The Bird Boys Read online

  Shirt from a slaughter yard.

  Heat crept the back of Phelan’s neck.

  He knew what had gone down in his office because he’d arrived not too many minutes after the fight was over. Cops would ask her who started that fight, the man who walked in—or Delpha? And being as how hospitals do have access to various types of clean clothes—yeah, they do—her wardrobe today must mean she wanted the police to get the picture.

  The hole in the crumpled white blouse drew the eye, rusty rosette formed around it, broad rust-stripe trailing down. The brown patches and gout and spray around the collar would not be hers, Phelan guessed, but they sure enhanced the grisly effect. The navy blue skirt was blackened at the waist. There was a spoiled, iron smell in the air. She seemed to be walking with an effort.

  Delpha’s head turned, stopped at Phelan. The light-brown hair an inch above her shoulders had felt some wind, and she had not combed it into place. No powder or rouge on the high cheekbones. Just lipstick the color of lips. She looked at him for a long second before her gaze retracted.

  E.E. introduced himself to Delpha and told her they’d like to ask her some questions, get everything squared away, standard stuff in this situation. Miles was next. Told her he was here to act as her attorney, if that was agreeable to her. Delpha’s head nodded slightly. She took a small side-step, almost a dip, and the lawyer cupped her elbow. Had the detectives read her her Miranda rights?

  “She’s not under arrest, counselor,” E.E. said. “We just fixin’ to take a statement. Determine what’s what.” He hooked his head at Abels. “Y’all go on.”

  Miles, ex-drum major, valedictorian, high-dollar divorce lawyer, was not on his own ground. Still, he emitted serene, tailored, carnivorous readiness: man was capital-B Billable. Phelan took scrupulous note. He knew something about masculine presentation, but he hadn’t honed it like this.

  Delpha looked at Phelan again. “You call him for me?” Faint light in the blue-gray flatness of her eyes, and she said it private, like only he could hear her.

  Phelan lifted his chin.

  The detectives shepherded her past him. Miles shot Phelan a glance and went with them. All squad room activity—breeze-shooting, questioning, report-writing, filing, phone-talking, candy bar-eating, and cigarette-smoking—everything buzzing back there would pretty much freeze, Phelan bet, while they watched the woman wearing the bloodbath pass by.

  E.E. tapped Phelan’s chest. “We got your statement the boys took at the scene. Don’t need you, Tommy.” He wheeled and followed them.

  Phelan went to the restroom and scrubbed his paint-crusted knuckles and nails, stump of his left middle finger, wrists. Came back. Sat in the chairs lined up beneath a long window that despite central air and Venetian blinds still beat with sun. The wall clock’s hands puttered around, stuck a while, went backward and scooped up some minutes forgot, trudged onward. He sat and smoked and sweated.

  From time to time, Fontenot disappeared from the desk and then returned and busied himself answering the phone and doodling on a clipboard. Addressed himself extra-conscientiously to visitors. Trimmed his gaze so it did not reach the border of Phelan’s outlands.

  II

  THE HITCH FROM the wound’s incision made her feel like she had a hook in her, from belly button to backbone. Her stomach was tight, sore.

  But at the sight of Miles Blankenship’s magazine suit and easy carriage, Delpha Wade’s knees unlocked. Her head went feverishly light. Had not had a lawyer who’d walked like that—like wherever he went, the street beneath his feet welcomed him. Wearing a suit that looked like somebody’d sewed it only for him. Spoke naturally, courteous, to the police chief, and she could tell he never once wondered would he get spoken back to or how. Miles Blankenship was equipped for How, he belonged here, in the station, belonged behind the nice oak desk he was sure to have, in a restaurant with velvet curtains, in a forward pew. And here he was, on her side. Speaking for her, god-almighty, throwing the protection of the law over her like a coat and not a net. Here was the difference between fourteen years and walking around free. She widened her stance to keep steady, in case gold sequins broke out before her eyes.

  Detectives Abels and Tucker took hold of the chairs across from where she and the lawyer were standing. The wall to her right was being held up by Joe Ford, Delpha’s parole officer, six foot five and glum as a buzzard. One of Joe Ford’s many instructions during their first meeting: The parolee must not own any knife with a blade longer than two inches, except for a kitchen knife, and only if their parole agent says so.

  Joe caught her eye, his gaze flickering. He probably didn’t favor being called to this room over a parolee of his, with police chief and lawyer, maybe any minute the D.A., men far above his pay grade. Mr. Ford, I didn’t have a two-inch knife. Or a ten-inch one. Just a whiskey bottle resting in a bottom drawer. Doesn’t signify, not a plug nickel, because it come down to me or him.

  Pug-nosed Tucker took the first chair, head drifting back, eyes squeezing shut, and produced a misty sneeze. He patted his pockets, fished out a handkerchief. Mr. Blankenship pulled out the chair across from Tucker for Delpha, inclined his head at it. She sat. Unexpectedly, he ushered the chair—with her suddenly unbalanced in it—to the table. He took his place next to her. Abels, the detective with the mustache and sideburns, slid off his hounds-tooth jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. He plopped down a white tablet and sat heavily. Scraped the chair forward, uncapped a pen.

  “OK, Delpha. On the afternoon of August 15, 1973, where were you?” A bulldog wearing a drill sergeant’s hat glowered from his forearm.

  “Office of Phelan Investigations, downtown on Orleans Street.”

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “No.”

  “Where was your employer?”

  “Out on a case.”

  “When the…deceased came to the door, you invited him in?”

  “He walked in.”

  “Door wasn’t locked?”

  “No.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Asked how I could help him.”

  “OK. What did he say?”

  “Said a girl said she left a book for him outside the door, but it wasn’t there.”

  Abels waited for her to continue and when she didn’t, said, “What did you say?”

  “Told him I brought it in and I’d get it for him and he could go.”

  “You were in a hurry to get rid of him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why was that?”

  “He wanted to know if my boss was gone. Looking around to make sure I was by myself.”

  “Maybe he was just looking at his surroundings,” Abels said, maintaining the neutral-cop tone.

  Delpha’s eyes flicked to Tucker’s then settled back on Abels’. She answered nothing.

  “You believed he intended to harm you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Without him making any kind of threat?”

  She nodded.

  “How’d you come to think that?”

  “Front of his pants was standin’ up.”

  And so on, slow and methodical, through the moment her attacker had pulled a knife, and the events that followed. Then, a detailed recapitulation of those events. It was eighty-nine minutes before Abels switched gears and the lawyer sitting next to her meaningfully shifted his posture forward.

  “OK, Delpha. In April of this year, you were released from Gatesville Women’s Prison?”

  “I was.”

  “You were incarcerated for what charge?”

  “Voluntary manslaughter.”

  “Your victim was—”

  Miles Blankenship finished the sentence. “A rapist, Detective. That’s enough of those questions. They’re irrelevant to the matter at hand. We all know Miss Wade happens to be on parole. And we all know that what we have here is justified self-defense. An individual with more than a reasonable belief that the use of force was necessary, defending
her life against a depraved and aggressive predator. As any man in this room would have done without a second thought. Let me emphasize that. Without a second thought. Any man.” He scanned the faces in the room, skipping Delpha’s.

  “There is no crime here, gentlemen. Miss Wade was carrying no weapon, so there is not even a parole violation. Not even that. This interview is a formality, the necessity of which we all understand. But let’s get this formality over with. Keep in mind that you’ve removed my client from a hospital bed.”

  Whereas the cops gazed flat-faced at Miles, Delpha noticed that her parole officer Joe Ford straightened up against the wall. He had unfolded the long arms he had barricaded in front of his chest and slipped his hands in his pockets. No violations, no way he could be faulted.

  Abels, brow raised, cut his eyes toward the Chief, who hiked his chin a quarter inch.

  The detective’s gaze sank back to hers. He jerked his neck to the side and back, getting his head on tighter. “All right, say again for the record, you were alone when the deceased came to the office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You invited him in?”

  “He walked in.”

  “OK. Did you talk with him?”

  Their verbal exchange was repeated for a third time. Delpha told the same story, reiterated that No, she had not met the man prior to this time nor seen him. Yes, she had heard of him from her boss, Mr. Phelan.

  “And what was it your boss told you?”

  “That he was preying on boys.”

  “You knew that for a true fact?”

  “Know for a fact Mr. Phelan believed that.”

  Abels’ mouth screwed to the side. Irritation sparked in his eyes. For only a second—then his tone traded its dogged neutrality for a mild, false curiosity. “Why’nt you just run, Delpha?”

  “’Cause he was hopin’ I would.”

  Without unfolding his arms, Chief Guidry spoke up. “You read his mind?”

  “Read the way he waved the knife.”

  “What waving technique was that?” Fake confusion from Abels.

  “Invitin’ me to make a break for it.”

  Tucker sawed at his nose with a horizontal finger. “You coulda hollered for help.”

  She nodded agreeably. “He woulda liked that.”

  “How would you know? Explain that for us.” Tucker sniffed.

  “No, sir. You hadn’t been in a knife fight, I cain’t tell you. Ruther you asked me a specific question.”

  The eraser of the lawyer’s pencil bounced on the yellow legal pad he was smiling down on.

  Abels balefully resumed the lead. “So you had no hesitation before you killed him?”

  “Not after he stabbed me.”

  Pause in the interrogation as, possibly, Abels regrouped and the other men measured themselves against this answer.

  “All right, then. Delpha. Just for a minute setting aside what we know now, that your assailant is also the chief suspect in six murders…on the afternoon in question, you didn’t know that—”

  Her lips parted. She stared straight-on at Abels and his coarse mustache with a few gray hairs in it. He would’ve been on that site, she knew it. At his rank. Case like this. Abels’d have pictures in his head of whatever was left of those young bodies in dirty plastic, he’d have putrefaction fresh in his nose.

  “Nobody sets six dead boys off to the side,” she said. “You don’t.”

  Abels’ head twitched like there was a bone inside he had to pop straight. There was silence. Breathing. Then, “I do not. No, ma’am.”

  Ma’am. Purely a figure of speech, but there it was. First shred of respect.

  As though a buzzer had sounded, Miles Blankenship checked his silver watch and glided to his feet. “I believe we’re finished here, officers,” he said pleasantly.

  He turned his head and addressed the chief. “If there are further questions, sir, please direct them to me. Miss Wade, I’ll be at your disposal.”

  He tilted toward her and began to ease back her chair.

  Delpha grabbed the sides of the seat.

  She craned back at Mr. Blankenship, who smiled kindly, murmuring Allow me. She then let go of the chair, let it be guided back from the table, but feeling embattled still, rose and scanned each in turn: met the weighing eyes of the chief, angled toward Joe Ford’s familiar bony face, then the two detectives facing her. Abels blew out a short sigh, coughed to cover it. Either Tucker winked at her, or he was afflicted by an allergic tic.

  Out in the hall, some uniforms were gathered, spilling out toward the squad room. Some of them had surely seen the bodies dug up. A couple of them nodded deliberately as if in support of the woman in the bloody shirt, others gawked as at a spectacle. Delpha passed by the badged chests into the open squad room, beginning to feel a sharp pain between her shoulder blades from holding herself upright. Feeling, in a rush, her exhaustion, the twanging ache of her incision, the barb in the middle of herself, as she neared the station’s waiting room. Behind her, low conversations were commencing.

  “Fuckin’ A right,” she heard, along with steak knife, motherfucker, and bite-size pieces. Somebody sniggered.

  Keys jingled. Joe Ford mumbled, “See you,” and excused himself by.

  Yeah, she’d see him in the parole office. Wouldn’t that be a session.

  Around three p.m., Fontenot slid behind the desk again, blue eyes snapping.

  “Tole you,” he sang, and Phelan knew they were cutting her loose.

  His friend Joe Ford appeared first, passing Phelan with a widening of the eyes and a simultaneous twist of the jaw. Then Miles. They weren’t charging her. Likely result: finding of self-defense to be forwarded to the D.A. Miles couldn’t stick around. He was off to mediate between a feuding couple, bone of contention: an aged beagle named Betty.

  “Send me your bill,” Phelan said.

  “Have to, Tom. I’m on the partners’ clock.” Miles smiled wryly. “She’d’ve done OK without me. Good to finally lay eyes on you again, buddy.” He shook Phelan’s hand and strode out.

  “Give you a ride,” Phelan said to Delpha when she and Abels walked out past Fontenot’s front desk. “Back to the hospital? Or home?”

  “Home.”

  Once in the car, Phelan asked her if she wanted a clean shirt. “Yeah, thanks,” she said, “ruther not scandalize the Rosemont.” He stopped at Gus Meyer, pulled a woman’s white shirt off a rack. In the car she put it on, leaving him with an image of a tender-looking red track across a rib, a rust-spotted cotton bra, and the curve of her breasts.

  He escorted her back into the New Rosemont, through the wide lobby furnished in sheenless blue velour, floral-print chintz, fringed lamps, scratched-up side tables with aluminum ashtrays. Couches and chairs grouped for cozy conversation were at that moment occupied by elderly clientele imitating arthritic marble statues. At the foot of the stairs, they stopped. Her boss looked at her a little while, like he wanted to say a thing, or say several things, his face pained. Finally just said, “Get well, hear?”

  Delpha whispered thanks and went up. She found she needed to hold to the rail.

  A night nurse who’d woken her to measure temperature and blood pressure had mentioned Mr. Phelan. That your husband or your boyfriend? she’d wanted to know. He’s not wearing a ring. I like the ones with no belly fat. You let me know if he’s not your boyfriend.

  He’d come to see her those days after the surgery, even during the week-long haze when she was mostly sleeping off an infection. He sat by the bed during the after-work hour, not saying much. The August sunlight through the window had picked out auburn glints in his dark hair. Getting long. His blue shirt usually looked like a chicken had ironed it. He’d been noncommittal about any new jobs, and she’d guessed there were none. She was afraid she’d ruined his business. Mr. Thomas Phelan, ex-roughneck, Worker’s Comp recipient for a lost finger, new private investigator. Employer of Delpha Wade when not another soul in Beaumont, Texas, would accept that title.r />
  III

  THE NEW ROSEMONT Retirement Hotel’s residents had picked through the Beaumont Journal’s front-page columns or watched Channel 4’s Evening Report—and spread the big story to others who hadn’t. Miss Delpha Wade, up in Room 221 at the top of the stairs, had killed a man in self-defense, and according to an astonishing paragraph farther down in the article, not her first. Why, when she’d walked into their lobby last spring, she had been fresh out of Gatesville Women’s Prison! There were dire looks and looks askance, clucking and jaws sagging below coffee-stained dentures.

  Delpha had avoided putting any of them on the spot. For the last ten days, if it wasn’t raining, she’d carried her coffee outside in the mornings and sat in the open air watching the downtown pass by. Last two of those days, she’d worn a skirt and blouse suitable for office work.

  Now her coffee was churning in her stomach, a mouthful gurgling back up into her throat, and again, she was dressed. The sky was lowering by the minute, a wood-handled black umbrella leaning against her hip.

  Droplets splashed her hair. Delpha cast an upward glance at the big, running clouds, purple along their bottom edges, then she stood and forced the umbrella to open its black vault.

  Phelan stared out the window at the rain, then at legs under an umbrella, crossing the street with less speed than might seem natural for such ugly weather. Walking deliberately in black flats. Wet black flats.

  Tropical Storm Celia was now whamming into Freemont for the second time, having hit land two days ago, sucked herself back out over the Gulf to do a HaHa U-Turn and then gathered her waters and her winds to boil into the same coastline. Beaumont was picking up the overflow wind and rain.

  When Phelan heard the steps on the stairs, not fast, not slow, he sat down in the boss chair. Then he stood up again. Ran a hand through his getting-long hair.

  Miss Wade came through the door of Phelan Investigations and stopped mid-stride. Her head swiveled as she surveyed the Apollo White walls.

  His neck warming up, Phelan surveyed her.

  The crease at the left side of her lips seemed etched a cut deeper. Her weight had fallen off some. Less than the 120 lbs. on her discharge paper from Gatesville Prison. Still five foot six. Still the gray-blue eyes, but something farther in their gaze. Not tough to figure. Jailhouse tan, long gone: there was sun on her cheekbones and in strands of her ash-brown hair. Miss Wade had been taking in the parade of downtown life from the New Rosemont Retirement Hotel’s outside chairs. He’d studied her from his window, being as the Rosemont was just across the street, wondered what was healing or not in her mind and in her body. Wondered did Phelan Investigations or its proprietor figure in anywhere.