Nail's Crossing

by Kris Lackey

  “You know, Bill, you’ve blown our annual towing budget from the nation.” Fox punched him on the shoulder. “Ada News, AP, and the Oklahoman all left messages. On your desk.”

  Maytubby walked down a dim corridor and turned into his office. He switched on the fluorescent overhead, casting its anemic blue light on the photo of the nation’s governor, who stared back at him with amiable indifference. The little room was stuffy and smelled faintly of mold. Condensation pipes leaked from the ceiling into the walls. He stood in a dank, chilly hole less than three feet from a dazzling inferno he couldn’t even see. Every office was more or less the same to him: insufferable.

  He leaned on the desk and peeled off sticky notes with reporters’ phone numbers. The cross-county pursuit and Love’s takedown would make a fetching teaser on the home page, sell some ads for popcorn chicken.

  The evidence against Love was strong—so strong that the forensics seemed to Maytubby necessary only because there was no eyewitness. The scientific details would bore a jury already convinced of Love’s guilt. But Maytubby didn’t feel convinced. He was not altogether sure why. Was Austin Love capable of homicide? Though he certainly didn’t mind knocking women around, he didn’t seem like a sadist. And he had never stayed with anyone long enough to nurture a dangerous grudge.

  The knife bothered him. It would bother him even if the FBI matched the prints. Right by the road, three hundred yards from the crime scene. Love could have tossed it in the Blue—or Lake Texoma, for that matter. There were no knife or gun charges on his sheet. Why would he replace an expensive artisanal knife with a factory version? Quicker way to get a reasonable replica? The mail order would have taken at least a week. But he might have bought it anywhere. It may never even have left its scabbard.

  Google yielded websites for thirteen bladesmiths in the region. Maytubby looked at the intent faces of the men at their forges and benches as they crafted their Persian hunters, cowboy fighters, and heart-seekers. Thomas Jefferson had admired those faces—self-reliant, undistorted by the merchant’s eagerness to please. Maytubby copied the URLs, made a contacts list called “LoveBowie,” and distributed the photo of Love’s knife that Hannah had e-mailed him before she returned to the Blue with the sheriff to do her discharged-firearm report. He asked the knife makers if they had recently sold such a knife and, if so, to whom. Had they been asked to copy another knife? If he had to guess, he would say that bladesmiths didn’t check their e-mail several times a day, and that a good many knife makers resented having to deal with computers at all. Looking at their spacious work sheds and big windows opening to woods and sky, he felt a little pang of false nostalgia.

  To the Associated Press, the beat reporter at the Ada News, and the state reporter at the Oklahoman, Maytubby related the same story of Love’s capture, as sparely as possible. The Johnston County sheriff might contribute more exciting facts. Hannah did not speak to reporters. After her sister was murdered, newspapers had printed her foster father’s lies. Maytubby wished the arrest had been routine.

  He was not fifteen minutes into the arrest report when his cell phone squawked. “Jake Renaldo” appeared on the screen.

  “Hey, Jake.”

  “Bill. ‘Fooz …’—how’d you say that?”

  “Bubba.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Fusilier. You get the guy driving the Cobalt?”

  “No. It was ditched off Hooey Road last night. Tag removed. Tried to torch it but just burned part of a seat. You captured Love, probably scared him.”

  “Name’s Woodley. I think. Anybody see the ditchers?”

  “From a long ways away, in the moonlight. Dogs woke the folks up. Dogs got all up on the getaway vehicle. Might be some scratches. One of the dogs got run over and killed. Ditchers left when the car was still burning. Bastards swept off their shoeprints with limbs. No make or model on the vehicle. It drove away lights out. Coal wants to know if LHP wants the Cobalt.”

  “Yes.”

  “Pretty soon that gang’s gonna run out of vehicles, don’tcha think?”

  “Fox says the nation’s going to have to sell more letter carts and Bedré truffles to pay our wrecker tab.”

  “Found some interesting literature in the Cobalt.”

  “Satan still waitin’?”

  “Damn, you’re good.”

  “Hannah stopped this guy Woodley for speeding. Claimed to be a preacher, gave her one of those doomsday leaflets. House on his license in Tushka’s been vacant for years. Same flyers blew out of a small light-colored car I was pursuing east of Antlers. Probably him. Found a place down there I think he and maybe Love and others were living. Nobody home. Probably won’t be anymore.”

  “You’re taking the Cobalt so you can get the preacher for accessory after?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Early in the evening, Maytubby finished his arrest report. He checked his e-mail. Not a single knife maker had responded.

  Chapter 15

  Maytubby banged and tugged on the double-hung windows in his old house to get them open. He would switch on the three window units next, but right now he had to get some fresh air inside. When the indoor temperature broke ninety-five, he finally went for it: refrigerated air. This evening, it was 105. All his AC units had to be tiny because the wiring had been added to the house the same year as the bathroom—1932—and had never been updated. He hoarded fuses.

  The territorial gable-and-wing perched on the bank of an old Katy railroad cut—now a bike path that ran very near Jill Milton’s neighborhood. The rent was cheap, the climate uncontrollable. Most days, wind whistled through fissures and holes. In the dead of winter, with every sash nestled in its frame, his panel curtains danced as if on a spring breeze. Naked light bulbs hung on long, twisted wires from the high ceilings. The water that issued from squeaky taps into the chipped enamel basins was often rusty.

  Still, the house was clean and spare and sunny. It had spiritual room, and its heat and cold and drafts, Maytubby believed, raised his threshold of discomfort. Jill Milton was happy with her threshold of discomfort. She also preferred her shower to a claw-foot tub and a plastic beer mug.

  He switched on a box fan and pulled down the long chrome handle of his 1950s Frigidaire. On the door, Jill had penciled four boxes with a cherry in each, above the word jackpot. He took out a red metal pitcher of water, a honeydew melon, an avocado, and a lime and set them all on the counter. He poured a glass of water. Then he sliced the melon and the avocado, halved the lime, and squeezed it over them. Under his arm, he tucked the Modern Library Classics edition of Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by the poet Billy Collins. Under the canopy of a mature pecan tree, Maytubby laid out his “tea,” as Jill called his early last meal of the day, on an old school desk. He slid into the seat and opened the book at random, excited. She could do Twilight Zone better than Rod Serling. Give you gooseflesh.

  His white-over-bronze 1965 Ford pickup, recently tuned up and outfitted with new tires, sat under the pecan, covered with tree litter. No joggers or cyclists came along the path. The air was still, not a bird singing. Sugar ants matted the plate he had laid on the dead grass. His vegetable garden had been broiled to a crisp, all but the okra. Its thick stalks were still a vibrant green and putting on fruit above Maytubby’s reach. Like the medieval Egyptians, he chopped it up, rolled it in meal, and fried it.

  Maytubby went back to the Frigidaire four times for cold water. At dusk, he called Jill Milton. “Earl Scruggs,” she said.

  “You know how you can tell one banjo tune from another?”

  “They have different names. That’s old.”

  “I just heard it this week on Rodeo Opry.”

  “On the radio in the turnip truck?”

  “Yep. Same station that plays Stephen Foster songs.”

  “Watch it, buster.”

  “I’m reading an uprig
ht Yankee, Emily Dickinson, while you’re wallowing in Confederate nostalgia.”

  “I doubt your rebel ancestors marched against the Union Indians to Bach’s Invention Eight.”

  “The medium is the message, Miss Milton.”

  “On the other hand, lots of Emily Dickinson poems could be sung to ‘Oh! Susanna.’”

  “And to the theme of Gilligan’s Island. That proves nothing.” Maytubby fanned himself with the classifieds section of the Ada News.

  “You want me to be the good cop at your interrogation tomorrow?”

  “You’re not a cop.”

  “I could put on a uniform and bring him candy bars and tell you to lay off it.”

  “I want to be the good cop.”

  “So who’s going to be the bad cop?”

  “I’m working on it, but you do have to be a real cop to be a bad cop.”

  “Naomi Colbert doing PD for Love?”

  “She is.”

  “The nation will elect her to the supreme court someday.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Will Love talk at all?”

  “Silence is all we dread.”

  “You bringing him to Pontotoc early?”

  “Yep. Where are you?”

  “The city. Grant summit at the capitol.”

  “Plant a flag for me.”

  Chapter 16

  Naomi Colbert held a Ticonderoga pencil eraser-down on the interrogation table. She spread her other hand over a canary legal pad. A slight overbite made her appear to be smiling, but she was not. Maytubby had given her all the information he had on the case. Austin Love sat on her left at the square table. He wore orange prison scrubs, and he stank. Probably jonesing. He ignored the Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of him and stared at the wall.

  Maytubby came into the room with three bananas. “Mr. Love knows the rules, Ms. Colbert?”

  “He does.”

  Maytubby said, “Mr. Love, the same day that Majesty Tate was stabbed and killed, four witnesses saw you together at the Lazy K in Sulphur. They said you and she hugged and kissed. Several people in Bromide saw your truck coming and going on the road leading to Majesty Tate’s rented house for a couple of days before the murder and on the day of the murder. The FBI and the LHP have matched the tire prints in her yard to the tires on your pickup. In the bar ditch on that road, I found a bloody stag-handled Bowie resembling the knife you always carried in a leg scabbard. You siphoned gas from your uncle’s truck the night of the murder. And you fled from officers of three law enforcement agencies. These are all facts. Do you want to dispute them?”

  Love stared at the wall over Maytubby’s right shoulder.

  “Did you stab Majesty Tate?”

  He didn’t take his eyes from the wall. “No.”

  “Did you have a sexual relationship with her?”

  Love’s eyes shifted slightly, and his face loosened. He was thinking this over.

  “You don’t have to answer,” Colbert reminded him.

  “Yeah,” Love said, staring at the wall. Colbert frowned and wrote something on her pad.

  “Did you ever hit her?”

  Colbert repeated her caution to Love. He said nothing.

  “On the evening of the murder, when did you leave Tate’s house?”

  Silence.

  “Did she say that she was afraid of anyone?”

  Nothing.

  “When did you learn that Tate had been murdered?”

  Somewhere in the building, a cell clanged shut.

  “If you didn’t kill Tate, why did you run?”

  Love was still as a tiki.

  “Did the knife found near Bromide after Tate’s murder belong to you?”

  “No.”

  “Dave Woodley try to win you to Jesus?”

  Love’s eyes widened a wee bit, and the edges of his lips moved. Maytubby had scored a palpable hit.

  “Does Woodley talk funny? Does he say ‘wahn’ instead of ‘wine’?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Love growled.

  “He picked you up after you abandoned your truck at Kullihoma.”

  Back to the stony gaze.

  “The Cobalt was ditched yesterday. They—Woodley and friends, I’m guessing—tried to burn it. Any idea what that was about?”

  Maytubby thought he saw Love’s embouchure contract toward “no,” but he said nothing, possibly recalling that silence and denial were not the same.

  “Wiley Bates riding with your outfit again?”

  A toilet flushed somewhere in the jail. The supply pipe rattled loudly.

  “He just moved out of his place in Coalgate and took that fancy new bass boat with him.” Maytubby watched the muscles around the fixed eyes. Some evanescent motion, but not a palpable hit.

  “I bet the Antlers Hilton was quiet last night.” Maytubby peeled and ate half a banana. He could be quiet, too. And was, for a space of ten minutes. Naomi Colbert tapped her pencil eraser quietly on her legal pad. “I think all your coyotes’ve left you with your leg in the trap.”

  Love sat motionless.

  Maytubby wondered whether Colbert had told her client she had a court date in thirty minutes. Soon find out. He ate the second and third bananas and threw the peels in the trash. “One of your coyotes killed Majesty Tate and you don’t help us, you’re going to be a seventy-year-old prison rodeo clown.”

  Twenty-five minutes passed in silence. Love never looked at Colbert’s watch. She hadn’t told him. Maytubby and Colbert rose at the same time, and a Pontotoc deputy took Love back to his cell.

  When Maytubby returned to headquarters, a tow truck was depositing the Cobalt next to Love’s monster truck. He looked at the Bubba Fusilier dealer sticker. The VIN numbers were intact, but Woodley had taken the tag. Maybe he thought nobody was paying him any attention, that the Coal sheriff would dump it on the auction lot and forget about it.

  There was one new post in his Chickasaw.net e-mail. It was from Grover Jessup, “the Knife Wizard.” The subject line read, “Knife.” The message read, “I will talk to you about the knife. No e-mails. Park behind my workshop.” A Google map for the site included a sharp aerial photograph of Jessup’s workshop, which was near Byrds Prairie Cemetery, south of Tupelo. Maytubby was there in twenty-five minutes.

  Jessup switched off his bellows and pulled his sweat-stained leather apron over his head. “I been goin’ after it hammer and tongs,” he said with a little grin.

  Maytubby laughed, knowing that old Grover had to make the same crack to every stranger.

  “Have a seat.”

  Jessup moved a pedestal fan closer to the chairs. In a small, brightly lit display case, a dozen knives glittered. Their handles were inlaid with turquoise, mother-of-pearl, and copper.

  “This is about that girl over in Bromide, isn’t it?” Jessup said.

  “Yes, it is. We have reason to suspect that knife may have been the murder weapon.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Because you made it?”

  “Yessir,” Jessup said, pulling a copy of the photo from his shirt pocket. He opened it and pointed to a little dot on the hilt. “I’m going to get another Bowie from the case.” Holding the knife out handle-first, Jessup tapped his finger on a tiny “J” stamped on the hilt.

  Maytubby nodded. “Did you make the knife in the picture for someone recently?”

  “Yes and no. Fella from around Krebs brought in a chunk of antler from a buck he shot last fall. That was about a month ago. Paid me half to make the knife, then called back two weeks ago to say he had to make child support and wouldn’t finish paying for it. I laid it on the counter by the case, was going to polish it up for display. Wasn’t too long after that a fella drove up in some little old green Toyota, from the nineties maybe. Come in, in a big hur
ry, didn’t say ‘boo.’ Had on a baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses. He went to the display, looked at my stock for all of three seconds, then half turned around. The Bowie on the counter caught his eye. He unsheathed it, put his elbow on the counter, and the butt of the knife next to it. Seemed to be measuring. Sheathed the knife and nodded at me. I said three-fifty, and he said three, like a question. I nodded back and he gave me six fifties. He left in a big hurry.”

  “You see his hair color?”

  “It wasn’t dark. Hair on his arm was pale.”

  Maytubby established that the buyer was white, of medium build and height. He wore jeans, brown chukkas, light-blue T-shirt, and a black baseball cap. When Maytubby asked if the cap had printing on it, Jessup wrinkled his nose and pointed his finger at him. “Something funny. Toad suck.”

  “State park in Arkansas. You see the tag on his car?” Maytubby showed Jessup photos of Tercels.

  “No, I didn’t. It’s that one,” he pointed to a 1995 coupe.

  Maytubby handed Jessup a card. “You make beautiful knives with your hammer and tongs, sir. Give me a call if you think of any detail that comes to mind.”

  Preliminary reports from both the medical examiner and FBI forensics were in his e-mail when he returned to headquarters. Majesty Tate’s death had been ruled a homicide. She had been killed by multiple stab wounds to the heart and neck. Her blood was on the knife Maytubby found, but the killer had worn latex gloves. Tate had had sexual intercourse during the twenty-four hours before her murder, and DNA taken from residual semen was a close match to Austin Love’s profile in the offender DNA database. DNA taken from skin and body hair under Tate’s fingernails did not match Love’s, but it did match one other sample in the CODIS national database, from an unsolved Arkansas murder.

  Maytubby called Naomi Colbert, related the exculpatory evidence, and forwarded the report. He also called the Chickasaw National District Court. Love had been smart not to lie about having sex with Tate. He still might be a material witness, and he had some serious parole issues. Not going anywhere tonight. Maytubby knew that he knew a lot. And also that he didn’t know everything, or he wouldn’t be in Pontotoc.