The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Then he kicked the boy once, firmly, sharply, in the upper arm.

  “Fucker,” he’d said, almost under his breath, not because he resented the boy, not because the boy might have been responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, not because he disagreed with the boy’s political sympathies, his loyalty to the communists, his allegiance to things that Gaines did not comprehend, but because he’d been in the way of the bullet when Gaines had pulled the trigger.

  That was all he could find to hate. That the boy had been in the way.

  Gaines had stood there for a moment more and then walked away, his poncho pulled tightly around him, and with the rain battering ceaselessly on his helmet, he’d eaten his breakfast out of a green Mermite tin

  He’d looked out in the fog, the moist, unbreathable fog that hung over the land and through which the vagaries of the landscape took on an awful and terrifying prospect. The fog itself did not move; it was the shapes within it.

  Later, when the fog cleared, the boy had gone.

  That strange sense of distortion, a sense of mystery, of profound disorientation, now assaulted Gaines once more.

  In closing his eyes, in trying to remember Nancy Denton’s face from only a handful of hours before, he could not. He saw only the dead teenager with depthless eyes and the fog that came to retrieve him.

  9

  Gaines made his way back over to see Powell. Powell was not there, though he would be back before too long. Gaines just stood in the corridor and waited. After remembering Linda Newman, Charles “Too High” Binney, the VC teenager with the hole in his face, his thoughts had been quiet. He remembered a neatly stenciled legend on the side of a Jeep: Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. Why he remembered such a thing, he did not know. He smiled. He closed his eyes, and then he took a deep breath. Sometimes—even now, and for no reason—he experienced the bitter taste of salt tabs. Like sweat, like tears. No, like nothing else.

  Sometimes he felt as if he’d spent his life missing the punch line, catching the last part of things, laughing not because he understood, but because everyone else was. Get up to speed, he kept thinking to himself. Get with it—another admonition.

  He had never been one of the chosen few. A different world awaited the beautiful.

  Sometimes resentment bled from every pore like a dark sweat. Resentment of himself, his dead father, his sick mother, of the people he had known and lost, of Linda and the child. He had believed in her—in them. He had found her, somehow. As if the clumsy poetry of his words had given her hope, hope that he—a spent and broken man, by all accounts—had yet somehow secured a path through the tortuous rapids and shallows of the human heart, that he had navigated a way, that he knew some means of escape, that alongside him, she would never experience the lovesick travails that appeared to befall all people. He had believed her his true north. But life happened. Life got in the way. The minuses added up, and no matter how many minuses were added, it never became a plus. Now he looked at the world as if everything before him was a little more than he could absorb, a fraction more than he could understand. And he resented it. Such an emotion infected all he touched, a virus of shadows, and some other sour-tasting bitterness. This is not the life I envisioned or wanted . . . This is not my life, but someone else’s. There has been a grave mistake. Who do I speak to about this? No one, the world replied. You make your bed, my friend, and you lie in it.

  “John?”

  Gaines looked up. How long had he been standing there?

  Powell smiled. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” Gaines replied. “I came back for the autopsy results.”

  They stood in silence for some time. The girl was laid out before them, her chest and stomach now stitched more neatly, her skin and hair washed, her hands enclosed in plastic bags, as were her feet. To preserve any detritus or blood beneath the nails, Powell had said. Unlikely, and even if there is, well, the possibility of matching it to anything is unlikely to impossible. But we do what we can.

  It was the snake that held Gaines’s attention.

  The remnants of the small basket had been washed clean of blood and mud, the snake—now clearly identifiable as a garter—there on the table beside it. It held its own tail in its mouth. Unraveled, the snake could not have been more than a foot long, but here it was in a circle, its tail in its mouth as if ready to swallow itself.

  Gaines had heard of this. Ouroboros. A symbol of the unity of all things, the cyclic nature of birth and death, of something constantly re-creating itself, of something existing with such force it cannot be extinguished.

  “I have no idea,” Powell said. “I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know what it was intended to signify. This is all lost on me.”

  “Was it strangulation, as you thought?” Gaines had asked him.

  “Yes,” Powell said. “The muscular damage around her throat and the fracture of the hyoid bone—”

  “Hyoid bone,” Gaines echoed. He was elsewhere. He was still thinking of Ouroboros, the snake that devours its own tail and disappears.

  “The damage to her throat and clavicle was preserved, almost as if this happened a week ago. Truth is, had she not been buried in mud, well, she would be nothing but a skeleton now.”

  Gaines closed his eyes. He tried his best not to picture it. What she must have gone through. Perhaps the only saving grace was that she had not been raped or sexually abused. He’d seen rape victims before, girls as young as ten or twelve assaulted by the VC as revenge for Army of the Republic of Vietnam collaboration. That faraway stare, the light in the eyes extinguished, the physical inertia, the apathy. The platoons left them behind. What could they do? The field hospitals couldn’t take them, and there was no way the US military could provide a transportation service to the few religious missions and outposts that were scattered back behind the rear lines. This was war. This was collateral damage.

  Where do I begin? This was the question in Gaines’s mind. He did not voice it.

  “Do you know anything of the story?” Gaines asked.

  Powell shook his head. “I was transferred here just a couple of years before you. However, I did speak to Jim Hughes, and he told me that it was never reported as a murder. The girl just disappeared. That was it. People figured her for a runaway. Don Bicklow, your predecessor, was sheriff back then, or so Hughes tells me, and his deputy was a guy called George Austin. Both of them are dead now, so whatever they found out has probably gone with them.”

  Gaines listened to the words, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was trying to find some context within which to place his thoughts.

  Whytesburg had seen three murders in Gaines’s four and a half years. Two had been domestics: discovered love affairs, one a cheating husband, the second a cheating wife. Leonore Franks had put a kitchen knife through her husband’s chest in November of 1970. She had caught him fucking a girl called Deidra Collins, a short-order cook from Picayune. Tommy Franks was a big man, but Leonore was bigger. She waited until he was sleeping, and then she brought that blade down into his heart with all the force she could muster. Powell told Gaines that Franks wouldn’t have had time to even open his eyes. It seemed no great loss to Gaines. Franks had always seemed to be too much of everything that was worthless. Infidelity was not the only way he proved himself an asshole. The man had been as crude and brash as a circus poster.

  Second case was March of 1971, a man called Cyrus Capaldi, all of five foot four. He was a barber, one with a better view of himself than was warranted. He talked ceaselessly, opinions worth little more than a cent or a nickel. He wore a perpetually furtive expression, as if his purpose were to relay some sordid sexual escapade, such escapade punishable by law in thirty-nine of fifty states. Hey, Capaldi, Gaines wanted to say. Why don’t you shut the hell up? But he didn’t. Figured the barber would do as he was asked, but would cut the back of Gaines’s hair all ragged and ornery just to get a small revenge. Anyway, Capaldi discovered his wife was screwing an
itinerant carpenter called Hank Graysmith. Graysmith was not his real name, but was the name he chose to use for work and other various extracurricular activities. Cyrus poisoned his wife, Bernice, with a combination of sleeping tablets and fungicide. The fungicide had been purchased from the hardware store to treat a mysterious mold that showed around the corner posts of the veranda. Evidently, Cyrus considered that his wife was now a mold, for he used the preparation to rid himself of her once and for all. According to Cyrus, this was not the first time she had gone out on him.

  In both of these cases, there had been no investigation. Leonore Franks had sat in her house, her hands covered in blood, until Sheriff Don Bicklow had shown up to arrest her. Cyrus Capaldi had called the sheriff himself, simply said, It’s over, Don. I done killed Bernice. She’s sat here at the kitchen table with her head slumped down, and there’s a white foam coming from her nose. Better come and get the both of us. Both Cyrus Capaldi and Leonore Franks were doing life, Cyrus up at Parchman Farm, Leonore at the women’s facility at Tupelo.

  The third murder had been a real murder. A dismembered body in a machine at the Whytesburg Laundromat. June of 1973, two days after Gaines’s thirty-third birthday, just four months before Bicklow gave himself a coronary seizure doing precisely what Tommy Franks should not have been.

  There was a head, two arms, two legs, but the torso was gone. The arms and legs had been severed at the elbows and knees respectively, and thus there were five parts, each carefully wrapped in a heavy-duty polyethylene. It wasn’t long before an ID was made. The victim was one Bradley Gardner, a salesman, a purveyor of sometime-necessaries, fripperies, extravagances, and wares. He was of the view that anything could be sold. Everything had a tradable value. It was simply a matter of clientele and confidence. Haircutting devices, ever-sharp razor blades, unbreakable coffee cups, socks guaranteed to last as long as your feet. Seemed to Gaines that such people as Bradley Gardner had only two functions in this world: getting drunk and sleeping it off. He was a petty criminal—nothing more, nothing less—but it seemed he had ideas above his station. Later, it transpired, Bradley Gardner was more than capable of blackmail.

  Searching the burned wreckage of his trailer home, parked there on the outskirts of Whytesburg, Bicklow and Gaines had discovered the remnants of photographs. The star of these photographs, discernible only by those who might have known him, was William Hammond, the son of a wealthy local sawmill owner. Bicklow visited the elder Hammond, they shared words, the discovered photograph remnants were produced, and though Bicklow knew he would never tie the death of Bradley Gardner to the Hammond family, he nevertheless wanted them to know that he knew. Whatever the younger Hammond might have been doing in those pictures would remain unknown, but Hammond the elder was smart enough to realize that staying in Whytesburg would only exacerbate Bicklow’s desire to see justice arrive in some fashion. By the end of August 1973, the Hammonds were gone—lock, stock, and barrel. Bicklow didn’t ask after them, and Hammond didn’t send flowers to Bicklow’s funeral two months later. Whether money exchanged hands in that June meeting at the Hammond place—the kind of money that put Don Bicklow’s mistress in a neat little apartment in Lyman—Gaines would never know, and he had long since reconciled himself to letting it lie. Gaines knew that if you asked questions that folks didn’t want to be asked, you more than likely got answers you didn’t want to hear. No need to sully Bicklow’s reputation now that the man was dead. The heart attack, in flagrante delicious, seemed punishment enough.

  So John Gaines, as a soldier, had seen more than enough death for any lifetime. As a police officer, he had seen all too little to be on firm ground with the Nancy Denton case. People would look to him—for order, for answers, for investigation, for results. This was local. There would be no external assistance. No one outside of Whytesburg would be interested in a twenty-year-old murder. The resources he possessed were the resources he could use. Richard Hagen, his deputy, and two other uniforms—Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton, twenty-six and twenty-four respectively. It would be the four of them, and they would have to deal with every aspect of it.

  It was this simple truth that John Gaines confronted as he considered the injuries that had been inflicted upon the person of Nancy Denton. What would the law say about this? That someone did murder the person of Nancy Grace Denton against the peace and dignity of the state of Mississippi. What about the peace and dignity of a teenage girl? Where did that get lost in the law books?

  “John?”

  Gaines looked up at Powell as he drew the white sheet back over the girl.

  “Any more questions?”

  “You know who did this thing, Victor?” Gaines asked.

  “No, John, I don’t,” Powell replied.

  “Then I have no more questions.”

  10

  It was seven o’clock. Gaines drove home to see his mother, to make a sandwich, to take a moment’s respite from the insanity of the day.

  When he arrived, he found his neighbor’s daughter, Caroline, bringing soup to the downstairs back bedroom where Gaines’s mother now spent her days.

  “I’ll take it,” Gaines said. “You go on home.”

  “Thanks, John,” Caroline said. “I got a date tonight. Jimmy’s coming in half an hour or so. We’re going to the movie theater in Bay St. Louis.”

  “What you gonna see?”

  “Well, I wanna see The Sugarland Express, but Jimmy wants to see some macho thing with Clint Eastwood, Thunder and Lightning or something—”

  Gaines smiled. “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get your own way,” Gaines said. “Anyway, you should’ve called me,” Gaines said. “I’d have come down sooner.”

  “Picture doesn’t start till eight thirty. It’s fine, John.”

  “How’s she been today?”

  “Asking after you, you know? Usual stuff.”

  “Crazy talk?”

  “No more than yesterday. She’s on about Nixon again, how he’s the devil, an’ all that other stuff she was sayin’ a while back.”

  Gaines nodded. His mother had it in for the president. Sure he was a liar, sure he was as crooked as a country river, but Alice Gaines seemed to believe there was a special hot place in hell being saved for Tricky Dicky.

  Ever since the Watergate break-in, she’d been rambling about him. Two years now. Nixon was still in the White House, and Alice Gaines was still dying of cancer. Maybe she was hanging on just to see for herself that he got his ass kicked good.

  Gaines wished Caroline a good night out, told her to make sure Jimmy didn’t drink before he drove her home, that if he did drink, she was to call Gaines and he would go fetch them both.

  “He won’t drink,” Caroline said.

  “But if he does—”

  “If he does, I’ll call you.” Caroline Rousseau smiled one more time, and then she left the house.

  Gaines stood there for a moment, the tray in his hand, the soup getting cold, and he wondered what kind of world this was.

  He took the soup through to his mother.

  “John,” she said, and she smiled. She looked well. There was some color in her cheeks. She had on The Bob Newhart Show, told Gaines to turn it down some.

  Gaines set the tray on the dresser, rearranged the pillows behind his mother’s head so she could sit and eat more comfortably, and then he put the tray in front of her. He sat on the edge of the bed. He watched her eat, as he did most evenings. This was her routine. Spend most of the day with Caroline, evening meal with her son, her waking hours filled with The Young and the Restless, Columbo, and Barnaby Jones. After her evening meal, Gaines would give her a sleeping tablet, and—aside from sometimes waking at three or four for help with the bathroom—she would be gone until he came in with her breakfast at six thirty. She was fifty-nine, looked seventy, but her mind—when she was lucid, when the morphine wasn’t assaulting her reality with hallucinations—was as
sharp and facile as it had ever been. She had been dying for six years, would go on dying for another six or ten or twelve, it seemed. She refused all treatment but the painkillers, said that things were the way they were and that was that. Bob Thurston said that she should have died within two or three years, five at most, but something kept her going.

  “I think she wants to see you married,” he told Gaines on one occasion. “Maybe she wants to see if you can muster up the energy to get her some grandkids.”

  “Not the marrying kind.”

  “Never done it, have you?”

  “Nope.”

  “So how do you know it won’t suit you?”

  Gaines had shrugged. “I know me, and I would be a nightmare to live with. Besides, I have Ma—”

  “Well, if my theory is right, once you got yourself hitched, she wouldn’t hang around much longer.”

  “Well, Bob, you stick to your theories, and I’ll stick to mine.”

  Thurston hadn’t mentioned it again, but Caroline was in his ear on a routine basis about finding someone as well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it was the very least of his concerns.

  “They’re gonna get him, you know?” Alice said.

  Gaines snapped to. “Get who, Ma?”

  “Tricky Dicky.”

  “Why? What’s he done now?”

  “Same things he’s always been doin’. You know. ’Cept that now they’re making him hand over the tape recordings he made. The Supreme Court, that is. House Judiciary Committee will impeach the son of a bitch—”

  “Ma—”

  “Don’t be so naive, John. He’s a liar through and through. Everyone’s all up in arms saying he’s a good man, that he brought the war to an end, but the war isn’t at an end, is it, John? There’s still American soldiers out there, plenty of them, and plenty of them are going to die yet.”