by Attica Locke
“It’s time,” Rosemary said brightly, with the confidence of a woman used to getting her way.
Quinn said, “Ranger Mathews is a part of a joint task force that’s investigating the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Any information your son has that could help authorities might give him a leg up on early release.”
“No,” Roger said quickly. Again, he patted Rosemary on the knee, the gesture this time not so much one of caution but of reassurance, his hand lingering there. Rosemary pressed her coral-painted lips together till the skin around them reddened and then turned purple. Her jaw was clenched so tight, Darren could see the vein in her temple, serpentine and angry. “I’ve instructed my son to make a clean break with that trash,” she said. “He will come home with no burdens. He will not spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for someone aiming to get even with him for telling tales out of church. He will serve his time. Then he will start over. I told him to forget he was ever involved with Nazis.”
Oh, really?
Darren knew he had the power to wipe the smug surety off her face, and it thrilled and frightened him how good it felt. He couldn’t believe he was actually entertaining the idea of fabricating evidence, didn’t recognize himself at all in this moment. He had the terrifying thought that the feelings of invisibility and dislocation were coming from his own mind. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” he said. He felt a slow rage building inside of him at the idea that Bill “Big Kill” King could just forget that he’d been a member of a gang whose initiation rite was the obliterating of a black life. He had savagely killed a man and never done any time for it after a Marion County jury had let him walk; it was selling opioids and meth to whites that had crossed a line for the good folks out here. “You talk about the Aryan Brotherhood being trash. Well, some of that trash came out of your house.”
“I did not raise a racist.”
“Says the woman who’s barely spoken to me since I walked in.”
“I have no problems with black people, Ranger Mathews. I have two of them in my home, Mary and Clyde, my driver. I just don’t like strangers in my house, especially ones looking to use my son. Bill has changed. He wants nothing to do with the Aryan Brotherhood, and he won’t say a word to you.” Sensing how that hung in the air, she quickly added, “And not because you’re black.”
Despite himself, Darren smiled. “Now, see, I wasn’t even thinking that.”
Sheriff Quinn groaned as if he’d belched up something sour. “Whoo, boy.”
Roger had his head down, having newly discovered a loose thread in his pants. But Darren did not suffer from the peculiar affliction that felled many a well-meaning white person—an allergic reaction to race talk, emotional hives breaking out and closing the throat completely—so he wasn’t fazed by any of this. “Mrs. King, your son—”
“I’m not saying I’ve always been comfortable with black people,” she said, rather softly, again playing with the white pearl at her throat. She’d grown pensive, thinking about what had happened to her son. “I don’t socialize with them. It’s just not like that around here; it’s not how I was raised. My people came over from Louisiana right before the Civil War, and we just had our ways of doing things. Never meant blacks any harm—they’re just not my people, if you know what I mean?” Frighteningly, Darren saw both Roger and Quinn, whom he’d come to like, nod their heads in understanding. Darren felt his limbs stiffen on the ridiculous sofa. “I didn’t fuss when they integrated the high school,” she said. “I had a colored girl in my home economics class. She made the best lemon Bundt cake I’ve ever tasted, and she smelled like lavender and honey,” she added in a tone of mild surprise. “We both liked the same type of lip gloss. We even talked about boys. But I would never have brought her home. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a black person in my home, not counting Mary and Clyde, of course . . . and you.”
“Rosie,” Roger said, a soft attempt to stop her from talking.
She shook her head, indignant, mad she’d been bullied into admitting any of this. Her neck grew tall, as did her sense of herself as a good person. “But listen,” she said to Darren, “I have never discriminated against a black person in my life, Mexican neither. I’ve never kept them out of my hotel. I mean, not since it was illegal to do that sort of thing. We have always followed the law.”
Rosemary King, it turned out, owned the Cardinal Hotel, where Darren would be staying in town. She wanted that point made and even said she’d call ahead to ensure that Ranger Mathews got one of their best rooms, a suite on the first floor with a view of the garden in back. The luxury hotel was one of the oldest in the state. Her people had built it the year they’d moved from New Orleans to Jefferson and turned it into the most exclusive palace for moneyed tradesmen and shipping barons during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; there were even rumors that President Benjamin Harrison had stayed at the Cardinal. But guest records had been lost in a devastating fire in 1910.
The hotel was her family legacy. And Bill’s too, if she could get him to turn his life around. “He was a good kid,” she said. “I didn’t see the signs; what can I say? One day he’s friends with everybody, then he gets into a fight with a black boy at school, and suddenly I hear the n-word a lot more, suddenly he starts socializing more with boys who don’t like the blacks. Then the little things—egging houses in the black part of town, kid stuff, you know. Then refusing to let Mary cook his food. I saw all of it happening; I just didn’t know it would lead where it did. It’s like I looked up one day and my sweet son had tattoos on his arms and a mean streak a mile long. And then he stopped coming home altogether, started hanging with some real bad guys, some down the highway in Marshall, some right here in Jefferson.”
Darren told her, “Gil Thomason might be one of those bad guys.”
“Wannabe, at least,” the sheriff said.
Rosemary spit out her assessment: “White trash.”
“Your son seems to think Gil might have hurt Levi in some way.”
She looked down at her hands, two fists in her lap. She unclenched them and then smoothed a few wrinkles in her dress. “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
Something shifted in that moment.
Quinn felt it too. He caught Darren’s eye.
Things were looking bad for the kid.
Marnie and Gil Thomason had sworn he was with his grandmother while refusing to let the sheriff and his men search their trailer. And here was Rosemary saying she hadn’t seen her grandson in weeks. “I know that must sound terribly cold to you,” Rosemary said. “But the truth is, I never got to know Levi. Marnie rarely allows us to spend time together. I don’t even know how well he remembers his father. He was just a pup when Bill got himself in trouble. The hope has always been that once Bill got out, the two of them could become father and son for real, and I could be a real grandmother. But maybe the State of Texas has got its way of punishing Bill for what he’s done, and God’s got other ideas.” Darren saw her eyes water, but the tears, he felt, were for the loss of the dream she couldn’t fulfill for her son rather than for the nine-year-old who was still missing. Wherever Levi King was, he was on his own.
7.
THEY SEARCHED the house anyway. Twenty rooms, including a library, a study, a sewing room, and a dining room large enough to double as a ballroom, as it did in the late 1800s when Rosemary King’s people settled in Jefferson. After Rosemary’s great-great-grandmother was widowed, she’d sold the family plantation in Louisiana, moved to Jefferson, and built the Cardinal, which became the centerpiece of the town’s sense of itself as the cosmopolitan capital of East Texas in the steamboat era. She became a grand dame of Jefferson society but never remarried and raised a daughter in the house that Rosemary King had lived in since she was born. The dining room had once hosted governors and bankers and plantation owners from as far away as Denton and Dallas. The house on North Vale Street was the largest in Marion County, Quinn said, and was a regular feature on the circuit of tour
s of historic homes and gardens in Jefferson. Once a year, Rosemary allowed the mayor and aldermen to hold parts of the town’s elaborate Civil War reenactments on her front lawn. She was, Quinn made it known, a very big deal around Jefferson.
She put no restrictions on the search, even silencing Roger when he’d tried to object. It was Mary who walked the sheriff and Darren through the house, as if they were regular guests whom it would be rude to leave wandering around the place looking for the facilities. Darren asked her if she’d ever met Mrs. King’s grandson Levi. She said, “Once,” speaking so softly that if Darren hadn’t seen her lips move, he might have thought he’d imagined the entire exchange. Though Quinn had gotten an “Afternoon, sir,” Mary avoided eye contact with Darren; he wondered if it pained her for him to see her in her maid’s uniform, a collared, ill-fitting, double-breasted dress that must have been a hand-me-down from the previous girl or maybe the one before that. Rosemary had said she’d never had a black guest in her home, so until today, Mary’s humiliation had been visible to white callers only and thus private in some way. Darren bearing witness to her servitude made it real, and she seemed to resent him for it.
There was no sign of the boy in the house, not even in the bedroom that had clearly been reserved for his visits, which Rosemary had said were few and far between. There was a twin bed covered with a red comforter dotted with pictures of quarter horses, saddles, and spurs. The walls were painted a pale blue. There was a desk in a corner with only a single book on its attached shelf—the King James Bible—and the only toys in the room were a plastic dump truck that would interest no child over the age of five and a stuffed cocker spaniel lying on its stomach. The room had the same desolate feel as the one that had been set up for Bill King’s return home from prison, both of them waiting empty and untouched.
They searched the carriage house too.
Clyde, Rosemary’s driver, smoked a cigarette along the side of the building that housed a copper ’53 Mercedes and a silver late-model Cadillac, both shiny as freshly minted coins. He nodded to Darren but didn’t speak either. There was nothing indicating that Levi had been in either vehicle. Still, Darren cringed watching the sheriff compromise potential evidence by running his ungloved hands inside both cars. They would need a clean sweep of the cars one day, wouldn’t they? Darren wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. Was he saying he thought the old woman was somehow connected to her grandson’s disappearance? Not exactly, but she was being cagey about something. Why the hell else had her lawyer been present? As a former law student, he knew he was wrong for thinking like that. But he didn’t like the woman. A second later, Quinn declared their work done. He neither dismissed Darren nor invited him to come along after he told Briggs he was heading back to the office. “I’ll let you know if we hear something on that warrant,” he said to Darren before turning and walking down the drive to his cruiser.
“Something’s off,” Darren told Wilson on the phone. He mentioned the odd dynamic between Marnie and her boyfriend, Gil, the way she cowered, and the fact that the boy’s grandmother had a lawyer hanging around, plus there was the bizarre lack of urgency on the part of the county for a lost kid from a trailer park. He liked Quinn, he said, but nobody seemed all that hot to find this kid. “Except for Bill King,” he said.
“I’m working with the state to get you in to talk to him as soon as possible.”
“Unless he’s hiding the kid in his cell, I don’t see what good that does.”
“Bill King’s potentially sitting on a shit-ton of evidence against the ABT.”
“He won’t talk,” Darren said, remembering Rosemary’s stridency and presenting it as fact here. Some part of him knew he was putting on a show, not wanting Wilson to think him too eager to get in a room alone with King.
“We’ll see about that,” Wilson said.
Darren remembered the sister all of a sudden, the image of her crying inside the trailer, and he mused aloud about finding a way to talk to her alone.
“Don’t you dare. This is Sheriff Quinn’s deal to run. Marion County didn’t ask for an assist. Your presence there is a courtesy offered by the local sheriff. Act like it. Remember your mission out there. Just make sure you’re in that trailer when the warrant comes through.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And hey, Mathews, you didn’t mention anything to Frank Vaughn, the San Jacinto County DA, about Ronnie Malvo being an informant for the task force, did you?”
“Of course not,” Darren said, feeling an irrational fear that Wilson could read his mind, the things he had planned to redirect that case. “Why?”
“He’s been calling my office,” Wilson said, sounding puzzled, and for a moment Darren pictured him hunched over a stack of those pink message slips his secretary still used. “Left word Friday and then again today. Mentioned your name both times. Want to be clear we’re on the same page before I call back.”
“Of course, sir,” Darren affirmed dutifully, damn near clipping his words like a soldier’s steps. Why was Frank Vaughn calling his boss?
“The good work you done down in Lark got you over the hump of people pointing the finger about you knowing more than you’ve let on about the Malvo deal. Steer clear of it now, hear? Keep your eyes on the prize out there in Jefferson, Mathews. We got a real shot at flushing the Brotherhood out of Texas.”
“Copy,” Darren said flatly before ending the call.
He resented the suggestion that he, of all people, didn’t understand the danger of the Aryan Brotherhood, that he was somehow shirking his duty to fight this particular form of homegrown terrorism. It pissed him off, frankly, made his blood run hot. He understood the threat of the Brotherhood in a way that Wilson never would, and he privately derided his lieutenant’s naivete, saw privilege in his earnest belief that the ABT was going anywhere. Darren thought he finally knew better, and it turned something heavy that had been sitting in his stomach for weeks now. It raised a sour taste in the back of his throat and put a name to what he’d been feeling: despair. Away from his daily office drudgery, the sterile combing of records that kept him off the road, he could finally admit that some part of him had merely been going through the motions these past weeks. In truth, he was the least optimistic he’d ever been that the Brotherhood and what it stood for would ever truly be eradicated. There were too many of them; in tattoos or neckties, they were out there. Everywhere. The country seemed to grow them in secret, like a nasty fungal disease that spread in the dark places you don’t ever dare to look. The country was in more trouble than any task force could handle. Darren knew this better than Wilson, better than the entire department maybe, no matter how much it scared him to admit it. He thought of Levi King and reached for the boy like a twisted lifeline, a dull ray of hope. Darren couldn’t stamp out hatred in a day, but what he could do was find a nine-year-old and give himself permission to nail the boy’s father for Malvo’s murder.
Bill King’s freedom would be the price he paid for his son’s life.
* * *
He was standing next to his Chevy truck parked a few feet from the Cardinal Hotel, a red-brick building that was a full city block long, with black shutters and a second-story balcony where four Lone Star flags flew. Briggs was out of his cruiser as soon as he saw Darren was off his phone. He hiked up the beige pants of his uniform and asked the Ranger if he was hunting for a place to eat. Briggs had a buddy who ran the kitchen at the Steamboat Palace, and he could probably get them a table. Darren looked around the nearly empty streets of downtown Jefferson and suppressed a chuckle. Even though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, he told Briggs that unless he heard word about the search of Marnie and Gil’s trailer, he was turning in for the night. Briggs offered to help get him settled in the room, keep an eye on things, as had been his orders.
Darren made that sound foolish. “Don’t need someone to watch me sleep.”
“But Sheriff said—”
“If I leave the hotel, I’ll call, I pr
omise. You’ll be by my side,” Darren said. Briggs nodded, liking the idea that he was needed. “But I’m good for now.”
He grabbed the duffel he always kept in the cab of his truck. He tossed the strap over his shoulder and nodded to Briggs. The hotel’s receptionist saw him through the window and had him checked in “on the house” by the time he approached the front desk in the lobby, which strongly resembled Rosemary King’s gilded parlor, although the Cardinal Hotel showed its age in a way that both Rosemary and her home did not. Seen up close, the baseboards were scuffed, and there was dust on the red velvet curtains; the carpet in his suite was worn in the hallway to the bathroom, which had an ancient claw-foot tub, and one of the windows didn’t open. Still, there was a weight to the place, a sense of history that was both regal and sad, a loss of glory in every ornate detail. Kind of like the town itself. Darren sat on the edge of the four-poster mahogany bed, heard its springs creak beneath him; the mattress emitted a smell of rose water and dust. He waited until he was sure Briggs had finally gone, and then he walked outside, climbed into his truck, and headed back to Hopetown.
Darren didn’t even know what the kid looked like, had nothing to show Leroy Page to confirm or deny whether this was the boy he’d seen Friday night. Short of announcing his intentions to Sheriff Quinn, there was only one way to get his hands on a photograph of Levi King. He drove hunched over the steering wheel—ignoring a second call from Mack—so he could pay attention to every ditch-like rut off Farm Road 727, every weed-choked path, to be sure he didn’t miss the narrow red-dirt road that led to Hopetown. His tires were coated with it by the time he pulled in front of Marnie and Gil’s blue and white trailer. The sun had wandered below the tops of the cypress trees on Caddo Lake to the west, and a honeyed light poured through the Spanish moss, dotting the surface of the water with circles of gold. Inland, dozens of loblolly pines and hundred-year-old live oaks ringed their arms around the trailer park, giving the place a warm, homey feel it didn’t deserve.
