by R.J. Ellory
The absence of a father was never that prevalent in Kenny’s mind. Folks asked him about it, and he said that what you never had you couldn’t miss. The kids didn’t really understand that sentiment; the adults were impressed with his philosophical attitude, and they favored him for his seeming honesty and sensitivity. He was an artistic boy, loved to draw and paint and make clay models, and there were those who believed he might be one of those who made it out.
“He could be an architect, a painter, a designer, or something,” the art teacher once told Janette Sawyer at a parent–teacher conference. “He certainly has a talent, Mrs. Sawyer, and I am sure he will do well.”
If Janette had possessed the energy to be proud, she might well have been. But she did not. She did not possess the energy for a great many things these days. She was not yet forty, and yet she felt as old as her own mother. Drained was the word she used. “I feel utterly drained, Kenny,” she would say. “Make yourself some soup and crackers. I’ll do some proper dinner later.” But mostly there was no later, and Kenny would take a couple of quarters from her purse and go get fried chicken.
It was on one of the fried chicken expeditions that he first met Leon Devereaux. Not a great deal more than a year earlier, he’d walked on up to the diner on Gorman Road, started back with the greasy paper bag, in it two wings, two legs, a tub of slaw, in his other hand a cup of root beer, and a black pickup had slowed alongside him and come to a stop.
Kenny Sawyer was not a suspicious child. He was young enough to take people at face value, to trust them until they gave him a reason not to, and yet old enough to consider he could take care of himself. Perhaps life had dealt him a mediocre hand, but it was with a mediocre hand that the best bluffs were undertaken.
“Got there?” a voice said.
Kenny stopped and turned left. “Chicken.”
“Where d’you get that?”
“Diner.”
A face then appeared at the window, the arm on the edge of the door, said arm scattered with jailhouse tats, the man’s hair closely shorn, a tooth missing on the left side of his crooked smile. But to Kenny it seemed like a good smile, an honest smile, and there was something about the man that seemed of decent humor.
“Back there?”
“Sure, back there. Half a mile, no more.”
“And it’s good chicken, you say?”
“Good enough,” Kenny said.
“You don’t get no supper at home?”
“Some.”
“But not today.”
“No, sir, not today.”
“Sir? What you done call me sir for?”
Kenny frowned. “Politeness, sir.”
“Well, shee-it, kid. I don’t recall that there’s ever been a time someone called me sir.”
“Well, maybe you ain’t knowed a great deal of polite folks.”
“I’m thinkin’ that may be the case. I think maybe you just hit the nail damn square on the head right there, son.”
“Maybe so,” Kenny said, and thought about his chicken getting cold.
“So that chicken is good, then, you say.”
“You wanna try some?” Kenny asked, and he took a step toward the pickup and held up the greasy paper bag.
“You’d let me have some of that there chicken you got in the bag?”
“Sure. Not all of it, mind, but you could maybe have a wing and see if it was good, and if you wanted more, you could drive right on down there and get yourself some.”
The man paused, tilted his head to one side, and looked at Kenny Sawyer like this was something altogether different.
“You’re a good kid, you know that?”
Kenny looked back at Leon like this was something altogether different for him, too.
“So, you want some?”
“Sure, kid. Let me have a wing there and we’ll see how it is.”
They agreed the chicken was good, not the best either of them had ever had, but fit for purpose.
“Where do you live, son?” Leon asked.
“Back a ways there, over beyond the clear-cut.”
“With your ma and pa?”
“Just my ma.”
“Your pa done run off?”
“Nope, he died.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yup.”
“You got brothers and sisters?”
“Two stepbrothers, Dale and Stephen, but they lit out when our pa died.”
“So they wasn’t your ma’s boys?”
“No, sir. They come with the package.”
Leon laughed. “Yes, indeedy, you’re a good kid, and you’re smart, too. Bet you there ain’t a great deal of people who can get past you.”
“I’d like to think not.”
“So, I’m gonna go down to that diner there and get myself some of that chicken. You wanna come?”
“Why for?”
“No reason. Just for company.”
“Ain’t s’posed to go no place with strangers.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Kenny.”
“Well, Kenny, my name is Leon, and I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.”
“Well, seein’ as how we’s on first-name terms, and seein’ as how we already shared some dinner there, looks like we ain’t strangers no more, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess.”
“Well, hop on up here and show me where this diner is, and then once we’ve eaten, I can give you a ride back home.”
Kenny hesitated for no more than a second, and then he went on up in the passenger seat and gave directions. Not that there were a great many directions to give, but he gave them anyway.
Seemed that there may have been some odious and disreputable reason for Leon Devereaux’s initial exchange with Kenny Sawyer, but then again, maybe there wasn’t. Maybe he was just looking for company, and Kenny Sawyer was there to provide it. Whatever the deal had been, the deal was now something different. Leon Devereaux went on into the diner and bought more chicken. He got French fries and a cup of ketchup and cookies that were still warm from the oven. The cookies were for Kenny. They ate together, right there in the cab of that pickup, and they didn’t talk a great deal. When they were done, Leon was good to his word and he drove Kenny home.
“You know the trailers parked up over yonder?”
“The ones where that crazy dog is at?” Kenny asked.
“That’s the ones.”
“Yes, I do, sir.”
“Well, that’s where I live. You ever want some company, you come on by there. And don’t mind the dog. That’s General Patton. He’s always chained up secure, and he ain’t half as mad as he sounds. He just does it to show off.”
“You want me to bring chicken?”
“Sure, son. You bring some chicken if you like.”
“Okay,” Kenny said.
“Well, okay,” Leon replied.
And so it had become a friendship of sorts, Kenny Sawyer taking the long way back from school to see if Leon’s pickup was out at the trailers, and—if so—heading for the diner, getting chicken for them both, and then walking back.
Most often Leon was not there, and so their meetings were few and far between. But when they did meet, they picked up the conversations where they’d left off—baseball, comic books, church, what was best to eat, girlfriends, the benefits of cats versus dogs or vice versa, other such things. Leon showed Kenny lumberjack fighting, taught him a few slick moves— how to throw a punch and make it matter—and Kenny never asked where Leon had been for the past week or so, and Leon never ventured an explanation for his absences.
And so it was, late afternoon of Monday, August 5th, that Kenny Sawyer came back from school and checked to see if Leon’s pickup was home. It was not, hadn’t been for near on two weeks, but this time there was something strange. General Patton was there, unchained, running back and forth between the trailers and barking like a crazy son of a bitch. Kenny called him, and
General Patton came running, near bowled him over with enthusiasm to see a familiar face.
“What’s up, boy?” Kenny asked him. “Where’s your pa, eh? Where’s Leon at? What you doin’ here by yourself?”
Each day Kenny had been down this way, he had seen the trailers but no pickup and no dog. This didn’t make sense. No sense at all. Couldn’t understand how Leon was absent but the General was here, untethered, running loose.
Kenny went on up to the big trailer, the one where he and Leon would sit and talk and eat chicken. He knocked, waited, figured that maybe Leon was in there with a girl again like he’d been a couple of times before. But Leon was not here. Of course he wasn’t. How the hell had he got here without the truck? Maybe he’d broken down someplace and had taken to walking back, had let the General run on ahead. A handful of minutes and he’d be turning the corner and asking where the chicken was at.
Kenny headed for the smaller trailer, the one where Leon slept.
He knocked again, knew he wouldn’t get an answer, and reached up to open the door.
Five minutes later, stopping once again to heave violently at the side of the road, Kenny Sawyer could still smell Leon Devereaux’s decaying corpse, still see just the one eye staring back at him. The other eye had been shot right through, left a hole the size of a quarter and then some, and whatever meatballs and tomato sauce had been inside that skull of his was decorating the wall above his head.
He’d been shot right there in his bed, had perhaps leaned up to see who was coming through the door, and taken a bullet right through the eye.
By the time he reached home, Kenny could hardly breathe, let alone speak. It was a while before Janette Sawyer appreciated the full import of what had happened, a while after that before she reached the Sheriff’s Office. Gradney himself went out to those trailers and saw what Kenny Sawyer had seen, and once he had the scene under control, once photographs had been taken, once the coroner had been called, Gradney took it upon himself to try to understand why an eleven-year-old kid would have a friend like Leon Devereaux. Gradney also knew that what you deserved and what you got were not the same thing, and that applied to friends as well. Kenny explained what he could, and then Gradney sat with Janette Sawyer and tried to get her to see that keeping an eye on who her son was spending time with might be a wise investment of her attention. After the Sawyers had left, Gradney called the dog pound, told them he had a mutt that needed collecting. Once the dog was gone, only then did he think to check the other trailer. He saw what Gaines had seen in the bathtub, and he was disturbed beyond measure. He did not know what Leon Devereaux had been doing, but he wondered whether Kenny Sawyer might have been the next intended recipient of whatever it was. Lastly, Gradney made a call to the Breed County Sheriff’s Office. He didn’t reach Gaines, but Hagen. He explained what had happened, that Leon Devereaux had been found dead in his trailer by a child.
“A child?” Hagen asked, incredulous.
“That’s what I said,” Gradney replied. “Seems Leon Devereaux kept some unlikely company. Little kid of eleven or twelve, said he’d been coming out here and visiting with Devereaux and General Patton—that’s Devereaux’s dog, by the way—for some time. Brought chicken after school, talked about girls and whatnot.”
Hagen lied convincingly. He said that he and Gaines had been out there, but had not ventured into the trailers. Gradney said that aside from Leon Devereaux’s corpse in the smaller of the trailers, there was evidence of some other foul play in the larger of the two vehicles. A great deal of blood had been found in the bathtub, blood that looked to have been there a good deal longer than Leon’s dead body.
“Of course, he could have decided to gut a pig in there,” Gradney suggested, “but I doubt it. I am concerned we might find that some poor son of a bitch has gone missing, and when we find him, he ain’t gonna have a great deal of blood left inside of him.”
And then he added, “Ironic, eh? Fact of the matter was that your boy was home all along, ’cept he wasn’t in the mood for taking visitors. Someone shot him in the eye, decorated the wall with most of his head, and then just left him there in bed. Coroner says he’d been there about a week. The man neither looked so good nor smelled so good at the best of times, so you can imagine what he’s like right now.”
Hagen thanked Gradney, told him there might be a chance he and Gaines would come out and take a look at the trailers, but today was unlikely. Gradney said they were welcome anytime, but to give him fair warning so he could be present. Hagen thanked him for calling, and the conversation was over.
Hagen knew he wouldn’t reach Gaines on the radio, and so he called Judge Marvin Wallace’s office and left a message for Gaines to call him back as soon as possible.
Set to leave his office, another call came through. It was Maryanne Benedict.
“Is Sheriff Gaines there?” she asked.
“No, Miss Benedict. He’s out of town right now. Can I help?”
“It’s Della Wade,” she said. “She called me, said she was coming over to see me, said she had some information about what happened to Clifton.”
“I’m leaving now,” Hagen said. “You tell her I’m on the way, and that she’s not to leave until I see her.”
“I’ll do my best,” Maryanne said, and hung up.
Hagen left the office, told Barbara to get him on the radio if there was any word from the sheriff. She said she would, and as she watched Hagen’s car pull away, she tried to remember the last time there had been such aggravation and commotion in Whytesburg. She could not recall such a time, and did not believe there ever had been.
65
Judge Marvin Wallace of Purvis was a man used to dealing with liars. He believed he could spot a liar at a hundred paces, that those selfsame liars recognized in him a man who’d waste not a second in listening to whatever mendacity was planned.
Such a faculty served him well as a judge and arbiter of law, for alibis became transparent, evasiveness in the face of direct questions received no quarter, and folks intent on deception were rapidly undone in the precise application of his pronouncements and edicts. Ken Howard knew him well, as did all the state defenders and prosecutors through every relevant county and a few beyond.
Branford was the county seat, and Frederick Otis ran a tight ship as far as that function was concerned, but Wallace was circuit and thus managed a far wider jurisdiction.
The appointment that he’d agreed to for three o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, August 5th, was—he imagined—related to some outstanding warrant, an ongoing case, a matter of t’s to be crossed and i’s to be dotted. Wallace had scheduled a meeting for thirty minutes later, certain that whatever Sheriff John Gaines had to discuss would take no more than that.
Wallace greeted Gaines politely, Nate Ross also, and when Gaines opened the conversation with, “Judge Wallace, thank you for seeing us. We wanted to talk to you about Matthias Wade,” there was a definite sense that the temperature in the room had dropped a degree or two.
“Matthias Wade?” Wallace asked. He shifted in his seat. He glanced at Ross, then looked back at Gaines. “What about Matthias Wade?”
“In the absence of any probative evidence, even anything significant of a circumstantial nature, we are nevertheless of the viewpoint that he may have been involved in the recent death of Michael Webster, and before that, all of twenty years ago, the death of Nancy Denton.”
Wallace showed no surprise. He was implacable, and after looking back at Gaines in silence for a good ten seconds, he smiled and then shook his head ever so slowly.
“So?” he asked.
“Well, I wanted to know your reaction to that suggestion. That he might have been involved.”
“I have no reaction, Sheriff Gaines. What kind of reaction did you think I might have?”
“I wondered whether or not your relationship with Matthias Wade—”
“I’m sorry, my relationship with Matthias Wade?”
“Okay, your fr
iendship. I wondered whether your friendship with Matthias Wa—”
Wallace raised his hand and Gaines fell silent. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers together.
For a little while the only sound was the fan in the ceiling.
“I think you have caught me on the back step,” Wallace said. “I feel as if I am coming late to the game and the score has already been decided. I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. You use the word relationship and then friendship when referring to Matthias Wade, and you use them as if they actually mean something of significance. I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Are you saying that you’re not friends with Matthias Wade?”
Wallace’s mouth smiled, but his eyes did not. “Friends? With Matthias Wade?” He was silent for a moment and then said, “Okay, Sheriff Gaines, let’s get one thing straight right here and now. If you have a question for me, then you ask it. You do not come into my office with this attitude. You do not present questions to me as if I am withholding something from you. You do not employ interrogative techniques when you ask me something, you understand?”
“Interrogative techniques?”
“The way you ask your questions. Am I saying that I am not friends with Matthias Wade? As if I am trying to deny some earlier statement. You know exactly what I am talking about, Sheriff, and don’t try and tell me you don’t. If you have a question for me, then ask me that question and not something else. I have no time for games.”
Gaines paused before speaking. “I apologize,” he said. “This has been a high-strung business for us, you know? Not often there’s a murder, and now we have more than one and a suicide as well. We just need your help, Judge, and there are some things that make sense and some that don’t, and we thought you could help clarify a few points.”
“Fire away, son. We’re all on the same side here, and if there’s a question I have an answer for, then you’ll get the answer.”
“Do you remember a man called Clifton Regis?”
Wallace was pensive, and then he slowly shook his head. “Can’t say I do, no.”
