The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020)

by Connolly, John

  Naylor located the wallet and handed it to the chief, not Parker.

  ‘Don’t mind if I take a look, do you?’ said Griffin.

  ‘Would it matter if I did?’

  ‘I’ll take that as permission.’

  He didn’t find much: cash, a pair of credit cards, and a New York State driver’s license in the name of Charles Parker. There was also a small photograph of a woman and a young girl, both blond, both beautiful. Griffin held it up so the man could see it.

  ‘Your family?’

  The alteration in Parker was momentary but profound. The rage was gone, and only grief remained in its place.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did something happen to them?’

  No reply.

  ‘I asked you a question,’ said Griffin.

  With that, the rage returned. It was bridled, but only barely.

  ‘I’m done answering your questions,’ said Parker. ‘Arrest me, or give me back my wallet and let me be done with your county, your town, and your dead girls.’

  Griffin didn’t surrender the wallet.

  ‘Dead girls,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You mentioned dead girls. Patricia Hartley was just one girl.’

  Parker stared at him, and Griffin stared back.

  ‘Officer Naylor,’ said Griffin, ‘arrest Mr Parker for obstruction of justice. And be sure to read him his rights.’

  4

  Griffin let Naylor take care of searching and cuffing Parker, and placing him in the back of the patrol car. Parker didn’t try to resist or make any objection to his treatment, which confirmed to Griffin that the man was familiar with the mechanics of the process. He drove Parker to the station house in silence, Naylor following in his own vehicle, and there relieved the prisoner of his belt, shoelaces, wallet, and watch before placing him in a holding cell for the night. He figured Parker had eaten, even if the size of the portions at Boyd’s had defeated him, but he did offer him a cup of coffee, which was declined. By then Kel Knight had arrived to take over the night shift, and the fourth full-time officer, Lorrie Colson, had returned from a domestic disturbance call. One of them would have to be at the station at all times while Parker remained in custody, but Naylor lived only a block away, and said he would be willing to pull on a coat and boots to provide cover if the need arose.

  Griffin took Kel Knight aside once Parker was safely behind bars. Knight was a rawboned, balding man who had never been known to raise his voice above conversational levels, and had yet to fire a weapon at anything other than a range target during his eighteen years in law enforcement, first up in Clay County, then down in Cargill. He had come back to this, his hometown, to care for his ailing parents, both of whom died within months of his return, which didn’t say much for his abilities as a nurse, although admittedly they were already circling the drain, by the time Knight arrived.

  He had served in Vietnam, which might have explained his reluctance to shoot at anyone again, Kel Knight having endured a superfluity of carnage in Southeast Asia, and thus exhausted his interest in the taking of lives, Asian or otherwise. Also, like many servicemen from that conflict, he retained no hostility toward his former enemies. When more than twenty-five thousand South Vietnamese men, women, and children were settled at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, Knight was among those who tore down the GOOKS GO HOME signs that began to sprout like toadstools in the vicinity of the base. He had no time for those that professed hatred toward the refugees, the ones that whispered of leprosy and venereal disease, and complained about the incomprehensibility of the newcomers’ language, the smell of their food, and the undoubted criminal aspect of their character, these Russos and Mullers and Reillys, these Nowaks and Campbells and Karlssons, each themselves only a generation or two removed from the immigrant ships, and whose parents and grandparents had been forced to endure similar slurs in this once strange land.

  If Knight had a flaw, it lay in the asceticism of his mien. He didn’t drink, smoked only a pipe, and had never sworn within earshot of Griffin or, quite possibly, anyone else. He was a father to four teenage boys, which meant he must have had carnal relations with his wife at least four times, but it wasn’t clear that he’d enjoyed the experience, or was in a hurry to revisit it now that his wife’s childbearing years were behind her. He was a hard man to get to know, and a harder man to like. But Griffin had done both, and was now as close to a friend as Kel Knight possessed.

  ‘What did this Parker do?’ Knight asked.

  ‘He irritated me,’ said Griffin.

  ‘If that was enough to put a man behind bars, half the town would be cluttering up our jail.’

  ‘God preserve me from your sensitivities. If it’s more amenable to you, his actions and behavior gave me grounds for reasonable suspicion, and I decided to place him under arrest until the nature of his character could be established. Does that sound better?’

  ‘It sounds better. You still haven’t told me what it means.’

  ‘He’s been asking questions about Patricia Hartley – Kevin says he was over by her old place earlier today, trying to establish where her people might have gone – but declined to elaborate on why.’

  Knight didn’t bite. He’d made clear his position on Patricia Hartley in the past, and no good could come from going over the same ground again, not with his boss in the kind of mood that had already seen him lock up one person for invoking her name.

  Griffin showed him Parker’s driver’s license.

  ‘New York,’ said Knight. ‘Huh. You figure him for a reporter?’

  ‘He’s no reporter. And why would a New York reporter be interested in a dead black girl from Burdon County, Arkansas? She barely made the papers out of Little Rock.’

  ‘Then what is he?’

  ‘That remains to be seen.’

  Griffin glanced back at the cells through the plexiglass screen in the door. Parker was sitting against a wall with his eyes closed. Griffin could almost sense him listening, even though there was no way their voices could have carried to him, so quietly were they speaking.

  ‘You’re confident that a night in the guest suite might lead to an improvement in his attitude?’ said Knight.

  ‘Even if it doesn’t, it’ll give us time to find out more about him.’

  ‘Has he asked for a lawyer?’

  ‘He hasn’t asked for anything at all.’ Griffin picked up his hat. ‘It’s already after ten in New York, so it’s unlikely we’ll get much joy from there until tomorrow, which gives us an excuse to let him cool his heels. You find yourself with a few free minutes, run him through the databases, but morning should suffice.’

  Kel Knight wasn’t any more competent than Griffin when it came to computers, a fact he continued to do his best to conceal, even though it was common knowledge to all. Each man carefully avoided calling the other on his ignorance, and thus contributed to the smooth running of the department.

  ‘Morning it is, then,’ said Knight.

  ‘He’s not going anywhere,’ said Griffin, ‘and I’ve already put in a longer day than any sane man should.’

  He left Knight and Colson to it and headed to the parking lot. Kevin Naylor was leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t in uniform, so Griffin couldn’t really discipline him for it, but he’d still have preferred the boy to resist the urge. Griffin checked his watch. If he were lucky, his wife would have left his dinner in the oven. If not, she’d have fed it to the dog. Then again, if she’d made meatloaf, it was the dog that could consider itself unlucky.

  Naylor watched him approach.

  ‘Chief.’

  ‘Kevin.’

  He could see that Naylor was troubled, and he knew by what: the same itch that was bothering Kel Knight – and bothering Griffin, too, truth be told, although he chose to scratch it only in private.

  ‘You got something you want to say?’ said Griffin, in a tone that made clear his total absence of any desire to listen should this be the case.
<
br />   ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then go home. And Kevin?’

  ‘Chief?’

  ‘Don’t smoke in the goddamned parking lot.’

  Naylor put the cigarette out against the sole of his shoe, and almost flicked the butt into the night before thinking better of it. Instead, he dropped it into one of his pockets and kept his eyes fixed on the ground as Griffin got in his car. He knew what had been done to Patricia Hartley. They all did.

  And still, they’d abandoned her to her fate.

  They’d left her to be forgotten.

  5

  Kel Knight looked in on the prisoner. Parker’s eyes were now open, but otherwise he remained in the same position as before.

  ‘You need anything?’ said Knight.

  ‘Something to read, if you have it.’

  ‘We got the Yellow Pages.’

  ‘I hear it starts strong, but tails off toward the end.’

  ‘I’ll see what else I can find.’ Knight began to move away, then paused. ‘You know, Chief Griffin is okay.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said so otherwise. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by answering his questions.’

  Parker shifted position to lie down on his bunk.

  ‘This?’ He took in the cell and – by extension – the station house, Cargill, and the rest of the county, if not the world entire. ‘This isn’t trouble, and I’ll be gone by morning.’

  ‘You seem very sure of that.’

  ‘I am, because I’m not your problem.’ He turned his face to the wall. ‘Your problem is dead girls.’

  Evan Griffin didn’t head straight home, despite the lure of it, but first stopped off at the Lakeside Inn. The Lakeside wasn’t actually located near the Karagol, which represented a sensible planning decision on the part of the original owners, because in summer the mosquitoes swarmed over the black water, and it exuded a stink of vegetal decay. If a person stood on the roof of the motel, it might have been possible to glimpse the lake in the distance, although only after someone had cut a swath through a plenitude of evergreens, and it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. The Lakeside was run by the Ures, Thomas and Mary, but the bank held the paper on it, and the bank, like most everything else in the area, owed its existence and continued survival to the Cade family. The Cades had been in Arkansas, and more particularly Burdon County, for a long, long time. Their history was embedded in its earth, like the roots of the oldest trees, like the Karagol itself.

  Thomas Ure appeared from the office as Griffin pulled into the lot. Ure wasn’t usually on duty so late, and was dressed for an evening on the town, as long as the town wasn’t Cargill. Here, people dressed up only for baptisms, weddings, funerals, and court appearances.

  ‘Is there a problem, Evan?’ he asked.

  ‘There might be, unless you forget you saw me here.’

  ‘I never did have a good memory for faces,’ said Ure, ‘or names.’

  ‘I always liked that about you,’ said Griffin. ‘Room twenty: single or double occupancy?’

  ‘Just one guy.’

  ‘Thanks. You can go back to being forgetful now.’

  He waited for Ure to return to the office before removing the motel room key from his pocket. He’d found it among the possessions of the man named Parker, although it wasn’t exactly a surprise: Cargill had just two motels, and the Lakeside was the more salubrious. The other, the Burdon Inn, was as damp and cheerless as it looked, and it was said that the bedbugs were as big as a man’s fingernail. Griffin didn’t know what they were subsisting on, because it sure as hell wasn’t guests. The Burdon Inn only stayed open to give Bill Gorce a project on which to waste his time and retirement money. When Gorce eventually died, the Burdon Inn would expire with him, or vice versa; if the Burdon Inn collapsed to the ground tomorrow, Griffin was sure that Bill Gorce would founder at precisely the same moment. But Gorce didn’t appear likely to depart this world anytime soon. He was holding on for better days, like just about everyone else in the county. They’d been holding on like that for a long while, but now they had hope.

  As long as they stayed quiet and pretended that nothing bad was happening.

  As long as nobody asked questions about dead girls.

  A quarter of the rooms at the Lakeside were currently occupied, judging by the lights behind the windows and the vehicles in the lot. The majority of the cars and trucks bore out-of-state plates, and looked like they had heavy miles on them, except for one newer Ford Taurus sitting alone at the end of the building to the right of the office. Griffin would have made the Ford for a rental even without the company sticker in the corner of the windshield.

  Griffin stopped outside Parker’s room. Technically, he should have gone to a sympathetic judge, such as old Lew Hawkins over in Boscombe, and asked for a search warrant, but even a soak like Hawkins might have balked at signing off on a warrant based on nothing more than a man’s intransigence. Griffin wasn’t overly concerned, though; he could justify the search as incident to the arrest, which gave him the authority to scrutinize areas within the arrestee’s immediate control. A man could throw a stone from the door of Boyd’s and hit the Lakeside Inn, which Griffin chose to interpret as falling under ‘immediate control’. Anyway, it wouldn’t make much difference unless the examination of Parker’s motel room turned up evidence of the commission of a crime, in which case Griffin would work back and set about bolstering the reasons for the arrest before securing a warrant. But that wasn’t the main purpose of entering the motel room. He was curious about Parker, and his interest in Patricia Hartley. An inspection of the contents of his room, and perhaps also his rental car, might provide Griffin with some answers.

  Despite Ure’s assurance that Parker had checked in alone, Griffin took the time to knock hard and identify himself before inserting the key in the lock. He heard the mechanism click, and shifted his right hand to the butt of his gun before turning the knob and opening the door.

  ‘Hello?’ he called again. ‘This is the police. Anyone in here?’

  No one answered. He saw a single lamp burning between the twin beds, but that was all. The TV was off, and the clock radio was unplugged. Griffin closed the door behind him, locked it, and secured the dead bolt. Like all motel rooms, this one smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cheap air freshener, and the décor and bedclothes hadn’t been renewed in a decade. The two beds didn’t look as though they had even been sat on, never mind slept in. A single black case, small enough to be carried on a plane as hand baggage, stood on the metal rack, and the bathroom contained a black leather toiletry bag. Otherwise, the room showed no signs of occupancy.

  The Lakeside Inn did not offer safes, which meant that anything valuable or incriminating would be contained in the suitcase. Griffin tested it, but it was locked. He took out his pocketknife and used it to bust the catches. If Parker turned out to be the Zodiac Killer, or was keeping his victims’ fingers as souvenirs, well, Griffin would have a lot of favors to call in from Lew Hawkins.

  He opened the suitcase to reveal a gun.

  6

  Exercising the right of seniority, Kel Knight sent Lorrie Colson out into the night to do a couple of circuits of the town before holing up on a side road by the Gas-N-Go at the southern limits, there to keep an eye out for drunks, hired assassins, and bank robbers, but mostly drunks. The Gas-N-Go was part of the Ferdy Bowers empire of ‘N-Go’ businesses, which also included the Wash-N-Go, the Dunk-N-Go, and the short-lived Mow-N-Go, a mower servicing and garden maintenance company that had barely survived a single summer, most local homeowners being content to take care of their own lawns when the need arose, and also sufficiently skilled to repair their own mowers too, thank you very much, without paying a premium to Bowers and his people for performing the service. Ferdy Bowers was one of the few businessmen in Burdon County not beholden to the Cades, although until recently he’d been smart enough to tick along with them, and not interfere with their affairs beyond a c
ertain level of acceptable competition. But lately Bowers had started smelling money in the air, and relations with the Cades had deteriorated as a consequence.

  Knight left the door between the cells and the main body of the station open, just in case the prisoner called out, before stepping into the parking lot and lighting his pipe. Evan Griffin might not have tolerated the smoking of cigarettes in the station house, or by his officers while in uniform, but he gave Knight a pass on the pipe, if only in the lot, since it served to enhance the quiet authority of his sergeant – or so Knight had informed him, and Griffin had been too bemused to argue. This impression of competence was aided by Knight’s passing resemblance to the late actor Lee Van Cleef, who, despite making a decent living starring in Westerns, had no affection for horses. Knight wasn’t sure how a man who didn’t like horses ended up as a Western star, but stranger things had happened in the world, and would undoubtedly continue to happen until that same world came to its inevitable end.

  Knight’s radio beeped, and Colson’s voice said, ‘Kel, you there?’

  ‘Where else would I be?’ he replied, because wherever he went, there he was.

  ‘Company’s coming,’ she said. ‘Jurel Cade just drove into town.’

  Griffin pulled on a pair of plastic gloves before removing the gun from its shoulder holster. It was a Smith & Wesson 1076, chambered in 10mm, the kind issued to FBI agents after two of them were killed in a shootout in Miami-Dade County in 1986 because their weapons at the time lacked sufficient stopping power. The original shitty plastic grip on Parker’s S&W had been replaced with one that looked custom-made, and the weapon was clean, oiled, and in good order. Alongside it was a New York State permit, which would be honored in Arkansas under reciprocity agreements. The weapon was unloaded, although the nine-round single-column magazine in the corner of the case was full.