The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020)

by Connolly, John

  Yet in daylight, when he talked with his dead wife as he drove, when he addressed his lost child as he shaved, they were entirely comprehensible to him, and he to them.

  But he feared that this latter discourse might be less real than the former.

  Griffin spoke, tearing him from his meditations.

  ‘What?’ said Parker.

  ‘I said that you never told me why you came back.’

  Parker barely gave the question thought.

  ‘To distract myself,’ he said.

  Griffin chose not to ask him from what. He had no need.

  ‘Is that all?’

  The briefest of pauses.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I never expressed my gratitude.’

  ‘Save it till later. Even then, you may not have cause to thank me when we’re done.’

  Griffin tried to speak lightly – ‘You of a mind to cause trouble?’ – as Parker’s thumb explored his grazed knuckles.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I am or not. Either way, it’ll come once we start asking questions. The Cades won’t be able to prevent it, and neither will you, even if you had the motivation.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you’re using me. If this investigation stirs people up, or endangers the Kovas deal, you’ll be able to blame some of the fallout on me. I provide an element of deniability – not much, but enough for you to survive if it all goes bad. I can also rattle cages that you can’t, and if anyone complains, you’ll be empowered to make sympathetic noises and promise it won’t happen again.’

  ‘That’s a hell of an accusation to make.’

  ‘Feel free to deny it.’

  Griffin didn’t bother. He might never have expressed it in those terms, or even have admitted it to himself, but now that Parker had come out with it, he knew it to be true. He could only hope to make the local population understand that it was a question of degree: the potential harm this inquisition might cause to their hopes of prosperity versus the certain damage that would follow if another young woman died.

  ‘And the Cades,’ said Parker, ‘are doing the same with us. That’s why Pappy acceded so quickly to your demand for control of the investigation. He believes you’ll fail, and any harm you cause will rebound on you and your department. In the meantime, he’ll reassure Kovas in an effort to protect the deal.’

  This, too, was unworthy of argument from Griffin. Pappy hadn’t conceded anything to them that he hadn’t already written off long before they arrived at his door.

  ‘What did you think of the Cades?’ Griffin asked.

  ‘I don’t like any of them.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable response.’

  ‘Is it the wrong one?’

  ‘That depends on what you require of them, but I’ll admit that none is without specific failings. Pappy is a pragmatist, but genuine in his desire to vouchsafe affluence to the county, if only for the sake of his own vanity. Jurel can be an astute investigator, but he’s his daddy’s instrument, if you hadn’t already noticed. He’s also selective in his inquiries, and immoral in his methods.

  ‘Delphia is her father’s eyes and ears in Little Rock, and takes care of the day-to-day running of the family businesses, but has no kindness in her, and is incautious about making political enemies. She’s the only one that’s married – to the Cade family lawyer, or one of the lawyers, although he tomcats around on her, and she cuckolds him in turn, so rumor has it. His name is Branstetter, but she never took it. There’s talk of a divorce on the horizon, with Branstetter currently calculating the price for his silence.’

  ‘Silence?’ said Parker.

  ‘Nothing down here is straight. Draw a line with a ruler, and it comes out crooked. Branstetter isn’t only a lawyer: he’s also a bagman. He’s smoothed out a lot of problems on the Kovas front, aided by a logroller named Charles Shire, who’s been looking after Kovas’s interests down here. Spousal privilege meant that the Cades had some protection should federal investigators have shown an interest in the more irregular specifics of the negotiations – unlikely, given that Arkansas owns the White House, but one can’t be too careful. I mean, look at Whitewater: no one is entirely safe, not even behind locked doors on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Cades have supported the Clintons since Bubba ran for the House against Hammerschmidt in seventy-four, and Pappy is owed favors in return, some of which he might have called in for Kovas. But if Branstetter were to roll over in the event of a divorce, well, there’s no telling where the indictments could end. So he’ll earn himself a nice payoff for all those years spent sharing a bed with Delphia Cade, and be thankful that he emerged at the end with his cock and balls still attached to the rest of him.’

  ‘And Nealus?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like much, does he?’

  ‘No, I can’t say that he does.’

  ‘Oddly, he’s the only Cade that the majority can abide without equivocation. He cared for his mother in her final illness, and now sits on the board of a couple of charities related to cancer and Parkinson’s, because Martha Cade suffered from a combination of both. He’s also heavily involved in environmental causes, not entirely unrelated to the fact that it annoys his sister and his old man. He might even qualify as a moderating influence on his father, if such a thing were possible.’

  ‘The Cades’ mother had Parkinson’s?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Parker.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think Pappy may also have it.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw the twitches. If that’s true, he’s keeping quiet about the diagnosis.’

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to admit to weakness, not with his precious accord so close to completion.’

  ‘That could be it.’

  They passed the town line, and shortly after entered Cargill itself. Griffin drove Parker straight to his motel.

  ‘I had Billie make up a dossier for you,’ he said. ‘It should be waiting at the reception desk. It’s got local maps, a list of names of some of our more noteworthy citizens, phone numbers, whatever she felt might be useful. You think of anything else you require, you just have to ask. Keep receipts for expenses, and we’ve cleared a desk for you at the station house in case you want to use it. Tomorrow we can figure out a division of labor, but I’ll be guided by you as far as possible. After all, you’ve done this kind of thing before.’

  ‘And Jurel?’

  ‘He won’t be actively obstructive. Like his daddy, he’s ultimately a pragmatist.’

  Parker pictured Patricia Hartley’s body, battered and broken by a slope of stone and scree.

  ‘Yes,’ said Parker, ‘I suppose he is.’

  41

  Randall Butcher wasn’t a man to hide how he made his money – or not the money he made by legal means; he felt it was better to remain more discreet about the funds that had accrued from methamphetamine, heroin, and a quantity of cocaine for the high fliers. It gave him pleasure to watch congressmen, state senators, and even the odd preacher tramp across the parking lot of the Gilded Cage, the first – and, so far, finest – of the gentlemen’s establishments that formed the backbone of his entertainment operation. They might have liked to pretend that they were superior to Butcher, their shit smelling of rose petals, but when they required money for their campaigns, or cash to keep God’s work going, he ensured that they or their representatives had to travel to his principal place of business to ask for it. A little dose of reality wouldn’t hurt them, a reminder that they were just like other men, and if they wanted to stay awhile and enjoy the show, he’d comp them a couple of drinks and a plate of ribs.

  The Gilded Cage wasn’t on a par with the better clubs in Miami, or even New Orleans – this was Burdon County, Arkansas, where most strip joints claimed to be high-toned if you didn’t find cigarette ash in your drink – but it had professional lighting and sound systems, two bars, four seating areas, including a VIP section, and televisions for every eyeline. More
pertinently, it also boasted dancers men would drive long distances to see naked, women who could carry on a conversation without making a patron want to scour his ears out after. The food was prepared fresh, and the price of drinks was just high enough to dissuade the impecunious. It had a dress code – no shorts, no wifebeaters – and a strict no-touching rule. The Gilded Cage, insofar as any strip club could be, was a clean house.

  Butcher was a man of average height, soft in some of the wrong places and hard in most of the right ones. He’d run with a rough crowd in his youth, yet somehow had avoided any convictions or jail time. When a couple of those old friends came calling later in life, he’d put them to good use in the more caliginous regions of his realm, while keeping them far removed from his clubs, because he didn’t want his legitimate interests tainted by any association with criminals. A few years earlier, Butcher had even been feted at the annual Gentlemen’s Club EXPO, the industry’s national convention and trade show, narrowly missing out on a nomination for Club of the Year. (Or so he’d been informed: Randall Butcher might have been clean, but he wasn’t that clean.)

  With the combination of income streams from flesh and drugs, Butcher should have been living high on the hog. The fact that this wasn’t the case was largely down to a run of bad investments, and a mistaken belief that he knew better than his financial advisors, a conviction unaltered by his growing losses. Increasingly, he required drug income to subsidize his speculations and atone for the bad advice picked up from business magazines, crooked accountants, disbarred lawyers, fortune tellers, homeless guys at bus stops – wherever it was that Butcher acquired his immaculately misguided financial nous.

  The impending touchdown of Kovas Industries promised a way for Butcher to dig himself out of debt – and not only in the form of the Gilded Cage II, his proposed club in Cargill, currently blocked by shortsighted zoning regulations. Through an intermediary, Butcher had also quietly put money into two construction companies that had barely been getting by in recent years, on the grounds that each had been promised subcontractor roles as soon as the ink dried on the Kovas paperwork. A third contractor was ready to move in and demolish the old church at the center of the planning dispute and raise the new club in its place, with the intention of having it up and running before Kovas’s construction workers even got their boots dirty. His lawyers assured him that the zoning difficulties were slowly but surely being dealt with, which left only the problem of Reverend Nathan Pettle and his congregation.

  Butcher had visited the reverend personally in an attempt to reason with him. He regarded Pettle as a fundamentally benign but misguided man, as evinced by the image of the black Jesus that hung on the wall of Pettle’s home, since everyone knew Jesus was Caucasian – or at worst tanned, like a white man who’d spent too long working in the sun. But Pettle wasn’t shifting on his conditions: in return for ceding the site to Butcher, he wanted a location of similar size within the town limits, and a cash sweetener, both of which presented difficulties because, so far, Butcher had neither the site nor the cash.

  From the window of his office in a small two-story building behind the Gilded Cage, he took in Tilon Ward’s slow approach across the lot. Butcher had known Tilon’s father, which wasn’t much in the way of a boast, Hollis Ward having been a sexually incontinent man of base predilections. His disappearance had been the best outcome for all concerned, Hollis himself perhaps excepted, depending on his ultimate fate. The son had inherited certain of the father’s skills without the vices that went with them, or so Butcher had believed, but recent developments now required a reconsideration of their relationship.

  Behind Butcher, Pruitt Dix shifted in a chair. Butcher could see him reflected in the glass. There was a doglike aspect to Dix, he thought: his loyalty, his stocky muscularity.

  Also, he liked burying things.

  42

  Parker entered his motel room to find a message asking him to contact the front desk. He made the call, and was informed that the Cargill PD would be covering the bill for the duration of his stay, and he was being upgraded to the motel’s honeymoon suite. He could pick up the key at his convenience, along with an envelope dropped off by Billie Brinton. Parker packed his bag and retrieved the .38 from under the bed. He had never entirely reconciled himself to his father’s gun, yet neither could he relieve himself of its burden. It had become a symbol of the past, a physical expression of the weight of his history.

  In the silence of his room, he hefted the .38, before pointing it at the shadows gathered in one corner.

  ‘Come out,’ he said. ‘Show yourself.’

  From the darkness he conjured up the form of a man, with a blade in his hand and blood on his skin, but faceless as his victims. Parker wondered how often this figure had watched him, both before and after stealing away his wife and child. He was aware of the taint of the killer’s regard, like a fingerprint upon the soul. Somewhere, he was waiting to see how Parker might respond. He might even be here in this town, another traveler passing through, studiedly anonymous, staring at the closed drapes in the window of a cheap motel room, imagining the life of the man behind them in all its devastation.

  Parker lowered the gun, stored it in the bag, and replaced it with the holstered 10 mm. He slipped it onto his belt, and positioned the weapon under his jacket so that it was barely visible. Now that he was attached to the Cargill PD, he felt more comfortable about carrying concealed. Once all this was done, he gathered his belongings, left the room, and locked the door behind him. Only three other vehicles sat in the lot, and all were empty. He was the object of no one’s attention, or none that he could see, and the evening air smelled of burning.

  Evan Griffin’s bones ached. He intended to run a bath when he got home in order to soak away the day’s events, but first he wanted to talk to Kel Knight and establish what progress, if any, his officers had made in his absence.

  Tucker McKenzie had finished his work at the Kernigan house and at the scene of the body’s discovery, and was promising a full report by morning. According to Knight, the house search had produced little of note beyond the meth and the gun. If Donna Lee had been seeing someone – an older white man, if her school friend was to be believed – he had left no trace of his presence in her daily life. A canvass of the neighborhood around the school had so far served only to confirm that none of the residents interviewed had noticed the truck that picked up Donna Lee after band practice. The police would continue trying to establish her movements from that moment on, but for now it remained the last time anyone had seen her alive.

  And still no trace had been found of Sallie Kernigan, although Malvern PD confirmed that there was no record of her arrest on charges of solicitation, nor did any Malvern gossip suggest she had engaged in acts of prostitution as intimated by some of her neighbors. Naylor had also driven out to her place of work, but had returned with no new information other than that Sallie appeared to have been well liked by her coworkers. She’d had some trouble with men ‘taking liberties,’ according to one of her fellow cleaners, a woman named Bobbye Osborne, who reminded Naylor of a younger version of his mother, but she’d learned to deal with it.

  ‘You have to, when you’re a woman,’ said Bobbye Osborne, ‘and more when you’re a black woman.’

  Naylor hadn’t disagreed.

  Then Griffin told Knight of the meeting with the Cades, and the promise of cooperation from Jurel Cade and the sheriff’s office.

  ‘What about Parker?’ said Knight.

  ‘At first, Jurel wasn’t pleased to learn of his involvement, but he mellowed in the end, relatively speaking.’

  ‘Because Pappy ordered him to?’

  ‘Perhaps “advised” would be more appropriate, for the sake of appearances.’

  ‘So what next?’ said Knight.

  ‘We see what evidence hasn’t been lost or destroyed from the Jackson and Hartley killings, and work on establishing connections between those girls and Donna Lee.’

  ‘Wh
at if they were just random victims?’

  ‘It’s of no account. The same man likely killed at least two of them, and he’s either local or has passed through here on occasion, enough to know the lay of the land. By tomorrow we should have more names to add to the list of people we need to talk to.’

  Before leaving the Cade compound, Griffin had asked Jurel to help compile a record of known sex offenders in the county, along with those residents whose racism veered toward the extreme. Billie Brinton had already done the same for Cargill and the surrounding area, regardless of whether the individuals in question had ever been convicted of, or even charged with, any crime. It was, the chief decided, depressingly long for a small town.

  ‘Anything else?’ he said.

  ‘Only that the discovery of the meth in the Kernigan house, along with the unregistered firearm, has got me thinking again about Tilon Ward.’

  ‘He knows more about the Kernigans than he’s telling us, I’ll grant you that,’ said Griffin.

  ‘Tilon Ward is a criminal,’ said Knight. ‘All criminals are, by nature or proclivity, dishonest.’

  ‘I still don’t make Tilon for a killer.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting he is, only that his secrecy could be an impediment to progress.’

  Knight wanted to say more, but did not. It was not for him to remind Griffin that he had no obligations toward Tilon Ward, no matter what Ward might have done, or tried to do, for him in the past.

  ‘You may be right,’ said Griffin. ‘You want to take a run at him, see if you can succeed where I couldn’t?’

  ‘I already dropped by his place. According to his mother, he left an hour or so earlier, and she couldn’t say when he’d be back.’

  ‘Did she tell you where he went?’