Hush My Mouth

by Cathy Pickens

  “What was that all about?”

  “Dumbass doesn’t have sense enough to wet his finger and see which way the wind is blowing. Thinks L.J. actually hired him and his book learning to be a detective.”

  “He’s mad about you looking into Neanna’s death?”

  “He ain’t seen mad.”

  I let it go. Rudy was a big boy and knew how to take care of himself. Most important, he knew how to take care of L.J. and keep things from blowing back on her. Which is what really mattered to L.J.

  “So, you got a present for me?”

  “I signed out the evidence file. You wanted to see it for yourself.” He didn’t hand it to me. “First, though, tell me about her sister.”

  “What’s to tell? She’s grieving. She misses her sister. She feels guilty, wondering what she could’ve done to prevent it. She’s smart, very polished, and driven to find out what happened.”

  Rudy focused on buttering a biscuit from the napkin-lined plastic basket. “You know they aren’t really sisters.”

  He watched for my reaction.

  “Yeah.” Quick work by the sheriff’s department. “But they thought of themselves that way. That’s what matters.”

  His turn to be surprised, that I already knew.

  “So what brought her here from Atlanta? The dead sister.”

  I winced at his callousness, even though I knew Rudy, like any cop, medical malpractice attorney, doctor, or nurse—anyone who deals with human difficulty had to develop self-protective calluses.

  I took a sip of ice tea, wanting to buy a moment to think. No need to let my friendship with Rudy blur the lines of my client’s confidences.

  “The concert,” I said. “And curiosity. You know her aunt—Neanna’s real aunt—was murdered here.”

  Rudy nodded, his eyes hooded. He’d wanted to know if I knew.

  “Neanna was—curious.” I’d hold the rest of my cards for now.

  “Why’d her sister hire you?”

  “Answers.”

  “She doesn’t trust us?”

  He read enough on my face to draw the conclusion he’d expected.

  “Some of that,” I said. “Face it, her aunt’s murder is still unsolved. She doesn’t know anybody in Camden County. How would you react, if you were her?”

  He slid the folder across the table. I opened it on the bench seat beside me, blocking it from view so no idle passerby could get a glimpse that might ruin his lunch.

  The photos were held in plastic-sleeved sheets. The first photo showed the rear of a dusty blue Honda taken from twenty feet away. The car sat on rough-patch asphalt littered with gravel and debris. In the second and third, the camera moved closer with each shot.

  To the right of the car ran a silver guardrail, dented and pocked with rust. Beyond the guardrail, treetops were visible, so the ground must fall away steeply on the other side. The car had a Georgia license plate.

  “Where is this?” I hadn’t asked exactly where they’d found her. Judging from the photos, I guessed a pull-off on a steep, little-traveled mountain road.

  Rudy studied me a moment with narrowed eyes. “The overlook above Moody Springs.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Of course he wasn’t. Rudy could tell I was surprised by the news. “Um, we—some of us were just talking about Moody Springs yesterday,” I explained. “Odd coincidence.”

  “We’re trying to keep it quiet. Don’t need a bunch of sightseeing ghouls up there getting theirselves run over.”

  Ghouls—or ghosters. I hoped the newspaper article had yielded more promising haunted places for them to visit.

  “That’s a busy road,” I said. “An odd choice. And such a beautiful spot. How . . .” I trailed off into my own thoughts. Who drives to a spot like that and thinks, This is a lovely place to die? Had Gran’s death and the breakup with her boyfriend and her obsession with Aunt Wenda’s death piled up into a depression she couldn’t push aside? Had she dwelt on the fact that she was now the same age Wenda had been when she died?

  I flipped to the next picture. The photographer was standing close behind the car. The headrest on the front seat blocked the view but, after some study, I could make out a body, leaned slightly to the right, slumped over the steering wheel. I could also guess what was obscuring part of the left side of the windshield.

  The next photo, taken from maybe ten feet away on the driver’s side of the car, showed the body clearly through the open window, although what remained looked human only because I knew what I was seeing.

  “I didn’t bring all the crime-scene photos, just the key ones. They aren’t all in the book yet. Too much trouble hauling everything around loose.”

  Something in Rudy’s tone made me look up from the photos. I kept the file on the seat beside me. He took a gulp of his tea, so I couldn’t read on his face what the loose photos implied, but I knew the case book would be Rodney’s responsibility, the irate would-be detective. The clear tea glass looked tiny in Rudy’s hand.

  Rudy, whose hair often sticks up in a cowlick in back, was scrupulously well organized when it came to managing the few criminal cases each year that called on him to be a detective. Rodney better make sure he got his act together.

  I flipped quickly to the next shot. “Thanks,” I said. “This is plenty of pictures.” Maybe too many. Sadness washed over me in a wave.

  The next photo showed a close-up of the car’s window frame. Bits of glass—the thick, almost round balls of safety glass from a broken car window rather than the shards that plate glass or a mirror would produce—lay along the edge of the window. Of course. The window was open because it was broken. Not rolled down. Shot out.

  The next photo showed the ground, with enough of the car visible to give it visual reference. A few bits of glass dotted the ground underneath the door.

  The waitress—new to Maylene’s, which wasn’t unusual because the turnover here was legend—plopped our plates and another plastic basket of biscuits and giant squares of cornbread down in front of us and smacked our checks onto the table.

  I stayed twisted around in the seat, thumbing through the last few photos. Most were the scene-setting variety, not the closeups with the right-angle ruler to measure the smallest bits of evidence or to show the wound details. These photos recorded the body’s position before she was removed, washed, and probed inside and out.

  I paused at one of the photo sheets. One shot taken through the open passenger door showed the gun on the front seat. An automatic pistol, solid black and ominous. The next, a close-up of her hand, showed dark flecks dotting the side of her forefinger and back of her hand. Her palm was clean, her fingers delicate and waxy.

  The next picture captured the view through the passenger door. If you could ignore the ominous dark spatters and avoid wondering what was on the door frame and headrest behind her, you could almost believe she was sleeping. Her shoulderlength pale hair fell over the lower part of her face.

  I closed the file folder, hiding the photos from view. That was enough for now.

  “Where did she—shoot herself? You called it a kill shot.”

  “Behind the right ear and the right ear canal, into the brain stem. She died instantly.”

  Kill shot.

  “You gonna eat your tomatoes?” He reached for the three bright red wedges decorating my lettuce salad without waiting for an answer.

  I picked up my fork and stirred my bleu cheese dressing. The macaroni and cheese smelled good, crusty and brown on top.

  A misspent youth, immersed as a young lawyer in medical records, physician textbooks, and photographs of the violence doctors can do to a human body trying to save it—or what an incompetent doctor can do in the name of “practicing” medicine—had left me able to distance myself from gruesome photos and the aftermath of injury. For some reason, though, I couldn’t as easily separate myself from Neanna’s private and devastatingly final act. Was it because of her sister, because I had a sister?

  “D
id you look at all of them?”

  “No, not quite.” I was still tossing my salad to mix the lumpy dressing. I’d known Rudy since kickball in grammar school. He was good at a lot of things, but he wouldn’t be much help figuring out my emotional reaction to Neanna’s death.

  He stared at me, waiting. No food in his mouth or on his fork. “Look at the last ones.”

  I put my fork down, flipped the file open, and turned the stack of photos over to begin at the end of the stack. These photos were of the inside of the car trunk. I kept turning until I found the first in the series: a view of the open trunk from several paces away, with each photo moving progressively closer.

  Inside the trunk was a battered blue American Tourister hard-sided suitcase. When had those things been popular? Before some wise man put wheels on the bottom and made them small enough that we could lift our own. I remembered the last time my mother’s college roommate came to visit when I was a kid. Her bag, one just like this one, had weighed a ton, full of gifts for Lydia and me.

  The suitcase lay open in the trunk, clothes strewn about—something lacy and pink, some jeans, a red sweater, a black bra. I glanced at Rudy. He was chewing now, slowly, watching me.

  The last photos were close-ups of the suitcase itself. The blue lining was loose. I studied the close-up shots of the two halves. The lining had faded in spots but didn’t look as though it had rotted or shredded from age or wear.

  “The lining was torn out of the suitcase?”

  He gestured with his fork. “Great minds thinking alike here.” He cut off another hunk of crispy fried flounder. It looked better than my “vegetable” plate: carrot salad, lettuce sans tomatoes, bleu cheese dressing, macaroni and cheese, and boiled crookneck squash.

  “Where was her purse?”

  He bowed his head as if acknowledging that his pupil was on track. “In the trunk. Down in the wheel well. Maybe I didn’t include that photo.”

  “Also dumped out and ripped up?”

  He nodded, chewing.

  “Why would she do that?” I didn’t need to say that out loud.

  “I’m guessing we both got a guess.”

  “That she didn’t.”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  I sat a moment, digesting the implications. “Didn’t you say she had no ID?”

  “They found it when they worked the trunk. Down under the spare tire.”

  “Did you find a scrapbook?”

  “No. Should we?”

  “She had one with news articles about her aunt’s death. Her sister thought she brought it with her.”

  We both sat silent for a moment, then I said, “Back up, Rudy. How come you decided she committed suicide?”

  “You’re talking to the wrong person.”

  I scooped up a forkful of macaroni. “Suppose you start talking now.”

  “You met our new baby detective.”

  I covered my mouth with my hand so I could talk around my food. “He’s the one who worked the scene.”

  He nodded.

  I turned back to the file folder, looking again at those final two shots.

  “He’s a detective? He can’t be much younger than you.”

  “He’s been to the FBI Academy.” Rudy emphasized the last words with raised hands and eye rolls and a body wiggle that put the disdain in his voice into motion.

  “At any age, you wouldn’t have missed a ransacked suitcase.” I cocked my head to the left, toward the file folder beside me.

  He shrugged and pushed his jealousy or disgust or whatever was going on with him and the baby detective out of sight as quickly as it had appeared. “Cop years are like dog years,” he said. “They go by quick, age you quick. He’ll learn.”

  “Meanwhile?”

  “Meanwhile, I got L.J. to put me in charge of this. After she saw these, she agreed.”

  Sheriff L. J.—Lucinda Jane—Peters had been a high school classmate of ours. If there had been a senior class superlative category for “most likely to break the law,” L.J. would have won hands down, a qualification that surprisingly made her a pretty good sheriff, if you overlooked her tendency to bully people.

  “That going to cause more hard feelings when the new kid finds out you squeezed him out of his case?”

  “I’ll work with him, but if he messes up, then who the hell cares whose feelings get hurt?”

  We ate in companionable silence. I had to rearrange some things in my brain.

  “Okay, so what do you have so far? No suicide note, a positive GSR test. The window glass was blown out. No way somebody could’ve shot her from outside, on the driver’s side?”

  “Naw. I called the ME after I saw those photos, just to doublecheck. Entry wound is on her right, exit wound on the left.”

  “But—” I paused, the significance of the photo of the driver’s side door crystallizing for me. “Explain the glass. If the bullet came from inside the car, wouldn’t the glass fall outside on the ground?”

  I knew from experience how much glass a broken car window left and how much vacuuming it took to clean it all up; someone had broken the window in my firm-leased BMW when I worked in Columbia.

  “Good eye,” he said. “That attracted everyone’s attention. Most of the broken glass fell inside the car, but the window slopes in slightly, which could explain why it fell inside rather than outside.”

  On TV, somebody would gather the glass and glue the whole window back together to check which side showed exit beveling, just to make sure. Maybe Rudy could suggest that to the baby detective. Something to keep him busy.

  “Was it her gun?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Stolen in a home robbery in Birmingham four years ago.”

  I couldn’t see somebody with Fran’s privileged background buying a hot gun on the street from a fence, but Neanna had lived life closer to the edge, maybe had run with folks who could have gotten her a stolen gun.

  “Any word on the tox screen?”

  “A little pot. Some alcohol. A lot of Xanax.”

  Two thoughts running on different tracks collided in my brain. My emotional first response was, No, don’t tell me she’d been using. Like mother, like daughter? The second, more rational response, I asked aloud. “Could she drive on that?” Even if she’d acquired a tolerance, could she navigate unfamiliar mountain roads?

  “You’d be surprised the crap some of the folks you meet on the road got in themselves.”

  He studied his empty plate for a forlorn moment, then asked, “You see the gun?”

  I nodded.

  “You ever handle one of those? A .40 caliber?”

  “Yeah, once. At the range.” Dang thing almost unhinged my right shoulder.

  “That model’s heavier than mine,” Rudy said. He could see he didn’t have to lead the witness any farther.

  I lifted my right arm, elbow stuck awkwardly out to the side, an imaginary muzzle pointed at the base of my skull, the spot where a bullet disrupting the medulla oblongata would stop everything. Instantly. Breathing, muscle movement, everything.

  “That would be a difficult shot,” I said. The weight of the gun, the angle, her small hands.

  He nodded, proud of his pupil.

  “Any dessert?” The waitress whisked up our plates, Rudy’s wiped clean, mine only half-eaten.

  “Peach cobbler,” Rudy said without pause.

  Maylene’s desserts were usually the best thing on the menu, but I wasn’t in the mood, even for warm peach cobbler and rock-hard vanilla ice cream. I turned sideways in the padded booth, my back against the wall and my legs stretched out across the bench seat.

  I could feel Rudy staring at me. Was he willing me to say it out loud so he wouldn’t have to commit himself?

  I didn’t turn to look at him. “You saying you don’t think she killed herself?”

  He slid his ice tea glass back and forth between his hands. “Not saying anything for certain. Just raising questions.”

  “Too many questions.”
>
  He glanced at me before his attention fell back to the puddle of condensation spreading from his sweating tea glass.

  “It’s worth digging into, don’t you think?” I asked. “Just to make sure? It’s probably suicide, but I’d hate to be wrong.”

  He shrugged. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “It bothers me about that window glass on the inside of the car. I can see how that could happen, given the curve of the door, but at the same time . . .”

  He nodded.

  “You think we could find a car like that? Do an experiment?”

  “You been watching too much TV.”

  “I was just thinking, Pun’s junkyard probably has a car like that.” Pun was always helping my dad track down parts for my Mustang. He probably wouldn’t ask many questions—or mind if some window glass got broken. “I can check, if you want,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Rudy wasn’t going to let himself look too excited—or too committed. Playing it close to his beige uniform shirt? Or was he worried about looking foolish, if Detective Boy found out?

  “Do y’all still have her car—Neanna’s?”

  “Yeah.” His tone was cautious.

  “Can I look at it? Or is it still—whatever?”

  “The crime-scene guys have finished with it, if that’s what you mean. But we can’t use it for any kind of experi—”

  “No, no. I know that. I just wanted—can I see it?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know why you’d want to.”

  I couldn’t quite answer that, even for myself. Whenever I’d tried large civil cases, I’d liked to conduct witness interviews myself, see the scene, touch the evidence, read the original hospital records before they were photocopied—even when I couldn’t in good conscience bill for that time. I liked to know my case, personally.

  “I just want to give her sister some small sense of—” Not closure. Something like this is never over and shut away.

  “Understanding?”

  I nodded. “Something like that. Too many open questions just makes it that much harder. Maybe it will help convince me that we have the right ending for her.”

  “I can take you tomorrow, if you want.”