Heaven, My Home

by Attica Locke

  “Keith Washington.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “And Danielle, Keisha, and Jarrod.”

  He was speaking of Keith’s wife and children.

  He knew their names.

  “I’ve written them once a week for the past six years, saying sorry every way I know how. They were returned unopened at first, but that stopped a couple of years ago, so . . . maybe,” he said, his voice growing wistful. “I’d understand it if they threw the letters away, but I hold out hope that they have heard some of what I’ve been trying to say, the change in my heart.”

  “I’m actually not here to facilitate your supposed redemption, and frankly I don’t give a rat’s ass about the ways you think you’ve changed.”

  “God knows.”

  “Well, you’re free to work that all out with Him at a later date. I’m here—”

  “I need you to help me find my son,” Bill said. “Please.”

  “I’m not here about that either.”

  “I know, I know, I talked to Marnie.”

  Darren’s ears were nearly aflame; his blood pressure spiked and that damp, sour smell rose up again from his own body. “You did?” Was it really going to be this easy? He heard the words almost before Bill King spoke them.

  “I’ll claim the hit on Ronnie Malvo. In exchange, I want you to fight for my son.” He looked at Darren, who realized this was why Bill King hadn’t wanted the COs in the room, that he and Darren were on the same page. With a resigned shrug, Bill said, “I would have gotten life or maybe even the chair if that first jury had convicted me on murder, so I might as well take what I had coming. I knew Ronnie Malvo, knew what he stood for. I’ll gladly take credit for offing him.”

  “Thought you believed you were getting out of here soon,” Darren said, remembering his first contact with Bill King, his letter to the governor.

  “I’ve already told Mama to call off next week.”

  “What’s next week?”

  “I’m ready to do my time, all I got coming.”

  “What’s next week, Bill?”

  “I’m not trying to get anybody else in trouble here; I just want you to find my son. Levi, that’s the only good thing I’ve done in this world, and I had hoped to go home someday and be a real father to the boy, make sure he don’t turn out nothing like me. But the truth is I have been a piece of shit as a human being, and I am willing to sacrifice my freedom for that child. Hell, maybe the best way to make sure he don’t turn out like me is for me to stay my ass right here inside.”

  “What makes you think I can find your son?”

  Bill let out a sigh of frustration tinged with hopelessness. “I am telling you, sir, I will take the fall on Ronnie Malvo if you just try. Can you please, sir, just try to find my child?” He sounded like Marnie King begging. And Darren was reminded of her and Dana’s tears. The love here was real. Bill King was willing to take a capital murder charge to help find Levi. And yet Darren hesitated.

  “What makes you think he’s still alive?”

  “What choice do I have?” Bill said, eyes watering. “That child is my only hope that my time on this planet, the shit I’ve done, can be turned around.”

  “But it can’t be, Bill,” Darren said, feeling a hot stone lodge in his throat so his voice came out hard and mean. “I help you find your son, and who gives Keisha and Jarrod their daddy back? How does that work? You telling me your redemption matters more than theirs? You think that saving your white son—who, by the way, is probably a racist shit just like his dad, so you can clear the little fantasy that he’s not out of your head now—you think that will make it all right for Keith’s kids?”

  Bill ran his grimy fingers through his closely cropped hair; the chains connected to his handcuffs rattled against the table. He seemed beat by this, undone by Darren’s withholding of praise for his moral rebirth. He so badly wanted this black man to pat him on the back for what millions of people managed with ease: not hating every black person they saw. Bill pleaded for grace. “I am laying my body on the line for my sins, man. Every day. Every day.”

  Darren looked directly into Bill’s watery eyes. “And it still ain’t enough.”

  Darren didn’t agree to anything in the room, but he didn’t have to. He already knew what he was going to do. But it would take a couple of drinks to screw up his courage. He pulled over at the bar nearest to the prison, a rough-looking roadside joint in a building made to look like a barn. It was called Bucky’s, and inside the place was filled with COs just off duty. Darren had removed his hat and badge in his truck to cut down on the spectacle, and at the bar he ordered six fingers of bourbon in two glasses. He wanted them lined up, back to back on the bar top, so there would be no lag between sips, no room for him to contemplate changing his mind. The lights in the bar were as low and warm as the feeling in his limbs when the liquor took over and muzzled his cerebral cortex. He didn’t want to think or feel anything, just let the words roll off his tongue when he climbed in his truck later and gave Lieutenant Wilson the news.

  “He says he ordered the hit on Ronnie Malvo.”

  “No shit,” Wilson said, his voice full of wonder.

  “You’ll need an affidavit, of course.”

  “It’s more than we even hoped for, Mathews.” Then, almost as if he couldn’t believe their good fortune, couldn’t believe it at all, he said, “Conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with a federal witness, this is it.”

  Darren, feeling a strange pull in his chest, almost like he owed Bill King something for taking the heat off Mack, said, “He thinks his son is alive.”

  “Looks like he’s the only one,” Wilson said, then he tried to steady his breathing for all that came next. They would need to get that affidavit right away, either by sending Darren back or getting a Ranger stationed out of Texarkana to do it. “And we all have to take a close look at the implications of what this means for the task force—if Bill King knew Ronnie Malvo was a snitch, who else knows? Speaking of which—” And here he called out to the secretary who organized his calendar and helped type up his reports. “Get me on the line with Frank Vaughn down in San Jacinto County when you can. We need to tell Frank that the task force will lead the investigation from here.”

  The mention of Vaughn reminded Darren of the deal he’d made with Bill, pinched at a sense of duty he didn’t want to feel for the former ABT captain. “Bill has concerns about the investigation of his son’s disappearance.”

  “Well, that ain’t on you anymore, Ranger. Darren, look, you did a hell of a job, pulled pee from a tree, worked a miracle, son. You owe yourself a drink and a drive home.”

  Darren smiled bitterly, knowing he had already doubled down on the former and wasn’t ready for the latter. “There’s more to this, though,” he said.

  He told Wilson of Rosemary King’s odd behavior, the attorney she’d had nearly attached to her hip from the time Darren had met her, which stopped all manner of questioning, including that involving Marion County’s latest mystery. He told Wilson about Monica Maldonado, the noises in the room, the run-in with Gaines, the lies, the notary who couldn’t find her, and the fact that she seemed to have completely disappeared. Wilson chuckled faintly at the end of it, as if he thought Darren were reaching for something else to do out there to avoid leaving town. “Thought you said things were good at home.”

  “A woman who was at Rosemary King’s house was seen with the man who is somehow tangled up in the sale of Hopetown, where Leroy Page lives and Levi King went missing. Now that woman is also missing,” Darren said with a certainty he really didn’t have. Could he say for sure that the woman he saw with Sandler Gaines outside the Cardinal Hotel was Monica Maldonado? No, he couldn’t. But he was sure there was more to this story. “I find that worthy of further inquiry.”

  “You already done what you could, Ranger. You brought it to the sheriff’s attention; beyond that, I can’t say that this is one for the Texas Rangers to take up. Stop wasting time and get out of Jefferson
and get back where you belong.”

  20.

  HE GOT properly drunk by way of a fifth of Jim Beam he’d picked up at a liquor store before heading to his room at the Cardinal Hotel, where he lay on top of the bloodred velvet duvet and ignored a dozen phone calls from Lisa, Clayton, Greg, even from Mack, for whom Darren theoretically had good news. The only person he didn’t hear from was his mother, but Bill King’s “confession” seemed to neutralize the threat there, and Darren felt he could breathe again, could sit in silence for five minutes in a row without being jolted by his terror of the .38 in his mother’s possession and its ability to ruin lives—his and Mack’s.

  He thought about calling Randie again, but he stopped himself, tender and embarrassed over the possibility that he had gone too far on the phone call last night. She had to know now that he felt things for her, even if they had yet to be named. But what if she didn’t feel the same? The whole thing had created an ache where there wasn’t one before. He should have left her alone; they should have remained just two souls passing each other in this lifetime.

  And something else was humming at the edge of his consciousness.

  As the sun set, wrapping Jefferson in coral and purple and dimming to a blue haze the light in the hotel room, Darren left all the lamps off and drank in the coming dark. The bourbon melted his first set of cares like butter, but it set a yellow flame to the new shit that was knocking around in his brain, bringing other concerns to a rabid boil. He thought of Bill and Marnie’s belief that their son was still alive, their desperate need for it to be true. He thought of his hard-hearted feelings for Levi and then pictured the face in the school photo, remembered that he was just a kid. He thought of Leroy Page’s arrest, his daughter’s coldness toward Margaret Goodfellow. He thought about Rosemary and her lawyer, of Sandler Gaines’s greasy smile and dodgy manner, and he wondered again if he was right about Monica Maldonado. Was this woman really missing, and if so, why? He remembered her business card in Leroy Page’s kitchen. Page’s odd, rambling words this morning at the hospital when Darren had tried to ask the delirious man how and when he’d met the woman. Rosemary could stop this anytime she wants to, he’d said. Just like Bill King had said, I’ve already told Mama to call off next week.

  Why did both men seem to believe that Rosemary held some master key that would open so many of the different locked doors around this mystery?

  Next week, next week.

  Darren mumbled the words over and over to himself, marveling at the slurred sound. His tongue was thick and slow, but even behind the bourbon curtain, his mind was working. They had been talking about Bill King’s earlier belief that he was getting out of prison. Soon, he’d written in his personal letter to the governor, underlining the word, Darren remembered. On a hunch, he got on his phone and started looking into Bill King’s prison history. He’d been in lockup since 2010 on drug charges and aggravated felony robbery—he had robbed a rival drug dealer’s safe house, and the other guy had been shot in the process. He’d been up for parole in 2012 and in 2014. Both times, he was denied. According to his testimony at the parole hearings, Bill had already begun his transformation. There were signed letters by prison clergy attesting to the change. Bill King had segregated himself from other members of the ABT, even committing multiple small infractions so he could get sent to solitary, which prevented him from fraternizing with his now enemy. He was studying the Bible and also trying to get his GED, and he was reading works by Nelson Mandela and Dr. King. Letter from Birmingham Jail had changed his life, he said, as he sat in his own jail cell, made him understand that part of what he’d hated about black people for years was their neediness, their steady complaints of I-ain’t-gots; it made his eyes go red with rage, he’d written the parole board.

  It was whites in need too. Why did everybody forget that? Where were our marches? Not for me, I mean, I always had a little something growing up Rosemary King’s son. But I saw friends in my county scratching at dirt for food and some kind of way to make a living and here come the blacks talking about me first, and y’all owe us this and y’all owe us that. I carried around that anger for a long, long time ’cause I ain’t had cracked no kind of books, didn’t have anyone at home who acted any better, and I didn’t understand, until I read Mr. King’s book and looked into some other stuff, that they was right. We did owe them for all they got their asses kicked since God was a boy, for all we done treated folks bad. And the ones marching and hollering about we want to eat here and we want to vote and we need good jobs, they was really just trying to raise their families like anybody else. I mean, it was kids in that Birmingham deal. Did you know that? It must be something to have kids my son’s age have to fight for what we was given at birth. Kids, man.

  It was all bullshit.

  Or it wasn’t.

  That was the thing about second chances—it was impossible to know what was real or what wasn’t; every act of forgiveness was a leap of faith. Leroy Page said he’d been burned before, as had every black person in this country. But Darren needed Bill King now, needed his false confession in the Malvo homicide.

  He heard the words again: Next week, next week.

  Darren kept pushing, kept searching.

  According to a site that tracked the actions of the state parole board, there was a panel at Telford Unit next Thursday, December 15, and Bill Avery King was due to go before the board. Was this the reason soon had been underlined in his letter to the governor? What made him so certain he might be home by Christmas? And what exactly was he telling Rosemary to call off?

  By then the fifth of bourbon was whistling with empty air when Darren turned it up to his mouth, wasn’t but a few swallows left, and he set it down on the nightstand and grabbed the florid hotel stationery. He tore off five sheets and at the top of each one he wrote the name of each member of the parole board that was set to gather and decide fates on December 15. Pam Sadler, Rita Montes, Arturo Valle, Austin Collins, and J. P. Graham. Then under each person’s name he wrote down as much information as he could find online, looking for any connection to Rosemary King. It wasn’t until he realized that Austin Collins was a Dallas banker who worked with several Texas real estate developers, including a Gaines Properties out of Longview, that Darren saw he’d been coming at this all wrong. It wasn’t Rosemary who had the connection to at least three members of Bill’s parole-board panel (a clean majority). She wasn’t the one who could rig the results of the parole hearing. It was Sandler Gaines, it seemed, who was willing to commit a felony for Rosemary’s son.

  21.

  IT WASN’T until he woke up the next morning, still in the same clothes from the night before, that he realized the mistake he’d made. The bourbon, the fact that he drank on an empty stomach washed in fish grease, the call to Wilson, the deal he’d made with Bill King—he stood up regretting all of it.

  He also couldn’t remember if he’d called Randie or if he’d dreamed it, but he’d told her everything, had confessed to thinking he might just turn in his badge over all this, that he didn’t entirely know anymore who or what he was fighting for or how to do it without breaking the very laws he’d sworn to uphold. And he’d told her he’d like to see her again. A dream. God, he hoped that was just a dream, that he hadn’t revealed himself so completely to a woman he hardly knew. He felt bricked in by his drinking, could only see the few inches in front of him, could only remember waking up.

  But the papers were there.

  The information on the parole-board members and his notes about Sandler Gaines were scattered across the velvet duvet, which he’d slept on top of, curled into himself, boots still on his feet. He read them all by the light of day, poured what little was left of the Jim Beam down the bathroom sink so he wouldn’t be tempted. It was so easy to be good at dawn, to swear you’d never touch another drop. Then he took a cold shower and waited until he thought cafés in town were open, until he thought he could get a warm bun and a coffee away from the Cardinal Hotel, until he thought
Marcus Aldrich was inside his shop.

  “So you’ve lived here, what, twenty, twenty-five years?” he said as he handed Marcus a takeaway cup of black coffee. He’d bet that he didn’t go in for the morning fuss of creams and syrups but then watched as Marcus poured six sugar packets from a stash in his office into the cup and stirred it with the eraser end of a pencil.

  “Thirty,” he said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “Moved here to work on my dissertation, what was supposed to be just a few months, met a girl, fell in love, and never left. Argued my dissertation on a twenty-four-hour turnaround and then came back to Jefferson and moved in with Betty.” He was wearing another Hawaiian-style shirt, banana yellow with red hibiscus flowers all over it. And he hadn’t shaved.

  “Betty?”

  “My ex. She runs the Dogwood Inn over on Bonham, one of dozens of B-and-Bs in Marion County. I mean, we both ran it while I was working on the book. We shared a love of Jefferson, but for different reasons, it soon became clear, and what can I say, the marriage couldn’t survive two different views on history.”

  “What was yours?”

  “That this whole town is a lie,” Marcus said, belching with a heat that seemed to gas him forward. “Perpetuating and profiteering off a fraud—the fiction of bloodless prosperity, an antebellum life of civility and grace—while conveniently forgetting the lives that made this town possible. Let me ask you this, son. On any of the ghost tours in town, they got a stop for the slaves that were killed on plantations in town, the men who were lynched? Hell naw,” Marcus said, answering his own question. “It’s all white ladies in distress, roaming halls, wrenching their hands over spurned lovers or losing their slaves.”