Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  She held up her hands in front of her, the headlights making black shadows beneath her eyes, clouds of red dirt swirling at her feet. “No, Keith,” she said. The crescent moon wasn’t strong enough to muscle any light through the thick braid of pine trees and cottonwood, and the darkness beyond the circle of light around the two cars was absolute. “This ain’t what you think,” she said.

  The nigger came out of the car next.

  He said, “Just taking the lady home.”

  He wasn’t scared, not yet, and that inflamed Keith even more.

  He hopped out of the truck’s cab and went for the nigger, grabbing him by the collar and slamming him against the shiny black car, worth more than Keith made in the last two years combined. The man’s head hit the roofline of the car, and that’s when he got really scared; he was alone on a dark farm road with two white folks, one of whom had him by the throat. The panic on his face whetted Keith’s appetite for inflicting pain, and he hit the man square in the face. Behind him, Missy was yelling for Keith to stop. She ran from the other side of the car and beat two fists against his back. Keith hit the man again, with homicidal force. But the nigger didn’t go all the way down. In fact before he even hit the ground, something seemed to snap in his posture, a surge of stress chemicals tilting toward the fight side of the fight-or-flight scale. He came up swinging, and Keith can admit the nigger landed a few good pops across his head, not enough to leave a scratch but enough to keep Keith from being fooled by the man’s clothes, his smooth leather loafers. The nigger could fight, would get the best of Keith if he let him. Keith reached down and caught a handful of dirt and threw it in his eyes. It was a dirty trick, but with no witness besides Missy, Keith didn’t care.

  It was enough to give him the upper hand. He went at the man with both fists, pummeling him from all sides, punching until skin broke, until he felt bone, until he could see blood on his knuckles by the light of the truck’s headlamps.

  “Stop it, Keith,” Missy yelled, because the nigger could no longer speak for himself. Keith told his wife to get her nigger-loving ass in the truck right now. He stepped back a few feet, and both Missy and the nigger got the wrong idea, thought a retreat was in motion. She actually went to his side, tried to help the man to his feet. She didn’t see Keith head to the back of his Dodge, didn’t realize he’d fished a two-by-four from the truck bed until he was standing right over her and the man on the ground, telling Missy, “Get out the way.”

  He lifted the piece of solid wood and told the nigger to open his eyes. He wanted him to look at Keith when he said, “Stay the hell away from my wife.”

  “Damn it, Keith, don’t you dare.”

  The nigger spit blood in the dirt. He raised a hand in defense. “I was just driving her home, man,” he said, his voice a thick croak. “That’s all.”

  Keith was seconds from landing the bar of wood on the man’s skull when Missy jumped between them. “Do it and you’ll have to kill me, too. You might could explain one dead, but I know you ain’t smart enough to get out of two. ’Cause I’ll tell—don’t think I won’t.” The headlights were behind him, haloing his head, and Missy couldn’t see his eyes for the shadows. “This ain’t about Junior,” she said. “This don’t have nothing to do with that. He was just driving me home.” And when Keith still didn’t drop the weapon, she said, “You just got out, Keith.”

  The mention of the Walls cleared his head.

  He dropped the two-by-four, gave the nigger one last kick in the gut, and spit on his head. Then he grabbed Missy and yanked her ass to the truck. The BMW’s headlights were still on. They bore witness to Keith backing up the truck so he could turn around on the dirt road and head around the bend toward his cabin, farther up the road. The nigger was still breathing. “I swear.”

  “He’s lying,” Van Horn said. “Just like he’s been lying from the beginning about Missy. He all but confessed in there.” He’d unbuttoned the top of his shirt, and Darren could see how red his skin was, heating him from the inside out. Van Horn pulled a handkerchief from his slacks and wiped his brow.

  “He only copped to Missy’s murder,” Darren said.

  They were standing outside the interrogation room in a narrow hallway that shared the same chipped linoleum tiles, the same rows of too-bright fluorescent lights. Van Horn looked both chastened and relieved when he told Darren of his intention to have the district attorney file charges against Keith Dale.

  “He killed her to cover up for the other,” Van Horn said. “Then he put her body behind Geneva’s, knowing I’d think one of her people did it, mad about that other fellow. I didn’t know he had that much of the devil in him.”

  Darren couldn’t believe the words about to come out of his mouth.

  “I don’t think he did it,” he said. “At least not by himself.”

  Van Horn waved away the thought. “He killed that girl in cold blood.”

  “Missy, yes. But not Michael.”

  “You actually believe that shitheel?”

  “There’s somebody else.” Has to be. Brady came to mind. Something about their run-in out back of the icehouse was sitting wrong with Darren.

  “Wait a minute, now,” Van Horn said. “You was hollering about Keith Dale being good for this from the time you crossed the county line.”

  “But where’s the car?”

  “Who the hell knows? Maybe he drove it into the Trinity River for all I know or care. But there’s no way in hell he didn’t finish the boy that night.”

  “Unless he didn’t do it alone.”

  Van Horn shook his head and started down the hall, the heels of his black ropers clicking on the tiles, forcing Darren to follow him into his office, near the front of the station. Like the room Darren had sat in earlier while reading the grisly details of Missy Dale’s autopsy, it was paneled in wood. But Van Horn’s office was carpeted in a military gray that clashed with the cheap paneling. His desk was wide and pale oak and empty save for a phone, a brass paperweight, and the sandwich he had been eating when Darren walked into the station with Keith Dale in cuffs. It was homemade—deviled ham on thick slices of white bread, whisper-thin slices of tomato and red onion peeking out. There was a diet soda sitting beside it on the desk. Darren found himself scanning the room for family photos, looking for a ring on Van Horn’s left hand. Seeing neither, he got a sudden image of the sheriff standing over his kitchen countertop in his shorts at dawn, making his lunch, and it unnerved him in a way that he couldn’t quite put into words. He didn’t want to see a man in this room, couldn’t afford to see flesh behind that sheriff’s badge. Van Horn closed the door behind Darren.

  When the two men were alone, the sheriff said, “Look, you got the win. You brought him in, and folks ain’t gon’ forget that.”

  “Brady,” Darren started.

  “Who?”

  “The manager at the icehouse. He offered Keith a kill. Me. He offered me.” Darren felt his face flush at the mention of the incident. It was his lowest point as a Ranger, his lowest point as a man who’d been taught to stand his ground. “As an initiation into the Brotherhood.”

  “Look, I know you got a hard-on for the Brotherhood,” Van Horn said, shutting him down. “I know you got kicked off that task force—”

  “Not true.”

  “But this here is a domestic deal, that’s all. Keith Dale got his panties in a bunch over his gal out there with another”—he paused where one particular word wanted to come out of hiding, but then settled on—“black man, and he went crazy, beat his ass and killed him, and then he was afraid Missy was gon’ say something to somebody so he killed her to keep her quiet. This was a man with a wife he couldn’t control who was gon’ make sure he got the last word.”

  “But if he’d already killed Michael Wright, why would Brady have offered me as his chance to jump in the ABT? He should have already been initiated.”

  “You not listening, son,” Van Horn said. He stood behind his desk, looked at his half-eaten lunch,
then threw the whole thing in the trash. The sudden movement ignited the smell of the onions, and the air in the room soured. “Keith Dale is too chickenshit to be a member of the Brotherhood.” He said it as if Keith had failed to qualify for active duty in the Marines, as if being a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was some kind of badge of honor.

  “Look, I’m still point on this,” Darren said.

  “You were never point.”

  “The Rangers put me on the ground to investigate the murder of Michael Wright, and I have a duty to them and to my state to find the real killer.”

  “I’m ready to arrest Keith on both the Wright murder and Missy.”

  “You arrest Keith, and I’ll tell the DA myself the case is shit. You put this on trial and lose, it’ll look at best like you’re incompetent and at worst like you’re rushing to put this on Keith to avoid the ABT connection. And then you sure as shit will have the feds in this county before you can blink.”

  He knew that would get him. It seemed like any mention of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas operating in Shelby County spooked Van Horn to hell.

  “You want to let that boy walk out of here?”

  “Hold him on assault charges for that stunt at the lumberyard. Give me some time to put together stronger evidence. If it’s Keith, it’s Keith. But if it’s someone else got their hands in this thing, then give me time to find them.”

  “I hold him on assault charges, that means the only one I got for Missy’s murder is Geneva Sweet,” Van Horn said, “and she stays in lockup.”

  He thought of Geneva spending a night—alone, if she was lucky—in a rusty jail cell, a single cot chained to a cement wall, the floor cracked and stained with God knows what, bars not wide enough to stick a fist through. It had already been a few hours, but things would feel different come sundown, every sound in the night an ominous echo. He felt faintly ill at the thought of her spending the night there. He tried to remember what she was wearing. If the temperature dropped tonight, would those clothes be enough to keep her warm?

  “Look, you can arrest Keith for Missy,” he said. “I’m fine with that.”

  “Naw. You got me questioning everything now,” Van Horn said with a sly smile. It was the card he had, and he laid it down hard. “Geneva Sweet stays in jail. I got forty-eight hours till I have to put her before a judge.” He lifted the can of diet soda and downed whatever was swimming around the bottom of the can. He let loose a rough belch, then said plainly, “You got two days, Ranger.”

  20.

  THE COURTHOUSE steps were slick with leftover rain, and the clouds overhead had conspired to shut out the sun, blanketing the sky with gray. East Texas decided to give fall a chance this afternoon, and the air had cooled considerably. For the first time since he’d been in Shelby County, Darren felt he ought to be wearing a sport coat or even the windbreaker he kept locked in his truck. He felt a shiver of wind inch its way beneath the thin cotton of his shirt.

  He’d been trying to get in to see Geneva, to renew his promise that he was going to get her out of there; he just needed a little more time. But Van Horn had rescinded Darren’s visiting privileges, and he never made it past the deputies on the third floor. He was hurrying to get to his truck and get back to Lark when he saw the Tribune reporter—Chris Wozniak—and Randie stepping out of the reporter’s rental car, which was parked just a few spots from Darren’s pickup in the courthouse parking lot. When she saw him, Randie practically ran from the passenger side of the Buick, breaking away from the reporter. “Darren, what is going on?” She nodded toward Wozniak. “He said Geneva’s been arrested. For Missy. But then they brought in Keith Dale. Does that mean they’re arresting him for Michael?” She was trembling, either from the drop in temperature or a turn of events that both pleased and confused her. She was wearing the cashmere coat again. It was soiled about the shoulders, dirtied after a few days in East Texas.

  “I brought in Keith,” Darren said. “But look, there are still some moving parts. We don’t have all the facts at this point.” He was embarrassed by the need to speak to her in the language of a cautious press release. Darren had very nearly offered Keith Dale to her as a promise, as the answer to the question of what had happened to her husband. Keith was the man Darren would bring to justice, ending this nightmare, and it seemed cruel to take that away from Randie when he had nothing to offer in its place. Wozniak hardly acknowledged Darren and walked quickly past both him and Randie on his way to the front doors of the courthouse. Darren called out to stop him. “Wait,” he said. “Before you go in, there are some things you need to understand about what’s going on, Chris. I’d like to get more information before making any comment on the case.”

  It was more than he’d said to Randie, and she grabbed his arm roughly when she sensed he was soft-pedaling. “Hey,” she said. But he kept moving toward Wozniak. The man’s pants had dried into a wrinkled mess, and he was clutching the messenger bag at his side as if he honestly believed Darren might snatch it. It was then Darren realized that something had changed between him and Wozniak, who, inches from the courthouse doors, spun around to Darren.

  “I’m not dealing with the Rangers on this anymore.”

  “What?”

  “Let me get this straight…a double homicide with serious racial overtones, a sheriff’s department that initially gave short shrift to the killing of a black man, and the Texas Rangers send in an officer on suspension—”

  “I’m not on suspension.” But even as he asserted it, he wasn’t sure it was true. He was currently wearing the badge merely by permission, not by right. His future with the Rangers hung on a grand jury in San Jacinto County.

  “You know what I take from that?” Wozniak said. “That the Rangers were never really serious about getting to the bottom of this. You’re no better than the good ol’ boys out here. Actually you’re worse, ’cause you don’t even realize you’re being used.”

  His words hit Darren in his gut, a sucker punch that flowered into sickening self-doubt, because he couldn’t say for certain it wasn’t true.

  “The Rangers didn’t send me in,” he said. “It was a friend in the Justice Department who tipped me off to the murders in Lark.”

  “Greg Heglund. I know,” Wozniak said. “He called me.”

  “He called you?”

  “I’ll be getting my information from the feds from now on.”

  Wozniak paused with his hands on the courthouse door, holding it open for a woman in pantyhose and Keds below the skirt of her suit who stepped outside to light a cigarette. He looked at Randie, who was standing behind Darren. “You coming?” he said. And when she didn’t respond right away, he stormed into the building and let the glass door swing closed behind him.

  “What the hell is going on, Darren?”

  She’d hardly gotten her seat belt on before he swung into the parking lot of a liquor store a few blocks away, slamming the car into Park. What was Greg doing calling the Tribune reporter? Did he want a professional come-up so badly that he would interfere with what Darren was trying to do out here? He was starting out of the car when Randie said, “What are we doing here?”

  He ignored the question as he climbed out of the truck.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and he was still in uniform, the button-down, boots, and badge, but the black lady behind the counter didn’t bat an eye when he set down a twenty and a five for a bottle of Jim Beam, which was about the best he was going to get his hands on in this backwater. He had the plastic off the cap by the time he slid back into the front seat of the Chevy. Randie looked at him like she’d never seen him before, as if a stranger had stumbled into the wrong truck. As he uncapped the bottle and bit off two fingers, enjoying the burn as it went down, the flush that crept across his jaw and throat, she said, “I’m not comfortable with you drinking and driving.”

  He unceremoniously tossed her the keys, then got out of the truck, walking around to the passenger side while Randie slid across the
front seat to drive.

  By the time they were back on Highway 59, he made a show of capping the bottle, of the fact that it was just a little something he needed, that it didn’t signify a problem so much as an itch for which the slightest scratch would do.

  Randie had her hands gripped at ten and two on the steering wheel. She had not adjusted the seat for her height and was perched on the very edge so that her feet would meet the gas pedal and the brake. She didn’t say anything until they got about a mile outside Lark. “They’ve got Keith in custody, and what? Now you suddenly don’t think he did it?” she said. Darren, flush from the bourbon, rolled down his window to let in a noisy crack of air. It whistled by his ear and swirled around the truck’s cab. He sat with that for a minute, his tongue slowed by the liquor, his heart weakened by a fear that he was letting this woman down.

  As they pulled into the north end of town, they came on the icehouse first. Darren asked her twice to pull over, and when she didn’t, he reached for the wheel himself. She shoved him back but eventually turned the truck into the icehouse’s gravel parking lot and shut off the engine. It clicked as it cooled, and for a moment that was the only sound in the cab save for the distant thrum of drums and guitar, the warm twang of country music playing inside the bar.

  Finally she spoke. “You better tell me what in the hell is going on right now,” she said, reaching for the bottle of bourbon between them on the seat and tossing it into the cab’s tiny backseat. “Don’t you dare fall apart on me.”

  “There may be someone else involved.”