The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020)

by Connolly, John

  Tilon had heard this too, although no one could swear to it.

  ‘But if I was you,’ Butcher continued, ‘I wouldn’t be mentioning Estella Jackson in the same breath as Donna Lee Kernigan, not with your family history.’

  Which received no argument from Tilon, although he hadn’t considered this further complication until Butcher mentioned it.

  ‘I still think we should wait,’ he said.

  ‘We have customers,’ said Butcher.

  ‘Just for a few days.’

  ‘Shit.’ He could almost hear Butcher’s gears clicking as he carried out the risk-benefit analysis. ‘Forty-eight hours. After that, we get back to work.’

  Tilon’s palms were sweating. He forced himself to relax.

  ‘Forty-eight hours,’ he echoed. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘You do that. And Tilon?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Were you fucking that dead girl? I mean, before she was dead, although I wouldn’t put it past you to try her cold. I know what your family’s like. You got some aberrations in you.’

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘You better not have been. I wouldn’t want to have to cut you loose. That wouldn’t be salutary for you.’

  No, Tilon understood, that certainly wouldn’t be salutary for him. They wouldn’t just cut him loose. They’d shoot him in the head and inter his remains in a hole in the woods.

  ‘I hear you,’ he said, but Butcher had already hung up. Tilon stared at the bathtub, and what lay hidden behind it. He stayed like that for what seemed to him like an age, before walking to the main house to check on his mother.

  27

  Parker drove east. Cargill receded in his rearview mirror – its cracked sidewalks, its boarded-up storefronts, its FOR LEASE signs – until the environs finally disappeared from view. His destination was Belzoni, Mississippi, where a woman named Eliza Tarp had been crucified against a tree some six months previously, a crown of honey locust thorns impaled on her head, and a wound opened in her right side that appeared to have been inflicted by a harvest sickle.

  He should have gone straight to Belzoni, he thought. He had wasted valuable time in Arkansas. The manner of the deaths in Cargill had always seemed to him cruder than the actions of the one he sought, and nothing he had learned in the interim had caused him to reconsider, but they were among the killings in the cache that had been provided, and by ruling them out he was narrowing the parameters of his search, if only marginally.

  Cargill, he reflected, was a miserable town, in a miserable county, and therefore a miserable place to die – not that it would have made much difference to Patricia Hartley, Donna Lee Kernigan, and Estella Jackson. Dying was dying, and the only mercy came at the end.

  The sky was a turbulent gray. More rain was coming. Ahead of him he saw a gas station with a diner attached. He wasn’t hungry, even though he had consumed just a few mouthfuls of the breakfast supplied to him in his cell. Perhaps it would have been truer to say that he felt no great desire to eat, but desire and necessity were not the same. He had not enjoyed a meal in many months. He ate because he had to. Food was fuel, and nothing more.

  He pulled up at a pump, filled the tank, and moved the car to a space near the diner. By the time he had paid for his gas at the register, the first drops had already begun to spatter the glass, so he entered the diner through a connecting corridor beside the beer fridges, its walls decorated with framed Bible quotations, including one from Proverbs outside the restrooms that read, ‘There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth.’

  He ordered the chicken salad sandwich, but when it arrived he found himself unable to eat. He was no longer in a diner in southwestern Arkansas. He was instead in a restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and seated across from him was the woman who would later become his wife. Rain was falling, and Susan was laughing at something he had said on this, their first evening together; the beginning, the initial step on a path that would lead to marriage, a child, and finally a house in Brooklyn awash with blood.

  But it had not been raining during that meal. He remembered it clearly. It was an unsullied evening, because he had met her as the sun shed the last of its gold on the boardwalk, having noticed her around town over the previous days. He could not recall much about burying his wife and child, could not bring to mind anything but clouded, fragmentary recollections of the days between their deaths and the closing of their graves, but his first date with Susan was vivid in every detail.

  Sometimes he believed that he saw them, his lost wife and child. He caught glimpses of them in the shadows, or smelled their scent. He conversed with them, and heard their responses. It was not uncommon, he knew, this conjuring of the dead by the living. It was an illusion, but who was to say what was real and what was not? If nothing else, it was a bulwark against the final forgetting.

  Now Susan was before him again, although her features were strangely blurred. Her laughter faded away, but a little of the smile remained. Her eyes grew sad, as though she were conflicted in her affections for him, while the shadow of the rain drew dry tears on her face. The rivulets were dark. They looked like blood.

  where are you going? she said. Her voice came to him from far away and was broken by static.

  ‘Southeast,’ he said.

  why?

  ‘I’m trying to find him.’

  but not for us, not for our sakes

  Us. Jennifer was suddenly seated by her mother, her face also unclear to him. She was not looking at her father, but toyed with an unseen plaything in the air. He wanted to reach out and take her in his arms, but she was not there, not truly, and he feared that if he tried to touch her, even this phantasm might vanish like smoke.

  ‘For whom, if not for you?’ he said.

  don’t lie

  you were always a bad liar

  ‘Was I?’

  perhaps only where i was concerned

  i saw through you, though

  i always could

  ‘I was happy for you to do it.’

  so why are you looking, if not for us?

  He heard the distant crash of surf breaking, or it might have been truck wheels passing on the wet road. He could no longer be sure, and he did not care. For the moment, those he had lost were here with him.

  ‘For me,’ he said. ‘For my own sake.’

  yes

  Susan, both absent and present, stroked Jennifer’s hair.

  but why stop?

  ‘To eat.’

  but you’re not hungry

  ‘For gas.’

  but your tank was almost full

  ‘To rest.’

  but you are not tired

  He pictured a woman being crowned with thorns, the garland digging into her scalp, the barbs tearing at hair, skin, and flesh. He watched a man kneel over Patricia Hartley and Donna Lee Kernigan to defile them with sticks.

  The seat across from him was empty, as it had always been, as it would always be. He stared at his hands, and the scars upon them.

  Unknown dead voices called his name.

  28

  Reverend Nathan Pettle entered his home through the back door. He slipped off his shoes and placed them on the mat bought by his wife for that purpose, printed with the words SHOE INN, which Delores had found funny. The house was quiet. Delores would be down at the small community center next to their church, where she hosted a social group for seniors every second day from noon. Her car was still outside, because Delores preferred to walk whenever the opportunity arose. She had started to put on weight and was embarrassed by it. He assured her that he had not noticed, but she did not believe him because he had given her no cause to. She no longer believed anything he told her.

  Pettle took a seat at the kitchen table, facing the image of Christ the Redeemer brought back from a business trip to Kenya by one of his parishioners. Pettle liked it because this Christ was noticeably dark-skinned, and had the build of a laborer, someone who could cut and
carry wood and worked with his hands. This was Pettle’s Christ, not some fragile Caucasian figure marked as a victim from birth, doomed to die an emaciated death on a cross.

  Pettle closed his eyes, clasped his hands before him, and tried to pray. When he opened his eyes again, Delores was standing by the kitchen sink. She was barefoot, but so lost had he been in his own thoughts that he doubted he would have noticed her approach even had she chosen to alert him to it. His wife was a plain woman, and he had first been attracted to her by the strength of her character as much as the depth of her faith. It was she who had been the true rock in the early days of his ministry – no, their ministry – when he preached to his flock beneath spreading trees or in the living rooms of their homes, accepting payment in the form of food offerings: bread, eggs, once even a whole deer, which had sustained him and his family through a long winter and spring at the start of the decade, until at last Delores became so sick of the taste of venison that she vowed never to eat it again.

  Hers was a practical, implacable Christianity, one wanting in warmth. She helped where and when she could, and made a positive difference to the lives of others, but her husband’s congregation looked elsewhere for words of comfort in times of distress. That was not her way, and none judged her for it.

  She stared at her husband, her expression unreadable.

  ‘Is it true?’ she said.

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That it was Sallie Kernigan’s girl they found out in those woods.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s true.’

  Delores Pettle took a single long step toward her husband, drew back her right hand, and slapped him hard across the face.

  The rain was likely to keep falling for the rest of the day. The patch of woodland on which Donna Lee Kernigan’s body had been discovered remained taped off, with signs posted advising that this was a crime scene, and any attempt to trespass upon it would be met with the full force of the law.

  Griffin had wanted to conduct a massive fingertip search of the surrounding area, with Tucker McKenzie supervising, but he didn’t have the manpower to do it properly, not without the assistance of the sheriff’s office, and that was unlikely to be forthcoming until after the meeting with Jurel Cade – and possibly not even then, depending on the outcome. Instead, McKenzie had done what he could with his own people, making the best of not very much at all. Already Griffin was starting to feel the investigation slipping away from him, and it had barely commenced. He was out of his depth. The only lead was the truck that had picked up Donna Lee. He had already set his officers to interviewing those living and working in the vicinity of the school, just in case someone might have noticed the truck or the driver, and could remember the license number, or the color of the driver’s hair, anything.

  Jurel Cade had left a message to say he’d been delayed, and their meeting would now have to take place later in the afternoon. Griffin guessed that Cade was working out his next move, trying to find a way to limit the damage should the Cargill PD prove unwilling to back down or reach an acceptable compromise. Evan Griffin knew he wasn’t very popular with the Cade family. Soon, he wouldn’t be popular with most of the population of Burdon County.

  He took his coat from the stand in his office and picked up his car keys. He wouldn’t do anyone any good sitting behind his desk. He told Billie he was going to join Kel and the others over at the school, but only once he’d run by the Kernigan house to take a look at it for himself. He might swing by the crime scene as well, just to check that everything was copacetic.

  As he was about to leave, a man appeared in the doorway of the station house. The rain dripped from his head and clothing, and the light in his eyes made Griffin suddenly fearful, as though he had erred gravely by invoking this presence, by adjuring it to remain in this town, this world.

  ‘You forget something?’ said Griffin.

  And Charlie Parker replied: ‘Perhaps.’

  II

  A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else’s business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don’t know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out … In a world like this, news is not welcome …

  Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960

  29

  The people on this earth can be divided into two groups for the most part: those that want to leave a place, and those that want to stay in it. The rest simply haven’t made up their minds yet. The smaller a place, the greater the pressure to pick a side, although one doesn’t necessarily have to stick with one’s choice. Circumstances may alter; life gets better, life gets worse.

  Generally, though, life tends to stay the same.

  For much of the twentieth century, Cargill was the kind of town in which people resided because they didn’t have the resources – financial, familial, or psychological – to go anywhere else. Even if curiosity about other lives, or existential unease at their own situation, caused some citizens to look farther afield, the majority elected to extend their gaze no farther than the boundaries of their own state – or perhaps, in exceptional circumstances, those of contiguous states – in which case they discovered little that struck them as an improvement on their present condition; it was another series of crossroads, except with a heavier dusting of strangers. After a time, the larger part just stopped looking, and tempered accordingly their expectations and those of their offspring.

  But Cargill was changing. Prosperity was on the way. It had been promised, and the populace had elected to believe that promise. They had invested themselves and their futures in it, and nothing could be allowed to get in its way, not even – or most particularly – dead girls, which was why a lot of folks in Cargill and its environs were angry at Patricia Hartley and Donna Lee Kernigan for getting themselves killed to begin with. Oh, they were also angry at whoever had killed the girls – they weren’t monsters, and only the most ignorant or self-deceiving had chosen to believe the lies about Hartley’s death – but for now the individual responsible for the murders remained anonymous and unseen. It was the evidence of his activities, in the form of bodies, that was potentially damaging to the town, the county, and their own prospects. Any public acknowledgment of murder risked drawing unwanted attention from outside, hence the level of discontent at Hartley’s and Kernigan’s failure to exit this world in a more considerate fashion. (Estella Jackson was a different case, her passing having being consigned to history.) This unhappiness was not expressed openly, or in so many words, but it was present nonetheless, evinced mainly in the form of a quiet callousness, a careful constraining of compassion, and even in the commonly held belief, predominantly among whites, that this could well be the work of a black man, one who had chosen to take his rage out on his own people but, by doing so, was causing collateral harm to all.

  But to pretend the killings were not happening meant they might continue, which would make outside interference not only more likely, but inevitable.

  It was a quandary, and no mistake.

  30

  Griffin sat with Charlie Parker at a table in Boyd’s. The bar rarely opened before six, the widow Kirby holding that the class of person that might drink in a bar prior to this hour was not one she wished to have on the premises. She chose to make an exception for the chief and the man with him on the grounds that a) they wanted only coffee; and b) it paid to stay on the right side of the police. If it struck her as curious that Chief Griffin was now engaged in a seemingly civil conversation with someone he had arrested at that very booth the previous night, she elected not to remark on it, understanding without being told that her discretion was to be relied upon in this instance. After all, the only reason the chief might have come knocking on her back door, requesting ingress and hospitality, was because he didn’t wish for this meeting to be noticed or overheard. So Joan Kirby served them coffee, and some fresh brownies to take the bare look from the table, before positioning
herself out of sight and earshot, the first step toward forgetting their presence entirely.

  ‘Here’s what you have to understand,’ said Griffin. ‘This county has been poor for as long as anyone can remember, and it didn’t look as though that situation was likely to change anytime soon. Even when other parts of the state started to do better, Burdon stuck in the dark ages.

  ‘Then Clinton got into the White House, and suddenly circumstances took on a whole new complexion. He’d made promises to the men and women of this state, and it was expected that they’d be kept. Arkansas was already beginning to see an influx of aerospace and defense contractors, on account of how we’re cheap, low-tax, anti-union, and don’t ask too many awkward questions, but under Clinton that process is accelerating. William Faulkner was right: our economy is no longer agricultural; it’s the federal government. Aerospace and defense represent a fresh start for the state, a better future, and Burdon County has a chance to benefit, because Cargill is on the verge of becoming the new Huntsville, Alabama.’

  Huntsville represented the New South in extremis. Back in 1950, it had been a town of 16,000 people, subsisting on cotton revenues. By the mid-1970s, its population had grown to more than 140,000, thanks to the presence of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, nineteen command centers including Army Missile Command and the Ballistic Missile Defense Systems Command, and plants operated by IBM, Chrysler, Lockheed, and others.

  ‘You ever hear of Kovas Industries?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘No,’ said Parker.

  ‘Kovas makes missile components and guidance systems, but it’s also investing heavily in high-tech armaments, robotics, pilotless aircraft – the kind of stuff you only see in movies. It’s looking to open a new research and manufacturing facility in the South, beginning with four hundred employees but expanding, over five years, to fifteen hundred. Because the work is so hush-hush, Kovas has very specific requirements: basically, it wants to turn somewhere into a company town. Kovas will invest in housing, schools, new businesses, all with the aim of creating a secure environment not only for itself and its employees, but also for the other companies that will follow, because the new facility is just the first of five that Kovas plans to build, and those plants will need their own support structures. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars, and long-term prosperity for wherever the company elects to settle. The choice has come down to Arkansas or Texas, and Little Rock is pressing Clinton hard to put his finger on the scales and tip the balance in favor of the home team. Right now, Cargill is leading the field as the preferred site for the key build. We’ve had Kovas executives and their security consultants carrying out all kinds of surveys for the past two years, and the word from Little Rock is that they like what they see – not just here, but in the whole county, because we’re prepared to hand it over to them lock, stock, and barrel, just as long as their money is good.’