Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  “Es-cort him,” Crandall said through teeth clenched around that damned cigar.

  Wood did not bend my arm behind my back to march me off. He just grasped some pressure point above the elbow and squeezed so my arm went dead clear to the ends of my fingers.

  “Hey,” I said, my arm flopping as useless as a fin as I tried to jerk free. “Hey, you’re an elected official, too. You going to let him order you around like that?”

  “On something like this?” Wood said. “You bet.”

  We were past the driveway walking beside the line of squads parked along the gravel road.

  “How far exactly would I have to go to find your car?” Woodrow said in my ear as we walked.

  Mr. George Smiley says a promise is always subject to review, but I’d promised Moze I’d protect him.

  “All right,” I said and pulled us up short. It’s hard to drag a guy as big as me even when his arm’s dead. “I’m leaving. What’s the matter with you guys anyway?”

  “Three kids and old woman shot. You tell me.” Wood seemed genuinely disappointed in me. “You haven’t been here that long, Clay, but you’ve probably noticed this ain’t Chicago. We haven’t had a murder here in ten, eleven years, and never a goddamned kid. Not in my lifetime.”

  “You said shot. So the answer to the second question you think I should’ve asked is that they were shot.”

  Wood rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Shotgun, pistol, what?”

  “No comment. Leave now, Clay.”

  “Crandall said people. ‘The people who killed three children and shot an old woman.’ You have reason to think more than one person did it?”

  “Jesus, do you miss anything?”

  “Well?”

  “No comment.”

  Wood turned toward the trailer.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

  Without turning back toward me, Wood said, “That’ll be a reason to wake up.”

  I could’ve fought Wood. I could’ve demanded my First Amendment rights and decried the prior restraints on my ability to report the news. But cops usually hoot when you spout that stuff, and it wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

  I needed at least a phone and maybe a car. Both were at Hack’s, so I started walking.

  The news, said the oracle Dill, is a fickle bitch. Either she has too little time or demands too much from what she has, so do the math. Always do the math, she said.

  It was nearly 4 a.m. on Saturday morning. The press would roll at 11. So far, I had the victims, some background, and a good idea of how they died. I had the babysitting angle and the Halloween angle. But in a small town like Failey, with its disproportionately high ratio of free minutes to mouths, nothing I knew so far would still be news by the time the press rolled.

  What would make papers fly out of the boxes would be stuff nobody else knew and since I had the time to find it, I would be expected to have it. What I came up with was an old guy sitting in the shadows of his back porch in front of a blood-spattered door.

  Three squads drew my attention to him. Down the ridge and across a field from the gravel road on which I walked, their red-and-blue lights flashed silently in the distance as the squads pulled from a driveway and headed toward town. All the lights remained on in the house they had left.

  It occurred to me that maybe there’d been another murder. It occurred to me that Aunt Lotty had gone to a neighbor’s house for help. It occurred to me that already my feet hurt, and even at that time of night, since they were up anyway, maybe the occupants would let me use the phone. Any one of those occurrent thoughts seemed like a good reason to stumble down the ridge and through the bean stubble across that field.

  The old guy could’ve been dead. He was hunched on the steps outside a screened-in porch that hung like it had come unglued from the back of the old, white, frame farm house. He had his knees up, his arms on his knees, and his head on his arms. A single, yellow bulb drooping from the eave gave a jaundiced cast to his white head. It also deepened to almost black the maroon marks, fanned like rose petals, head high on the edges of the porch’s white door.

  He had to be alive. As a rule, cops don’t go off and leave behind stiffs. But I waited outside the yellow crime scene tape the cops had strung around his back yard until I saw his shoulders heave.

  He heard me duck under the tape and step closer. He raised his eyes off his arms to look at me, then slowly straightened up. He had on a dingy, ribbed undershirt and bib overalls, and his peaked, gnarled feet were bare. In the cold night, the feet alone made me forlorn.

  The old guy dropped his left hand to his side. The barrel of a rifle appeared out of the darkness beside his left knee.

  A fat man does not raise his hands over his head if he can help it. I held mine out palms up and away from my body, so he could see I had nothing in them. A delicate introduction seemed appropriate.

  “You all right?” I said.

  His expression reflected a lot more uncertainty than I would’ve expected from a guy holding a gun. He looked at me some more, not quite sure who I was.

  “You come back to clean up your mess?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I thought you people’d gone,” he said, the disgust evident in his tone.

  “I’m not police, if that’s who you mean.”

  He raised the barrel an inch. That, of course, stopped my gut from roiling since on me the head presents a so much smaller target.

  “Well?” he said, and I told him who I was.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Fine. Could I use your phone?”

  It caught him off guard. He was gearing up for an argument, and he had stop and think about it.

  “There’s shit all over it,” he said finally.

  He had a long face and a day or two’s worth of white stubble on a narrow, tapered jaw. His voice was low, earthy, like he had to push a lot of wind through his box to make noise, and he talked slowly. But I doubted that his name was Lenny or that he raised rabbits. It was more that he was methodical and deliberate; once he’d decided where he was going it took him time to shift course.

  “You’ve lost me again, partner,” I said.

  “Gray shit,” he shouted. “That print shit,” he said a little more calmly.

  “The cops dusted you?”

  He held up his right hand so that I could see his palm. The tips of all five fingers were black with what I assumed was the ink the cops would have used to take his fingerprints.

  Pronouncing each word distinctly and pausing a beat in between, he said, “They did not clean up their damned shit,” as if that defined the issue. I decided maybe there was another one.

  “They let you keep that?” I said, cocking my chin at the rifle.

  He looked at the rifle with surprise as though he’d forgotten he held it. When he looked back at me, I could see that he realized what I was thinking. He quickly put the rifle down and shrugged.

  “They took my goddamned shotguns,” he said, as if those would have been his firearms of choice.

  “Did they?” I said. “How many?”

  He held up two fingers.

  “You fired them lately?”

  He said, “That’s what they asked.”

  “After they sniffed them, I imagine.”

  He looked at me with surprise as though I had read his mind, but I just said, “And?”

  “Squirrel season,” he said.

  “You hunt with them.”

  He gave me a curt, grudging nod.

  “And you hadn’t cleaned them.”

  He shook his head.

  “And you didn’t tell them about the rifle.”

  He shook his bowed head slowly.

  “It was in the barn,” he said. “And they didn’t ask. J
ust wanted shotguns.”

  “They take anything else?” Maybe I could figure out what exactly they were looking for.

  “The shells,” he said. “My robe. A blanket. A towel. Had blood on them.”

  “Yours?”

  He shook his head. I considered the door and its rose-petal dabs.

  “Lotty came here.”

  I had said it gently, but I didn’t give him the option of a question, and he nodded.

  “They think maybe you did it?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  I said, “Maybe you ought to get your story out before they do.”

  He cocked his head and his eyes went blank. He was a methodical man. He had to think about that.

  I do not like to think of myself as sentimental, but I am sometimes touched by the openness and willingness to trust that I encounter among the good people of Austin County. Having spent the better part of my life in that rude place Chicago, I am sometimes ambushed by amiability here.

  The old guy had, I will gratefully acknowledge, dropped his gun on a stranger who approached him at four in the morning after his neighbors were killed. More importantly, he agreed with my premise, although it seemed a weak one, since as a rule, cops are no more likely to leave behind good suspects than they are stiffs. The honesty the Program demands, however, also requires me to say, as I might not have before, that the fact that I am occasionally touched by the trusting nature of these folks has never stopped me from exploiting it.

  His name was Orlo, he said after a moment and spelled it without my asking. Orlo Ratliff, he said and did not bother to shake hands or invite me to sit. It took me a second to realize we were down to business; he was starting the interview.

  His mother had called him Bunny, he said. I could call him that if I wanted.

  “Ever’body does,” he said in a resigned tone that made it sound as if he couldn’t do much about it at this point. “I suspect you’ll put Bunny in those marks in the middle of my name,” he said.

  “Sounds like you read the papers, know our style,” I said to ingratiate myself.

  He didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he seemed to have other clear, preconceived ideas about what kind of information I wanted and proceeded to deliver it.

  He was 62 years old, he said. He was not married, never was married, and he wanted me to know that, no sir, he did not do it. He had been in a war, he said. Korea, he said. He had killed men, but never children. If he could not kill children then, he could not kill children now.

  And he would not hurt Lotty. Goddamn, he said, his voice cracking, goddamn, he loved her. And when he had breathed deeply a couple of times, he added: “Not that it made much difference to her, of course.” He saw something on the cement between his feet and frowned. “Or them policemens.”

  Orlo rubbed at the cement with his thumb, looked at it, and abruptly stood up and went in the house. I thought he’d ended the interview, but just as I was about to pound on the door and holler for him to come back, he returned with a bucket and a brush.

  “That’s her,” he said, pointing to spots on the cement but talking with surprise and affection as though he had found someone in a family album he wanted me to see.

  “She just appear at your door or what, Orlo?”

  He looked at me funny. Orlo and Bunny were a tossup when it came to which I’d least like to be named, but he obviously didn’t care for Bunny, so I’d used his given name.

  He smiled, gratified and a little embarrassed. But he was a methodical man. He would tell a complete story, and he would pick his own place to start.

  “I’ve lived here all my life,” Orlo said, “except the service, of course. So I’ve knowed her a long time.”

  There was a spigot off to one side of the porch. He took the bucket there and started to fill it.

  Lotty used to live on the other side of the place, her parents’ place, he said. Her father farmed. The mother probably was a housewife, since that’s what women did then and Orlo didn’t mention anything unusual like a job. Lotty, he said, helped her dad farm and her mother around the house and she started babysitting.

  “What else’s an old maid going to do anyway, unless she teaches or gives piano lessons or something?” he said, a hard edge of disgust suddenly entering his voice.

  Then her parents got old and sick. Lotty farmed and cared for them in their sickness, Orlo said. And when they died, she didn’t want to live in their house anymore. “Too much to take care of. Didn’t feel like home no more,” he said with a certainty that made me think he was talking more from his own experience than hers.

  “She can be a pistol,” Orlo said, the judgment expressed with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement. “Particular,” he said after considering it another moment. “Independent.”

  About ten years ago, she’d sold off all her parents’ place except the woods on the back. She’d bought herself the double-wide, set it up in the clearing, and put the money left over in the bank.

  “We was neighbors then,” he said. He brought the bucket back to the porch. “But we never paid each other much mind until Sister died.”

  “Who’s Sister?” I asked.

  He took up the brush and stiffly lowered himself to his knees to scrub at the spots on the steps.

  His sister, Adell. He had lived with his mother and her until his mother died, then he had lived with Adell until she died. That was seven years ago.

  “Then,” he said, as though it was a revelation, something that could not be foretold, “then I lived by myself.

  “I do her favors,” Orlo said. “Lotty,” he said in his careful way, as though I might’ve forgotten whom we were talking about. “I fix things, plow her garden.” He turned to look up and back over his shoulder at me with a grin. “She’s scrawny. Little, tiny woman.”

  “Needs you, does she?” I said, although I was beginning to suspect it might be the other way around.

  “Not to hear her tell it. God damn her.”

  “Orlo, I can’t tell whether you like Lotty or not.”

  “Oh, I like her well enough.” He scrubbed back and forth in an arc like a windshield wiper. His brush strokes became wider and harder. “She don’t always care much about me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Says I ain’t been around women enough. Don’t know what they want.” He dipped the brush and shook off the excess water with a snap. “Says I would’ve knowed more if I hadn’t lived with my mother and Sister.”

  I almost missed that. “You’re . . . “ I struggled to find the right word and not sound too incredulous. “Lovers?”

  “Well,” he said. He stopped brushing. “You going to put that in the paper?” he asked without looking up.

  “No.”

  “Well,” he repeated. “Just when it suits her. Just when she’s got needs.” He shrugged. “Then I get invited to supper.” He climbed to his feet, sloshed what was left of the water around in the bucket, and threw it on the steps. “And I ain’t s’posed to show up till it’s good and goddamned dark.”

  The coffee-shop theorists—the ones with nothing better to do than rehash the whole business—still wonder about Orlo. He was her lover, they say, and she treated him like dirt. If he’d ever been romantically attached to a woman, no one could remember it, and a lifetime of isolation, living as a bachelor on a farm with only his mother and his sister, had left him socially stunted. He didn’t like children much, and he was known to be jealous of the time Lotty spent with them. He had shotguns and Lotty’s blood all over his house. He was stubborn and odd.

  All true, but I never bought what the wags called the Bunny theory. I saw his face when he looked at his door. He was appalled.

  It caught his attention when he looked up from his chore. He stared, his eyes darting from one side of the door to the other, for a l
ong time.

  “I missed that,” he said finally, sounding defeated.

  He filled the bucket again and carried it back to the door. Two ladder-back chairs, painted white, set against the wall next to the steps. I’d been on my feet long enough, so I took one. I could see his face from there, too.

  He had wet the stiff-bristled brush and raised it to the paint, but then thought better of it. Orlo stood before the door, again perplexed.

  “She joked,” he said, thinking, staring at the door, and talking now to himself. “I thought she was horsing me around.”

  “When was this, Orlo?”

  “Around midnight. Could’ve been earlier.” He turned to me to explain. “I don’t leave the light on. I go to bed. Got to get up. Don’t have nothing the little shits’d want anyway.”

  “Halloween’s tonight, Orlo.”

  “Yeah,” he said, the distinction not of any consequence for his attention had returned to the door.

  He dropped the brush back in the bucket and raised his arms like a supplicant at an altar. He held his big hands over the marks on either side of the door. They were not rose petals or random spatters, I now saw, but palm prints, three or four on either side of the door and not much bigger than a child’s. Orlo played his hands above them, hovering for a moment over each one.

  “I ‘spect she was down here a long time ‘fore I heard her,” he said.

  With both hands, he slapped the door. It rattled the house, echoed off barns. When the sound bounced back, he banged the door again, three times, hard.

  “Why didn’t I hear that?” he sobbed.

  After a moment, I said, “You must’ve eventually.”

  “Yeah,” he said and sucked up two quick breaths. “Yeah, I did.”

  Orlo took a pressed and folded blue bandana from the rear pocket of his overalls and dabbed each eye. As he started to refold it, he looked at the stains. He wet a corner of the handkerchief with his tongue and dabbed at the edge of one of the prints. It turned orange and faded.