by Attica Locke
For the first time, Darren felt a profound dislike for the man. “It’s Ranger.”
Maybe it was the beer that was making him cranky. Sure as shit wasn’t enough alcohol in it to do anything but make Darren want to suck down something real. He cursed himself for not keeping a pint in his truck anymore. He repeated his advice to Leroy Page to think about getting a lawyer, and then he got the hell out of there, regretting the visit almost as soon as his boots hit the porch.
There were two cruisers parked in front of Leroy’s house, a pair of Marion County Sheriff deputies watching him walk out of the suspect’s home. Beyond the police, white men and women from the trailer park had lined up a wall of cars, all facing Leroy Page’s front door. There were rifle racks in pickups, handguns glinting on dashboards. They were armed and ready for battle, several loudly accusing the sheriff’s department of protecting a nigger who’d messed with one of theirs. The deputies did nothing to stop them, but neither did they let a single man or woman come closer to Leroy’s house. By now Margaret’s people had returned to her front porch. They had reclaimed their weapons, and even Margaret had a pearl-handled pistol tucked into an apron tied around her waist. The whole of East Texas history set out like figurines in the Civil War reenactments on Rosemary King’s lawn, the air resonant with a threat of violence; you could hear it in the rumble of all those car engines, in the sound of the shells Donald loaded in his gun. Darren thought it was altogether possible someone might die in Hopetown before Levi King was ever found.
15.
LEROY PAGE was lying, Darren thought.
At least, he didn’t believe the man when he said he’d never heard the name Sandler Gaines. His plan had been to return to the Cardinal Hotel in town and see if he couldn’t track down the real estate developer and get a clearer idea of what was going on with the sale of Hopetown. Maybe it would reveal more about Mr. Page, what kind of man he really was. Levelheaded and sanguine about the potential sale of his homeland? Or angrier about it than he’d let on? Had Levi’s harassment, along with that of his mother’s boyfriend and his barefoot, red-faced goons, driven Mr. Page to sell against his heart? And had that driven Leroy into a fit of rage? Darren pictured the blond boy in the photo, tried to quantify in his mind the amount of grace owed a child, one who was merely copying the grown men around him. And that’s all it was, wasn’t it? He hated to think the country was growing racists like bumper crops, full of piss and venom, as bitter as the dirt from which they came. Levi King deserved the benefit of the doubt, didn’t he? Did Darren really want to live in a world where a nine-year-old wasn’t worth his hope?
He needed to find Sandler Gaines at the hotel.
Maybe change his shirt and freshen up a bit first.
But when Darren opened the door to his hotel room, his wife, Lisa, was sitting on the king-size bed, a few legal files spread out on the bloodred velvet duvet. She wasn’t wearing lingerie exactly, but her hair was down and the slip she had on was black and lacy and decorated with tiny bone-white bows, making her look like a present left for him on the bed. He was confused for a moment. First, if he was being honest, he’d forgotten Lisa had said anything about driving up to Jefferson. And second, why was his wife dressed for debauchery but also wearing reading glasses and flipping through a manila file folder with a Bic pen clamped between her teeth? He had the fleeting thought that the security at this hotel was troubling enough that he should consider a change of venue, as now two people had walked into his room without a key.
She looked up and saw him and smiled sheepishly, then quickly scooped up the papers and set them and the pen on the bedside table. “I didn’t know when you’d be back.”
She got off the bed and stood on her tiptoes so she could kiss her husband. The brim of his hat got in the way, and with a smile she tore it from his head and tossed it, something she knew Darren would never do. It missed the dresser and fell onto the floor. It took everything in Darren’s power not to stop her hands, already reaching for his belt, and set his Stetson the proper way, brim down, on top of the dresser. But he knew this show of passion was a gesture from his wife, that it would be rude and hurtful to hold her off, to not play out the scenario she’d surely been scripting on her nearly four-hour drive to Jefferson. He hardly had time to catch his breath, the way she went at him. He wanted to slow down, to taste her, not just her mouth but the skin on her neck where her hairline tangled into a tiny mess of curls between sessions at the salon, the place where she was most raw and tender—he wanted to take his time with all of it. But again, he was afraid to offend her. So he let it play out like something she’d seen in a movie, some idea she had of the perfect picture of passion, which wasn’t to say that Darren didn’t enjoy himself. He’d only been with a few women in his life, but Lisa was always home, the first girl having eclipsed the ones who came after, girls from undergrad and law school he saw in the years when he and Lisa were separated by their academic choices, when they’d made an unspoken pact to ask few questions. He hardly remembered those girls or the brief, sloppy nights on dorm-lounge couches, one time up against the dryer in the laundry room. He spent his years in Princeton and Chicago only ever wanting to get back to Lisa.
They lay sweaty after, crushed velvet all around them. It made creases in the skin of Lisa’s back that Darren traced with his fingers. The room was soft with the dew of the effort they’d made of it, and he kissed the salted moisture on Lisa’s shoulder and thanked her. She’d never once joined him on the road, something that wasn’t forbidden by headquarters so much as it was just a terrible idea.
“I’m glad you came,” he said. He was actually touched, deeply so. He pulled her toward him and kissed her and said he loved her for doing this, for driving two hundred–plus miles just to be with him. She basked in that for a moment, a twinkle of pride in her eyes, which ruined it a little for Darren. He knew Lisa well enough to sense when she was keeping score, savoring a victory. She had now made the greater show of devotion and had gained the upper hand somehow. And with that leverage, she posed a question that carried the dead weight of a declaration. The drive, the lingerie, her legs wrapped around his waist minutes ago—it all seemed a setup now, a dollop of honey before the bitter medicine went down. “We’re not keeping secrets anymore, right?” she said, turning to look into his eyes. A worm of dread writhed in his insides. His first thought was Randie. Did she think something had happened between them? They’d been over that, hadn’t they? Or was it Lisa who had something to confess? Darren came up on his elbows and then sat up completely, his damp back against the headboard. The heat in the room had cooled, so it felt clammy in here now. The moisture in the air had exhumed some long-buried scent from the room’s carpeting. It was cloying, like rotting fruit.
“What’s really going on with you and Bell?” Lisa said finally.
Darren felt relief at first. But it lasted about as long as it took Lisa to sit up in bed and say, “Clayton says you’ve been giving her money?”
“Why have you been talking to Clayton about my relationship with my mother?” He now felt the scoreboard flip in his favor, as he could avoid telling Lisa the truth about the missing gun and his mother’s blackmail if he focused on her transgression: talking about him to his uncle Clayton behind his back. This had come up no less than fifteen times in just four sessions with Dr. Long, and Lisa had acknowledged that this made Darren feel like she and Clayton were ganging up on him—over his choices about law school, the Rangers, and, especially, his relationship with Bell. Clayton wanted Darren to cut his mother out of his life. Lisa was breaking a rule they’d negotiated in the safe space of the therapist’s office.
“I’m not sure that’s the important thing here,” Lisa said coolly.
“I’m not sure that it isn’t.”
“This is not about Clayton.” Darren gave her a look and then she said, “Yes, he called me, worried that your mother was scamming you or something, saying you’d asked him to get some money to Bell, to pay her rent. An
d I kind of couldn’t believe you didn’t think you could tell me. And then Frank Vaughn came by my office and—”
“What?”
“The DA from San Jacinto County.”
“I know who he is,” Darren said, feeling angry and panicked at the same time. “What was he doing coming to your office in Houston? You didn’t say anything, did you? Nothing about the night I went out to Mack’s place?”
“Two days before Ronnie Malvo was killed? No, Darren, I did not tell a district attorney about you riding out like a cowboy in the middle of the night without calling for any backup to talk Mack down from shooting a man.” She swung her legs out of bed and stood over him, arms crossed like swords. “So that’s one lie, Darren. That’s one lie I have now told to an officer of the court.”
“He asked you about it? Directly?” Darren stood too. Did Vaughn already know?
“No.”
“Well, then, it wasn’t a lie.”
“Quit acting like you didn’t clear two years of law school, Darren. Interfering with a murder investigation is obstruction. I could be disbarred.”
“That’s not going to happen. Mack’s not going to say anything. And I won’t let anything happen to him or you, I promise you, Lisa.”
“Did he do it?”
“What did Vaughn ask you?”
“Answer the question, Darren. Did Mack shoot Ronnie Malvo?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you,” his wife said. She lowered her arms, baring herself, making a show of her defenselessness. “And if I don’t believe you about this, then I don’t trust you, and if I don’t trust you, Darren, what are we doing?”
“I was trying to protect you,” he said. “And Mack.”
“I love Mack too,” she said, but Darren knew it was a lie. She didn’t know Mack like he did, hadn’t grown up with the man. A Houston girl, she didn’t know the bonds of rural black folks, the way the earth and its seasons made family out of strangers, how folks helped each other out, surviving by sharing food or shelter; she didn’t know the way black East Texans lived or died by the stories they shared, warnings of which towns and which back roads to avoid. Her professed love for Mack was to mitigate the utter harshness of what came next. “But if he killed a man,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself again like armor, “I don’t care who it was, don’t you dare get yourself or your career tangled up in any of it.”
“Too late,” Darren said.
He felt the pull of flight then, of surrender, the desire to leap off this cliff and confess. He asked her to have a seat on the sofa and then sat down across from her on the bed and told her about Mack and the missing gun. Told her about his suspicion that Mack had hidden it at the Mathews family homestead in Camilla, a suspicion that Darren had kept to himself for weeks. Told her that by not saying anything about it, he’d damn near committed perjury in front of a grand jury. And the cherry flambé on top: Bell Callis had the gun. Lisa sat in stunned silence for what felt like an eternity but was probably only two minutes of her bull-like breathing, two minutes of her unwillingness to look him in the eye. She stood suddenly and started to dress, covering the lacy slip that now seemed to belong in a different marriage with a dark gray silk shirtdress. She looked up from buttoning it and said, “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you fix this,” she said with cool pragmatism. “Vaughn ain’t letting this drop. He asked if we kept any guns in the house, if I’d stumbled across one that didn’t belong. He could get a search warrant, Darren.”
“He won’t find anything.”
“You know once they get in, they can find any damn thing they want to.”
She turned her back to him, slid on a pair of yellow Tory Burch flats.
“You’re leaving?”
“I told Greg we’d have dinner with him,” she said.
“Hmph.” It was a grunt of surprise. He didn’t know when Lisa and Greg had spoken, how she even knew he was in Jefferson. Beside the bed, the phone rang. Darren answered and heard a woman’s voice on the other end, soft-spoken, a lilt of inquiry in every syllable, as if she were apologizing for the intrusion or for her gender: “I’m looking for Monica Maldonado,” she said. Darren told her she had the wrong room and hung up just as Lisa was starting for the door. She glanced over her shoulder at Darren, who was still naked on the side of the bed. “I’ll wait for you downstairs,” she said, still barely making eye contact, leaving Darren exiled in his own shame. “You could go to prison, Darren,” she said. “Fix this.”
Once she was on the other side of the door, Darren stood, naked and shriveled in body and spirit. He felt immediately queasy from all of it. The fight with his wife, her abject disappointment in him and her fear that he’d made decisions that put their life together in jeopardy. The prospect of dinner with Greg, who was right now moving the Levi King disappearance in a direction that Darren couldn’t get behind, even though he didn’t trust Leroy Page. And there was something else. He’d hung up on the caller before he had a chance to register her words. There was something familiar about the name of the woman the caller was looking for. He waited for a while before getting dressed, hoping it would come to him. But in the end he couldn’t recall where he’d heard it or what it was supposed to mean; it was an itch he couldn’t reach.
The restaurant was Greg’s choice, a steak house in a former bank that had been built at the turn of the last century, just a few blocks from the Cardinal Hotel. They had a table on the second-floor gallery, linen white and crisp against the darkening sky and the swirl of iron detailing on the balcony. It was a long way from Froggy’s, where Greg and Darren had met last night, and he wondered if the posh setting now was for him—a gesture of reconciliation—or for Lisa. His wife did look beautiful in her surroundings, her brown skin like dark honey by the light of the candles and the string of tiny white bulbs decorating the garland of plastic holly on the balcony. The restaurant had hired carolers to sing for dinner patrons. The singers stood on the street, necks craned up to the second-story balcony as they sang “The First Noel” in seventy-two-degree weather. Darren had a view of Jefferson’s town center, and from this height, he could see where the prim tameness of the town gave way to the rawness of the piney woods that surrounded it. Cypress Bayou, which emptied into Caddo Lake, was behind the restaurant, not far from Sandler Gaines’s mock steamboat. It was hard to believe that the worlds of Jefferson, with its antebellum grace, and Caddo Lake, with its thorny, untamed waters, were only a handful of miles apart, just as it was hard to picture nineteenth-century women in petticoats and parasols traveling through an overgrown swamp.
Something else that didn’t fit in downtown Jefferson: the rust-streaked yellow van from the trailer park in Hopetown. Darren saw it across the street from the steak house, saw the dixie towel spread across the windshield, and through the driver’s-side window he saw Bo, red beard aflame at sunset. His eyes, shadowed beneath the brim of a ball cap, were trained on Darren, watching his dinner party on the balcony. Darren instinctively reached for his pistol, made a show of slowly lifting it from its holster and setting it on the white tablecloth in full view. Bo gave him a little shrug, may have even winked at the gamesmanship; Darren couldn’t tell from this distance. Only thing that was clear was that he was being watched. Lisa flinched when she saw the gun. Greg made a face but ignored it.
There were other, weightier things on his mind.
Before the first glasses of water were poured, Darren made it plain to Greg that he wasn’t going to piss on his investigation or interfere in any way, that he wasn’t sure about Leroy Page anymore either. But he held out hope that he wasn’t a killer, that the boy might even still be alive. “I know you want to make a point with this case in order to stir the Justice Department about the truth of hate crimes, but if that boy is actually still alive, your investigation is going to stop anyone else from looking,” Darren said. “I still think his grandmother ain’t exactly telling all she knows in thi
s. And Dana, Levi’s sister, said she never saw the boat come back, which means Leroy couldn’t have seen it either.”
“I know, you told me,” Greg said.
“I just keeping coming back to the water is all,” Darren said. “Maybe the answer lies out there somewhere. Maybe this was a simple accident.”
“Water’s too shallow. Everyone from Sheriff Quinn to the game warden says that’s unlikely.”
“Don’t mean he wouldn’t be gator bait. Who knows? Maybe something happened to the boat, and the boy’s hanging on to a cypress tree out there somewhere, waiting for someone to come save him.”
Greg shook his head, even going so far as to glance down at the menu to show his lack of interest in Darren’s line of thinking. “If something happened to the boat, if Dana never saw it come back, then why the hell was it sitting in the boat shed? It’s more likely that Page is telling the truth about seeing the boy return the boat . . . which makes him the last one to see Levi King alive.”
Lisa sighed then. She hadn’t spoken to or touched her husband since they’d arrived. Even the air kisses she gave Greg carried more warmth than Darren was getting. If Greg noticed the arctic chill between them, he was gracious enough to keep quiet about it. Lisa shook the paper menu in her hands, suggesting that they move on from talk of potential homicides and federal crimes. Within minutes, a waiter was by her side, a slim white man trained to read a table, to identify the guest who was playing host to the others, and he seemed flustered not to understand the dynamic at the table. You ain’t the only one, Darren thought. Lisa ordered the étouffée and Greg the grilled catfish. Darren put in for a Kansas City strip steak, which was oddly the nicest cut of meat in this Texas steak house. But of course, Jefferson was still a small town, and despite its rococo architecture, the Victorian and grand colonial homes, its play at glamour and sophistication, nothing could hide its small, hard, provincial heart.
