I joined the cop. He had a lovely blond mustache and short blond hair mostly covered by a brown cap. He might have been in his mid-twenties. He wore a tan shirt that emphasized great pecs. He barely took notice of me but kept staring at the backseat of the car.
I tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t move.
“I found the body,” I said.
“Was he dead?” the cop asked.
“When I found him? Yes.” I thought it best not to add that “I found the body” implies that it was dead when I discovered it. I was extremely tired, but I wanted to stick with a general policy of quiet cooperation and compliance.
He just kept staring at the body. Since the cop’s responses seemed to be limited, I strolled over to the medical people. One woman and two men.
“Shouldn’t we try to revive him?” one asked.
“You can tell he’s dead.”
“I know he’s dead.”
“We should do something. He’s the sheriff. He can’t just be dead.”
“Can’t be much deader.”
“Y’all see a point in attaching electrodes, starting transfusions, or inserting IVs? Blood would just flow right out again.”
That they could recognize dead when they saw it I thought was a plus.
Another cop car drove up. A very slender, dark-haired guy got out. He seemed to be about the same age and height as the blond.
“What’s up, Harvey?” he said to the blond.
Harvey pointed. “Sheriff’s dead.”
The new guy walked up to the car, opened the back door, lifted the sheriff’s head, and whistled. He rejoined Harvey. “He’s dead all right.”
I was pleased at this new confirmation of the obvious.
“This is gonna be big news,” the dark-haired one said. “Every official in the county is gonna want to be in on this one.”
I wasn’t sure which one I wanted to interrogate me. The dark-haired one’s hips were narrow and his shoulders broad, but the blond had lovely muscles. I doubted they’d let me choose.
Mostly I stood around as a crowd gathered and what must have been half the officials in the county examined either the body, the car, the ground, or all of the above, in general doing everything but preserving the integrity of the crime scene. Several herds of demented elephants on their morning stampede couldn’t have obscured the evidence any more than these people did.
No one suggested we adjourn to a nice air-conditioned car or building to avoid the heat and humidity, already unpleasant at this hour.
Around ten a lean, grizzled man with dark circles under his eyes drove up. He wore a very light gray suit and tie. His full head of hair was cut short and was totally white.
Everyone stepped back and allowed him space. They waited for him to speak. He barely looked at the backseat of the rental car. The first thing he said was, “Cody, cordon off this area. Move all the people back, including the doctors and nurses.” The brown-haired guy moved to obey. So Cody was the name of the slender broad-shouldered one. The older man put his hands on his hips, gazed at the sky, the surrounding buildings, finally the pavement and the car. He saw me and walked over.
“You found the body?”
I hadn’t seen anybody tell him. Somehow word got around in this town as if everybody had their own Burr County CNN antenna attached inside their skull.
I nodded.
“I’m Wainwright Richardson, the county coroner.” He did not offer his hand to be shaken. “I take over when the sheriff is incapacitated. I’ll be handling the investigation. I want you to give your statement to Harvey.” He pointed to the blond.
At this moment Scott approached me from across the hospital parking lot.
“How’s your dad?” I asked.
“Still breathing on his own. Shannon and Hiram are with him. They told me Peter was dead. What happened?”
“I found the sheriff in the back of our rent-a-car. Rent-a-corpse? Whichever. He was very dead.”
Harvey strolled over. I liked the way he hooked his thumbs on either side of his oversized buffalo-head belt buckle. He pointed at me. “I want to talk to you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said to Scott. “I’ll be fine. Get back to your dad.” Scott hesitated. “It’s okay,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”
He still hesitated, but Harvey placed his hand on my elbow, less than a yank but more than gently, and led me toward a cop car.
I was sweating in the morning heat. The parking lot had no shade, and I could already feel warmth from the concrete radiating through my shoes.
We sat in the front seat. He took a hand-sized note pad from the dashboard.
“Can you turn the air-conditioning on?” I asked.
“Listen, faggot, everybody knows what happened yesterday between you and the sheriff. If I can hang this on you, I will.”
The towering anger triggered by that kind of unfairness ran smack into my cooperation vow and my good sense. Calm was absolutely essential at this point. I said, “Officer, I’m willing to do anything I can to help. I found the body. I had no reason to kill him. I barely knew him. I’ve been at the hospital all night. It would help me if you didn’t address me as ‘faggot.’”
“I don’t give a shit what would help you. The sheriff was my coach in high school and my friend. He helped me get this job. He’s dead and I’ll call you anything I want. Just answer my questions.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Don’t start that lawyer shit with me. Just talk. I want everything you did last night in order.” He held his hand poised with pen over pad.
So I told him. Just to be nasty, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to snatch glimpses of his polyester-covered crotch. This is a great way to make a straight man feel uncomfortable. Once he caught my glance and quickly looked away.
By the time we were finished, I’d sweated through the back of my shirt and the seat of my pants. The window on my side faced the east and the sun shone in on me. The open window let in what little breeze there was.
Harvey flipped his notebook shut. “Stay there,” he growled. He got out and walked directly to the coroner.
During the interrogation someone had been taking crime-scene photos and another person dusted for fingerprints.
I gazed at the assembled mass of gawkers. More vehicles had arrived, including an ambulance and one more cop car. Twenty-five feet away a crowd of thirty or forty people stood behind yellow crime-scene tape. As each new spectator arrived, the car where the body still sat in the heat was pointed out and then fingers would swing in my direction.
I saw Clara Thorton in earnest conversation with Wainwright Richardson.
Minutes later I spotted Scott trying to enter through the police cordon, but Cody stopped him. No one seemed to be noticing me, so I got out of the car. I strolled over to Scott.
“News on your dad?” I asked.
“I was just upstairs. Nothing. You look miserable.”
“I’ve been sweating in that damn car.”
Several officers noticed us and pointed. Cody, Harvey, Clara, and Wainwright moved toward us. The crowd behind the police cordon surged in our direction. I saw teenagers and little kids on bikes, older women in sun hats, young men and women in jeans, and elderly couples in khakis. I guess there isn’t an approved gawker-at-tragedy uniform.
I observed the approaching mass of officialdom. “It’s the cavalry,” I said, “and I don’t think they’re riding to the rescue.”
Over their shoulders I could see Sheriff Woodall’s body being placed in a body bag and into an ambulance.
“What’s happened so far?” Scott asked.
“I was questioned. They should be done. I never got your stuff from the house.”
“No big deal.”
When the group of officials arrived, Richardson said, “Mr. Mason, we’ll want you to come down to the police station to sign a statement. We also will have a few more questions.”
This had gone on just about lo
ng enough. I said, “I’ll want a lawyer present, and I’ll need to make some calls.”
The three others looked at Richardson. He gripped his chin in his hand, nodded slowly, and said, “We’ll decide that when we get to the station.”
I didn’t like the sound of that and began a protest. So did Scott, but two cops positioned themselves on either side of me. They didn’t cuff me, but I wasn’t free to leave, either.
“I’ll get you out,” Scott called to me.
“Call Todd Bristol,” I shouted back. Todd was our lawyer in Chicago. I was beginning to dislike this big-time.
I was placed in the backseat of Cody’s police car. He did not turn on the air-conditioning, but the rush of the wind through the open windows as the car moved gave some relief.
I said, “So, Cody, how ’bout them Braves?”
“Shut up, asshole.”
Tension-relieving chatter was not Cody’s long suit.
The drive of a few blocks took only moments. Cody led me up the steps of the police station. It was two stories tall, with four windows on both sides of the front door. The woodwork around them was painted white. It could have used another coat. Inside, the linoleum floors were faded yellow with black flecks. Pine, stained dark brown, covered the walls halfway to the ceiling; the upper portion was painted pale beige. The first floor was basically one large room with offices around the sides, separated by glass partitions that reached only three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. A reception desk was immediately to the left as I walked in, staffed by a gray-haired woman answering the phone. A low wooden railing separated the reception area from the rest of the fifty-by-fifty-foot space.
Two African-American men in cop uniforms stood off to my left on the far side of the room. Four white people in plainclothes worked at various desks on the other side of the railing. I noticed potted plants and pictures of families on desktops. One desk had a typewriter with a yellow rubber duck on top—it had the friendliest face of anybody or thing in the place.
I was fingerprinted and subjected to paperwork being filled out. All the people talked more slowly than I was used to in Chicago. For a few of them I wanted desperately to reach over and press their fast-forward button. It didn’t seem like they’d ever get done speaking. Everyone was reasonably polite, but nobody moved a speck above slow, as if time were theirs to play with. All this took until after twelve. Finally, they led me up stairs that were immediately behind the reception desk. I saw a hallway as dreary as the space below. They put me in the first room on the right.
It was not a suite at the Ritz. The best thing about it was that there were no rats or crawling critters visible. There was a chair, but one of the legs was slightly shorter than the other, which made sitting in it annoying. The table in the center of the room could have been shellacked and made into a shrine to the criminals who had carved their initials, names, what I hoped were nicknames, and obscene graffiti into it. The window had wire mesh on the inside.
Nobody stayed in the room with me. For comfort I finally moved the table against a wall and sat on top of it. I waited and wondered. No doubt in my mind that I was a suspect. I tried the door. Locked. I decided if there was a fire I could batter the table or chair through the mesh on the window and jump two flights down. They hadn’t taken my wallet, watch, other valuables, or shoelaces.
There was no air-conditioning and I had no way to remove the wire mesh and open the window to get some fresh air. At first I sweated a fine mist of damp all over my body. Then I started to drip. An hour later, when rivers of moisture were running off me and with my worries mounting, Wainwright Richardson came in.
I neither gave nor got a cheery greeting. He refused my first and all subsequent requests for water. Richardson took the chair, turned it backwards, and straddled it. He had to lean forward so the short chair leg rested on the ground. I guess it doesn’t do to rock back and forth while grilling a suspect.
“You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.
“I want my lawyer.”
“Don’t you start that with me. We aren’t up north. We take our slow time down here and we do things right.”
“If you’re doing things right, you’re tracking the sheriff’s movements from last night, finding out who saw him last, seeing if there were any witnesses for this morning, checking to see who had grudges against him. I want my lawyer.”
“You talk a lot for somebody in so much trouble.”
“I’m just enchanted with the luxury of the surroundings and the charm of my hosts.”
“Why’d you kill him?”
“I want my lawyer.”
“Now, we’re not getting anywhere this way. You need to talk to me.”
“I want my lawyer.”
As his questioning continued, my responses didn’t vary much from “I want my lawyer” and “I don’t know why you keep asking me things—I want my lawyer.” Kind of a dull conversation, but I was beginning to move from worried to scared.
After an hour of this I said, “You have nothing to hold me on. I’m leaving.”
I got up, walked to the door, and tried the handle. It was still locked.
“You’re staying here,” he said quietly.
“No, I’m not.” But I think he knew my bluster was for naught.
He said, “Your boyfriend may be rich, but down here we take murder seriously. Don’t have much crime in this county, and we don’t like strangers coming in and causing trouble.”
“Are you a throwback?” I asked. “Is this Mississippi Burning?”
“What’s that?”
“A movie. Look, I know I haven’t crossed any international boundaries. You people might not like me because I’m gay, but you must read the papers. The world is changing. You can’t just lock somebody up and throw away the key. Eventually there will be lawyers and publicity involved with this.”
“We’ll handle any problems.” He knocked three times on the door. Harvey, the young blond cop, opened it. Richardson slipped out. I didn’t bother to rush them. I could see the headline: “Faggot Shot While Trying to Escape.”
Sweating before was as nothing now as the heat of the day stretched into late afternoon. Outdoors had been stifling. Inside was beastly. During the next hour, I took my shoes and socks off, let my shirt hang open, and contemplated stripping down to my shorts. For the hour after that, hunger and especially thirst became massively important as I tried to think of all the long cool drinks I’d ever had. The third hour had me in my underwear. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall. I shut my eyes and must have dozed, because I woke with a start as somebody rattled the doorknob. I did not leap to my feet. I wanted a drink of something and didn’t care who saw me nearly naked.
The door opened and I thought, this is the end. The man who stood in the door looked like the warden from the movie Cool Hand Luke, only this guy must have been in about his sixties. He was a mousy guy with a hat, a short-sleeve shirt, hands on his hips, and an arrogant air. I glanced over his shoulder for a man in mirrored sunglasses who would be toting a shotgun.
I expected him to speak in a reedy-whiny voice, the first words of which would be, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
He gazed around the room, caught sight of me on the floor, and said to someone behind him, “Get this man some water, and I want a fan in here now!”
He propped the door open with his briefcase, bent his pudgy frame down next to me, and offered me his hand. “You okay, son?” he asked.
“Think I’ll sit until the water gets here,” I said.
He nodded and went to the door. A pitcher of water, a glass, and a fan were brought in by a lanky teenager. “Thank you,” my savior said. The kid scuttled out.
He poured me water and handed me the glass. I gulped greedily.
“I’m Beauregard Lee,” he said. “Call me Beau. I’m a lawyer. I got a call from Todd Bristol. We went to law school together. Don’t tell him I told you, but he was my first lover back when dinosaur
s ruled the world.”
He plugged the fan in and aimed it so the breeze hit me directly. I drained the water from the glass, poured myself another.
“Took me a while, because I had to drive down from Atlanta, and I can’t stay long. I’ve got to get back for a huge case tomorrow, and I don’t do criminal law, but Todd said you were a sister, and I know how these backwoods towns can be. The death of the sheriff was on all the news stations.”
“I haven’t been charged with anything yet.”
“Not from lack of trying.”
“Huh?” I felt somewhat better. I reached for my pants, stood up, and pulled them on. Beau looked disappointed but didn’t comment.
He said, “The only thing these people have done all day is try and tie you to the murder. Every step you and Scott have taken since you got here has been investigated. What they don’t have is direct evidence linking you to the murder.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“I understand. They don’t. They know you’re gay and you’re a stranger. You corrupted their favorite son. Led him to Sodom.”
“He was more than willing.”
“Yes, but they don’t want to know that, or won’t accept it. The big cities and evil ways have stolen him from them. There is a lot of affection for Scott Carpenter in this town, as you can imagine. I remember as he was growing up reading about him in the Atlanta papers as all-state everything. He was gorgeous then.”
“How is he?”
“He’s been downstairs most of the afternoon. He’s been trying to get to see you.”
“How’s his dad?”
“I don’t know. I told him to go back to the hospital and that I’d call him as soon as something developed here.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“The only thing that’s stood in the way of you being arrested, so far as I can tell, is that the district attorney is a young fella just out of law school.”
“And he isn’t as prejudiced and narrow-minded as these others?”
“He’s a part-time preacher at the local Evangelical Christian Reformed Nazarene church.”
Rust on the Razor Page 6
