When we arrived at my place, we were hungry. I decided on chili.
I got a wide and deep cast-iron frying pan out from under the cabinet and put hamburger meat in it. As it fried, I black peppered it.
Leonard cut up half an onion and a jalapeno, scraped that off the cutting board into the meat. I stirred it while he got the chili powder out of the cabinet and shook some of that in.
I let it cook for a while, and we got soft drinks and sat at the table and smelled the chili cooking.
“So, what do you think?” Leonard said.
“I think Mercury is probably right,” I said. “It’s all connected, and the thing now is, how do we get enough evidence to nail Devil Red, and find a way not to nail Kincaid and Ms. Clinton.”
“I’m not sure I care as much about them as you do,” Leonard said. “There’s something about this whole thing still bothers me. It’s like an animal called Not Quite Right crawled up my ass and is wiggling around.”
“I thought you enjoyed that kind of thing.”
“Wrong kind of animal.”
“All right. How about we try to find evidence to nail Devil Red, not make an effort to stick our vengeful couple, but if things shake out that way, and we can’t keep it from happening, we let it. Him in that chair, and she his former wife, they might get off with something light.”
“She might not have anything to do with it,” Leonard said.
“Oh, she did somethin’, all right. She’s still in love with him. That much was easy to tell. And if anyone knows his business, it’s her.”
“He dumped her, and she’s still moonin’ over him like a preteen,” Leonard said. “I don’t get it.”
“I think love is hard to explain, brother.”
“Yeah. Well, I think it’s made up.”
“You do? What about John?”
“I think I was attracted to him, and him to me, and we had certain things in common, both being queer was right up there, and-”
“He made you laugh, right? That’s what everyone always says.”
“You and Brett make each other laugh. Me and John, not so much. But I think our basic attraction created love. I think love is real, but I think it’s created, kind of like a smoothie.”
“You are such a romantic.”
“No. No I’m not,” Leonard said.
The chili cooked for a long time, and we were starved when it was ready. We ate quickly, devouring huge bowls of it with crackers, and then we did seconds. Between it all, we made some general plans about going back to Houston to shake Kincaid’s and Clinton’s tree some, see we could get them to make a mistake, wiggle something out of the woodwork. It wasn’t a plan up there with Patton, but it was a plan. We had plenty of clues now, plenty of circumstantial evidence. Thing to do was to see if our knowing what we knew made them nervous.
And then the worm turned.