by Attica Locke
“When my friend left, I was the one who waited, watching as it grew dark,” she said. And here she grabbed him by the arm, startling him with a grip as strong and desperate as her mother’s, and pulled him toward a small rectangular window above the trailer’s kitchen sink. There was a clear view of the boat shed; Quinn’s deputies had confirmed the boat was there. “And I’m telling you the old man is lying. I woulda seen something.”
“But you admit you missed seeing your brother returning the boat.”
“Mr. . . . Ranger, I didn’t see anybody. Not Levi. Not Leroy Page on patrol.”
“Is it possible you missed Mr. Page?”
“Missed a black man on a horse with a forty-five on his hip? Around here”—she tried to say this next part gently, not wanting to offend Darren—“that’s not the kind of thing goes unnoticed. When Mr. Page and them Indians do their patrol, soon as you hear the clip of those horses, folks in the trailers come sit out on their front steps with their own weapons showing. Been known to pop a few warning shots. You can’t miss it when they get started.” She looked down at her hands, chipped black polish, nails bitten and torn. “Leroy is lying, got to be.”
13.
“I WANT eyes on Page,” Quinn was saying to a couple of his deputies as Darren walked into the tiny office of the Marion County Sheriff back in Jefferson, his first time inside. The whole outfit wasn’t much larger than the suite he was occupying at the Cardinal Hotel. There was a white woman in her seventies sitting behind a reception desk. She had a jar of strawberry candies set out, as if this were a real estate office or a pediatrics practice and not a place for the sifting through and sorting of criminals, a workspace that was directly attached to the county jail. The receptionist, chestnut-and-gray hair teased and sprayed into a perfect dome, took one look at Darren and said, “The rest of ’em is back there.”
“The rest” included Greg Heglund, wearing the same black suit from last night, and another federal agent, slightly older than him and dressed as stiffly in a black suit and black tie. The two had their heads together as they trailed Sheriff Quinn and his deputies into the hallway. As Darren approached, Quinn, who’d cooled toward him considerably in the past twenty-four hours, gave him a terse nod and said, “Thomason’s all yours.” They were moving with such clarity of purpose that when one of the deputies offered to escort Darren to the interrogation room, where Gil Thomason was waiting, Darren actually hung back to try to get a word with Greg, whom he’d never seen with another federal agent, never seen walk and talk in the clipped and stiff way that he did now.
Greg was telling Quinn, “We’ll work to get a warrant to search Mr. Page’s home on our end. If this is what we think this is, the Bureau is ready to put in the time and resources to bring about a federal indictment.”
“What’s going on?” Darren asked his friend, who, in the presence of the local sheriff, made a show of giving Quinn the floor and fairly ignoring Darren.
“Mr. Thomason has signed an affidavit detailing acts of harassment by Mr. Page against him and Marnie King and threatening violence against the boy, Levi King. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of this kid for four days, and it’s time to call this what it is. Agent Heglund here is looking to head up the homicide investigation for the FBI, and we’ll assist in any way we can.”
Greg finally looked at him, and Darren saw something sheepish in his expression; the direction of the case seemed to have shaved years of fraternal affection and closeness between the two men down to something so thin Darren could see straight through what was left of it, could feel cold air breeze through the new holes in their relationship. “Leroy Page is our number-one suspect.”
So you got your hate crime.
He kept the words to himself, wouldn’t call out his friend like that. But a gulf had opened up between them. After twenty-some years of friendship, had race finally dumped a swamp of quicksand at their feet, making it impossible for either man to reach the other without the threat of losing himself in the process? Or were they just doing their jobs the best way they knew how? “What about Thomason?” Darren said. “What about the drugs?”
“Oh, he ain’t going home no time soon,” Quinn said.
“And you don’t think he knows that? He’s saying anything, trying to save his own ass.”
Wasn’t that, in fact, what Darren had been counting on? Using a criminal’s natural instinct for butt-preservation to get Thomason to name Bill King in the Ronnie Malvo homicide? Lazy police work could cut both ways, he guessed. “He’s telling tales on Leroy Page just to save himself on the drug charges he knows are coming.”
“It’s not just him,” Greg said. “Marnie King confirmed Leroy Page has been terrorizing folks out in Hopetown, riding with an armed posse, and that he had a particular dislike for her son. The two had had words, a grown man cussing a kid.”
“A kid who’d spray-painted nigger on his house, who’d tried to burn down what the Indians hold as sacred, their place of worship.”
“All of which is going in the indictment,” Greg said. “Goes to motive.”
Darren felt like he’d walked in at the tail end of a horror movie, the plot of which he couldn’t quite follow. But he was sure everyone on-screen was making a terrible mistake. Stop this, he wanted to scream. “Talk to the daughter. Dana, Marnie’s other kid,” he said, speaking directly to Greg now. “She says Gil and Marnie weren’t home all night. She was the one looking for Levi and she says Leroy Page wasn’t out that night, that there’s no way he saw Levi.”
“So the old man lied about seeing him alive?” Quinn said. “Well, that sure as shit don’t clear him.”
Darren said, “The only way you got to Page as a suspect is him saying he’d seen the kid. If he was confused, got his nights mixed up—”
“Sorry, D., but that’s just not true,” Greg said. “We have the old man’s own statements about Levi King and now corroborating stories from the boy’s mother and her boyfriend, also living in the house.” He looked at Darren, wanting some reassurance that things were okay between them. “Don’t worry—we are going to handle this carefully, every rock overturned, before we go anywhere near a grand jury. We know we can’t afford to fuck this up.” Trust me, his eyes were saying. It’s a tactic. The long game is for the greater good. But then he went and ruined it by saying in front of the other federal agent and Sheriff Quinn, two white men: “You know if the races were reversed and some black kid came up dead and his white neighbor had threatened him, that neighbor would be a suspect.” Greg using Darren’s race—and his assumption that he had a right to do so in mixed company to make his point—hurt Darren in a way that nothing else had.
“‘Came up dead’?” Darren said. “There’s no body. There’s no case, Greg.”
“We’ll see,” Quinn said, putting a supportive hand on Greg’s shoulder.
Darren’s time in the box with Gil Thomason was as unproductive and unpleasant as a trip to the bathroom after a hard bender, and his head ached just as much. He was admittedly distracted by the turn this case had taken, by Greg’s cocky assurance that he was doing the right thing, and by Darren’s own doubts about Leroy Page. He believed Dana and her tears for her brother. But why would the old man have lied about seeing Levi the night he disappeared?
Gil wasn’t exactly cooperating. He alternated between stony silence—arms crossed tightly across his chest, wooden chair leaned back on its rear legs—and launching race grenades at Darren, as if he’d grown bored and wanted to see how they would land. Nigger. Coon. Nigger-coon. Roach. Monkey with a badge. “Did you know that on average, black men have IQs twenty points lower than white men? So chances are, badge or no badge, I’m a hell of a lot smarter than you, Ranger.”
“If you tell me you can spell IQ, then I’ll believe it,” Darren said.
Gil actually paused for a second, thinking. The answer was so simple, as was the joke embedded in it, that Gil had to search hard in his brain for the trick, and it left him gape-mouthed and looking
as dumb as driftwood. And that only made him madder. Nigger. Coon. Burr-head. Buckwheat motherfucker.
There wasn’t a single visible tattoo on his tanned and ropy arms. His neck likewise bore no marks save for acne scars and shave bumps along the hairline. Darren wasn’t sure Gil Thomason knew who Hitler was, let alone could explain the significance of the seminal text Mein Kampf that was in his trailer. And after fifteen minutes, Darren decided he’d wasted enough of his time on Gil and lost his appetite for dirty dealing; it was a fire you could start for a single good reason and end up turning a forest to ash. He was on his way out of the station when he was informed by one of the deputies that Marnie was asking to speak to him.
The headquarters of the Marion County Sheriff didn’t have two interrogation rooms, so Marnie had been locked in Quinn’s office this whole time, a sliver of a room overheated by a radiator with flaking paint under the window. Case files were stacked every which way, and Quinn had a bunch of leftover yard signs from his most recent campaign leaning upside down against a wall, their wooden stakes pointed in the air like church steeples. But it was a MAGA hat sitting on the edge of Quinn’s desk next to a jar of buffalo nickels that drew Darren’s attention; it was red like a siren, a warning signal. The sheriff was done with Marnie by then, but it was clear he had no intention of leaving Darren and Marnie alone in his office. He sat behind his desk, fingers linked and resting on his slight belly, watching Darren, who stood while Marnie, who’d been dragged to the station barefoot, ran her dusty toes along the flat gray carpet. Even with the heat, she was shivering as she sat in the chair across from Quinn’s desk. Neither man acknowledged her discomfort. Despite Darren’s irritation over her probable exaggerations of Leroy Page’s behavior toward her family, he was curious enough to be courteous. He crouched down to keep her from having to crane her neck to meet his eyes. Her tears had dried, but her eyes were puffy and makeup-smeared. “I’m sorry about Gil” was the first thing she said. “All that nigger this and nigger that. He just talks tough, ain’t nearly as hateful as he pretends to be. You’d see if you got to know him.”
“Well, ma’am, I usually take people at the first nigger,” Darren said. “I find it saves time that way.”
“I don’t hate Gil, I don’t.”
“Well, good for you.”
“I just don’t want y’all thinking I’d have all that mess around my kids,” she said, running the back of her hand under her nose to wipe a lingering drop of snot. “I never even let Bill keep drugs and guns around the house. There’s safe houses for that stuff. But Gil ain’t been jumped in yet, and he’s an idiot.”
“But surely you knew what Bill was up to back in the day,” Darren said.
“I know a whole hell of a lot,” Marnie said. “I’ll know whatever you want me to know if you find my kid. Please, Ranger Mathews, I am begging you to help me find my kid.” She had the same despairing look her daughter, Dana, had had in the trailer today—she looked at Darren as an unforgiving mirror, saw the wretchedness of her life choices through his eyes. She too needed him to see past all that, to see past the bitten nails, the teeth yellowed with nicotine, the skin pocked with time and poor nutrition. She wanted him to see her as a woman, as somebody’s brokenhearted mother, not trash, as Rosemary King had so crassly put it. “I’ll remember anything you want me to about Bill King, sign anything.”
There it was, Darren thought, his for the taking.
She lowered her head then, her face pinking as the tears started again. “I just want my son back,” she said. “I’m a good mom. Fuck Rosemary.”
Quinn leaned forward, his chair squeaking slightly. “Ma’am, we are doing everything to find out what happened to your son.”
“You think he’s dead.”
Quinn wouldn’t correct her statement, so she turned to Darren. “I can’t explain it, but I just don’t think my baby’s gone.”
“It’s important to have hope,” Quinn said. “But as law enforcement, we have to be pragmatic, ma’am. We can’t let evidence slip by while we’re hoping.”
To Darren, she said, “Please find him. Please.” And then she added, “I’ll give you anything you want on Bill,” like she knew his real reason for being here, as if she didn’t believe an agency as important as the Texas Rangers would actually be worrying over her trailer-park kid.
“You ever heard of a man named Ronnie Malvo?” he said, the words jumping out before he could stop them. “ABT, out of San Jacinto County?”
Marnie looked at him with her swamp-green eyes, searching the brown of his for how much this might get her. “Yeah, yeah, I heard Bill mention him.”
“So I guess you know he’s gone?”
“Gone?”
From his desk, Quinn watched the back-and-forth volley with a frown, trying to follow the turn this interview had taken right under his nose.
“Dead,” Darren said. “Murdered, a couple months back.”
Slowly, Marnie nodded, committing to no more than that.
“And Bill?” Darren said. “He ever mention any beef with Malvo, any reason he might have wanted to harm the man or see him gone?”
“You know, he might have,” she said carefully, nailing her gaze to his so he would understand the deal she was cutting. “But my hurt over Levi, not sleeping at night, worrying over my son, I just can’t think of nothing else. But you find my son, and I’m gon’ think on it, and I bet it’ll come back to me.”
Darren sighed and straightened to his full height.
Marnie looked panicked then, fearing she’d lost him, her last hope. “Please,” she said, standing too. “He’s alive.” She narrowed her eyes at Quinn. “He don’t believe me.” She looked back at Darren. “I can’t explain it, I just . . . day my daddy died, his heart give out while he was sitting in his chair watching reruns of Hogan’s Heroes. It was still on the TV when I come home. But I knew. I knew before I hit the door he was dead. I can’t explain. I just felt a bolt run through me in town and I rushed home.” Tears sprang up, making her green eyes wet and making Darren think again of the great Caddo Lake. “My boy, Levi, he’s still alive. I know it.”
14.
HE TEASED Wilson with it when they spoke by phone about a half an hour later. Finally something for his actual mission, something real they could pin on Bill King, ABT captain and a missing piece in the joint task force’s collection of indictments on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. “Ronnie Malvo?” Wilson said over the phone. This was followed by a hmph sound, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. Darren was careful to play just the tease, not to commit to anything he couldn’t change his mind on later. He’d been ready to let the whole thing go until he’d met a like mind in Marnie King: “Find my son and you can keep Bill King’s ass in prison for the rest of his life,” she’d said as he was leaving Quinn’s office. “She knows something for sure,” Darren told his boss. “But the thing with the kid, she’s distracted, not ready to talk about all that right now, you understand.”
“That’s some find, Mathews.” Wilson sounded vaguely proud, but he was unable to mask a fog of suspicion that rolled out of his mouth on a sigh that colored the whole conversation gray. “I mean, if there’s something to this, it not only explains what happened to Ronnie Malvo but also sets a potential capital murder charge against Bill King, plus conspiracy. And again, you’re sure you haven’t mentioned anything like this to the San Jacinto County DA? I mean, with them trying to solve this thing and still asking questions about you, and then this here falls right in your lap . . . ” He paused, allowing Darren the opportunity to fill in the silence with something that would make sense to Fred Wilson. Darren could tell he wanted it to be this simple, but he needed Darren to sell it, to help him wave away the pinch of stink that was hovering in the fog over this whole conversation.
“Don’t know about you, but I was raised not to look too closely in a horse’s mouth, especially not when its gifts might wrap up a federal case.”
Wilson chuckled softly. Darren heard t
he creak of his office chair and pictured the older man leaning back, head nearly bumping the framed commendations on the wall behind him. “Well, this gives me a reason not to call Vaughn back on the Malvo case. I’ll wait until we see if we really got something here.”
Darren swallowed a lump in his throat. “He called again?”
“No matter.”
Something heavy seemed to have lifted off the lieutenant. Wilson’s voice came back lighter, damn near buoyant. “This is good work, Ranger,” he said. Darren felt a wave of nausea over how easy this was, how far he’d wandered from how he was raised. He thought of his uncles, both of whom were men of truth, in all things. Could there ever be honor in lying, even when it might save an elderly black man from prison, even if Ronnie Malvo deserved no more than knockoff justice, a cheap facsimile? Could anything really justify what he was doing? He immediately wanted to take it all back.
He made Wilson promise to keep the information close to the vest until he could dig a little deeper. And of course there was still the business with the kid. It made sense, he said, for him to stick around Marion County for a while. “Sure, sure,” Wilson said, adding that he was still working on getting Darren inside the Telford Unit in Bowie County. “But I’m having a hell of a time.”
“What’s the holdup?”
“Someone dragging his feet at the Department of Criminal Justice. But don’t worry, I’m going to get you in front of Bill King one way or another.”
Darren couldn’t think of anything he wanted less in that moment. But he bit through the stress of the mess he’d gotten himself into and said, “Sure thing, sir.”
He hung up with Wilson, already halfway back to Hopetown.
The old man didn’t answer his front door. The horses were stabled and the Buick was parked on the grass out front, but there was no other sign of Leroy Page, not a window cracked open nor the sound of his old radio coming from anywhere in the house. There was music, though. Harmonica, drums, and a flute of some sort, the sound reedy and thin but also warm, the drums almost welcoming, as familiar to him as the rhythm of his own heartbeat. It wasn’t his beloved blues, but something holy was in the air, and his first thought was the church, the conical hut that sat a little above the rest of Hopetown on a mound of packed dirt—the only part of the original settlement that wasn’t green with freshly clipped grass. Music like that had to be coming from a house of worship. He was walking in a semicircle around the hut, searching for a way in, when behind him he heard a man’s voice call out a warning, deep and sudden. “Got no place in there, you or none of the other pig deputies.”
