by EQM
“Thought the aroma might awaken you,” he said, as he sat at the table. “I have oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon, sausage, and scrambled eggs. You take coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, as I took a seat.
I picked up the fork with my weak hand and started to sample the sausage, when I noted that Quincy had his hands folded in front of him, and his eyes closed. One eye winked open.
I set the fork down and waited for him to finish his prayer.
“Are you a religious man?” he asked.
“I was raised Catholic,” I told him. “Even went to seminary, but I didn’t finish.”
“Crisis of faith?”
“You know about that sort of thing?”
“Of course. Doubt is a human condition, Mr. Gallegher.”
“Please, call me Pat.”
“How’d you do that?” he said, pointing to my cast.
I told him the story about the poodle and the tough guy. Some of it was funny, if it hadn’t happened to you. He laughed at the appropriate places, but as I finished the story his face seemed to go dark.
“I have a feeling you lead an adventurous life,” he said.
“Things happen,” I said.
“And then you have to fight your way out.”
“It isn’t something I do on purpose, at least not most of the time. You get a reputation, though. People know you can do something other people can’t, and they come to you when they’re in need. I have a hard time turning down people in need, no matter how badly I want to.”
“So you’re some kind of detective?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a musician. I play a horn in a bar. The rest of it is ... it just happens. I suppose being a musician doesn’t really count for much.”
“Nonsense,” Quincy said. “You have a gift. You can speak a language in which it is impossible to say a mean or hurtful thing. You should be proud of that.”
I nodded and turned my attention to the meal. As I ate, a thought occurred to me.
“Where would you suggest I go to learn more about Katie?”
He hesitated for a second.
“I’m going to be the only mourner at her graveside,” I added. “I think I should know more about her. Where did she go to school?”
“Everyone in this town goes to Prosperity Glen High School.”
“You think there might be people there who’d recall her?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Quincy said.
It took me about five minutes to reach the school parking lot. I had a feeling it took about five minutes to get anywhere in Prosperity from just about anywhere else in Prosperity.
I first asked to see the principal. If things went as I expected, I would probably ask a lot of personal questions before the day was out. It would be nice to have the imprimatur of the big guy in the front office.
The principal was a sallow, bleary-eyed man in his fifties named Hart Compton. He invited me directly back to his office.
“How can I help you, Mr. Gallegher?”
I told him about Katie Costner’s murder, and how I had come from New Orleans to find her family.
“Yes,” he said. “Very sad. The whole affair. So the entire family’s dead now.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not certain what you want.”
“The police detective investigating her murder back in New Orleans likes to have as much information as he can get. He’s there. I’m here. Maybe I can find out something about Katie’s life in Prosperity that had some bearing on her murder in New Orleans.”
“An ... official inquiry?”
“Some friendly questions,” I said. “You can check with the detective.”
I gave him Farley’s number. Compton asked me to wait in the outer office while he called. After ten minutes, he opened his door and gestured for me to come back in.
“Your detective friend vouches for you,” he said.
“He’s in a charitable mood.”
“He also asked me to pass along a request, in the interest of good public relations, that you not kill anyone in the course of your inquiries.”
I cleared my throat.
“Is this something you’re likely to do?” Compton asked.
“I’ll make a special effort.”
“Yes,” he said, with obvious discomfort. “I should advise you in advance. You aren’t likely to find many of the faculty and staff receptive to your questions.”
“Why’s that?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed a spot on the bridge of his nose, as if warding off a headache. I had a feeling he did that a lot.
“Katie left town under something of a cloud. People weren’t particularly sad to see her go.”
“Could you tell me more?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll hear plenty.”
“Where’s your library?” I asked.
“We call it a Media Center.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s just down the hall to the right. Why do you ask?”
“More background. Would it be all right if I peruse some of your back yearbooks?”
I asked the woman at the front desk in the library where I could find back yearbooks. She directed me to the reference center and showed me where it was.
“Are you looking for anything specific?” she asked.
“I’m trying to find anything I can on a girl who attended Prosperity Glen several years ago. Her name was Katie Costner.”
It was as if someone had flipped a switch on her entire personality. She stepped back half a step. The air between us chilled ten or twenty degrees.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”
“You don’t recall her?”
“I’m very busy,” she said, which I found a very facile way of avoiding my question. “The yearbooks are in the reference center.”
I shrugged and walked to the reference center. According to the papers Hart Compton had given me, Katie had graduated six years earlier. I flipped directly to the senior pictures. Each one had a quote at the bottom and a list of the student’s achievements. It took me a moment to find Katie’s picture. She didn’t look terribly different from what I remembered, except that her hair was longer. She also seemed somewhat happier in the picture than I recalled her in real life.
Her quote read: “Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.”
She had only one achievement in four years of high school—Chorus I.
It was as if she had drifted through four years of school and scarcely made a ripple.
Katie’s algebra instructor was on a planning break. I decided to stop by her classroom.
Myra Soames was in her fifties, plump, red of cheeks, and going gracefully gray. She invited me into her classroom when I knocked on the door. I introduced myself.
“I’m from New Orleans,” I said. “I’ve been sent up here to look into some background information on a former student named Katie Costner.”
Just as the librarian had, Myra Soames suddenly bristled and grew cool toward me.
“Why are you asking about Katie Costner?” she asked. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“Only if the theologians are right,” I said. “She’s dead.”
I thought the news of Katie’s death might soften Ms. Soames a bit. Instead, she grew even colder.
“I wish I could say I was sorry,” she said. “But if you’re right, and there is an eternal judgment, then Katie is in a great deal of trouble. I’m a Christian woman, Mr. Gallegher, Bible-raised and river-dunked. It’s a sin to speak ill of the dead. I’ll say no more on the matter. If you’ll excuse me, I have papers to grade.”
“Is there anyone you can think of—a former classmate, maybe—who knew Katie when she was a student here?”
“I’d say there were a great number of students who knew Katie, in every sense. You should check at the Piggly Wiggly. The assistant manager there, Rob Kiser, was a friend of her
s, as I recall. Now, please, I am very busy ...”
I visited three other teachers, and none of them would discuss Katie with me. I got the strong impression that none of them had cared for the girl, and that none of them was particularly distressed to discover that she had died.
I gave up and drove over to the Piggly Wiggly. The manager there paged Rob Kiser to come to the front office.
Kiser, like Katie, was probably in his early twenties. He had red hair and residual facial acne. His fingernails were ragged and bitten.
I introduced myself, and dropped the news about Katie on him.
“That’s too bad,” he said, without a lot of emotion.
“I was led to believe that you were one of her friends.”
“Friends,” he repeated. “Yeah, I suppose you could say that. At least at one time. Katie didn’t keep friends for long.”
“Why was that?”
“She just didn’t. It was her personality, I guess. I reckon most people in this town weren’t sorry to see the back of her car when she left.”
“Just what did this girl do that was so bad?”
“Sorry, Mr. Gallegher, but you come to the wrong place. I got work to do, if you don’t mind.”
The Prosperity Police Department was in a row of buildings on a hill overlooking the strip mall and the Piggly Wiggly. I hiked up the concrete steps and around to the front of the station.
“Chief Wheeler in?” I asked the woman at the front desk.
Before she could page him, Wheeler walked out of his office and stepped into the waiting room.
“You’ve been busy,” he said. “Step back to my office.”
I followed him into the other room. He gestured toward a couple of chairs across the desk from his seat, and we both sat facing each other for several moments.
“I’ve gotten three different calls about you today,” he said.
“It’s nice to know people care.”
“Oh, they care, all right. They care a great deal about people walking in out of the blue and dredging up muck from years ago that ought to be left alone. If I’d known you were going to drive around Prosperity upsetting people, I’d have let you stay at the motel in Morgan.”
I leaned back in my seat and soaked in his menacing-cop gawp. People who never hang around the police tend to be intimidated by them. I had learned a long time ago that intimidation is one more coin of the realm in law enforcement.
“Nobody will talk with me,” I said. “Just what did Katie do that was so terrible?”
Wheeler stood for a second and stared out the window of his office, his thumbs hooked in his Sam Browne belt. Then he turned and took his seat behind his desk again.
“I had only been chief of police for a couple of years when Katie took off,” he said. “Katie was what you’d call wild. I reckon the only way anyone could have contained her would have been with a whip and a chair.
“There was this boy, Roger Thoreson. Nice kid. Lived with his mother. His father was dead. Tall kid. Clear of eye. Athletic. Smart. A real winner. He was the class president at both the middle school and the high school. Three-letter man at Prosperity Glen. He turned down a football scholarship to South Carolina because Duke offered him a full ride on academics.”
“A shining light.”
“Like a beacon. Everyone loved him, expected great things out of Roger. Thought he was going to put Prosperity on the map. Roger took an interest in Katie Costner. Katie came with a lot of baggage, a lot of whispers behind her back. Everybody knew she was promiscuous. This is a conservative town. People who don’t conform spend a lot of time fending off those who do.
“I think, maybe, Roger felt bad for Katie. He started spending time with her. One thing led to another and ... well, by August that boy was just plain girl-stupid over her. Most people think she was his first, you know, in bed. Roger started talking crazy, saying maybe he’d go to the state college over in Parker County rather than Duke. He even talked about getting married.
“His mother—shoot, just about everybody—tried to talk him out of it. It was like talking to a fish. Nothing got through to him. Then, about two weeks before school was supposed to start, Katie pulled the plug.”
“She broke up with Roger?” I asked.
“Told him it was over. Said she’d taken up with some boy over in Mica Wells. Roger drove over there, looked up the kid, and offered to fight him for Katie. The kid kicked Roger’s butt all over half the county. Roger had to go to the ER over in Morgan, get some stitches in his scalp.
“After Roger got back from the hospital, he and Katie had a terrible fight on his front porch. Stories vary depending on who tells them, but all the neighbors agree that Katie told Roger to get out of her life. Then she stomped off the porch, got in her car, and peeled out as she left the driveway.”
“Tough deal for a young guy.”
“Later that night, Roger’s mother went up to his room to tell him good night. She found him in a bathtub full of pink water, his eyes fixed on some point a billion miles away. When I got there about five minutes later, Karen Thoreson was still screaming.”
“The people in this town thought Katie killed their dreams for Roger Thoreson,” I said.
“That pretty much sums it up. If people didn’t like Katie before that, they plain despised her afterward. She tried to stand up to it. That only made people hate her more. Finally, she gave up, packed what belongings she had, climbed in her car, and drove away.”
“That’s why people didn’t want to talk about her,” I said.
“There’re people in Prosperity who still think Lee gave up too early at Appomattox. Katie Costner’s affair with Roger Thoreson is still an open wound. You ran around Prosperity today pouring salt in it.”
“You could have told me all this yesterday,” I said. “Could have saved me a lot of trouble.”
“You weren’t looking for Katie yesterday. You were looking for her parents. If I’d thought you were planning to dig up all the bodies in town, I’d have told you. That was my mistake.”
I drove back to Quincy’s house. He had been cutting the grass. I found him sitting on his front steps, sipping from a bottle of beer.
“Got another one?” I asked as I walked up.
“In the fridge.”
I grabbed a bottle and joined him on the steps.
“Nice little town you have here,” I said.
“We like it.”
“You might have mentioned that Katie Costner was the town hump.”
“I’m no gossip, Pat. That kind of thing doesn’t go over well with the congregation.”
“I think I understand now why Katie’s funeral will be so poorly attended.”
“It’s a sad story.”
“A lot of people hated her.”
“True.”
“You think any of them hated her enough to kill her?”
He had been raising the bottle to his mouth, but stopped halfway.
“What are you suggesting?”
“I haven’t been completely open with you, Quincy. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been trying to make that right. A lot of the things I do to balance the scales of my flimsy karma involve crimes. Like murder.”
“And?”
“I know a thing or two about murder. I understand some of the reasons why people kill. Revenge is one of the biggies.”
“I don’t know. It seems a stretch to me.”
“How so?”
“You can’t escape yourself. Katie might have fled Prosperity, but she had to take herself wherever she went. Her personality being what it was, she was certain to behave the same way wherever she landed.”
“Meaning that she was bound to make people angry with her no matter where she lived.”
“Seems reasonable. Maybe Katie pulled the same stunt she did with Roger Thoreson on some poor guy down in New Orleans, someone more inclined to kill her than he was to kill himself.”
“Mayb
e that makes more sense.”
“It’s certainly a simpler explanation than somebody from Prosperity harboring a grudge for five years before driving or flying all the way to New Orleans to do Katie in. I’ve made the arrangements for Katie’s body to be transported here. We could have her funeral the day after tomorrow, and then you can be on your way back home. Would that suit you?”
My curiosity about Katie had been satisfied. I called Farley and told him what I had learned. I also suggested that he might consider the possibility that Katie had been murdered by a disappointed suitor in New Orleans.
That done, I had little to occupy myself until Katie’s body arrived. Fortunately, Quincy had an excellent library. He left after breakfast the next day to make hospital visits. I foraged his bookcase until I found an interesting collection of stories. Then I settled in his living room to read.
The telephone rang around eleven o’clock. I hesitated answering it, since I was little more than a traveler using his home for shelter. Then I recalled that—as a minister—Quincy had to respond to any number of emergencies on a daily basis. The least I could do was take a message.
“Quincy Pressley’s residence,” I said.
“Could I speak with Reverend Pressley?” a woman asked. Her voice sounded dry and weathered.
“I’m sorry. He’s out. Can I take a message?”
“Who’s this?”
“I’m visiting with Reverend Pressley. He’s making hospital visits this morning. Any message for him, ma’am?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him that Inez Stillman called.”
I wrote her information on a pad next to the phone.
“Anything else?”
“No, just tell him that I hope his cousin is feeling much better. He hasn’t said anything about her, has he?”
“Not to me, ma’am.”
“And one more thing. Could you tell him I called to thank him for those delicious pralines he brought back from his trip?”
Something like an electric tingle began at the base of my skull. It was a signal that I’d long since learned not to ignore.
“Pralines, ma’am?”
“Yes, he brought them to me to apologize for canceling our dinner. He picked them up while visiting his sick cousin.”
