The Death Collectors

by J. A. Kerley

  I came inside and ate a couple of sausage biscuits at the counter, then swept the sand out the door, made a grocery run, did two loads of laundry, and greased the squeak from the bathroom door. I was folding towels and counting the hours until I met Harry and Willow for the trek to Ambrose Poll’s place. Hearing a crunch of shells, I glanced through the curtain and saw a silver Audi pulling into my drive. I heard the door open, but couldn’t see who exited. Footsteps climbed the stairs.

  I opened the door to DeeDee Danbury, knuckles poised in mid-knock. I almost didn’t recognize her. She wore a sleeveless blue denim work shirt tucked into multi-pocketed khaki shorts with a webbed belt. Her hair was bundled in a neat ponytail and tipped-back sunglasses rode the crown of her head. A pair of compact field glasses hung around her neck.

  “It’s OK,” I said, “I’ll let you closer than that.”

  A flash of puzzlement, then she looked down. “Oh, the binocs. I wear them so much I forget they’re on. Some girls probably say that about diamonds, but what the hell.”

  I waved her to enter and she looked around at my decor of posters and driftwood. The furniture came in a box from Sweden and had looked better in the catalog, but it was comfortable.

  “Helluva place, pogobo,” she said. “You get a commission on the big solves, or what?”

  “It’s an inheritance, basically,” I said. “What brings you here, Ms Danbury?”

  She seemed not to have heard, wandered to the deck doors and looked out. Without the TV make-up, designer clothes, and camera-bred intensity, she looked relatively human. Danbury lifted the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the beach.

  “If I had a view like this,” she said, “I’d never make it to work.”

  “The binoculars part of journalism? Or window peeping?”

  The glasses dropped to her chest. “Birdwatching. It’s how I relax.”

  It didn’t seem appropriate; I’d have figured her for collecting poisonous plant species. She said, “I was out this morning on the inland side, then thought I’d come over here, see what’s in the air.”

  My hand swept toward the beach. “Pelicans, gulls, sandpipers, herons, now and then a frigate bird…”

  “I mean like what’s up between us. After that little tussle at the morgue the other day.”

  “I explained myself to the chief. I don’t have to explain anything to you. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  “I didn’t tattle to management, Ryder. All part of a day’s work is what I figure. Borg can be an asshole sometimes. No, all of the time. If it means anything, I told management there was another side to the story.”

  “I don’t need your help, Ms Danbury.”

  She walked toward the living room. “I found it curious the sound on Borg’s camera cut out when he might have been talking, but was recording when you were explaining the various proctological possibilities of a videocam.”

  “Is that what I did?”

  “It was wonderfully colorful.”

  “What really brings you here, Ms Danbury?”

  She nodded at the couch. “Mind if I sit?” Without waiting for my response, she sat, settled in comfortably. “I know how you work, you and Nautilus. I’ve studied it.”

  “How about blessing me with a synopsis, Ms Danbury?”

  She leaned back and crossed her legs. The economical knees counterbalanced the extravagant calves. “You guys have selective gravity or something. The strange cases pop up, look around until they see you, then run over and jump in your laps. Half the time you don’t seem to know what you’re doing, then Bang-Hallelujah! The case is cleared, your faces are in the paper, and everyone’s running up to bask in your sunshine.”

  “Maybe it’s just luck.”

  “Luck is dice coming up hot when you need it. They could just as easily sit cold. It’s statistics. Statistically, you and Nautilus are full-time hotties when it comes to crazies. Magnets for freaks.”

  “I disagree. Either way, I’m not sure how it affects you.”

  “I think there’s a story cooking here. Give me a peek in the kitchen. It’ll be a trade. I’ll tell you how I know what little I know, keep filling you in as I learn more. I’m going to learn more; you know I will. It’s what I do.”

  “It’s not my place to keep you informed of anything, Ms Danbury.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I said I researched you and Nautilus? I concentrated on you. Nothing you’ve done in the department has been typical. You cut your own path, usually through the backcountry. I remember the Adrian case, how they shut the door in your face, so you kicked in the wall. Don’t go by-the-book on me now, Ryder. Give me a taste of what’s happening. I’ll keep you up on what comes my way. What do you say to that?”

  “No comment.”

  She started to speak, then shook her head slowly. She stood and walked to the door, pulled it open. She stepped toward the stoop, but stopped and turned. Danbury lifted the binoculars, reversing them to study me through the front lenses rather than the eyepieces.

  “Isn’t that interesting,” she said. “I could have sworn you were a lot bigger.”

  Chapter 12

  I hadn’t noted DeeDee Danbury’s perfume when she was in the house; only after she’d left did it appear. There was delicacy to it, floral, with a base note of spice, something dry and exotic, like clove or cardamom. I walked slowly through the living room, sniffing, detecting where it seemed strongest, wondering how long it would take to dissipate.

  I suddenly felt foolish and looked out at the beach. It had grown crowded during my conversation with Danbury. The Blovines were out as well, she sunning with her top strap undone and her pumpkin boobs squishing out the sides, him trying to fish. He’d backlashed the casting reel, and was tugging at the snarled line. Picking out backlashes takes patience, and he finally gave up and tossed the rig in the sand.

  The clock rang noon and I headed off to meet Mr Ambrose Poll. Harry and Willow were at a diner in mid Mobile and we drove the last few blocks in Harry’s department car. Poll lived on a tree-lined street of bungalows built in the forties, tended flowerbeds, safe, boxy cars in the drives. No children playing, no sports cars in sight. A man on the porch eyeballed us over a paper he was pretending to read. Next door, an elderly woman with silver hair hosed water over dogwoods.

  Willow nodded at the man with the paper. “That’s Poll.”

  “Let’s face him and brace him,” Harry said.

  “Hey there, Poll. Ambrose Poll,” Willow called when we’d walked halfway up the drive.

  Poll squinted. “Willow?”

  “It’s me, Ambrose. A ghost from the past. Boo.”

  Poll frowned as he studied us. He had a ruddy, vein-spidered face and a prognathous jaw; he thrust the jaw at Willow like a defense. But his eyes flickered nervously.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Willow strode the steps to the porch as if it were his own. “These are detectives Ryder and Nautilus, Ambrose. They’re looking into the Hexcamp case. They’d like to talk to you about it.”

  “Hex who? What the hell you talking about?”

  “Stow the amnesia, Poll. You remember the case, no one could forget it. What I especially can’t forget is how everything I found in his house turned to vapor two days later.”

  “I don’t know nothing about pages from Hexcamp.”

  “I gave them to you. They disappeared.”

  Ambrose Poll shrugged and spat off the front of the porch. “That was a long time ago.”

  Harry spoke up. “Ancient history, Mr Poll. So it shouldn’t matter if you fill in any blanks we might have.”

  Poll scooted the chair forty-five degrees away from us and stared into the street. The woman watering her lawn moved closer to the porch, her ear cocked toward us as she tried to eavesdrop.

  Harry said, “You were the property-room clerk for a long time, Mr Poll.”

  “I was good at what I did. You do good in a job, you keep it.”

  “Back then property ro
om was a job for guys too tired and fat for the street, or on the outs politically. You started in the job before you were thirty, and worked there until you retired. Must be a record.”

  “What I did was my business, and you can take yours elsewhere.”

  Harry peeled off his burgundy jacket, draped it over his arm, and sat on the porch railing, a relaxed man. He took his time looking up and down the street.

  “Pretty little neighborhood here, Mr Poll, neat and sweet. Lots of retirees, I’ll bet. Like that lady watering her lawn. Or that fellow across the way looking through the curtain.”

  “It’s a nice place to live. Be even better when you leave.”

  “I’ll bet they love to hear your cop stories. Nailing the bank robbers, breaking the big cases. Ambrose Poll, the scourge of criminals everywhere. How many times did you almost buy it in the line of duty, Poll?”

  “I got no idea what you’re blabbering about. I think you’re crazy’s what I think.”

  “Do you tell people you were the original blue knight? Or a detective to rival Sherlock Holmes? Or do you tell them the truth: that you spent twenty-something years as a clerk?”

  Poll stiffened. “I don’t lie to no one.”

  I sauntered over and smiled at the woman, who had now turned off her hose and was fiddling with a myrtle five feet from the porch.

  “Morning, ma’am, how’re you?”

  She lit up at the notice. “Just fine, officer. You’re a policeman, aren’t you? I can always tell.” She pointed to our ride. “You folks drive the drabbest cars. The Navy drives gray ships and police drive drab cars.” She peered between the posts on the porch. “Morning, Ambrose. I watered your tomatoes.”

  Poll looked stricken and forced a smile. “Thank you, Myrna.”

  She arched a penciled eyebrow at me. “Is he helping you on a case? I know he still does that. Detective Poll probably has a lot to teach you younger fellows.”

  “I guess, ma’am,” I said, nodding. “Trouble is, he’s just so doggoned humble, we can barely pry a story out of him.”

  “Well you just ask him about the time he rounded up that cat burglar, chased him clear across a rooftop like in that movie with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.”

  I produced a quizzical face. “Cat burglar? But all those years I thought Mr Poll worked in the -”

  “Hey there,” Poll barked. “No need to go into all that.” He sighed and looked down. “Come on inside. I’ll tell you a story or two.”

  Poll slumped into the house, Willow and I in his wake. Harry brought up the rear. He paused at the door, then leaned out to look at the woman. “Mr Poll’s an amazing resource, ma’am. I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  She beamed.

  Poll’s house smelled like coffee and fried ham. We sat around his dining-room table, a pile of scissored-out coupons centering the table. Poll said, “I didn’t give a shit for all that street stuff. Car air conditionin’ wasn’t like now and half the time you’d spend all day in a rolling sweathouse. One day I allowed to the old dep’ty chief I’d do near anything to be done with it.”

  Harry said, “You bought the job.”

  Poll’s mason-block jaw jutted defiance at Harry. “I kicked back twenty per cent every payday. I didn’t care, it was a good job, and needing doing.”

  “Twenty per cent is a big bite, Mr Poll.”

  “I’m an economical man, I made do.”

  “How much you make on the retail side?”

  Poll started to protest but Harry held up his hand to cut him off. “Let’s turn off the fiction machine, Mr Poll. Nothing bad’s gonna happen if you tell the truth.”

  Poll slumped in the chair, studied his hands. “Hell, there were guns and stuff in there went back fifty years. Closed cases. Nobody’d ever miss a little something gone now and then. I just moved enough to make back the twenty per cent.”

  Willow leaned in, his eyes hot but his voice cool. “Hexcamp’s possessions, Poll. What about them?”

  Poll squeezed his hands together, stared at them. “That was something different. I got a call that night. Said if the stuff you brought in got misplaced there’d be five hundred bucks in it. You know what five hundred bucks was then?”

  “Over two grand now,” Willow said. “At least you weren’t a cheap crook.”

  “Fuck you,” Poll said, but his venom had been replaced by resignation. I saw Harry eyeball Willow, Ease up.

  “Where’d the stuff go?” Harry asked gently.

  “I was told to take the package out back one night. Every piece, nothing held back. A car come along and we traded packages.”

  “What’d the guy making the pickup look like?”

  Poll pressed his hands into his eye sockets as if it helped light his memories. “Wasn’t a man,” he said, so softly we had to lean closer. “It was a woman, beautiful. She looked like an angel.”

  We left Poll staring at his hands. “The beautiful woman?” I asked Willow as we walked to our cars. “One of Hexcamp’s followers?”

  “Just because their heads were scrambled didn’t make the women ugly. Some of the prettiest women you ever saw would have gone a month without food just to wash Hexcamp’s feet.”

  “What happened to them?” Harry asked.

  “Most just drifted away; disappeared. A couple of the girls eventually went to prison on lesser raps. As you read, the Crying Woman shot herself after she put a bullet through Hexcamp’s belly. There were a couple of men as well, I heard, but not in for the long haul. There is one woman from the day who you can talk to.”

  “Name?”

  “Carla Hutchins. Lives in the country outside Chunchula. Be in her early fifties now.”

  “You’ve not spoken with her?”

  “I approached her twice. She wouldn’t talk and no way I could make her. I got the impression she didn’t want to relive those days.”

  “She do time?” Harry asked.

  “No evidence of direct involvement in the killings, a follower type. She was one of the sanest of Hexcamp’s groupies. Probably not saying a lot.”

  Chapter 13

  Carla Hutchins lived out where the phone poles held two fraying wires. As Harry drove, I reclined in back staring at the ceiling and thinking, loosely speaking. Clouds piled up above us, darkened, broke with fast hard rain, and the storm blew by like an afterthought. A quarter mile ahead a copse broke the fielded landscape to reveal a small gray house tucked in the trees. Coming closer, we made out a woman hanging laundry in the side yard.

  “That should be Hutchins,” I said, noting the number on the mailbox. Harry edged the car into the dirt drive. Hutchins glanced at us with little interest. I figured she probably spent a fair amount of time directing people back to the main road. She plucked a pair of jeans from a basket at her feet and shook them out, whapwhapwhap, counterpoint to the hiss and burr of insects in the fields.

  “Excuse me, Ms Hutchins?”

  She turned, startled at hearing her name. She wore a simple blue dress and a white pocketed apron. Her feet were bare in the grass. She was slender to the point of skinny, her angular face long, framed by straight hair falling to her shoulders, blonde hair going gray, shiny with a recent cleaning. She wore no make-up or jewelry and could have blended into any Depression-era farm community in Oklahoma.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Carson Ryder, a detective with the Mobile Police. This is Detective Harry Nautilus. I’d like to ask you some questions about…” I didn’t know how to complete the sentence.

  Harry jumped in. “About a long time ago, Miz Hutchins. When life wasn’t so peaceful.”

  Hutchins turned back to hanging laundry. The pins in her apron pocket rattled when she moved. There was just enough breeze to waft the clothes and I smelled whatever she’d washed them in, something with lemon.

  “Please go,” she said. “I’m clean now.”

  Harry said, “I’m sorry, Miz Hutchins. I don’t understand.”

  “I’m clean. I used to be d
irty, but I’m clean. Talking about back then makes me dirty again. Please leave.”

  Harry reached up his finger and touched a line as if seeing if it were really there. “Lord, it’s hot as a sauna today,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “Rain feels so nice when it’s falling and ten minutes later it’s gone straight to steam. Are you thirsty for something cold, Miz Hutchins, Carla? Can I call you Carla?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, yes, I’m thirsty. But there’s nothing I can offer you but tap wat-”

  Harry flicked his head down the road. “Go down to that store we passed, Carson. Get us some cold drinks. I’ll take a diet RC, Co-cola they don’t have it. You, Carla?”

  “You really don’t have to…an orange soda? Is that all right?”

  When I returned a few minutes later Harry had clothespins in his mouth and was hanging clothes alongside Ms Hutchins. I passed out bottles, opened a bag of boiled peanuts, and sat atop the picnic table, chomping like a draft animal and listening as Ms Hutchins spoke in a dusty drawl surprisingly refined in diction and vocabulary.

  “I don’t know where his work went, Detective Nautilus,” she said, clipping a sleeve of a pink blouse to the line. “I don’t know much about it. Maybe that seems strange, after living there for over a year, but only a very few saw it all, the totality. Calypso did, certainly. Terpsichore perhaps. Persephone.”

  “Strange names,” Harry said.

  “We were given names from art or mythology. M-Marsden’s idea.”

  Harry clipped the other sleeve to the line. “What was your name?”

  Hutchins paused. I watched her shape a silent word with her mouth, then add breath to it. “M-Maja, after the Goya painting. It feels strange to say it; I haven’t said it in years. Sometimes I hear it in dreams. I’ve learned to force myself awake.”