by George Wier
“She’s not into that scene,” I said. I turned to Julie. “Honey, I’ll leave the keys with you. Why don’t you call and check in on the kids, then you might check in on Ms. Baha and see how she’s doing since our talk last night. After that, you may want to actually look around. You might try shopping.”
“I might duck into an antique store or something,” she said.
“That’s fine.” I kissed her and she headed back towards the hotel.
“Fine wife you got there,” Sheriff Renard said, admiring her as she walked away.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
*****
I followed Sheriff Renard to his cruiser, which was close by.
“If you’ve ever ridden in one of these,” he said, “then you know how cramped they can be, what with all the computer shit.”
“I may have been up front of one of these a time or two,” I responded.
This seemed to mollify him. He unlocked the passenger door and I had to move a shotgun over to be able to fit properly. Yep. Some things never change. The computer itself was a laptop, though a bit oversized for the times. I doubted it could take a bullet and still keep ticking.
The Sheriff loaded his oversized frame behind the wheel and got us in motion. We crossed town and pulled up in front of an unprepossessing funeral home, a blocky maroon brick affair less attuned to the aesthetic needs of the bereaved than to economy of form and finances.
I followed Sheriff Renard to the side entrance. “I’m taking it that you’ve also seen a corpse before.”
“Before, and after,” I said.
He chuckled. “Now that’s funny.”
“Sorry. Don’t mean to be irreverent.”
He grasped the oversized door handle and swung it open and bade me inside.
I detest funeral homes. I also detest hospitals, doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, jails, prisons and generally anything having to do with the housing or warehousing of the stupid, the sick, dying, or already dead. Quite fortunately the Jones & Crum Funeral Home was a dry version of the above. I noted the absence of cloying, overly scented dead flowers in the foyer, subdued religious organ music, and restrained solemnity. We were met, instead, with the reddened face of a young man in dress bluejeans and a clean white shirt.
“Howdy,” he said. “Ya’ll come on in. Here to see the body, Sheriff?”
“That’s right,” Sheriff Renard said. “I brought an expert along with me,” he hooked a thumb my direction.
“Right this way,” he said, and turned down a hallway which led away from the main foyer and the funeral chapel. The young fellow had clean, chiseled lines on his face and he moved like a cat. If I had my guesses, I would say that he was new to the funeral business and was used to working long hours outside with his hands—given his ruddy complexion, he had, at some point, likely been a farmer, a rancher, or possibly a fisherman.
We went through a door with a sign that read: STAFF ONLY, and into a well-lit workshop with a number of strange tools on the walls. I shuddered.
“Business any good?” Sheriff Renard asked.
“Hell no,” the man said, “Business is never good, except when it is, and then it’s great. But in this business that means things aren’t good for somebody, particularly the, uh, client.”
“Ever thought of going back to fishing, Charlie?” Sheriff Renard asked.
Score a point for Bill Travis.
“I think about it every day. But I’m starting to like this whole air conditioning thing.”
“Charlie, air conditioning has been around since the 1930s.”
Charlie nodded and gestured to the box on the worktable.
“Open it up,” Sheriff Renard said.
“Yep.”
Charlie flipped a catch at one end of the plywood box, then two catches along one side, then one at the opposite end. The box opened without a singular creak.
I looked in the box. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“Expert, huh?” Charlie said.
Sheriff Renard frowned, then nodded.
I looked the corpse over. A blue blanket—the kind a person might wrap themselves in while going to sleep on an airplane flight—was tucked under his chin and went all the way down to the ankles. What was showing of the man could have been on loan from a museum along the Nile. That is to say, he was a mummy.
“No clothes, huh?” I asked. “Is this how he was found?”
“Nope,” Sheriff Renard said. “He was in his overalls. Samples were taken from it and sent to the crime lab in Houston. As was some of his, uh, flesh.”
“How do you know for sure this is Lee Purcell?” I asked.
“Purcell Lee,” both Sheriff Renard and Charlie insisted together.
“Sorry. How do you know this is Purcell Lee? I’m sure you can’t tell from his facial features.”
“X-rays of his mouth match his dental records,” Renard said.
“Dental records? From what I heard, he was toothless.”
“Well, his dentures are a match from those Doc Simmons had made for him. I’ve already talked to him about it. He confirms that’s Lee’s mouth.”
“Okay. Are you going to dress him?”
“Uh,” Charlie began. “He’s going for the long sleep just like this. It’s a closed casket ceremony, tomorrow evening.” Charlie glanced quickly at the Sheriff. “Nobody wants to go inside his trailer and get any of his clothes.”
I looked up at the Sheriff uncertainly.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m not going in that trailer of his.”
“Are you afraid of something?” I asked.
“I’m not afraid of anything, Mr. Travis.” Apparently I had hit a nerve. “What I am is both smart and cautious. We don’t know what killed him. Maybe it’s some kind of virus or something. Nobody knows, and I’d rather not find out firsthand.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “That is pretty smart. Okay. Rule out electric shock, therefore rule out lightning. Rule out nanites.”
“What-ites?” Charlie asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “It’s technical. Rule out spontaneous combustion because there was no fire. You know what’s left over after that?”
“What?” Charlie asked.
“Not very damn much.”
“Any bite marks or anything anywhere on him. Uh, top or bottom side?”
“No bite marks,” Charlie said.
“He was a big man, wasn’t he?” I asked.
Sheriff Renard nodded. “He was the biggest man in town.”
“He’s not so big now,” I said.
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
A long silence ensued. I gestured for Charlie to close Purcell Lee up a final time for his upcoming drowse.
“So, whaddya think, Mr. Travis?” Sheriff Renard asked.
“Strange times,” I said, and meant it.
CHAPTER NINE
We were back in Sheriff Renard’s cruiser and headed to the Sheriff’s Office. An uneasy feeling settled into my stomach like an old friend dropping in to sit a spell. Renard was pensive, so I decided to let him percolate. In the meantime, I watched the town roll past with its sparse and sedate traffic, its mom and pop stores that somehow managed to stay open through the years on the threadbare skein of said traffic, and the quiet timelessness of a town that had, somewhere along about 1958, forgotten clocks and calendars. I checked my watch and saw that we were coming up on the noon hour. I wanted to check in with Julie, but decided to wait until I could speak to her without being overheard. I had some thoughts I wanted to run by her. Mostly I wanted her intuition and impressions—not that my own were not of value; sometimes it takes an extra set of eyes to catch the full dimensions of a thing.
We got out into the bright sunshine and I noticed a breeze had come up, marring the stillness of the warm day.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“I thought you’d want to talk to Harley. He was here the night Lee came in here caterwauling abo
ut a screech in the night. Nearly gave Harley a heart attack, and Harley’s young.”
“Yes, I would like to talk to him.”
“All right. He’s pulling the eleven to seven shift today. He’ll cadge a few hours of sleep after that, then be back in the middle of the night. Talk all you want to. I’m going to walk around and talk to some folks a bit.”
“Fine, Sheriff,” I said. “Thank you.”
Sheriff Renard walked off and turned the corner of the building, disappearing from sight. I went inside.
I looked at the door to the Sheriff’s Office and decided it was a good time to make the call.
“Hey, honey,” she answered on the first ring.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m with Cathy Baha.”
“Really. What’s going on?”
“We’re doing a little shopping.” Julie’s switched to muffled voice mode for a moment, and I distinctly heard: “No, the purple one. Yeah.” Then she was back on. “Cathy thinks you’re in some kind of danger.”
“I’m standing in front of the Sheriff’s Office and I’ve been riding around with him. I think I’m pretty safe.”
“Well, I realize that. But Cathy says she gets these tinglings, and she says she always regrets it when she doesn’t act on them. It’s sort of funny, but I was just about to call you.”
“I guess that’s why I called. I’m getting some tinglings of my own. So far, nothing makes any sense. I mean, we come down here to check up on the lady, and it’s a bogus setup from her brother, who has definite issues. I have to admit, when we were coming down here I expected Cathy to be the one with issues, but she’s clearly not. I know you can’t say much out loud at the moment, but what I mean is, different doesn’t mean ‘crazy,’ it just means different. So the whole aura cleansing thing and the tarot thing doesn’t phase me a bit. Just wanted you to know.”
“I know that,” she said.
“Did she say what kind of thing is back of this...tingle of hers?”
“She kept going on about the Nine of Wands. The tarot thing, remember? It was the first thing she said when she opened her front door last night.”
“I remember,” I said.
“She says the wands are real. I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Does she know?”
“I don’t think so, but she seems...scared for you. I’m thinking of taking her home and coming to get you, and heading out of town right now.”
“Where’s Franklin?”
“He’s along with us. No one seems to mind him following us into the stores around here. No one’s said anything about him not being on a leash. And you know Franklin. I swear, if we ever have a break-in at the house, he’s liable to leave with the robbers.”
“Yeah, that’s Franklin,” I said. “Okay, let me talk to one more person here, then I may call you to come get me.”
“Sure.”
“One last thing. There’s something I’m unclear about. Can you ask Cathy whether she initially called her brother about what’s going on in this town?”
“Yeah. Hold on.”
There was a moment of muffled silence. I was almost certain that I was nuzzled against Julie’s chest. Then she was back on. “No. She hasn’t spoken to her brother in months.”
I felt it then. The pit of my stomach did a slow somersault.
“That’s all I needed to know,” I said. “Thanks, babe.”
“Be careful.”
I thought on it. “My radar is up,” I said.
*****
“Bill Travis?” the man behind the counter asked. His nametag read H. Feltheimer. This was unmistakably Harley.
“That’s right,” I said. The fellow was no more than thirty years old. He looked perpetually half asleep and his uniform could have used a warm iron. The dark circles under his eyes had their own circles.
“I’ve been waiting for you. The Sheriff said you wanted to talk to me about Purcell Lee. About how he came in here making a fuss the night before he got himself dead.”
“Uh huh.” I shook hands with the deputy.
Apparently Sheriff Renard had arranged for his deputy to be there to meet with me. This gave me the sense that good Sheriff Renard felt like he needed me. That he was somehow out of his depth and needed an extra set of eyes and ears and the perspective that went along with them. For some reason, he didn’t feel as though he could ask me outright. I’ve known a few lawmen like that. Normally I call their bluff and force them to ask me, but then again I had the feeling that it wouldn’t get anywhere with the current Chambers County administration, he with the old Stetson hat and the size fifty belt.
“What did Lee say?” I asked.
“He yelled about somebody shrieking from the direction of the library. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t get much sense out of him.”
“Did he say he actually saw anything?”
“I asked him that. He said he saw a ghost walking across the grounds under the shade trees.”
“A ghost, huh? How many ghost reports have you had over the last week or so?”
“Three that were credible.” Harley rubbed his eyes. “I mean, besides Purcell Lee. What I mean by that was that those three independently said some of the same things. The Sheriff asked each one of them not to go spreading it around to anybody, and the people in this town listen to Sheriff Renard, that I can tell you. Each of those people are honest. I’ve known them all my life.”
I glanced behind Deputy Feltheimer and toward the jail. I saw another deputy thirty feet away writing something on a clipboard, a number of filing cabinets, a fingerprint roller and a camera tripod setup for photographing inmates. The usual. It was apparent to me that no one was paying us any attention. Also, there was a rattle from the air conditioning system, a white noise that made our conversation semi-private.
“What did they say, Harley, that was essentially the same.”
“One of them used the word ‘apparition’ and I had to go look it up. It basically means ‘ghost.’ This ghost was tall and wide at the shoulders. It sort of glowed, especially when it passed near the street lamp.”
“Glowed, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah. That’s what they said.”
“Where did it glow? All over, or some specific place?”
“I asked one of them that. That was the only one I personally talked to first. The other two talked to Sheriff Renard first, but he asked them to tell me, and then we compared notes on what they said after, to see if they kept to the story. When the ghost turned to walk out of town, one of them said...” Harley’s eyes were getting wide. He was starting to believe, and this took him back to when he was wet behind the ears and listening to stories around the fire during a campout. “He said he glowed along his shoulders when he turned his back. Said he was tall. Ten feet tall.”
“A ten foot tall ghost with glowing shoulders.”
Harley nodded.
“How did he know he was ten feet tall?” I asked.
“Because, he passed just this side of the lamp post, and his head covered the light for a second. And those post lights are ten feet off the ground.”
I nodded. “Hmph. If he was a ghost, I wonder why the light didn’t go right through his head.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Deputy Feltheimer said.
“Maybe it’s something to think about. Where did you first hear the term ‘ghost killer’?”
“My wife said it to me. I asked her what she was talking about, and she said it was going around town. I think everybody here knows about it. It has already spread like one of those Congo River diseases they have in South America.”
I chuckled. “No doubt. No doubt. Okay, Harley, is that about it?”
“I suppose so. Did you want to ask me anything?”
I thought on it, then instantly decided. “Just one thing, but if I ask you—and it’s a simple yes or not answer—I wouldn’t want you telling anyone I asked it. Not even the Sheriff. Al
l right?”
“I can’t lie to the Sheriff, Mr. Travis.”
“Okay then, I’ve got an idea. Say I ask you, then you only tell the Sheriff if he asks you about it directly. I mean, if he does, you’d have to be honest, right?”
Harley shook his head vigorously. “Oh yes! Yes indeed. I’d have to be forthright on it. I’d have to clear the air about it.”
“But only if he asks you, okay?”
Harley looked off into space for a moment, considering. I counted the seconds. He turned his eyes back to me and nodded. “Uh, yep. That’s agreeable.”
“Good. Okay. Have you ever heard the name Evanston Cooper?”
Harley nodded. “Yep. I have heard that name.”
“Can we do another yes or no question? Same rules?”
“Sure,” Harley agreed, and smiled. He was clearly relieved. Apparently the subject matter wasn’t some kind of state secret.
“Do you know him if you see him?”
“Oh, ayep! I do know him when I see him. That would be an affirmative, Mr. Travis.”
“Okay. One more question. Same rules.”
Harley shook his head. He was in the safety zone. I wasn’t sure what I was going to ask, but then it came to me like a lightning bolt from the blue.
“Harley, do you think Evanston Cooper is in Anahuac right now?” I asked.
“Oh. I know he is. I saw him this morning when I was coming off of work.”
I suppose I found myself grinding my teeth.
“Thank you Deputy Feltheimer. I do appreciate it.”
“Any time, Mr. Travis. Okay, I’m gonna call the Sheriff and ask him if I can go home and get some sleep.”
“You do that,” I said. “Tell him I said you earned it.”
CHAPTER TEN
There was one place in Anahuac I haven’t been that I wanted to see. That was the Chambers County Library. I waited in Sheriff Renard’s office until he came in.
“Was Deputy Feltheimer helpful?” he asked.
“Sure. Although he didn’t know much. It’s still all a big mystery. That’s one thing I can’t abide, Sheriff. A damned mystery.”
