peeled, chipped, wind-whipped, lonely. “Rose Hill Manor,” he said as they got out of the car. He lifted his chin at the old mansion’s second-story veranda that would have hosted a hundred guests hoisting bourbon or lemonade. The water was just out of sight over the hill.

  “I’m glad and proud to have my own office,” he said suddenly. “My own business.” His dark hair, glinting auburn in the sun, blew around his face. “But out here…I’m somebody else.” His face worked, and he turned his back on her, starting toward the water. “Thinking you might know what I mean.”

  Saying this, he didn’t look her in the face. Delpha appreciated that. And she knew what he meant. Fourteen years locked in cinderblock and steel? Hell yes, she knew. Out here the salt wind blew. Sunshine poured down, not summer-roasting right now, but hot enough to burn your nose. Up over the rise was about to stretch an expanse of water, and she was about to see and feel it. She followed him up, her arms rising lightly from her sides. She couldn’t keep them down. Riding on the wind, coming off the old white-on-white mansion, the smell of roses drifted to her nose. She scanned for the rose bushes to see what color was blooming so late in the season, but didn’t see any bushes. Just some honeysuckle vine over by the house.

  They walked up to the sea wall, the barrier of granite chunks lined far as you could see.

  Phelan’d been heartened when, in the beginning, Delpha Wade had said “we” about the business. Felt like he wasn’t alone in this flyer he was taking, someone was on his side. Someone who fit with how he saw stuff. Her getting grievously hurt had added another layer of complicated, job-related feelings. Now he gazed out at Sabine Lake, glittering fiercely under the sun, past it to the far shore, which belonged to Louisiana, trees and green scrub. Sun, air, water, the view free and wide. He took a deep, windy breath and examined his proprietary attitudes toward Phelan Investigations. He poked at them, found them surprisingly elastic. Possibly because she was a woman, it seemed more like she was helping and less like she was horning in. Was that right? Or not?

  “This conference is a fine idea,” Delpha said. Her arms were out, the wind ruffling her sleeves.

  Phelan got to it. “Our first cases, it worked out I could do most of the footwork, and you were in the office. Isn’t working out that way now.”

  “Noticed that.” She angled to face him, wind streaming her hair backward.

  “Listen, Delpha, you’re gonna help out on jobs, I should pay you more, but it’s only right to ask if you wanna do that. I know you like keeping the files and stuff and you know how to lay out bills and you sure as hell know how to talk to clients but—”

  “No, I do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Like working on the jobs, too.” She stayed looking out at the sparkles popping on the water, not at him.

  “Driving around to the realtors, maybe even the homebuyers, that’s OK with you?”

  “You mean, do I get homesick for my desk? I like finding things out, Tom. Like I look at those names, and I wonder what these two old men playin hide n’ seek want with each other.”

  Phelan nodded. “Yeah, me too. OK then, guess we agre
e, so gimme the big news. Tell me about finding Rodney yesterday.”

  “Tell me your Frank news first.”

  Phelan shot her a look. “Oh, man, yours must be good.” He ran down his coastal-reconnaissance/shrimp-buying trip, the odd envious comment about other people’s riches or smug stare—and his talk with Ticker, who most certainly was an ocean-going man. One who carried a Smith & Wesson backed up by a shotgun while he was doling out shrimp at a roadside stand.

  Delpha’s eyebrows raised. “That’s sure something. So you’ll just wait to get a call from Cheryl, that the plan? She’ll tell you where Frank’s going. Think Frank tells her the truth?”

  “No. She might come up with some trick that makes him, I don’t know. I do know that I’ll follow him.” A private investigator with years instead of months’ worth of experience might have all sorts of tricks for tailing, but until he had those experienced years, Phelan’s Operating Procedures were Common Sense and Winging It.

  They stayed out there in the windy open a while, strolling the cement path, watching the lake ripple and gleam. Then they drove back in the direction of Pleasure Island. “Used to be a park over there on the island,” Phelan said, “golf course, biggest roller coaster in Texas. They had a ballroom three thousand people could dance in.”

  “Really. Ever dance there?”

  “Nah. Heard it was big during the war.”

  “Guess it would be. All those girls in homemade sundresses.”

  “All those sailor boys and Guadalcanal waiting for ‘em.”

  Delpha pointed. They checked out a couple shrimpers at the marina, just floating there unmanned. Docked and docile. They drove up and down by the channel, checking out spots a boat could berth. Not here, too public. Their boat, Phelan thought, would slip into the wetlands, some dirt road siding a channel, like the ones he drove the other day. Somewhere not so far from here, makeshift landing pier maybe, channel dredged so the boat could come in, somewhere middle of the night. Close to a highway. Maybe they’d have a lookout, maybe just a bunch of offloaders, working fast.

  Farther on, a pick-up-sticks jumble of white masts attached to a bunch of sailboats, their slender hulls painted candy colors. “Pretty,” Delpha said. “So here’s what I found out yesterday.”

  “You don’t mind, let’s talk about Bell at the right place.” Phelan grinned. “This conference’s a field trip. Smugglers and birdlands.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Aw, there’s a few of them. Let’s drive.”

  They wove around through a patch of slash pine that looked like a pencil plantation and on into the tangled piney woods. House tucked here, one there, back seats and flower pots on the porches, girl in one yard lolling in a tire swing. Round and round to a sharp right turn onto a gravel road the car crunched down. After a while screens sprang up both sides of the road: six-foot reeds bearing white flowers. Phelan rolled his window all the way down. The tall reeds blowing and brushing in the wet wind made the sound of cloth ripping. Moist wind again as they rolled down this green, swaying tunnel to a ranger hut. No ranger. The wooden booth was empty but had a rack with saggy pamphlets you could take.

  “Shows how the road goes,” Delpha said, her finger tracing, “this line. Lookit all the birds. They got a list of ones stop here.” She ran her finger the length of the pamphlet. “Look at all the kinds of egrets. Great egrets, little egrets, middle-size egrets. Like Goldilocks in the bears’ house. There’s even a red one. And a Chinese one.”

  They rolled on down the narrow, shell road, leaving behind, after a while, the reed walls. Grasses green and driedtan, grasses with bayonet edges faced the full ditches that ran each side of the road. When the road rose, they could see past this dense border to marsh islands beyond: curly green islands dotted throughout brownish water. Then the road descended again, even with the ditches. Birds were calling. Phelan slowed further.

  “Turtle,” Delpha said, twisted to peer out her window, “swimming over here. Dragonflies! See ‘em? Big brass ones.” She turned back to him, hair flying, her face alight.

  His breath skipped. Hadn’t seen that expression since…when? Back in May, the evening he handed over the duplicate key to the office of Phelan Investigations. Or August, at the wake of an old woman she’d been hired to care for, when she’d helped load the Rosemont table with pies, pralines, ham and barbecue, and lilies.

  Up ahead a great egret coasted down to the ditchwater, back-flapping so he could land. “Wingspread of a B-52,” Phelan said.

  “Lookit them.”

  He turned from watching the huge white bird plunge its stick legs into the water to see that farther down the road seven or eight smaller egrets had self-assembled. Every one stared seriously into the wind, intent as remnants of a squad, scanning the field after the fight is over. Their staggered line, produced when each landed separately to join its fellows, their still attention, gave him this image. The egrets didn’t stir until the car came within ten feet of them, and then only reluctantly, a little one hopping into the air, the others flapping a short distance to the ditch, reclaiming their road after the car had passed.

  Delpha whispered, “Lookathere.” Visible, through the wild greenery, a long flat head and jaws, part of a mudcolored barrel on the mud bank. Ridged tail, short, fat-clawed legs camouflaged by ferns and reeds. Maybe hunting, maybe just hunkered there soothed in his mud-water world as the poor, unbounded air creatures cried above him.

  “OK,” Phelan said quietly because this place made him quiet, “let’s have it.”

  She turned away from the gator, back to Phelan.

  “I b’lieve Rodney’s name’s Jim Anderson. His fake name. He’s a homebuyer. You went to his house, but he wasn’t there.”

  “Anderson. Right, the house with the Christmas tree farm in front. How do you figure it’s him?”

  “Bunch of reasons. Right age, giant cage of parakeets, a younger man with him that’s…sweet and not right in the head. I talked to some Beaumont shopkeepers used to do business in New Orleans, and they told me Anderson was a big name there, back at the turn of the century. You’re picking a fake name, maybe a familiar one comes to mind quicker. He’s outside a lot because his face is real tanned ‘cept at the top. Like a farmer’s. But he’s not a farmer. There was a little black case with a strap on his dinette table. Right size to be a case for binoculars. Like somebody watching birds would carry.”

  Phelan stared at this news. “Stellar work, Delpha.”

  They looked at each other, sitting there with the warm wind running through the car windows, bending and rustling the reeds.

  Delpha pointed. Large bird, wings outspread, canted a few degrees in the wind. Phelan leaned into the windshield. “Hawk. Can’t tell if it’s redtail or white.”

  “Doesn’t matter if you don’t belong in this place. Nobody does. It belongs to them.”

  “Who?”

  Delpha spread her arms wide, the left one grazing Phelan’s shoulder. The right one arced out the window, taking in the hawk wafting the currents, uneven line of egrets reading the wind behind them, the gator bellied in the reeds.

  “Them. They’d bite you if they had to. But not for fun.”

  Phelan smiled at her, and, instead of running his hand through her hair, he proposed they get hamburgers in Winnie.

  On their way back down the road, they passed a weathered middle-aged couple squatting by the ditch at a juncture where the road split, a cooler and a bucket beside them. The woman quickly lowered a wire contraption back into the water, and they both turned to watch the car go by.

  Trapping themselves some free, live bait. Minnows.

  Phelan waved. Then he braked and put it in reverse. When he reached the spot where the couple was, the bucket was not in sight.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” the man said, standing up.

  “This is gonna sound funny, but y’all seen a guy with a bayonet wandering around out here?”

  They stared. The woman looked at the man
and away.

  The man said, “In my dreams, mister.”

  Phelan Investigations smelled like Aqua Velva and cigarettes and felt like autumn in Anchorage.

  Calvin stood up from Phelan’s desk chair and strode forward, craning to see past Phelan. “I fixed it for you,” he said. The handyman had shaved, anointed himself with oils, and dressed in clean khakis and a t-shirt with an R-rated Harley decal that read—Phelan peered at the dumb cluck—Put Something Exciting Between Your Legs.

  Delpha entered, glanced at the decal first, screwed up her eyes at the handyman, then passed him to drop her purse in her bottom drawer. In vain Calvin smiled his way out.

  Phelan adjusted the AC down to normal. He’d go see Jim Anderson tonight, tomorrow at the latest. He felt good about having toured some waterway geography, though he planned on memorizing specific, likely locations from the map he’d picked up. Just because you dropped out of Boy Scouts didn’t mean you couldn’t be prepared.

  Because: what if he lost Frank? That scenario made Phelan’s ego shudder, which reaction he kept to himself. Instead asked, “How’s that Dodge running for you?”

  “Loud. OK I do an errand in the morning? Won’t be too late coming in.”

  “You don’t have to ask,” he said.

  XXX

  DELPHA HAD FINAGLED an advance from Oscar. Along with prior savings, she had $211 unspent, tucked inside a sheet corner. Up in her room in the Rosemont, dim morning light from the alley slanting in, she took out two hundred. Left the eleven and ran across the street to the Dodge.

  In five minutes she was sitting on a soft leather couch by a receptionist’s desk, which was arranged on an area rug decorated with brown circles and gold squares. On the walls hung framed pictures of clean hunting dogs, a vase of cattails on a side table. Cattails stiff in a vase, that was kind of funny because the last thing they’d been decorating was a ditch.