by R.J. Ellory
Gaines did not shake the man’s hand.
Wade paid the absence of courtesy no mind. “So,” he said, “how do we do this?”
Gaines smiled awkwardly, more disbelief than dismay. “Seriously, you are here to pay Webster’s bail?”
“Sure I am,” Wade said, and there—in his tone—were the last vestiges of New Orleans. This man was as Louisianan as Gaines, but he had lost the greater part of his accent somewhere along the road.
“You are what to him? His friend? His counselor?”
“I am just a businessman, Sheriff Gaines. I have a number of small businesses here and there, but I am also a good citizen, a hard worker, and I like to think of myself as somewhat of a philanthropist. Seems to me that when a man has some good fortune in his life, he carries a responsibility to share that fortune with those less fortunate.”
“And Webster is one of these less fortunates?”
“Michael Webster is a war veteran, as I believe you are, Sheriff. He seems to have been given a raw deal, wouldn’t you say? Some men seem to be able to integrate themselves back into society. Take yourself, for example. You served your country at war, and now you are home and you are continuing to serve your country. You are perhaps made of stronger stuff than Lieutenant Webster. Some men are just a little more fragile than others, you know?”
“You’re telling me that he is the victim here? Are you fucking crazy?”
“Oh, I am saying nothing of the sort, Sheriff. I am well aware that a heinous crime has been perpetrated here, that some poor girl was abused and murdered, but this was all twenty years ago. Memories might be long, but evidence is short-lived for the main part. I just think that Michael Webster is incapable of establishing any kind of stable ground for his own defense, and I would like to think I am assisting him with his constitutional right to fair representation when it comes to his day in court.”
“This is just bullshit, if you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Wade. This is just the most extraordinary bullshit I have ever heard. I have a killer in my basement, plain and simple. And even if he was not directly and solely responsible for her death, he was certainly responsible for what was done to her after she was dead.” Gaines stopped. “But, then again, I don’t need to detail what he did to her, do I, Mr. Wade?”
Wade frowned. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
“He says he told you. All those years ago, he told you what he’d done, and so, according to your friend, you are as guilty of withholding this as he is . . . ?”
Wade smiled. Then he started laughing. “I think Lieutenant Webster is even more fragile in his mind than I understood him to be. Or perhaps it was just a simple misunderstanding, much the same kind of misunderstanding as you and he had when you thought he’d given you permission to search his motel room . . .”
Wade let the statement hang in the air.
Gaines had no response.
“So,” Wade said eventually, “who wants my five thousand dollars?”
28
Before and after combat there was fear. During combat there was only adrenaline. It seemed that the two were mutually exclusive—one could not exist in the presence of the other. Other emotions did not register or apply. It was only later, much later, that anger, hatred, disbelief, horror, wonder, and awe overtook everything else. It was only later that mental and emotional reactions impinged upon the physical, that hands shook uncontrollably, that nervous twitches assaulted muscles. Gaines was familiar with this delayed response, and though he did not feel anything so overpowering as that, he did feel rage and dismay as he watched Michael Webster leaving the Sheriff’s Office with Matthias Wade.
He knew it would be no time at all before Judith Denton got word of what had happened. The thought of facing her, of trying to explain himself, how he had failed her, how he had failed Nancy . . .
It was five minutes past three on the afternoon of Friday, July 26th, and Gaines watched silently as Matthias Wade walked Webster to a plain sedan parked outside the office. Where they were going, Gaines did not know. Neither Webster nor Wade had to tell him. Perhaps Wade would take Webster to his own house. Perhaps Gaines would not see either of them again.
Had Gaines applied the letter of the law, Webster would more than likely still be in the basement, if not there then en route to Jackson or Hattiesburg to be remanded until trial. If Gaines had acted according to standard protocol, then some of the things that Webster had told him would be on tape, Ken Howard would have been present, and bail would never have been granted. But Gaines had acted impulsively, without due consideration, and now Webster was going to leave nothing more than a trail of dust behind him as he was chauffeured out of Gaines’s custody.
Gaines turned away from the swiftly vanishing sedan and went back to his office.
Hagen was waiting there for him. “Morgan City is St. Mary Parish,” he said. “I spoke to the deputy, and he said that the sheriff wouldn’t be back until about five.”
“His name?” Gaines asked.
“Sheriff is Dennis Young. Deputy is Garrett Ryan.”
“I’m going over there,” Gaines said. “It’s about a hundred or so miles. I’ll be there by the time he gets back from wherever he is.”
“You want I should come with you?”
“No, you stay here.”
“Judith Denton’s gonna turn up, ain’t she?”
“I reckon so.”
“What do I tell her?”
“You tell her whatever you think she can stand to hear, Richard. I don’t know what to say. I fucked it up, and now Webster is out on the street and we have no way of keeping tabs on him.”
“And what’s the deal with this Wade character? You know anything about him?”
“Nothing ’cept rumor an’ hearsay. That’s why I want to go on up and see Sheriff Young in Morgan.”
Hagen sighed audibly. “Jesus, this is a hell of a mess, ain’t it?”
“As good as any I’ve seen before,” Gaines replied.
Hagen left the office. Gaines called home, was relieved when he got Caroline instead of his ma.
“Gonna be late tonight, more than likely,” Gaines said. “Have to go on out to see someone. You got any plans for later that I’m upsetting?”
“No, I’m good, John,” Caroline replied.
“Appreciated, sweetheart. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d cope, I’m sure,” Caroline said. “Safe travels.”
Gaines hung up, fetched his hat down from the stand behind the door, headed on out to the car, and aimed it west toward Slidell.
Crow-wise, it was little more than a hundred and fifty clicks to Morgan City. Use the bridge, it was heading for 180. The other route—I-12 from Slidell to Hammond, south on 55, cutting through the outskirts of New Orleans and turning west again toward Morgan—wasn’t significantly greater. Gaines decided to bypass the bridge and go around the northeast route. Perhaps the traffic through the center of New Orleans would be fine, but he didn’t want to risk it.
It was ten after five by the time Gaines pulled up in front of the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Office on Bayonard Street. Against a broken-yolk sunset, the office was lit up bright and bold like Fenway Park. Beside it was an expanse of waste ground, across it a collection of rusted machinery—large, awkward insects now weakened by time and weather, unable to resist the wild suffocation of vines scrawled all around them like indecipherable calligraphy. A yappy, discourteous dog chained to a tractor tire argued with Gaines as he crossed from his car to the main entrance.
Sheriff Dennis Young was not the man Gaines expected. Had Gaines been asked what he expected, he wouldn’t have been precise, but Young was not it. Maybe he expected some kind of old-school Huey Long character, one of those who figured the world should solely be plantations, all of them run as fiefdoms by people such as himself. To Gaines, Young looked like the sort of person who’d never had friends, more than likely never would. Not meanness, but w
ound up so tight that no one would ever get under his skin. Most people believed there was room enough in their lives for a host of visitors and a handful of permanents. The impression Young gave was that there was room enough for himself and himself alone. Aloneness was not necessarily loneliness, but as far as quality of life was concerned, it seemed to Gaines that such an existence was a handful of small change instead of a fistful of bills.
Sheriff Dennis Young, the better part of sixty, a good head taller than Gaines, looked directly at Gaines as Gaines entered the room. Young’s expression was almost a threat, but his eyes seemed to carry a weight of sadness. Looked like a man who not only remembered the past, but longed to live there. He reminded Gaines of the hardfaced, bitter police veteran with whom he’d first been partnered. That man, the first day they met, had shook Gaines’s hand roughly, slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Well, hell, son, let’s get you out there and see if we can’t get you shot at or blown to kingdom come, eh?”
“Do for you?” Young asked.
“I’m Sheriff John Gaines, Breed County, Mississippi—”
“I know who you is, son. ’Parently, one of your people called here and said you was on the way. Who you is ain’t what I asked.”
“I’m here about Matthias Wade.”
Young slowed down then. Had Gaines not been as intent, had he not been so aware of Young’s every move, he perhaps would not have noticed it. There was a definite and tangible shift in atmosphere in that room.
“He’s been around and about again, has he?”
“Yes, sir, he has.”
Young smiled knowingly. He seemed to relax a mite, barely noticeable, but relax he did.
“He was always one for getting on and about into other folks’ business.”
“He’s getting involved over in Breed County,” Gaines said.
“Tell me what he’s been saying.”
“Not what he says, but what he’s done. I had a guy called Michael Webster on a possible first-degree. World War Two veteran, crazy as a shithouse rat. Looks like he strangled a teenage girl down there a while back, and there was a fuck-up with a warrant and he was given bail. Wade came down and paid up the bail and took him away just three or four hours ago. Paid all of five thousand dollars.”
“Did he, now?”
“Yes, Sheriff, he did.”
Young nodded, and then he smiled. “The name’s Dennis, son, just Dennis. After all, we is family, is we not?”
Gaines nodded respectfully. Maybe Young wasn’t so impregnable after all.
“And you have a question for me, right?” Young prompted. “And I’m wonderin’ if it has something to do with what happened back here in sixty-eight.”
“That’s right,” Gaines said.
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing much. Word has it that some girls were killed.”
Young smiled resignedly. “Oh, there is more than a word, my friend. We think he killed two little girls. Personally, I would stake my life on it. But it don’t seem my life has a great deal of weight against the lack of evidence. What actually happened back then, and what we think happened, well, that’s where the disagreements start, and to this day they have not ended. All we got right now is Matthias Wade walking the streets a free man, two little girls dead, and not an ounce of justice to share between them.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“I can tell you what I know,” Young said. “Two girls, one ten, the other twelve, found strangled . . . left in a shack someplace out in the middle of no place special. Only thing that linked them to the Wades was that both girls were daughters of Wade-family employees. That was the thing, you see? It was such a fragile link, and there was nothing substantive we could use to bring Matthias Wade in. He was—what?—maybe thirty-five years old at the time. He wasn’t some clueless punk. He was a smart man, Sheriff Gaines, and more than likely still is.”
“So what made you think he was responsible for the killings?”
“Some people you think are bad,” Young said. “But there’s some people you know are bad. He’s one of them. Can smell his kind from a mile and a half away. Pompous asshole, telling us what we can and can’t say to him. Son of a bitch. I know he killed those girls. I had him in here for two hours, and he talked himself around the countryside, saying how he didn’t know squat about nothin’, but I could read it in his eyes and the dark sack of shadows he has in place of a soul.”
Young shook his head and sighed. “God didn’t make many of them like that, but the ones he did make are awful bad.” He paused to light a cigarette. “So tell me what you got over there in Breed.” He leaned forward, his eyes all fired up bright with interest.
“Girl of sixteen years old, found buried in a riverbank. She’d been there for twenty years. Was a disappearance back in fifty-four, only come to light now, so to speak. Had her heart cut out, in her chest a wicker basket with a snake inside. She’d been strangled and then butchered postmortem.”
“Jesus Christ almighty,” Young said, and he whistled through his teeth. “What the hell kind of madness is that?”
“What happened to the two girls here?” Gaines asked.
“I can show you the files, my friend. You can look at the pictures, too. However, sounds like we had ourselves a church picnic compared to what you’re dealing with.”
“There are others who think that Wade was responsible for the deaths of these two girls?”
“I am not alone in my conviction, Sheriff. Whole heap of people don’t see it could have been any other way. Wade is the baddest kind of son of a bitch I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with.” Young shook his head. “Most folks is simple. Even the crooks and the crazies. You know what they’re gonna say before they even set themselves down to the table. That’s the thing that makes most of this job pretty straightforward. Someone gets killed around here, well, there’s pretty much gonna be only two or three that coulda done it. Even with the housebreaking an’ all that, you get some folks’ place robbed, and a day later you got some dumbass son of a bitch tryin’ to sell their shit in a bar three blocks from home. It ain’t complicated because most people ain’t complicated. But then there’s others. Others who is intricate. Others who are a different kind of animal altogether. You just can’t predict what they’re thinking, nor what will pass their lips. And even when they do say it, well, it’s just as likely gonna mean something different than how it sounds. Wade is a devious creature. He don’t pretty much say nothin’ ’cept if it’s a lie. Easiest way to know if he’s lying is to look see if his lips are moving. If his lips are moving, he’s delivering up some kind of bullshit, and that’s a fact. Those girls of ours, Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick, went missing within three days of each other back in January of sixty-eight. They were both found together less than a week after Dorothy disappeared . . . Well, you can read the files and look at the pictures, and then you can tell me what kind of human being it is that can strangle little kids like that.”
“And Wade was your only suspect?”
“Only suspect then, only suspect now. He was local, you see. Ran a whole heap of companies down around these parts, and after it happened, he got real busy quieting everyone down about it, newspapers suddenly deciding they weren’t going to run the story and this sort of thing. And here we are six years down the line, and the likelihood of proving anything against him grows more impossible with every passing day. He has connections, you see? He has family down here, and the Wades are a family that will do whatever it takes not to have their name sullied by the taint of such things.”
“I didn’t get it at first, but these are the Wades, aren’t they?”
“Only ones I know. More money than is decent. Sugar and cotton and crawfish and rice and soybeans and whatever the hell else they fancy. You look under the porch of a Wade house and you find everyone from the bank owners and the real estate folks to the governor hiding there. That family’s been backhanding support to pretty much ever
y political official that suits their business for five generations.”
“And there was a picture album in Webster’s room. Photographs of Webster with Wade and our victim, a girl called Nancy Denton. There are pictures of the other Wade kids, as well. And there was another girl that Webster mentioned, a girl called Maryanne?”
Young shook his head. “Can’t help you there, son.”
“So the question now is how come Matthias Wade would pay five grand to bail Webster out. Is he helping out an old friend, or . . .” Gaines stopped and looked at Young.
“That’s a question beggin’ for an answer,” Young said. “But if I know Matthias Wade, you’ll wind up askin’ yourself a load more questions that don’t belong, and you’ll still walk away with nothing.”
“You think I could take a look at those files?”
“Sure you can, son.” Young leaned forward and lifted the phone. “Marcie, Get me them files on Mayhew and McCormick, would you? Bring ’em on in here for me.”
Young set down the receiver. He lit another cigarette and smoked it in silence. It was no more than a minute before Marcie came in bearing an armful of dossiers.
She put them on Young’s desk, backed up, and left the room.
There was no similarity in appearance between either girl and the other, or either girl and Nancy Denton. Young slid out the pictures one by one, and there was nothing that needed to be explained.
Both girls had been strangled. Bruising was evident around the base of their throats.
The more Gaines looked at the pictures, the more he noticed a strangeness around the eyes.
“Eyebrows,” Young said quietly. “We think they were blindfolded with a heavy adhesive tape, and when the tape was removed, most of the eyebrow came with it.”
Gaines looked at the rest of the pictures. He wanted to feel so much. He wanted to be shocked, enraged, upset, but he was not. Had he not seen what had been done to Nancy Denton, had he not been still submerged beneath the weight of conscience for his procedural omission, he might have been objective enough to suffer the expected emotions. But he was not. He had seen it all, if not here, then in war, and he just felt numb.
