a long time. I let him talk.
One of God's little jokes: as soon as I had reached Carl on the phone the TV program somehow switched from baseball coverage to a rerun of Buckner Fanning's morning sermon from Trinity Baptist. I had dragged the phone across the living room as far as the cord would reach and was now trying to reach the television controls with my foot, hoping I could either turn the set off or find another channel. So far Buckner was thwarting my efforts. Tan and immaculately dressed, he was smiling and admonishing me to accept God.
"Yeah," I said to Carl at the appropriate moments. "That sounds pretty bad." After a while Carl presented me with an opening. He asked me what I was doing back in town.
"If I were to want some case files on Dad's death, who would I talk to?"
A long pull on a cigarette. A rumbly cough. "Christ, son. You've come back to look into that?"
"No," I said. "But maybe now I could read about it fresh, more objectively, maybe put it behind me."
I could hear him blow smoke into the receiver.
"Not a week goes by I don't see him in my sleep," Carl said, "lying there like that."
We both got quiet. I thought about that eternal five minutes between the time my father had fallen to the ground and the first paramedic unit had arrived, when we'd stood there, Carl and I, watching the groceries roll down the sidewalk with the lines of blood. I'd been completely frozen. Carl had been the opposite. He'd started pacing, rambling about what jack and he had been planning on doing that weekend, how the hunting was going to be, what Aggie jokes jack had told him the night before. All the while he was wiping away tears, lighting and crushing cigarettes one after the other. A jar of jelly had rolled into the crook of my father's arm and nestled there like a teddy bear.
"I don't know about putting it behind you," Carl said.
Buckner Fanning started telling me about his latest trip to the Holy City of Jerusalem.
"Who would I talk to to see the files, Carl?"
"It's in-house, son. And it's been too long. It just ain't done that way."
"But if it was?"
Carl exhaled into my ear. "You remember Drapiewski? Larry Drapiewski? Made deputy lieutenant about a year ago."
"What about for SAPD?"
He had a coughing fit for a minute, then cleared his throat.
"I'd try Kingston in Criminal Investigations, if he's still there. He was always in debt to jack for one favor or another. There was an FBI review of the case a few years back too. I can't help you there."
I remembered neither Drapiewski nor Kingston, but it was a place to start.
"Thanks, Carl. "
"Yeah well, sorry I can't help much. I thought you were my son calling from Austin. He ain't called in over a month, you know. For a minute there, you sounded like him."
"Take care of yourself, Carl."
"Nice way to spend an afternoon," he said. "You kept me talking all the way up to 60 Minutes."
I hung up. I couldn't help picturing Carl Kelley, sitting in some house alone, a cigarette in his withered hand, living for television shows and a phone call from Austin that never came. I sat for a minute, Robert Johnson instantly on my lap, and we watched Buckner talk about spiritual healing. Then I turned off the set.
Chapter 9-10
Chapter 9
"Little Tres?" Larry Drapiewski laughed. "Jesus, E not the same seven-year-old kid who used to sit on my desk and eat the custard out of the middle of my donuts."
As soon as he said that I had a vague memory of Drapiewski - a large man, flat-topped red hair, friendly smile, a sweating face that looked like the Martian landscape. His big hands always full of food.
"Yeah," I said, "only twenty years and a lot of donuts later nobody calls me 'little'."
"Join the club," the lieutenant said. "So what's on your mind?"
When I told him why I was calling he was quiet for an uncomfortable amount of time. An oscillating fan on his desk hummed back and forth into the receiver.
"You understand everybody has looked at this," Larry said. "Half the departments in town, the county, the FBI. Everybody wanted a piece of this. You want to find something that nobody's caught before, it isn't going to happen."
"Does that mean you won't help?"
"I didn't say that."
I heard papers being moved around on the other end of