Deadly Kiss

by Bob Bickford

  “They didn’t usually execute people on the weekends?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “What’s weird is that the state of Georgia didn’t hang people in 1946. They had been using the electric chair at Reidsville for at least twenty years. Until 1924, hanging was done in every county, and the execution was the responsibility of the county sheriff. Then it all got changed to one location, Reidsville, and they used the chair. It’s like they turned back the clock in this one case. I can’t see how this was even legal. Hanging him was irregular at best. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to the bottom of this.”

  “The reason for blackmailing my father is somewhere in here, but I don’t see it,” I said. “I know it was Wanda Sutton, but I don’t know why.”

  “I gather from what Crider told me you’re worried that this could embarrass the family?”

  “I could care less about that,” I said. “I just want answers, and you may be a lot faster than the cops.”

  “So we’ll start with Wanda Sutton,” she said. “See if we can get her to open up.”

  “We need to look at all the children, Sydney. We have to follow the children that were there for this kiss that started everything. What happened to those kids that day? What was so bad it scared my father to death over sixty years later?”

  “Same difference,” she said. “It’s down to Wanda. The others are dead. They can’t tell us anything anymore.”

  I doubted that was true, but I kept my mouth shut.

  That night, I dreamed that I came upon a huge golden bier, covered with carved figures. Someone stood behind me, out of sight, and told me that it belonged to my father. He had left a gift for me, they said. I walked around to the front of it and saw his dead body stretched out at the base, lying on its side. He looked younger than he had when I had last seen him.

  A small package rested next to his midsection. It was a rectangular box, wrapped with purple paper and finished with a thin bow. I came close and reached for it. He opened his black eyes and looked at me. I pulled my hand back.

  He stared at me without speaking. I had the vague realization that his mouth had been sewn closed and he couldn’t speak. We gazed at each other for a few seconds, and then he stirred and slightly changed his position. His eyes lost their dark focus and closed. He settled and was again still.

  “He’s asleep,” the voice behind me said. “He can’t wake up.”

  “He isn’t dead,” I answered. “At least he isn’t dead. I don’t know what to do with him, though.”

  “He can’t wake up,” the voice repeated. “He can’t wake up anymore.”

  I was flooded with grief and woke up in my childhood bedroom, my face wet with tears. I had lain in this room, in this bed for thousands of nights. He had always been somewhere outside this door, first with my mother, and then by himself. Now he was gone. If he was anywhere, he was somewhere else. He had left me here, all alone in the house that he had abandoned. He couldn’t wake up anymore.

  I stared up at the dark ceiling. The shadows there were absolutely still.

  Downstairs in the front hall, my mother’s piano sounded. Two soft notes floated up to me, and then there was a pause. I held my breath and waited. Finally there was one more, a tiny echo that filled the rooms and lingered on and on. At last, the house was quiet again. I turned onto my side and cried myself to sleep.

  CHAPTER 18

  Wanda Sutton,

  Milton County, Georgia, Friday, October 1, 1948:

  The girl sat on a hard wooden chair. Her feet didn’t reach the floor. She slid her bottom forward on the varnished seat until she could touch the tiles with her toe.

  “Sit up straight!”

  The woman behind the desk glared at her and then turned back to her typing. She tapped a steady staccato, punctuated by a bell, and then she slammed the carriage back to start it over again.

  The building echoed and smelled faintly of old cigarette smoke and floor wax. The walls were aqua, the ceilings were high, and all the doors had pebbled glass. The door to the inner office behind the row of chairs was open, and Wanda Sutton could hear conversation. It was about her, and she listened hard.

  “...must warn you...incorrigible. This may not be like other wards you’ve taken.”

  “There’s nothing that good, healthy food, and plenty of exercise won’t cure. A sound mind in a sound body is how we look at it.”

  “A firm hand...boundaries...respect.”

  “...children of suicides, especially...”

  Eventually, they came for her. The man who decided what happened to her wore a shiny gray suit with dandruff flakes on the shoulders. He carried a miasma of body odor with him, morning or afternoon, and he punctuated incomprehensible questions to her with long, absent silences. She was glad if she never had to see him again.

  The couple who was taking her away was younger than she expected, much younger than her own mother and father had been. The woman wore a tailored skirt and blouse, and the man had a tie held to his shirt front with a gold clip. They looked like children playing dress-up, and they crouched in front of her.

  The woman had a large gap between her front teeth, and her tongue poked into the space when she spoke. She sounded like a baby when she talked. “Hello, sweetie,” she lisped. “Aren’t you pretty? You’re coming home with us. Isn’t that wonderful? We’re so happy to have you.”

  Her face came close. Her eyes and nose and lips became huge, blocking out everything else. Wanda couldn’t breathe. Panic bloomed, and she tried to squirm out of the chair. She was caught painfully under the arm. The young man had her. She twisted her body and began to scream.

  “We know what to do from here...”

  “...fine once she’s settled...”

  “...case meeting every quarter...conference in a month.”

  They went down a broad flight of steps to the glass front doors. Outside was another broad set of stone steps. The woman’s grasp was hot, and sweat formed between their palms. Wanda’s feet barely touched on the way down. At the bottom, there was a glass light globe on a post, which was supported by a metal lion. She thought that the lion could eat these people and save her, but its snarl was frozen and indifferent. The iron eyes stared at her and seemed to say goodbye, goodbye, and goodbye.

  For the rest of her life, whenever she felt that she wasn’t alone, and that she might possibly be loved, the image of the lion appeared to her. She was desolate, although she didn’t remember where or when she had seen it, or what it meant.

  “I never thought we’d get out of there,” the man said. “She’s certainly a bad girl.”

  “That’s just what we wanted,” the woman answered. “Isn’t it?”

  They crossed gravel, headed toward a black car. Wanda knew it was an older car because it had an old-time radiator and spoked wheels. The man opened a rear door and put her in, giving her a push at the last moment. She sat up on the back seat. The horse hair stuffing smelled musty.

  The man and woman got into the front. The man took off his hat and put it on the seat between them. The woman sat sideways so she could look back at Wanda. “She is pretty, isn’t she? She really, really is.”

  “You bet,” he answered. “Like you said, just what we wanted.”

  “Don’t forget, we have to come back in a month. We have to talk about her progress.”

  They laughed together, leaned toward each other, and kissed. Wanda felt her bladder loosen, and hot urine soaked the seat beneath her. She was immediately cold as the flow eased.

  The woman had broken the kiss and was staring at her, her nose wrinkled. She reached back, snatched up her skirt, and poked at her.

  “A bad girl, and a dirty girl,” she said. “A very dirty girl.”

  “Just what we wanted,” the man said, and started the car.

  ***

  Present Day:

  I tapped on the door of the guest room. “You up?”

  Molly opened her door and kissed me a good morning. We were
still in separate rooms, but she was markedly warmer. I was hopeful that the specter of Angela would leave us soon.

  “That investigator’s coming by in a little while,” I said.

  “That seems so funny. A private investigator. Marlowe, Spade, Spenser. Pistols and trench coats.”

  “Milhone, Warshawski, and Plum in this case,” I said. “Nancy Drew. Sunny Randall. I guess private eyes are still out there, not just in books. Insurance companies and lawyers use them a lot.”

  On cue, the doorbell rang. I looked out at Sydney Cotton. She didn’t look like what I thought a private eye ought to look like.

  “Mr. Latta?”

  I’m not a big man, and people rarely strike me as small, but she was five-foot-one-on-her-tiptoes little. Red-haired. She set some files on the step and fished in her purse.

  “Give me a minute,” she said. She lit a cigarette and talked to me through the screen. “I have some more info for you.”

  “You can come in. Bring your smoke. The house is going to have to be cleaned and sold. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “No. It’s repulsive. I actually quit, sort of. I chew special gum and wear a patch and try to smoke less. My nicotine consumption has at least doubled since I sort of stopped smoking.”

  Behind me, Molly laughed and reached around me to open the door.

  “So what do we do first?” I asked.

  Sydney took a long pull on her smoke. The coal looked as long as my little finger. Molly went to find an ashtray.

  “It depends,” she said. “What are you trying to do here? I know you’re trying to find out what happened to your dad, but then what?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far.”

  “Well, how we approach this depends on what you want in the end. If we get some kind of evidence that Wanda Sutton blackmailed your dad, what then? Are you looking to recover the money? Do you want her arrested and prosecuted? What?”

  “I don’t need the money,” I said. “I guess I don’t want her to have what she stole, but that’s about all. I want the truth about my dad.”

  “Even if you prove this and involve the police, it could be a long time before you ever see a cent, so it’s if that isn’t a big motivation. A couple hundred thousand isn’t nothing, but you can also spend it in a few hours. It may be gone.”

  “I just want to know what happened to my father,” I repeated. “I can walk away from the money if I know.”

  “Well, then, let’s go talk to her. I told you I needed to go through your father’s things, but she might have all the answers we need. We’ll do it now. This isn’t something we call ahead for; surprise is good.”

  “You think she’ll talk to us?”

  “A big part of what I do,” she said, “is talking to people who don’t want to talk to me. Sooner or later somebody always says something.” She stubbed out her cigarette.

  We waited for Molly to finish dressing, and then we went out to a green minivan parked at the curb. I got in the back, leaving the front to the women. Sydney removed the key from the ignition and reached across to unlock the glove box. She pulled out a handgun in a fabric holster and dropped it into her handbag, which was resting between the seats.

  “You think you’ll need that?” I asked.

  “I’ve never needed it yet, but I’ve always had it with me,” she said. “Goes with the job.”

  “How did you get into this kind of work?” Molly smiled. “It’s really cool.”

  “I was married to a guy who did it for a living. I helped out. When we split, I realized that I’d been better at it than him, so there was no reason to stop.”

  She drove quickly and well, comfortable behind the wheel of the van. We entered the freeway that circled the city.

  “You said you’re from here, right?” Sydney asked me.

  “I grew up here, yes. Haven’t lived here in a long time.”

  “I know it might seem like that’s obvious, your dad living here and all, but you don’t have much of an accent, so I figured he could have come here later in life.”

  “I’ve been gone for more than twenty years, so I kind of lost it. My ex-wife always said the accent came back when I was stressed.”

  “And you?” she asked Molly.

  “I’m Canadian,” she answered. “Far from home.”

  “You two are a couple, I gather?”

  I cringed at the question. Molly glanced over at me and smiled.

  “We’re together,” she answered. “You grew up here?”

  “I did. Wasn’t born here, though. Gulfport, Mississippi. I was born the day Hurricane Camille came through and flattened the place. My father used to say the storm brought me--about three foot tall and nothing but attitude.”

  I realized that she was older than she looked.

  We got off of the freeway after only a couple of exits. When we were stopped at a red light, Sydney pulled a battered street guide from the dash and flipped pages. As the light turned green, she nodded once and tossed it back.

  “She lives in Smyrna now,” Sydney said. “I hate driving here. Smyrna cops’ll stop you for two miles over the speed limit, and with a gun in the car, getting stopped means my day is shot. They check my permit for an hour, like they’ve never seen one before. I think they’d drive by a rape in progress to stop a speeder.”

  “The rapist doesn’t have to pay a ticket. No profit in it.”

  “Exactly.” She laughed. “Not that I mind stopping speeders--but everywhere else in Atlanta people drive like it’s a Nascar qualifier. You go to the grocery store and the person in front of you dawdles for an hour getting through the checkout. They’re so slow it makes me crazy. They chat for ten minutes with the cashier who they don’t even know, wander out, and say hello to all the people they don’t know in the parking lot, and then they get behind the wheel and lay about a city block of rubber leaving. It’s just nuts.”

  She wheeled us into a side street. The homes were mostly small and older, a mix of immaculate and run-down. The street was heavily treed, but like much of the area, there were no flowers, even on the well-tended properties. The red clay was so acidic that people tended to just lay pine straw over anything that wasn’t grass. Sydney pulled over and shut off the engine.

  The street sat baking in the heat, quiet except for the drowsy buzz of insects. Wanda Sutton’s house was an unkempt bungalow, partially obscured by bushes. A narrow driveway ran up the left side. The laneway between it and the house next door was filled by a new-looking boat on a trailer. The rig was canted slightly over because of a soft tire on one side. A shiny black motorcycle leaned on its kickstand near the street.

  “That’s a new boat, just about,” I said. “Way more than anyone needs for the lakes around here, and it looks like shit already.”

  She looked across the street at it. “Looks pretty nice to me. You know boats?”

  “I live on an island.”

  “Guess you do, then,” she said, and got out. “Hang on a sec.”

  She was lighting a cigarette as I came around the front of the vehicle. I waited as she took a few drags and then stepped on the butt.

  “New Harley too,” I said as we crossed the street. “Must be Junior’s. What’s his name? Arthur? That and the boat have to be his.”

  “I can’t see Wanda riding it, no.”

  “Guess my dad probably bought it for him.”

  She looked at me sharply. “If this is about you jumping to angry conclusions,” she said, “you won’t help me here. This is about trying to get information, not starting a fight.”

  I raised both hands in a placating gesture. In behind the screen of bushes, the bungalow was dark and worn out. Small air conditioners hummed in both windows. The front porch was screened in, but there was no doorbell button.

  Sydney tried the screen door and found it unlatched. She shrugged and we went in. She rapped her knuckles on the inner door.

  It was immediately pulled open, as though the woman on the other side had been waitin
g for the knock. Wanda Sutton stood there and stared at us without speaking. She wore wide blue shorts and a sleeveless blouse. A dingy bra strap slid down on her upper arm, as though it had surrendered to her pendulous breasts. She had an elastic bandage wrapped around one ankle and bare foot. The bottom of it was filthy.

  I stepped forward. “Ms. Sutton, my name is Mike Latta. You knew my father Sam. I saw you at the funeral. I appreciate your being there. I wanted to talk to you about him.”

  She was still. One hand rested on the door frame. Her chin was up and her eyes were slightly narrowed. There was a curious dignity in her defiance.

  “I figured you’d be around sooner or later,” she finally said. “You better come in.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Wanda Sutton,

  Marian, Georgia Saturday, January 7, 1950

  “Wake up!”

  A hand grabbed Wanda’s shoulder, pinching the skin. She sat up and squirmed away. Another girl’s face loomed over her, lit only by the moon in the dormitory window. Her eyes were dark holes. She grinned blackly, and a missing front tooth turned her head into a jack-o-lantern.

  “It’s time to go,” she hissed.

  Everyone in the long room was awake. The littlest girls stood silently on their bunks, too frightened to cry, as the group went by. Wanda found herself drawn in behind the last of them, out the door and down the staircase. The first of the twenty or so was racing down the ground floor hallway before the last of them had started down the stairs. They ran, thin cotton nightgowns billowing out behind them, like a posse of ghosts.

  Bare feet slapped on the linoleum floor as they passed classrooms, offices, and staff quarters. The tall space was illuminated dimly by occasional night lights set into the high ceiling. Portraits of dead state officials watched them from the walls as they went by. Midway down the hall, a door opened.