by Attica Locke
“That looks like a white sandwich board.”
The girl sucked her teeth and turned the page.
Geneva saw Randie and said, “Can I help you?”
The girl turned and immediately took an interest in the stranger. She studied Randie from head to toe, the black jeans, the fine linen T-shirt rolled at the elbows, the tiny gold hoops she was wearing. “I like your hair,” she said.
Randie gave a faint nod, but Darren wasn’t altogether sure she’d heard the girl. She was staring at the cafe’s insides. The Christmas calendars and the rusting license plates. The jukebox lit up with the color blue. Lightnin’ Hopkins making his guitar cry, while across the cafe’s linoleum floor, the barber, the middle-aged, fair-skinned black man, ran a pair of clippers along the hairline of a teenage boy. The smell of hair grease mixed with the smell of bacon grease coming out of the kitchen, and Darren felt his tongue thicken, could almost feel the pork fat coat the insides of his mouth. For reasons that made no sense to him, Randie still had that camera hanging off her shoulder, keeping it close. Darren felt her hand twitch toward it, felt her instinct to put a filter between her and the thing right in front of her, to create distance between herself and the small-town folks in East Texas. She looked like a tourist, but Geneva knew better.
“You from Dallas?” the girl said eagerly.
“No, Faith, she ain’t from Dallas,” Geneva said, looking not so much at Randie as at the man who had walked in behind her. “Ain’t that right, Ranger?”
Darren nodded in her direction. “Ma’am,” he said.
“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but I don’t cotton to people lying to my face, young man, not in my place of business.”
“Just doing my job, ma’am, the way I know how.”
“You could have said something when you were in here yesterday, but you came in here, no badge, ain’t said a word about Ranger this or that, knowing I took you for a customer. You let them send you in here to blend in with us, thinking we’d say something in front of you we wouldn’t in front of Van Horn.”
“Nobody sent me, ma’am,” Darren said. “And if you’re willing to answer a few questions, maybe I can help you out with the sheriff and keep him at bay.”
“Missy Dale wasn’t nowhere around here Sunday night, and Van Horn knows it. That’s my statement, top to bottom.”
“You can talk to him or you can talk to me.”
“I’ll take my chance with the devil I know,” Geneva said.
It stung, Darren could admit, to be held in such ill regard by this woman for whom he was only trying to do some good. The apron, the scent of the food surrounding Geneva, the discerning gaze—it was a tableau of black maternal warmth that tickled a hunger in Darren that he sometimes forgot was there. The most his mother had served him out of her kitchen was cans of Pearl beer. He’d had his first drink at her feet, in fact, on the steps of her trailer. He was thirteen, and by then Clayton was teaching con law at UT in Austin and spending most of the work week up there. Left on his own for days at a time, he’d ride his bike to his mother’s place, something Clayton would have frowned upon. Bell would let him have one beer for every four or five she had, and they would talk—about school, which she’d pretend to listen to, and about girls, which interested her much more. Bell was a romantic, and she wanted her son to be a gentleman. You make sure you buy her dinner before, she said repeatedly, looking out for a future sweetheart whom Darren couldn’t even imagine at the time. Clayton sent him to high school in Houston as much to give him a four-star education as to get him the hell away from his mother’s influence. But it held just the same. The night he had sex for the first time—with Lisa, then his girlfriend—he spent every cent he’d ever saved at a chain restaurant at West Oaks Mall. Whatever you want.
He heard a voice behind him say loudly, “That’s mine.”
It was a bark that came out of Randie’s mouth, and both Darren and Geneva turned, Darren utterly uncomprehending of what had just happened, why Randie looked like she’d seen a ghost, why her breathing had changed.
“That’s mine,” she said again. She was staring at the booth farthest from the door, which had its own mini decor. The wall above it was papered with concert bills from blues shows fifty years old. Lightnin’ Hopkins at the Eldorado Ballroom, in Houston. Albert Collins headlining a Third Ward revue. Bobby “Blue” Bland on stage with a new band in Dallas. A show at the Club Pow Pow featuring Joe “Petey Pie” Sweet. And just above the booth, on a low shelf, sat a 1955 Gibson Les Paul, the blond wood scratched and fading on one side. This is what had Randie spooked—what Darren now saw had her hands shaking.
“I beg your pardon?” Geneva said.
“That’s from my house. It’s mine. I mean, it was Michael’s.” She walked toward the booth, reaching to grab the guitar on the shelf.
“Don’t you dare.”
Randie heard something in Geneva’s voice that stopped her cold.
“That belonged to my husband,” the older woman said. “And it’s gon’ stay right there.”
She dropped condiment packets in the box of food, then lifted the whole thing and started across the cafe. She asked Huxley if he had any mail to get out, then hollered at Faith on her way to the door. “You coming?” she asked.
Faith rolled her eyes. “Waste of food,” she said softly.
“She’s still your mama,” Geneva said, to which Faith gave no reply.
The bell on the door jingled as Geneva headed out. Darren reached for the woman’s arm, grabbing her wrist. He felt bone through her papery skin.
“Just tell me, ma’am. Just tell us if Michael Wright was here.”
Geneva looked at him and said, “You saw the guitar, didn’t you?”
With that she pushed past him and out the door, the bell tinkling behind her. Outside, he heard the engine of her Pontiac kick into gear. He watched for a few seconds as she steered the boat of a car around toward the highway, pulling out and taking off down 59. “Where is she going?” Darren asked. Huxley raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Faith sighed and closed her bridal magazine.
“Gatesville,” she said.
“Gatesville?”
Darren didn’t know a soul who went to Gatesville for any reason other than to visit someone in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The town had eight prisons, five of which housed only women.
“She going to see someone on the inside?”
Faith stood and said, “My mama been in Hilltop Unit for two years.”
She walked to the large mirror all the way on the other side of the cafe, squeezing past the barber’s chair and the man cutting hair to look at her reflection. She lifted her wavy hair and piled it on the top of her head, then turned to Randie, the fashionable woman from out of town. “What you think? With some baby’s breath on top? Rodney’s saying he’ll pay for me to get it professionally done in Timpson before the wedding.”
In Geneva’s absence, Randie went for the guitar. She crossed to the far booth, sliding in and kneeling on the cushion so she could reach the Les Paul on the shelf. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Huxley said, and again Randie froze. She looked at Darren, who shook his head softly. They needed Geneva. He watched as Huxley closed his newspaper and tucked it under his arm. “Betty’ll have my tail if I don’t get home for lunch at least one day this week,” the older man said.
Darren asked him, “Were you here on Wednesday, sir?”
“I’m always here.”
“Did you see my husband?” Randie said.
Huxley stood and looked at her. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. But the answers to what happened to your husband ain’t around here. All I know, he came in around five, six in the evening, ate a little piece. Wednesdays is catfish. He and Geneva talked some, but Tim and I was in a card game, and I wasn’t listening much. I heard something about him renting a room in her trailer back there, but he left, and then he just didn’t come back. And now they saying he was up
to that icehouse. That’s where y’all need to be looking at things.”
“But why?” Darren said, asking the question of Randie as much as of the old man. “Why would Michael just up and leave and go to the icehouse?” Of course Darren had done the same thing yesterday, hunting for a drink.
“I don’t know,” Huxley said. “But Lil’ Joe used to hang around that bar, and look what happened to him.”
“Leave my mama out of it,” Faith snapped.
“Who’s Lil’ Joe?” Darren asked.
From the mirror, Faith said, “My daddy.”
Before Darren could ask what had happened to Faith’s daddy and what her mother had to do with it, his cell phone dinged in his pants pocket. It was a text from Greg: sent u autopsy.
12.
HE TOLD Randie he had to make a call, mumbling something about his lieutenant, anything to grant him a few minutes alone to read the medical examiner’s report. He could not take in the information and protect her from it at the same time. He would tell her what he had to and no more. He left as a John Lee Hooker record dropped on the jukebox, and Randie sank into the booth below the guitar, staring at the Les Paul. Bluebird, bluebird, take this letter down South for me, Hooker sang as Darren opened the cafe’s front door, the bell clinking behind him. The air outside stung the sweat breaking out across his forehead. He stepped into the cab of his truck, warm from the midday sun. The file came attached to an e-mail that reported that Missy Dale’s final examination was still in progress at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office.
Darren opened the file on Michael Wright.
The pictures hit him first. Skin a waxy, purplish gray, body bloated beyond recognition as a member of the species known as man. The two days Michael had spent in the water—before being discovered by a white farmer on the other side of the bayou from the icehouse—had destroyed the body as well as a lot of the physical evidence, as was noted on the first page of the written report. But there was still visible trauma to the left side of Michael’s head at the time of the forensic exam, skin torn and bruised near his eye and a deep gash above his ear. He’d been beaten badly, enough to fracture his skull in two places, by blunt force from an object that was hypothesized to be about the width of a baseball bat but with defined edges, sharp enough to cut through skin, with enough force to break bone. The medical examiner, a woman named Aimee Kwon, noted that there were wood fibers embedded so deeply in the tissue around the injuries that, even though the body had been submerged in water for days, medical tweezers were required to remove them. They bore a resemblance to the pulp of unfinished pine but would require testing for the medical examiner to be certain. Because of the decomposition in the cranial cavity, the medical examiner could not be sure if the blow to Michael’s head would have immediately incapacitated him or if he would have been able to walk of his own accord to the bayou’s edge. His blood alcohol level was a .02, which means he’d had one drink, maybe not even finished it. Darren didn’t think alcohol was a factor, and neither did the medical examiner. She’d ruled it out. There was enough bayou water in Michael’s lungs to conclude that he’d drowned. But whether he’d fallen in the bayou on his own or been dragged to the water while unconscious was beyond the scope of the report. Absent more information from a Shelby County investigation, the manner of death was listed as undetermined. It was officially neither an accident nor a homicide. Darren, who’d stood in the shallow, muddy water, believed someone had to have dragged Michael’s limp, prostrate body and tossed it into the bayou. And now, more than ever, he believed he knew who that someone was.
* * *
He walked Randie through it as gently as he could. He steered her away from the pictures and most of the written report. He was surprised that she trusted him enough to not press the issue. She was as quiet as he’d ever heard her. She listened to his words, his recitation from memory of the autopsy findings. She nodded but asked very few questions. Laying her head against the passenger-side window at one point, she cried. She said nothing except that she thought she was going to throw up, but when she opened the door and leaned her head over the gray pavement, nothing came. There was no relief, and she retreated back inside the cab, wiping a thin line of spit from her bottom lip. Whatever emotional sickness was locked inside her continued to roil. She put her black ankle boots on the seat, lifting her knees so she could hug them tightly, making her body an anchor against a pain that was literally shaking her. Darren said her name softly: “Randie.” He went to touch her shoulder but stopped himself. “Let me take it from here, okay? There’s no reason for you to put yourself through this. Take your husband home and lay him to rest. I promise you I will find the person who did this to Michael.”
She released her knees and sat up straight. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Randie, I need you to let me do my job.”
“I’m not leaving until there’s an arrest. I’m not leaving him,” she said, as if Michael’s soul would stay in Lark forever if she didn’t see this through. She’d hardened again, and the anger calmed and focused her; it made the shaking stop.
“Fine. But there are some things I need to do on my own.” Randie shot him a look, a question implicit in the raise of her eyebrow. “I’m going back to that icehouse,” he said. “And you can’t just walk in there.”
“Neither can you.”
“I’m not going in.”
Since they’d left her rental car at the motel—where Darren was no longer welcome—he let her drive his truck, with strict instructions that she was to return to pick him up as soon as she got a text from him or after an hour had passed, whichever came first. She dropped him on FM 19, along the narrow patch of woods between the farm road and the icehouse. He hopped out of the Chevy and walked through the thicket of blackjack and post oak trees, edging sideways through the branches, leaves falling at his touch. He walked until he came to a clearing around back of the icehouse. Country music was coming through the bar’s walls and spilling outside. Waylon Jennings talking about starting over in Luckenbach, Texas. Darren listened for the sound of the Chevy’s engine fading but couldn’t hear anything above the twanged-up love song. He waited until he thought Randie was long gone.
There was a propane tank and a generator behind the icehouse, plus a smoker that had pine needles resting on top, the bottom having rusted out years ago. Next to a plastic lawn chair was an overturned paint bucket on top of which sat a chipped glass ashtray, the edge sharp enough to break skin. This close to the woods, the pine scent was sweet, but it was fighting a losing battle with the smell of trash and stale beer in the bottles piled inside a huge black trash can, dead flies stuck to the lid. Darren tucked a loose cigarette into his shirt pocket, and he waited. It was coming on three in the afternoon, and the sun had danced to the other side of the highway. Behind Jeff’s Juice House, a breeze swirled, lifting a few stray paper receipts no one had bothered to pick out of the knots of grass. There were small plastic ziplock bags on the ground, too, some old and ground into the dirt, small enough to hold buttons or loose change or rocks of crystal meth. Where the Aryan Brotherhood was present, drugs usually followed. Darren bent down and picked one up with his handkerchief, pocketing potential evidence. He kept an eye on the bar’s back door, and he waited.
To pass the time, he took out his phone and looked up Joe Sweet, whose name had been mentioned three times since Darren had rolled into town. Joe “Petey Pie” Sweet, according to his Wikipedia page, was born Joseph Sweet on a farm outside Fayette, Mississippi, in 1939, one of eleven children. His older brother, Nathan, taught him to play guitar, and by the time he was twelve, Joe was playing juke joints he wasn’t old enough to drink in. He left Mississippi with two of his brothers in the late fifties, settling first in Gary, Indiana, then later in Chicago, the mecca for Delta blues, homeboys from the Deep South bringing their music up north. Joe soon fell in with Muddy Waters and a young Buddy Guy, played in a band with Little Walter, and had a regular gig doing session work fo
r the Chess brothers. He toured some, joining Bobby “Blue” Bland’s group, but never broke out on his own. He stopped touring and recording in the late sixties, and he was killed in a robbery in Lark, Texas, in 2010, at the age of seventy-one. He had been married from 1968 until his death to Geneva Sweet. Together they had only one son, Joe Sweet Jr., who died in 2013.
Out of curiosity, Darren clicked on a few other pages and pulled up pictures of a dark-skinned black man who favored skinny ties and a close-cropped afro. Darren’s mind kept swirling back to something. We ain’t had nothing like this around here since Joe died. Followed by Tim asking provocatively, Which one? They were dead—Geneva’s husband and her son, Faith’s father.
Her two Joes, both gone.
The back door to the icehouse opened suddenly, and Darren looked up to see the bartender from last night step outside, lighting a smoke before she looked up and saw Darren. She didn’t break stride when she laid eyes on him, just exhaled a line of smoke through her nose and said, “You ain’t supposed to be back here. Brady sees you sniffing around, he’ll kick your ass and mine.”
“That your boss?”
“Wally’s the boss,” she said. “Brady’s just the manager.”
“He know what kind of people come in this bar?”
“I know he don’t want you coming in here.”
“I’m talking about the Brotherhood, ma’am,” he said, thinking that a woman like this—today wearing a mesh T-shirt over a dingy white tank top, more sores and pimples cascading down her neck—doesn’t hear the word ma’am on the regular and that a little deference wouldn’t hurt. “I’m talking about the dudes with the ABT tattoos in there, that big one who kicked us off the property last night.”
