“He’s very agitated, Earl. It might be wiser to give him a while to simmer down.”
“You think he’s going to get any less agitated sitting in some jail cell?”
“I just don’t want him to say anything that makes all this worse.”
“There’s nothing he can say if he didn’t do it.”
McNutt sighed his unhappy assent.
“All right.”
“Go get them.”
McNutt nodded back through the wired glass.
“Oh, I don’t have to get anybody, Earl.”
Wooten looked. The detectives, Van Riper and Chones were milling about the door to the holding room. The younger detective was staring at Wooten with pitiless, calculating eyes. Wooten started to return his gaze but realized there was nothing to be gained by such a showdown.
“Can I be in there?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be right with him the whole time.”
Wooten wished the lawyer’s words afforded him more comfort.
Dawn began to break while they talked to Joel. A woman arrived to take the place of the duty sergeant. She carried a tray of freshly baked cinnamon rolls. None were offered to Wooten. He sat on the bench, the same few thoughts roaming through his mind, like vehicles looking for spaces in a completely full lot. Joel had left the house without telling them. He was under arrest. They said he’d murdered pretty little Susan Truax.
They found out, didn’t they.
McNutt finally emerged, looking grim. He told Wooten that Joel was being charged with the second-degree murder of Susan Truax.
“But I still don’t understand what the cops are saying happened.”
“That Joel found Susan stepping out with another boy and attacked them.”
“What other boy?”
“Teddy Swope.”
The words left Wooten dumbfounded for several seconds.
“Teddy Swope?”
“That’s right.”
“Was he hurt?”
“I don’t think so. But he was assaulted.”
“Teddy?” Wooten repeated incredulously. “Teddy and Joel are best friends.”
McNutt chucked his chin back toward the holding room.
“According to them there’d been trouble between the two of them about the girl recently.”
Wooten remembered Joel’s return home last week with a bloody nose, his cryptic remarks about a fight with Teddy. He never had been able to figure out what it was all about, what with Chicago and then getting thrown out of the house.
“Yeah, they did have some sort of trouble last week.”
McNutt’s expression somehow managed to get even more grave.
“Do you know what this altercation was about? Was it about Miss Truax?”
Wooten shook his head. Swope’s behavior on the phone suddenly made sense. Teddy was the one saying Joel had hurt Susan.
“What did Joel say to all this?” Wooten asked.
“Some story about how Teddy was the one who’d arranged for him to be with Susan down there at the lake. It was sort of, well, hard to follow. I gotta tell you, I don’t think it cut much ice with our friends in the State Bureau of Investigation.”
Wooten was silent for a while. This was starting to look very, very bad.
“So what do you think?” he asked, his voice sounding as desperate as he felt. “Did my boy do something here?”
McNutt sighed.
“My client maintains his innocence so of course that’s my position.”
“Cut the shit, Ray.”
McNutt stared evenly at Wooten.
“They have motive,” he said. “They have opportunity. They have an eyewitness who happens to be the son of the most important man in this county. We have a whole lot of I-don’t-knows, a cock-and-bull story about some bizarre assignation and a dead white girl. You better hope I don’t cut the shit, Earl. ‘Cause it’s gonna stink pretty damned bad.”
“Can I see him now?”
“After he’s arraigned.”
“When will that be?”
“This afternoon at the earliest.”
“Can we get bail then?”
“I’ll certainly try. It might be a bit steep but Spivey should go for it.”
“It doesn’t matter how much it is. I just want him home.”
“All right. Look, I better get back in there. Let Joel know how the next few hours are going to play out.”
Wooten watched McNutt vanish back into that locked room, then collapsed onto the bench, searching for the one small thing that would stop the doubt hammering ever louder in his mind. Just a tiny, unnoticed fact he could build upon. A hard, immutable truth to which he could pin his son’s innocence. But there was nothing like that. Everything pointed the other way. The fight with Teddy. Sneaking out of the house. Joel’s own words.
And then a terrifying thought began to sound in Wooten’s mind. Maybe there was no absolving fact, no alternative story to the one being told. Maybe Joel had done it. Wooten wasn’t sure how and he wasn’t even sure why. But suddenly, the idea that his son had hurt that girl started to look undeniable. The bad medicine had finally taken hold. He’d done it.
No, he told himself. It’s too early to think these things. Let the sun shine on this whole mess for a few hours. See how it looks in the light of day.
It’s too early to think it.
They brought Joel out a few minutes later, walking him toward that corridor. Going, Wooten knew, to the cells. He looked tired and confused. His shirt had come untucked at the back, his unlaced sneakers flapped awkwardly on the tile. Wooten raised his hands to attract his son’s attention, but the boy disappeared without looking.
After that there was nothing left to do in Cannon City. There would be no visits, no intercessions. Not until the hearing that afternoon. McNutt left after explaining that he would meet with Joel later in the morning to prepare a plea. As of now he presumed it would be not guilty. Wooten nodded dully. And then the lawyer was gone, leaving behind a small cloud of lavender.
Wooten followed a few seconds later. He was surprised to discover upon coming through the station’s heavy doors that it was a beautiful day.
Birds, sun, fragrant air. People had begun to move through the square. Cars were now slotted into the slant spaces. As Wooten headed toward his Ranchero some men emerged from one of them, a dimpled Fury. They headed straight toward him. One was small and wore a corduroy suit. The other was tall and hairy and carried a camera.
“Mr. Wooten?”
He kept walking toward his car.
“We’re with the Baltimore Sun. Got a minute?”
The man in the corduroy suit was next to him now. The hairy man had moved in front, walking backward as he took pictures. Wooten scowled at him but this only seemed to increase the shutter’s clicking.
“Did your son kill Susan Truax, Mr. Wooten?
Just get to the car, he thought.
“Is it true they were lovers?”
Wooten looked at the man. Lovers. As if they were anything other than kids. He turned back toward the Ranchero, lowering his shoulder in the direction of the photographer. If the man got hit that would be his own damned fault. But he danced out of the way with surprising agility. Wooten dropped into the driver’s seat. The camera was right against the window, its lens clicking against the glass like a trapped cricket. The reporter was still speaking. Just go, Wooten thought. He turned the engine over. There was a beastly growl that ended in a harsh choke. Don’t do this to me now. He tried again. Once again, a growl, followed by silence.
Wooten looked around. Other people had begun to gather. Citizens, on their way to work. They stood on the sidewalk, staring at him. A few whispered. They knew. There were other reporters as well, rushing toward him out of haphazardly parked cars. More cameras were wielded. Flashes began to strobe his tired eyes. Voices penetrated the sealed windows.
“How will your son plead?”
“Did he kill he
r?”
“Were they lovers?”
He gave the key a final, desperate twist. The engine turned over. Finally, some mercy. He checked the rearview mirror. People blocked the way. Wooten put the car in reverse and started to back out. But they wouldn’t budge. It was as if they were deliberately trapping him. On the square in front of him there were some squirrels, some breakfasting birds.
But no people. He dropped the car into drive and hit the gas pedal. It bumped hard over the curb and barely missed a parking meter. After that it was smooth going. Wooten could feel the tires bite into the damp ground. Divots filled his rearview mirror as he slalomed through the cannon and the trees. By the time he reached the far side of the square he was doing well over whatever the damned speed limit was out here.
31
He was in the basement when the screaming began. Steady, three-second howls, each of them followed by long intervals of echoing silence. The sound startled him when he first heard it. She wasn’t supposed to be awake. She’d had enough of her pills and her booze to sleep until at least the afternoon. But her voice was clear and sharp, pouring beneath the doors and through the ducts like a gale. She was still on Susan’s bed. He could tell by the way the sound moved down to him. She’d been lying there since seven, when they finally returned from the hospital in Cannon City, a flat brick building where they took Susan. Before that, she lay for what seemed like hours on the slanting redwood pier, covered by a blanket with the words CANNON COUNTY VFD dyed into its gray fabric. They had stood a few feet away, watching the water stain grow and then stop growing. Nothing happened until Swope returned from his conference with the sheriff in the parking lot. He was nodding grimly.
“They’re arresting Joel Wooten,” he said.
Irma’s eyes remained on the blanket.
“Teddy and Susan were down here and he attacked them,” Swope continued. “Teddy tried to save her but it was … not feasible.”
When he heard this, Truax remembered Joel sneaking back into the house just a few hours earlier, the confused and worried look on his face, the way he’d crept up the steps. If he’d seen the boy sneaking out he would have followed him. But he’d dropped his guard. And now there was this.
Irma finally understood Swope’s words.
“Joel? He did this?”
“The police are picking him up as we speak.”
She looked back at Susan’s body.
“What if they can’t find him?” she asked, her voice suddenly piercing.
Both men looked at her.
“What if he’s gone? What if they’re hiding him?” She was growing hysterical. “They do that, you know. Hide them. They have places the police do not know about. Basements and hovels. What if this happens?”
Swope put his hand on her arm.
“There aren’t places like that in Newton,” he said with a finality that silenced her. “They’ll find him.”
Moments later a van arrived from the coroner’s office, driving along the dock and through the chain-link fence. It stopped at the mouth of the damaged pier. Two men emerged from it. One was fat, with red hair and a mincing walk. The other was a short, wiry black man who wouldn’t meet anybody’s eye. They peered beneath the blanket and wrote on clipboards. Muttering. Pointing things out. Knowing that everybody was watching them. After five minutes of this Chones spoke with them. Swope joined the conversation for a while, then returned to the Truaxes, explaining that the men would be taking their daughter to Cannon City.
“I want to go with her,” Irma said.
Her eyes were fixed on the two men as they loaded the body onto a retractable stretcher. The brakes on it were broken—they had to keep chocking it with their shoes so it wouldn’t roll into the lake.
“Of course.” Swope turned to Truax. “Are you all right or do you want me to arrange a ride?”
“No,” Truax answered, the first words he’d spoken since his arrival. “I’m all right.”
They followed in the Cutlass. It was not quite dawn. For a short while a newspaper delivery truck got between them and the van. Irma started to whimper and so Truax sped up to pass it. He had no words for his wife. She wouldn’t have heard him anyway. She was in the van with the girl.
There was nothing for them to do in Cannon City. The people at the hospital were kind, offering them things. The autopsy wouldn’t be until later in the morning, though the doctor who admitted the body said that it would be cursory. His initial examination suggested that Susan had drowned after being knocked unconscious. Which was why she sank. She’d breathed spasmodically and water filled her lungs. He used to work in Ocean City. He knew about these things.
Spasmodically, Truax thought.
They let them see her. She was on a stainless-steel gurney, a different blanket draped over her thin body. There were runnels. They were dry. Susan didn’t look different yet. Death hadn’t settled on her. Truax had seen so many like this, young faces still astonished to have lost a life that had seconds earlier been as easily held as a can of soda. The doctor assured Irma that they’d do everything they could to make sure she rested with dignity. The Truaxes sat on a bench for a while after that. Dawn broke. Robed sick people began to emerge from rooms around them, some pushing wheeled stands that held bags of liquid. A woman in a white uniform brought coffee that neither of them touched.
“We should go,” Truax said finally.
At home he woke Darryl and told her. She had slept, forgotten, through the night. Irma let him be the one to do it. She took her pills with three glasses of bourbon that might just as well have been tap water, then collapsed on Susan’s bed. Truax could see her stockinged feet as he leaned over Darryl to shake her shoulder. She opened her eyes and stared up at him.
“What is it?”
He told her that Susan was gone, that she’d drowned in the lake. Darryl sat up and gathered a pillow to her stomach.
“So she’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we have to pray.”
Truax looked at his daughter’s coarse features for a moment, then peered across the hall at his wife’s feet. The way her toes filled the ends of her nylons reminded him of the condom he’d seen on Joel Wooten. He stood.
“Dad?”
“You pray,” he said.
He went downstairs, a feeling of unfulfilled duty welling up from deep within him. There was no need to make funeral arrangements. Swope had said at the pier that he would handle all of that. But there were still people to call. Relatives. Friends at Meade.
And then he remembered he had to report in to Swope. He didn’t know what the next move was. How this changed things. He dialed his home number. Sally answered on the second ring.
“John, we’re so sorry.”
He nodded his head, not knowing what to say.
“John?”
“I need to speak with Mr. Swope.”
“He’s in the shower. I’ll have him call you when he gets out.”
“All right.”
He hung up. The phone rang immediately. It was someone from the Cannon County Courier. Truax hung up before the man could finish asking his question. There were two more calls after that. The Sun and the News American. He hung up on them as well, then took the phone off the hook.
He’d call Swope later.
He sat at the kitchen table for a long time. There was a recorded voice on the phone and then some sort of beeper went off. After a while it stopped. He could hear Darryl dressing. She wept and then she sang. When she was done she went into Susan’s room and said some things. Irma didn’t reply. Darryl came down. She stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at Truax. He could hear her labored breath as it whistled through her braces.
“Why is the phone off the hook?”
“Because I don’t want them to call.”
“Your hand smells bad, Daddy. You should change your dressing.”
“Yes. All right.”
She said something about Reverend Abernathy and the Interfaith C
enter. Truax let her go without a word. He went upstairs to check on his wife. She was still on the bed, her eyes closed, her breathing deep and even. Above her, Truax noticed that the glow-in-the-dark stars Susan had stuck to the ceiling had begun to come loose, their triangular edges dangling limply.
He went down to the basement, turning on the bulb above his workbench. His Sears Craftsman tools gleamed in the 80-watt glow. Irma and the girls had given him the complete set for his birthday last year, the idea being that once his hand was better he would start using them. But his hand wasn’t better. It would never be better. The infection was crossing the lifeline. There was no denying it now. He’d peered beneath the dressing back at the hospital. So the tools would remain where they were, arranged on the Peg-Board according to size. Having built nothing. Having fixed nothing.
The key was hidden in a small drawer of twopenny nails. He had to dump them out and rummage before he found it. The cobweb-shrouded lockbox was slotted behind one of the bench’s broad legs. He placed it on the work surface and opened the heavy lid. Oil had leaked into the wrapping. He laid the weapon on the bench, unfolding the cloth gingerly, like Christmas paper you might want to use again. He picked up the .45 with his left hand, feeling its weight. It was strange—he’d never wielded it with his left hand before. It was like nothing he’d ever held.
He put the weapon back on the bench and took the rest of the gear from the lockbox. The extra magazine, the spare rounds, the cleaning oils, the felt ball and brass brush. He laid them all out neatly, then sprang the magazine and thumbed out the rounds. He stacked these into a neat line and began to clean the weapon. He took his time, swabbing out the barrel twice. It was awkward, working with just one good hand.
Wooten had friends in Cannon City. The sheriff and the lawyers and the judges. Fellow thieves. People who couldn’t be trusted. It was why Truax had been needed in the first place. And it was why he was needed now. To make sure that Wooten did not use his power to free his son. There was a law above the law and that was what Truax must now be. To make sure the boy was punished.
Irma began to scream just as he finished cleaning. He reloaded the first magazine and slotted it in, then held the weapon aloft, taking aim at various targets in the basement. The pressure meter on the hot water tank. A pair of goggles dangling from an old pair of skis. A chip on a cinder block. The box of left-handed gloves. He held a steady bead on each target for thirty seconds before squeezing the trigger. Not quite hard enough to fire. Seeking command and control. It was difficult. In the past, he had always used two hands. One on the trigger, the other cupping the magazine.
The New City Page 39
