“Torture?”
“Not any kind I know.”
“Anybody phone the widow?”
He looked up from his notes, blinking back sweat though the air conditioning was running full blast. “Thought that was your job.”
It was. McKenna knocked on the door of the low-rent apartment and it swung open to reveal a woman in her thirties with worried eyes. He took a deep breath and went into the ritual. Soon enough he saw again the thousand-yard stare of the new widow. It came over her after he got only a few sentences into his description. Ordinary people do not expect death’s messenger to be on the other side of the knock. Marcie Anselmo got a look at the abyss and would never be the same.
McKenna never wanted to be the intruder into others’ pain. He didn’t like asking the shell-shocked widow details about their life, his job, where he’d been lately. All she knew was he hadn’t come home last night. He did some night jobs but he had never stayed out all night like this before.
He spent a long hour with her. She said he sometimes hung out at The Right Spot. McKenna nodded, recognizing the name. Then they talked some more and he let the tensions rise and fall in her, concluding that maybe it was time to call their relatives. Start the process. Claim the body, the rest. Someone would be calling with details.
He left his card. This part went with the job. It was the price you paid to get to do what came next. Figure out. Find out.
Ethan Anselmo had worked as a pickup deck man on shrimpers out of Bayou La Batre. She hadn’t asked which one he went out on lately. They came and went, after all.
McKenna knew The Right Spot, an ancient bar that had once sported decent food and that knew him, too. He forgot about the Pinot Grigio chilling at home and drove through the soft night air over to the long line of run-down docks and sheds that had avoided the worst of the last hurricane. The Right Spot had seen better days but then so had he.
He changed in the darkness to his down-home outfit. Dirty jeans, blue work shirt with snaps instead of buttons, baseball cap with salt stains. Last time he had been here he had sported a moustache, so maybe clean-shaven he would look different. Older, too, by half of a pretty tough year. Showtime…
Insects shrilled in the high grass of the wiped-out lot next door and frogs brayed from the swampy pond beyond. There was even a sort-of front yard to it, since it had once been a big rambling house, now canted to the left by decay. Night creeper and cat’s claw smothered the flowerbeds and flavored the thick air.
There was a separate bar to the side of the restaurant and he hesitated. The juke joint music was pump and wail and crash, sonic oblivion for a few hours. Food first, he decided. Mercifully, there were two rooms and he got away from the noise into the restaurant, a room bleached out by the flat ceramic light. A sharp smell of disinfectant hiding behind the fried food aroma. New South, all right. A sign on the wall in crude type said FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FOREIGN SHRIMP.
The joint had changed. He sat at a table and ordered jambalaya. When it came, too fast, he knew what to expect before the first mouthful.
It was a far, forlorn cry from the semi-Cajun coast food he knew as a boy, spicy if you wanted and not just to cover the taste of the ingredients. The shrimp and okra and oysters were fresh then, caught or picked that day. That was a richer time, when people ate at home and grew or caught much of what they ate. Paradise, and as usual, nobody had much noticed it at the time.
He looked around and caught the old flavor. Despite his disguise, he saw that some people notice you’re a cop. After a few minutes their eyes slide away and they go back to living their lives whether he was watching them or not. Their talk followed the meandering logic of real talk or the even more wayward path of stoned talk. Half-lowered eyelids, gossip, beer smells mingling with fried fish and nose-crinkling popcorn shrimp. Life.
He finished eating, letting the place get used to him. Nobody paid him much attention. The Right Spot was now an odd combination, a restaurant in steep decline with a sleazy bar one thin wall away. Maybe people only ate after they’d guzzled enough that the taste didn’t matter anyway.
When he cut through the side door two Cajun women at the end of the bar gave him one glance that instantly said cop at the same time his eyes registered hookers. But they weren’t full-on pros. They looked like locals in fluffy blouses and skinny pants who made a little extra on the side and told themselves they were trying out the talent for the bigger game, a sort of modern style of courtship, free of hypocrisy. Just over the line. He had seen plenty of them when he worked vice. It was important to know the difference, the passing tide of women versus the real hard core who made up the true business. These were just true locals. Fair enough.
The woman bartender leaned over to give him a look at the small but nicely shaped breasts down the top of her gold lame vest. She had a rose tattoo on one.
“Whiskey rocks, right?” She gave him a thin smile.
“Red wine.” She had made him as a cop, too. Maybe he had even ordered whiskey last time he was here.
“You been gone a while.”
Best to take the polite, formal mode, southern Cary Grant. “I’m sure you haven’t lacked for attention.” Now that he thought about it, he had gotten some good information here about six months back, and she had pointed out the source.
“I could sure use some.” A smile and a slow wink.
“Not from me. Too old. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.”
She laughed, showing a lot of bright teeth, even though it was an old line, maybe as ancient as the era it referred to. But this wasn’t what he was here for, no. He took the wine, paid, and turned casually to case the room.
Most of the trade here was beer. Big TVs showed talking heads with thick necks against a backdrop of a football field. Guys in jeans and work shirts watched, rapt eyes above the bottles pressed to their mouths. He headed for the back with the glass of indifferent wine, where an old juke strummed with Springsteen singing “There’s a darkness on the edge of town.”
The fishermen sat along the back. He could tell by the work boots, worn hands, and salt-rimmed cuffs of their jeans and by something more, a squinty look from working in the sea glare. He walked over and sat down at the only open table, at the edge of maybe a dozen of the men sipping on beers.
It took a quarter of an hour before he could get into their conversation. It helped that he had spent years working on his family’s boat. He knew the rhythms and lingo, the subtle lurch of consonants and soft vowels that told them he was from around here. He bought the next table over a round of Jax beers and that did it. Only gradually did it dawn on him that they already knew about Ethan Anselmo’s death. The kids on the beach had spread the story, naturally.
But most of them here probably didn’t know he was a cop, not yet. He sidled along and sat in a squeaky oak chair. Several of the guys were tired and loaded up with beer, stalling before going home to the missus. Others were brighter and on a guess he asked one, “Goin’ out tonight?”
“Yeah, night dredgin’. All I can get lately.”
The man looked like he had, in his time, quite probably eaten dinner in lot of poolrooms, or out of vending machines, and washed off using a garden hose. Working a dredger at night was mean work. Also, the easiest way to avoid the rules about damaging the sea bottom. Getting caught at that was risky and most men wouldn’t take it.
McKenna leaned back and said in slow syllables, “This guy Ethan, the dead guy, know him?”
A nod, eyes crinkling with memory. “He worked the good boat. That one the Centauris hired, double money.”
“I hadn’t heard they hired anybody other than on Dauphin Island.”