by Neely Tucker
Mr. Larrington shook his head, no, no. “It was a quiet scandal. No one really knew them. My father, he didn’t even mail the photograph to trigger the second payment. The insult he had been given, that we could not be trusted without photographic evidence. Outrageous. No, she was interred and that was all. Much more known in death than in life. My missus, she didn’t even know Mrs. Harper’s first name until she read in the obituary in the newspaper.”
Sully, starting to look up, to fire a final question or two, stopped, blinked. The obit. What kind of sorry reporter came to town looking for dead people and didn’t look up the obit?
TWENTY-FOUR
THE LINCOLN CITIZEN was an eight-page weekly, doing business in a tired one-story redbrick building between a hardware store and a card shop. It had a long storefront, most of it plateglass windows, and most of them had a sepia tone to them. When Sully was parking, he thought they were tinted, to keep the sun at bay. When he got on the cracked sidewalk, he could see that they were just old and had been dusty for so long that no amount of cleaning would make a good goddamn. The dirt, the dust, the grime had long since baked in.
The glass double doors were locked, but the interior lights were on. A heavyset man with a white dress shirt half untucked appeared in the hallway a moment after Sully knocked, then came to the door. His hair was disheveled and he looked like the worst Rotarian in town.
“Help you?” he said, opening the door halfway.
Sully, one hand buried in his pocket, straightened his shoulders, introducing himself and his employer, the name of the paper getting a raised eyebrow and a step back from the door, an unspoken invitation. Sully came inside, the air-conditioning turned up to the beef-hanging stage, thank God, the sweat-dampened shirt instantly going cold against his flesh. The man fell in beside him, pointing the way to his office, from which he’d just emerged, with a collegial flick of his thick wrist, the watch on it the size of a dinner plate. “We go to the printer’s tomorrow morning,” he said, “so this is my one late night of the week. John Edgar Jenkins. Everybody calls me John Ed. Family’s owned the Citizen since my dad bought it in ’57. Here, sit down and let me get you a card.”
Half an hour and two shots each from the Buffalo Trace bottle in John Ed’s drawer later, Sully felt like he’d returned to the land of the living. He was set up in the paper’s morgue, actually just the dimly lit back storeroom. It was a large open space, a concrete floor, with lots of boxes and barrels lined up along the walls and long rows of metal shelves covering the open area. On them were stacks and stacks of papers, going back to World War II, a double handful of each week’s edition, side by side and shelf by shelf. It was a fire hazard of breathless potential.
“We sell the back copies every now and again,” John Ed said. “Five dollars. People are forever wanting something from sometime about one of their people.”
John Ed said he’d been going through them since he was a teen, tracking down old copies for customers. So it didn’t take him any time at all to skim along the row of papers from the summers of 1972 and 1973, taking one copy of each, then plunking them down on a sagging wooden table in the corner of the room, setting off a small cloud of dust. Flapping open the first of the papers, he pointed out that the obits ran on page six, right across from the comics on page seven. He said they didn’t report suicides, even now, so he doubted there would be a news story from the Harper incident, but there might be an obituary.
“Holler, you need me,” he said, heading back to his office, running his hand through his hair, slouching from the shoulders down. “We ain’t ready when the printers come, we got to pay extra.”
There was a little triangular rubber wedge on the floor, and he scooted it around with his foot until it was under the door frame. It propped open the door to the main newsroom, such as it was, and, with a small screech of the door grating on the concrete, Sully was alone with the research.
* * *
The smell came over him, unfolding one paper, then another, turning the pages, the must and the sense of passing of time in still rooms. They were oddly addictive, old newspapers, especially in little towns. They felt and read like diaries from another time, something secret that you had stumbled across in your grandfather’s closet after the funeral. The stories were kind and decent, fuzzed by familiarity and not bothered by the news of the larger world. There were no major investigative pieces, or small ones, either. Everybody knew everybody anyway, and nobody really wanted anybody fired from City Hall, not really, unless they were just drunks and incompetents and still that just meant people would pray for them all the harder in Sunday School, or just say, “Bless his heart,” and go on to something else. You certainly didn’t hang the dirty laundry out on the front page of the weekly for God and everybody to read.
Week by week, and page by page, he flipped through the journalistic record of Lincoln County, the pages brittle and going brown. He didn’t expect to find anything in particular, but this was the one newspaper of record where Terry Waters and George Harper had lived when they were boys, before they were trying to hide anything. Maybe Mrs. Harper had been at one of the ladies’ functions. Maybe the old man made a local business deal or turned up at the Rotary lunch on the first Monday.
“No Rain for Three Weeks,” ran a 1-A headline from late summer of ’72. “County Commission Votes on Sewer Rates.” “Governor to Speak at Cattleman’s BBQ.” He went through them, a page at a time, from May to the first week of September, and there was nothing in the summer of any note, except that the boys’ football team had made it to the state playoffs the previous year and hopes were high for this year’s team, which was starting two-a-days the next week. Nothing in ’73, either.
He put them back, calling out to John Ed that it must be ’71 or ’74, and John Ed hollered back to make himself at home.
It was near the end of going through the papers from ’71 when he turned to page six and felt a jolt buzz up his spine. “Mrs. William Harper,” ran the small headline at the bottom left of the obit page, one of three that week. He didn’t breathe, swallowing it as much as reading it.
Mrs. William Harper passed away last week at her home in Lincoln County, just west of Prague on the Old Schoolhouse Road, Sheriff Bobby Lewis said.
Mr. and Mrs. Harper have been part-time residents of the county for a few years. Mr. Harper is in the oil business near Wichita Falls, the sheriff said, and the family has a place on the reservoir.
Mrs. Harper, Miriam to her friends, was known to be quiet and devout, and seldom went out without her husband. She died suddenly, the sheriff said.
The Harpers’ grandson, George, often spent summers here with them. They had a daughter, Frances, who lives in Washington, D.C., the sheriff said.
Mrs. Harper was sixty-eight. She is to be interred at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in a private service. There was no word from the family about donations or memorials.
That was it, five homey paragraphs, all attributed to the sheriff, but the words glowed like burning coals. George. Miriam. Frances, who had been living in Washington, D.C.
“Shit,” he said, standing up and flipping the paper shut. What had Terry Waters brayed in court? Miriam.
But he couldn’t go. He couldn’t run for the plane. Instead, he was staring at the sports page, the back of the paper, that now lay open in front of him.
Summer-league baseball had wrapped up and there were the pictures of each of the local teams, each posed on a dusty field with scrubby grass and a half-ass wooden dugout in the background. Eight teams. The layout was such that the pictures took up the entire page.
The seventh picture, in the bottom left corner, was the team photo for People’s Bank. The boys were in two lines, kneeling in front, standing in back, just ten of them. Dark-colored shirts, hats askew. Two of them wore jeans. Some wore shorts. In the back row, a name flickered across his vision.
Terry Waters.
&
nbsp; He looked up at the image, frozen, to see a skinny boy with black hair, his cap jammed down on his head, the brim obscuring the top half of his face, biting his lower lip to try to keep from laughing. Leaning into Waters’s right shoulder was a slender, black-haired kid with three bats slung over his shoulder, no hat on his head, the slugger with a touch of preadolescent swag.
“George Harper,” read the caption.
Sully leaned forward, not breathing, staring at the image until it dissolved into a million tiny gray dots. The man shooting in the Capitol, lying on Mass Ave., singing in Superior Court. There was no doubt.
“I ain’t got a lot,” he whispered to the picture, tapping it with his index finger, “but, sweet pea, I got you.”
Still staring, he hollered out loud. “Hey, John Ed?”
“Whoo.”
“You know when the last flight from Tulsa goes wheels up, brother?”
TWENTY-FIVE
“WE ABSOLUTELY CAN’T print it, and even if we could, I don’t know that we should,” Eddie was saying, leaning over his desk, looking down at the brittle broadsheet laid out in front of him. “It’s not enough. Not yet. I’ll give you strong facial similarities, I’ll give you circumstantial.”
“Agreed,” Sully said.
“But I can’t give you, and no one would, beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Miriam,” said Sully.
Eddie, still leaning forward, said, “That comes pretty close. I’ll give that to you, too. But we’re still fucked.”
“No argument here.”
“This woman in the house, Elaine, the Waters’ neighbor. Do you see any way to verify her story?”
“None that I didn’t already do,” Sully said. “But for what it’s worth, I absolutely believed her. Can’t see a motive for her to lie. Like I said to R.J., on the phone out there, coming up with that story on the fly? I just don’t see it.”
Nine fifteen in the morning, Sully, bleary-eyed, sipping on black coffee with a ton of sugar, Eddie, R.J., Paul, and Melissa in Eddie’s glass-walled office, the door closed but the newsroom yet to populate for the day.
R.J. shifted in his chair, his pants up over his ankle-high socks, showing pale calf, not caring, weighing in again. “No, but we don’t have to know why. Maybe she didn’t like you. Or palefaces in general. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she’s really Terry Waters’s aunt. Who knows. She won’t even put her name on it.”
“But,” said Eddie, “what this does do is screw us over, in at least the short term. We’re supposed to, on one hand, keep calling this guy ‘Terry Waters’ in print, while we’re thinking that’s wrong? It’s not journalistic malpractice, but it’s . . . troublesome.”
And then R.J. was talking about good faith, glancing over at Sully, that the paper was working in good faith, we had a lead on a story of interest and we were checking it out, as any responsible news-gathering outfit would do, verifying it before publication, the lines of due diligence being laid out, getting some air, everyone nodding.
“Okay,” Eddie said. “Okay. If, if this guy in jail is not Terry Waters but is this putz George Harper, why doesn’t law enforcement know? Wouldn’t fingerprints iron that out?”
“You don’t get fingerprinted,” Sully said, “unless you’re arrested. There’s no record Terry Waters was ever arrested.”
“What about Harper?”
“Susan, over in research, I called her last night on the way to the airport in Tulsa, and got her started on the Harper family. LexisNexis, Accurint, Accutrack. Granddad, that’s William, is probably going to be our best bet since he was in business somewhere in north Texas and was living life aboveboard. From there, we should be able to get George, his mother, other relatives, neighbors.”
Eddie let out a sigh at that and sat down. “Jesus. This guy pretends to be a dead Native American and says his dead grandmother is going to kill a D.C. Superior Court magistrate.” It was just an observation, not meant to prompt any response, but it hung over the room. Sully fighting back a headache, the lack of sleep catching up with him.
R.J., his face pinched, took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, suddenly looking old. Paul, one of those guys at the gym at 6:15 five days a week, reading the Times on the stationary bike, looked like a million. He was writing on his legal pad, no doubt sketching out assignments for his National staff. Melissa was, for once, looking like this was something they should pursue rather than trying to convince Eddie that Sully had gone off the deep end. She sensed that Eddie was thinking, thus offering a break in the conversation for a lower editor to chip in.
“Frances, the mom?” she said. “Were you able to get anything else on her? Can we get how she died? Isn’t that what this guy is pissed about? Maybe that’s the link to Representative Edmonds.”
Sully held his hands up, hey, don’t shoot. “No. No time. I mean, I left that office out there and drove like hell for Tulsa. Left everything at the hotel. Last flight heading east was to Detroit. That connected to Minneapolis. That got me into Dulles this morning about an hour after midnight. I gave the name, though, to Susan, with George’s. She’s working it.”
“Any word on the dad?”
“None.”
She nodded. “You mind letting us in Metro chase that end? Keith is really good with records, the courts. Any leads, he’ll call them in to me. He’ll run down Frances, or, if there’s multiple possibilities, I can assign a warm body to each one. Anything to pass on, we will.”
This politeness from her, this jumping in on the effort, what did you even do with that? Whatever. The sleep deprivation was making everything blurry around the edges. “Keith’s great, sure,” he said. “This thing has too many tentacles anyhow. George, that baseball picture I came across? He was in the ten- to twelve-year-old league. That would put him born in 1959 to 1961. Frances, she could have been anywhere from eighteen to what, maybe forty when he was born?”
“Which would make her sixty-something now. Maybe seventy, seventy-five.”
“Possibly still alive,” Eddie said.
“Sure,” R.J. said, “and if living here, might have provided home and shelter to sonny boy. This thing could be right the hell under us.”
“He certainly wasn’t living under an overpass,” Melissa said. “I’ve had half the staff in every homeless shelter and soup kitchen in town.”
Paul finally looked up from his notebook, that shark-glint to the eyes. “Eddie, for National? The best line of inquiry here is the old one: the man’s ties to Edmonds. We were looking for Terry Waters before. Nobody was looking for a George Harper. Maybe Frances Harper. Maybe we were looking in the right place with the wrong name.”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
“We know, at least we think we know, that there were no threatening calls, or letters, or what have you, to the congressman’s office from anyone, no matter the name,” Paul said, looking back down at his legal pad; he’d made summarized notes. “He wasn’t getting any extra security, his staff didn’t know of anything. His schedule was public knowledge, on his Web site. So it wouldn’t have been all that difficult to know, at least in a general way, to know he was meeting with the Speaker’s staff that afternoon.”
“What about his family?”
Paul shrugged. “Closed off. No statements, no interviews. The funeral, it was just accolades and sorrow. That’s been the only time his wife, the daughter, have been in public.”
Eddie unclasped and clasped the band of his Rolex, looking around the room at each of them. “All that’s great. Do it. Full bore. But that’s not job number one. Job number one is who the hell is the individual being eval’ed over at St. E’s right now, and what do we call him in the paper. Now. How do we find that out?”
It sat in the air like dead weight.
“Easy,” Sully said, finally. “Walk up behind him, say, ‘Hey George,’ and see if he jumps.”
&nbs
p; Eddie folded his arms across his chest and tucked his chin down and tilted his head slightly to the side, irritation rising across his face.
“Our boy is currently being held in the heavily secured grounds of one of the most notorious mental hospitals in the United States. He is, further, in the most secured building on that godforsaken campus, on the lockdown ward of the hall for the criminally insane. How, exactly, do you plan to just walk up to him and say, ‘Hey, George?’”
Sully had seen this coming since he’d pulled out of the motel in Stroud the night before, blowing the rental up Interstate 44. It had come to him in its simple brilliance.
He nodded, more to himself than Eddie. “I got a guy for that,” he said.
TWENTY-SIX
SLY HASTINGS SAID he had two words for the idea, then, wait, no, it was three: “Oh, hell no.”
“You always telling me you go up to St. E’s all the time,” Sully said, “that your mom used to take you to see her brother, dear old Uncle Reggie—”
“You the one needs to be locked up in there.”
“—and you still go, look in on him and all, ’cause your momma made you promise.”
“You going to do a lot better in life, you don’t mention my momma to me,” Sly said. He fiddled with a toothpick. “The thing about that place, it’s not hard to get in, never has been. But it always used to fuck with me, being a kid, you know, getting back out. They close them gates and shit, who’s to say they won’t call you as crazy as the rest of ’em?”
They were sitting at the usual meet-up, Kenny’s BBQ Smokehouse on Eighth and Maryland Avenue on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from Sully’s house. They sat at a steel table with an umbrella in the shade. It was muggy, overcast, a few hours after he’d left the meeting at the paper. Felt like rain. Sully had been working on Sly with the idea since three in the afternoon, and now it was coming up on five.
