Grave Error

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Who?”

  “In a minute,” she said, shaking her head. “I have to tell you a story first.”

  I started to say something but Sara cut me off. “Please hear me out,” she said quietly. “It’s important.”

  I said for her to go ahead.

  “Once upon a time, about twenty years ago, a boy and a girl met and fell in love. They were both seventeen. He was handsome, intelligent, witty. The son of a wealthy rancher. She was poor but attractive. He was the quarterback and she was the cheerleader; he was King of the Prom, she was the Queen. A storybook romance.”

  “I guess I missed those stories.”

  Sara ignored me. “This boy and girl went everywhere together—football games, picnics, dances. They created a private world, were convinced they didn’t need anyone else, that no one else was worthy of their passion. They talked late into the night, about God and love and life and death and everything else kids talk about when they first discover the range of their minds. The months went by, blissful months, and then a problem reared its head. The problem was sex. The girl was determined to be a virgin on her wedding day and the boy didn’t want to wait. Does that part sound familiar?”

  I nodded. It was as familiar as a hangnail.

  “They argued it through, debated the point as though it were before the United Nations. Then the boy made a decision. He wanted consummation, as he put it, and if the cheerleader wouldn’t give it to him he would get it somewhere else. So he started seeing another girl. A slut with the kind of figure men draw on rest room walls and other girls try desperately to find in their mirrors but never do. And the slut was more than happy to service our hero, along with a few others.”

  “What’s the point?” I broke in.

  “The point is this. One night the Oxtail police found the slut—her name was Angelina, by the way, Angie Peel—they found her in a car that had crashed into a railroad overpass south of town. She was badly hurt, but she recovered. When she was conscious enough to talk Angie told the police that she and our young lover had been at her house earlier that night, that her father had come home drunk and begun beating her mother, that the boy had tried to stop him and there had been a fight and the boy had hit her father and killed him. She said she and the boy were planning to run away to Mexico when they had the crash. That was the last thing she remembered.”

  “What happened to the King of the Prom?”

  “He died. In the wreck.”

  “Too bad. But what does this have to do with Claire Nelson?”

  “The slut. Angie. The girl in the wreck.”

  “What about her?”

  “She was five months pregnant at the time of the crash. While she was still in the hospital recovering from her injuries she had a baby. Then she gave it up for adoption. The baby was born on July twelfth, nineteen fifty-eight.”

  Neither of us said anything. Images of sordid couplings and drunken violence and broken bodies crept into the room and slithered around on the floor.

  “Have you told Claire?” I asked when the room had cleared.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t told anyone. And I told Donna Rae not to say anything.”

  “Good,” I said. “I guess the dead lover was Claire’s father.”

  “Yes. His name’s on the hospital records.”

  “What happened to Angie?”

  “I don’t know. Neither did Donna Rae.”

  “I’m going to find out,” I said. “What was the dead boy’s name?”

  “Michael. Michael Whitson.”

  “What about Angie’s mother?”

  “She’s still alive as far as I know. She used to live in a little house out by the railroad tracks.”

  “And that leaves the jilted cheerleader.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m looking at her, aren’t I?”

  Sara closed her eyes and her head fell forward. Her arms crossed over her breasts as if she were awaiting someone’s benediction. “I want to joke about it,” she said finally, “to laugh at my silly little love affair that went sour, convince myself that it doesn’t make any difference after all these years. But I can’t. I still have dreams about Michael, day and night. He’s as real to me as this chair. I’ve still got a fantasy world in my head, a world that only Michael and I inhabit. We’re married, we’re successful, we have beautiful children and a beautiful house and a beautiful life. King and Queen of the Prom, twenty years later. I spend a lot of time in that world. I don’t know if I can ever break out of it completely. I don’t even know if I want to.”

  “You were there last night, weren’t you?”

  “No. Yes. Most of the time, I guess. I don’t know.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But not at the end. Not then Marsh. Then I was with you.”

  I spent the next several hours trying to believe her.

  EIGHTEEN

  By eight the next morning I was on my way back to Oxtail. I had convinced Sara to stay behind on the promise that I would call if I came across anything she could help me with. I also convinced her not to tell Claire Nelson anything about Donna Rae’s telephone call and all it seemed to mean until I could find out something more about why anyone would kill Harry Spring to keep him from looking into the murder of a man named Peel two decades ago.

  It was a nice day. Some cottonball clouds had been pinned to the sky and the waves in the Bay tossed the sunlight around like a bunch of kids playing keepaway. But it was hard to relax. Vans and campers buzzed around me like hornets, racing to arrive at the next campground in time to visit the camp store and shower in the concrete rest room and exchange their reserved stall for one closer to the lodge. Roughing it.

  This time I went through San Jose and Morgan Hill, then cut over to the new stretch of 101 to Gilroy. In the distance clusters of white-shirted farm workers dotted the landscape, cultivating artichokes in one field, picking lettuce in another, initiating the miracle that enabled a strawberry picked in Salinas on Wednesday morning to be fondled by a Brooklyn housewife afoot in the A&P on Thursday afternoon. Chavez had brought the farm workers better wages and better housing and better health: the short hoe was illegal and chemical toilets were required and children couldn’t be used in the fields during the school year. But a pieceworker’s life was still more brutal than anything this side of a Kentucky coal mine.

  From Gilroy I cut through the Pacheco Pass and hit Highway 99 at Chowchilla, then turned south. When I got to Oxtail I stopped at a gas station and asked the attendant how to get to the Laurel Motel. He grinned madly and pointed at something behind me. I turned and saw a large motel sign teasing me from behind a scruffy palm. As I drove out of the station the attendant was describing my ignorance to his boss. It didn’t take much to give the folks in Oxtail a chuckle.

  I parked in the motel lot and walked to the office. A family of six was splashing away in a concrete puddle called the Heated Pool. I overheard the husband tell the wife that the water sure felt good. The wife looked as though it would feel even better if a couple of her kids would drown.

  A bell tinkled when I opened the office door. Some metal chairs were scattered around the edges of the tiny room and an ancient Coke machine stood next to a plywood counter that had been varnished the color of a hobo’s teeth. The doorway behind the counter was draped with a faded brown curtain. Beyond the curtain a television patient was asking a television doctor if she would still be able to have children after the operation. The doctor said no. The patient cried. Then a man began talking about lip gloss.

  Someone sniffed and the curtain parted in front of a plump and homely girl of about seventeen. She was wearing the kind of pants that stretch, but hers weren’t stretching far enough. The wad of gum in her mouth snapped like a string of lady-fingers. She asked what I wanted and I said a room. She shoved a registration card at me and I put down a fake name and address and paid the sixteen-buck tab. The girl took a key off a peg numbered ten and started to hand it to me.

&
nbsp; “Say,” I said, “isn’t this the place that guy was staying when he got killed? The guy they found in a ditch somewhere around here?”

  The girl looked down at my money to make sure she was still holding it. “Yeah,” she said. “What about it?”

  “You didn’t give me his room, did you?”

  “Nah. He was in twenty-four.”

  “Good,” I said brightly, then knit my brow to show how hard I was thinking. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind if I did have his room. Be something to tell the boys back at the home office—that I spent the night in a murdered man’s bed.”

  “I can give it to you if you want,” the girl said. “There’s no bloodstains or nothing, though. He was just staying here, he wasn’t shot here.”

  “Anyone else stayed there since the guy got killed?”

  “Nope. Been kind of slow.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you give me twenty-four. Be something different. Course if I can’t get to sleep I’ll have to come down in the middle of the night and get another room.”

  “Be okay with me; I get off at seven.”

  The girl replaced my key with number twenty-four and tossed it to me. She was back behind the curtain before I could turn around.

  The room was on the second level near the back. The double bed was made up and none of Harry’s things were in sight. The air was as fresh as an underground garage.

  I sat in a chair and turned on the lamp. The ceiling sparkled like the sequins on a flapper. A cheap reproduction of a cubist harlequin hung on the wall behind the bed. Someone had become immortal by carving the initials J. L. on the desk.

  I got up and turned on the air conditioner and began opening the drawers in the dresser and then in the desk. They were empty except for some writing paper, a picture postcard of the motel, and a Gideon Bible. I turned the Bible over and ruffled its pages. Nothing fell out. A girl’s name and phone number were written in pencil on the first page. I jotted them down in my notebook under the heading of last resorts.

  I shut the drawers and looked in the closet. Nothing, not even a hanger. In the bathroom the fungus was one up on the disinfectant. There was nothing unusual, not even in the toilet tank.

  From there I went over to the bed and looked in the nightstand. The only thing in it was the Oxtail telephone book. It was about the size of a Superman comic. I pulled it out and leafed through the pages. Toward the end something caught my eye. There was a check mark by the name Whitson, John L. I didn’t think it was a coincidence. Harry Spring had looked up the number of the dead boy’s father, who was also Claire Nelson’s grandfather.

  I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes and let the ribbed chenille massage my spine. Water dripped from a faucet in three-four time. I had spent too much of my life in rooms like this, rooms that pierced the soul with silent screams of loneliness and desire, rooms as warm as a mineshaft and as lovely as a wart. I hoped by the time I got back to it I would be either drunk or exhausted or both. I would have to be if I wanted to get any sleep.

  I rolled over and grabbed the phone and called Sheriff Marks. He told me he would be in his office for another hour. He also told me he didn’t have anything new on Harry’s death and implied that I’d be wasting his time to come by. I didn’t take the hint.

  When I got to the station my friend Harley Cates wasn’t in sight, but his memory lingered. The cigar in his ashtray was the same soggy, slimy pulp he had left behind. I held my breath and went into Sheriff Marks’s domain.

  The sheriff was on the phone but he motioned me to a chair and I sat on it. After a long silence he chuckled briefly, then thanked whomever he was talking to and hung up.

  “That was the Frisco police,” he said to me. “They haven’t found anything helpful in Spring’s files, but they’re still checking.”

  “Good.”

  “Sergeant Fannon said to say hello. He also said I ought to toss you out of town.”

  “Fannon says a lot of things. Most of them are neither true nor advisable.”

  “He doesn’t think you can help clear this up.”

  “He doesn’t think. Period.”

  “I take it you and Sergeant Fannon had a run-in.”

  “You take it correctly. Do they have any other leads?”

  “Nothing worth talking about. They’re getting up a list of the cons in the area that Spring helped send to jail. That sort of thing. I don’t expect them to come up with anything helpful.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think the motive for the Spring killing is right here in Oxtail,” the sheriff said. “He was after something or someone. All we have to do is find out what.”

  I just nodded.

  “How about you?” Marks continued blandly. “You got anything I might find interesting?”

  “Not really. Nothing that has any definite bearing on the murder. When I do I’ll let you know.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. “Fannon told me something else about you, Tanner. He told me you used to be a lawyer, like you said, but that you got in a fight with some judge and got sent up on a contempt charge. That true?”

  “True enough.”

  “I guess my estimate of you will have to go up some then. A man who quits lawyering can’t be all bad. Most of the shysters around here would do anything for a buck and probably have.”

  “I smell a lack of respect for the adversary system of justice, Sheriff.”

  “Nothing wrong with your nose. My respect for the truth keeps getting in the way of my respect for the system.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’d enjoy debating jurisprudential matters with you sometime, Sheriff. But I need some information.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “What can you tell me about the murder of a man named Peel? Happened twenty years ago or so.”

  Marks blinked twice, then fumbled for his pipe and started striking matches. It took him five tries to get it lit. Then his anger seemed to ignite along with the pipe. “I thought you were down here about Harry Spring, Tanner,” he said heavily. “Your old buddy. Now you start asking about the Peel case. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know. I just heard about the Peel thing and thought you could tell me about it.”

  “Crap. I can tell you about it all right. I wasn’t sheriff when it happened, but I’ve reviewed the file a few times. I can tell you exactly what happened. The question is, why should I?”

  “Because I asked.”

  “You’re too glib for your own damn good, you know that? Next time I may let Harley keep coming at you.”

  “I wouldn’t if he means anything to you.”

  “He doesn’t. Neither do you.”

  “What about old man Peel?”

  Marks hesitated. “Just so you know that I know that you think the Peel case is tied in with Spring’s death. Somehow. You don’t fool me with this vague bullshit. I’m going along because you can find out about the Peel killing from anyone in town over the age of forty, and because I think you’re a lot like me. There’s not many things in this world you give a shit for, but when you do come across something you care about you keep after it until you get it. I think you cared about Harry Spring and I think you care about finding his killer.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just because I think you’re a lot like me doesn’t mean I like you much. I don’t like myself much, either.”

  Marks took a few more puffs on his pipe. Somewhere a siren began to cry.

  “That’s a city siren,” he said. “Must be Harley chasing some little girl he caught speeding. Harley’s whole sex life depends on catching little girls speeding.”

  “Good old Harley.”

  “Yeah. The Peel case was a city case. Old man Peel was murdered in town, in a house down past the train depot. A city case all the way. Just between you and me, they screwed it up.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, nothing big and nothing I can prove. It just died awfully fast, for a mu
rder. Harley and a couple of the other cops were real tight with Angie Peel back when they were in high school. The dead man’s daughter. That was before they became cops, of course, but still, I don’t think they pushed the investigation too hard. No one gave much of a damn about old Jed Peel. I think they figured they might get Angie in some trouble if they found the boy, what’s his name, Michael, and he claimed Angie was lying when she said he did it, so they just left well enough alone. Plus, I think they figured if the boy never came back Angie would be fair game again. She was a hot number, the way I hear. Say, that guy you asked me about, Rodman, he was one of the gang that ran around with Harley and Angie Peel and the rest. Quite a crew.”

  “A wrecking crew. But wait a minute, Sheriff. I was told Michael Whitson was dead, died in the wreck.”

  “Oh, he probably is. But they never found a body. Just a bunch of blood and some tracks leading off into a field. City boys figured he wandered off somewhere and died of his injuries, but they should have kept on it till they found a corpse.” Marks chuckled. “Folks used to joke that someone ought to name a variety of grape after young Whitson since his body was probably fertilizing some of the vineyards around there.”

  “So the boy may still be alive?”

  “I suppose. Case’s still open. Officially. Someone might even lock the kid up if he walked into the station and confessed. Might have to hold his hands out just right to take a pair of cuffs, though.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “Left town. They patched her up over at the hospital and then she lit out. Went to LA, I think, somewhere down there. As far as I know she hasn’t been back since.”

  “Is her mother still around?”

  He nodded. “Lives out by the depot. Takes in sewing or some such. Sick a lot, is what I hear.”

  “Does that take care of everyone?”

  “Yep. Except for the boy’s father. John Whitson. He owns the bank and half the county. Never really been the same since that day. Wife died shortly after the accident, and he began to live like a hermit. Course he claims his boy couldn’t have killed anyone, number one, and that he’s still alive, number two. We’ll probably never know whether he’s right or not.”