by Attica Locke
“Not a peep. But I threw back quite a few this evening.”
“Where were you coming from, sir?”
“Dinner party.”
“At Rosemary King’s house?”
“Yes.”
“And who was the woman I saw you with earlier?”
“Well, Ranger, let’s just say I pick up all kinds of friends on my travels, and I rarely inquire about names so I can claim ignorance when the wife asks.” He was sitting on the edge of the king-size bed, close to swinging his hairy legs back under the covers, clearly waiting on Darren to leave. “That all, Ranger?”
His cool indifference in the presence of law enforcement also bothered Darren, but he couldn’t rightly say why. There didn’t appear to be a single thing the man had done wrong, but the whole exchange left Darren unsettled. He’d heard something. Hadn’t he? He actually doubted himself for a moment. Could he trust anything he’d seen or heard this evening? Between exhaustion and the cheap hotel-room beer, he’d conjured a ghost in his room. Maybe he’d imagined the noises too. Maybe he’d drunk more than he thought. Maybe this backslide was more dangerous than he realized. It was two o’clock in the morning, and he was standing in a strange man’s room in his underwear. “I didn’t get your name,” Darren said.
But it turned out he already knew it.
“Sandler Gaines,” he said.
The man who was buying Hopetown.
12.
FIRST THING in the morning, Darren checked the man’s story.
The woman working the front desk was wearing a frilly white shirt tucked into a slim black skirt, and she had a red velvet ribbon around her ponytail that looked like it had been snipped right off the curtains. She typed into a rather large gray desktop computer and within a few seconds confirmed for Darren that rooms 209 and 207, the two flanking Mr. Gaines’s suite, were indeed both empty last night. “And all three rooms were rented to Mr. Gaines?”
The desk clerk, who was in her twenties, stared at the screen and then frowned. “Well, no,” she said slowly, eyes scanning the computer’s monitor. “Room two-oh-seven was rented to another guest.”
And yet Sandler Gaines had had a key to the room.
“And the guest’s name?”
The clerk shook her head, the swirl of her honey-colored ponytail swinging. “We’re not allowed to give out that kind of information, sir.”
Darren set his badge on the counter and smiled. “It’s okay.”
Seeing the shiny glint of the five-point-star badge, the girl let out a tiny Oh in surprise, a gasp of excitement, and for a moment Darren thought he had her.
But then the clerk gave Darren a sweet, pitying frown, like a kindergarten teacher telling her kids to stop jumping down the slide, that rules keep everybody safe. “I believe you’d need a court order or something like that to see private hotel records. Discretion is one of the pillars of service the Cardinal Hotel prides itself on,” she said, rattling off chunks of text from an employee-training binder.
“And you’re sure the room was empty?”
“Oh, yes, sir, she checked out around nine o’clock last night,” the clerk said, not realizing what she’d let slip. She, Darren noted. He’d still been at the bar with Greg at the time. He wasn’t sure what he’d heard last night, but in any case, Sandler Gaines had lied to him, and he wanted to know why.
“How long has Mr. Gaines been staying at the Cardinal?” he asked.
This she answered excitedly, forgetting herself and the sense of propriety she’d held so dear only moments ago. “Oh, he arrived with the Jeffersonian.”
“The what?”
“The steamboat,” she said. She pointed to a display of brochures for various local attractions, everything from the Jefferson Historical Museum to the Jefferson General Store to garden walks and ghost tours and plantation restaurants to a Gone with the Wind museum to several ongoing Civil War reenactments. From the display, the desk clerk plucked a green-and-white brochure and handed it to Darren. There was a picture of a boat that resembled a wedding cake but with a large paddle wheel and two black smokestacks attached to the back. COME SEE JEFFERSON’S NEWEST ATTRACTION, the caption read. The brochure had pictures of slot machines and blackjack tables on the boat and an image of a well-dressed and well-tanned couple standing on the deck of the Jeffersonian, their two glasses of champagne kissing as the sun set behind them on Big Cypress Bayou, the main artery from the town into the wilds of Caddo Lake.
Darren didn’t understand what he was looking at or what Gaines was selling. “Gambling’s illegal in Texas,” he said.
“Oh, that’s just for show,” the clerk said. Her name tag said SHAWNA, Darren saw now. She had wide brown eyes and nails both bitten and polished. “It’s just a boat right now, a prototype, Mr. Gaines said when he had a crew bring it in. Can’t even ride on the thing yet. But you can go see it. It’s just a few yards behind the courthouse, parked right under the railway bridge. It’ll cost you ten dollars, though,” Shawna said. “And was everything okay with your room?”
It was smaller in real life. He’d walked down a small hill of grass, past a plaque that identified the spot under the rusted railroad bridge as the Jefferson Turn Basin, the place on Big Cypress where ships could turn during the heyday of Jefferson’s days as a port city. The “steamboat” docked before him—essentially an oversize double-decker pontoon boat in elaborate disguise, the smokestacks and paddle wheel in back tacked on as decoration—certainly called to mind the era when Jefferson was the crown jewel in Texas trade, a time of local wealth and glamour when steamboat travel was considered the height of sophistication and comfort, the way to get to Texas from New Orleans or St. Louis or anywhere else along the Mississippi River. There were candlelit dining halls and elegant ballrooms, smoking salons and rooms for men to wager money on card games. And there was danger too. Only a few hundred yards behind Darren was the faded mural of the Mittie Stephens, homage to a ghost ship.
It was one of the deadliest steamboat crash-and-burns in history, some sixty souls perishing on a cold night in the middle of Caddo Lake nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, after the vessel caught fire and then grounded in shallow water. Though the wreck of the Mittie Stephens was the one everyone remembered, there’d been crashes before that, and there were crashes after, until steamboat travel through Caddo Lake dried up for good in the 1870s. Why Sandler Gaines was trying to build a new entertainment industry on such rusted history was beyond Darren. And there’d be no time to dissect the business venture now or even take a peek inside. He heard footsteps coming fast behind him, and then Deputy Briggs’s voice. “There you are.” Darren turned and saw the young deputy gnawing on a piece of white sandwich bread wrapped around a link sausage with dill pickle chips hanging out of it. “Was waiting out front of the Cardinal from six this morning,” he said. The sun was still on its climb to the east on the other side of Big Cypress Bayou, the light sprinkling gold across the greenish surface of the water. It was only a little after seven, but Briggs was hyped. “Guess you musta slipped past me somehow. The news came down just fifteen minutes ago,” he said, nodding toward the yellow brick courthouse.
Darren took a last look at the Jeffersonian, then turned and started away from the water and up the hill toward town. “Warrant come through?” he said.
“Big time.”
* * *
Gil Thomason was already in cuffs in the back of a squad car by the time Darren made it back to the trailer park. There were several deputies gathered, plus Sheriff Quinn, all of them trying to calm down Marnie King, who was walking in circles with her eyes down, as if divining something in the pattern her bare feet made in the dirt. She shook off a deputy who was trying to stem her plum-faced rage and snotty tears. She was crying, telling anyone who would listen that the shit wasn’t hers. “The credit cards, rocks of crystal, you’re crazy if you think I’d ever have that shit around my kids.” She jabbed a finger against the back passenger window where Gil was tied up and said, �
��You can lock the son of a bitch under the jail for all I care. Just leave me and my kids out of it. Take me in too, I don’t care. I’ll tell you every goddamn thing this SOB’s been up to, all the shit he promised he wasn’t bringing into my daddy’s trailer. I’ll cut a deal right now. I just want my boy back.” She banged her hands on the squad car’s window as if, given enough time and effort, she could make contact with Gil and his “goddamn, fucking hard head.” Quinn finally grabbed her by the arms, practically lifted her off the ground, and dragged her away from his cruiser before she could do any real damage. The palms of her hands were as red as if she’d set them on hot coals.
A crowd had gathered. Marnie and Gil’s neighbors, the white couple living out of the van decorated with the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag and dixie beach towel, were standing closer than Darren might have allowed if it were his crime scene. Bo, the dude with the beard, the one who’d offered to posse up against Darren if Gil gave the say-so, was standing with his arms folded tight across his chest. His wife, girlfriend, sister—Darren had no clue—had a cigarette dangling from the corner of her dry lips. With her right hand she held up a cell phone, filming the police activity while providing running commentary between puffs on her smoke. “You see this shit, you see what it’s like out here, what it’s come to in this country when white folks is drug out they home. You see how these turncoat fake-ass cops are doing good white folks minding they own business.”
Darren told the woman to back up a few feet, and when she spit in the dirt at his feet, he told her he was willing to give her the same treatment black folks got from cops if she thought she was getting the raw end of this citizenship deal. “Though, bit of advice, you may want to get your affairs in order first.”
“You hear that, Sheriff? The nigger just threatened me.”
Quinn turned, his arms still holding Marnie in such a way that she was nearly cuffed by the sheer strength of his will. They both saw Darren at the same time. Like a bull from a pen, Marnie threw off the sheriff and ran through the red dirt to Darren, looking at him with begging eyes. She grabbed his arm, digging her fingers through his shirt, digging through to bone. Darren felt like a stone in mud, hammered in place by her hurt. “Did you find Levi? Did you find my boy?”
Bo scratched his reddish beard and nodded toward Darren. “Why don’t you ask him what he was doing talking to Leroy Page about the boy last night?”
Sheriff Quinn shot Darren a look that cracked what easy camaraderie there’d been between them yesterday. Quinn was furious. “You talked to Page?”
“Wanted to be clear he knew what he saw Friday night.”
Marnie looked from Darren to the sheriff. “Mr. Page? He saw Levi? Does he know where my son is?”
From the back of the cruiser, Gil hollered through the glass, loud enough that his breath fogged the back window, “I never laid a hand on that boy.”
Marnie screamed back, “You whipped him just two weeks ago, left welts the size of bloody slugs. He couldn’t hardly sit right for days.”
“Shut the fuck up, Marnie!”
“Fuck you, Gil.”
“It’s Page,” Gil said, nearly obscured by the fog of his breath in the back of the cruiser. “Can’t y’all see that? The old man had it in for Levi since he tried to burn the church, red hot over the fact that he tagged up the old man’s house.”
“Ask the Ranger here if he’s protecting one of his own,” the bearded man said while his wife, girlfriend, whoever, kept filming the scene with her phone. Darren edged away from the two of them, from the cracked camera’s lens, aware of the potential hazards that being filmed carried for him as a Ranger who’d only recently gotten his badge returned. He turned his back to the cell phone camera and asked Quinn, “You arresting him on the kid?”
“No,” Quinn said, nodding toward the open door to the trailer. “We got stolen credit cards, a drug stash and paraphernalia, plus a buncha shit boosted from the Walmart in Marshall. I’m gon’ hold him on that while we try to figure out what happened to that kid.” He glanced back toward the green hills on the other side of Hopetown. “Not feeling hopeful, Ranger, I’ll tell you that.”
Darren lifted his hands in an apology. “I was truly only trying to help. Just wanted to get a sense of the man, Page, see how he reacted to a picture of Levi.”
“Aw, hell, he’s known that boy his whole life.”
Darren nodded. “I keep coming back to the water. We sure the boy didn’t get lost out there? Maybe he ran into some kind of trouble with the boat?”
Quinn stared at the weather-beaten boat shed fifty yards or so near the shore, wood feathered gray with age, rotted across the roof, and shook his head.
“The boat was returned, Ranger. Everything says Levi made it back to shore, including Page’s own statement. If he says he saw him, I got no good reason not to believe him. And that makes him the last one to see the boy alive. Period.”
In the end they carted them both away, Gil for the credit cards and drugs and Marnie for whatever the Texas penal code for acting a damn fool, hollering and swearing and mouthing off to anyone in a fifty-foot radius. The show over, Bo and his wife, girlfriend, sister, or whoever stopped filming and returned to their van. Darren watched as it listed sideways, as they climbed in one after the other. The dusty lane that ran between the trailers, vans, and houseboats grew quiet then. There were still a few deputies who’d been ordered to stay behind while Darren got his look inside the trailer. And the white residents of Hopetown seemed content to let the drama trail up the road behind the two cruisers carrying Marnie and Gil. No one seemed interested in drawing the curiosity of cops anywhere near their patchwork abodes. Darren heard doors behind him slam shut. Heard locks click. Alone, he walked up the stairs of Marnie’s trailer.
Inside it smelled of lemon Pledge, of the effort to make something pretty of a thirty-year-old trailer, six hundred square feet of matted carpet, ripped and fraying in places. There were two tiny bedrooms with hampers doubling as dresser drawers, the plastic cages filled with clothes and stacked nearly to the ceiling. The sheriff’s deputies had tossed the place. There were books, VHS tapes, photocopied papers and messy piles of receipts, old toys, and a few loose car parts strewn over the floor and on every open surface. But damn if those surfaces weren’t gleaming. Someone had whitewashed the wood paneling, giving the trailer a vaguely beach cabin–like feel. And with great care, someone had sewn curtains made of blue cotton printed with tiny conch shells.
“Levi made those.” Darren turned to see a doughy teenage girl standing in the doorway to one of the bedrooms. Behind her, he saw the one double bed and its two twin-size comforters, one an aging fleece with a picture of Hannah Montana on it, parts of her peach-colored skin flaking off the fabric, the other with Pokémon on the cover. “He got kicked out of gym class, and his coach made him take a home-ec class as punishment. But I think they look nice.” Softly, she said, “I’m Dana.”
“Your brother seemed to get into his share of trouble.”
“He’s just a stupid kid, bored out of his mind out here.”
“Lot of bored kids don’t terrorize folks.” He turned away from her then, continued his inspection of the trailer, finding no more connection to the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas than a copy of Mein Kampf that no one had so much as cracked the spine on, dixie-flag tea towels, and a few sketches of SS Bolts and the ABT crest on the back of a bill for a refill of the family’s propane tank. Gil Thomason was a poser, it seemed, a wannabe ABT tough who didn’t seem to hold much connection to the organization’s inner circles of power. The photocopied papers in the folders he found weren’t member rosters or notes from meetings but song lyrics and sheet music. Someone was learning to play “Cry, Cry, Cry” by Johnny Cash on a guitar that Darren saw nowhere in the trailer. He’d seen enough. The rest of his work would take place inside an interrogation room back at the sheriff’s office in Jefferson. In fact, the blankness of Gil’s association with the Brotherhood might make it all the easier to use
him to tie Bill King to Ronnie Malvo’s murder. Maybe justice is poetry, he told himself again, maybe it was whatever art you could make of it.
“I was the only one here, you know,” Dana said behind him.
He turned and caught her looking down at the tips of her shoes, cheap boots with peeling pleather. “They lied to the sheriff. That whole mess about them waiting up all night? Bullshit. They were out to Jefferson or Marshall or wherever the hell and didn’t come home until two in the morning, drunk off their asses, both of them. Took till sunrise for Mama to sober up and understand Levi was gone. By then I’d already called Rosemary. So I knew he wasn’t there.”
And Rosemary must have been the one to call Bill.
Hence his letter to the governor Sunday.
“This is my fault,” Dana said, tears forming, making black rivers of her drugstore mascara and a shallow pool of pain where they landed in the hollow of her throat. “I sent him on the water. I gave him the boat key. And when my company left . . . ” It was such a strange, formal word coming from a girl in cheap boots and raccoon eyes. Darren felt a pity that shamed him. She was trying so hard to get this right, to get this man with a badge to see past the tiny trailer, the messiness of her mother and her boyfriend, to get this black man not to look at her and see white trash. He respected the fact that she was smart enough to wait until Marnie and Gil were gone to tell the truth.
