River of Secrets

by Roger Johns

  “Do you think his cause is unjust?”

  “Well, it’s kind of…”

  Wallace brought the point of her pen to the blank page of her notebook, holding Glenn’s gaze as she did so.

  “Hey, you know what,” he continued, “you’ve got to admire somebody who thinks that far outside the box.”

  “Did your father ever have any dealings with him?”

  “Nothing that wasn’t reported, ad nauseam, in the papers. I mean, back when these guys were going at each other, hammer and tongs, in the media, they hurled a lot of abuse at each other. But my old man had moved on from the frame of mind that motivated the kind of bombs he used to throw at Pitkin.”

  “Do you believe that was a real change?”

  “Can we ever really know what’s in the heart of another?” He shrugged.

  “Did you ever hear your father express any recent opinions about Mr. Pitkin or his methods?”

  “No, not recently. Just the things I already mentioned.”

  “Did you ever have any dealings with Eddie Pitkin?”

  “You are full of surprises, Detective. I never know where you’re going next. They teach you that little technique at the police academy?”

  She nodded, giving him a lazy smile. “The same day they taught me how to recognize when someone is stalling.”

  “No, Detective Hartman, I do not now nor have I ever had any dealings with the aforementioned Eddie Pitkin.” He laughed and shook his head as if he were indulging a silly child.

  “Let’s assume, just for the sake of discussion, that there’s no known suspect in this case. Is there anyone you can think of that would do something like this?”

  “Well, half the people in the legislature hated his guts.”

  “Glenn, your father was murdered. And it wasn’t accomplished from some remote distance, like a shooting. The killer had to get up close enough to touch him. And there’s evidence the killer stayed to watch him die. It would have been pretty awful. Political rivalry doesn’t seem strong enough or personal enough.”

  “Not to you, maybe. But I’m guessing you don’t have a ton of experience pursuing the kinds of agendas that get people all worked up. A lot of folks thought he was swimming against the tide of history, and a lot of others thought he was trying to drown them in it.”

  “Can you think of anything specific that an individual or group of individuals might have taken as a direct enough threat that it would provoke this kind of violence?”

  “I’m not in a position to know what would inspire one person to kill another.” Glenn looked at her, then stared into his drink. “Louisiana’s a right-to-work state. Some folks consider that a polite term for anti-union. He was in favor of policies that would make it harder to do away with the right-to-work laws. He was also a strong advocate for gender equality and gender identity.”

  “That seems like a set of priorities that would not typically coexist in the same person.”

  “Now you’re getting the picture.” He took a long pull on his drink, refilled it from the pitcher, and then drained it again.

  “Anything else?” she asked, skeptical that the senator had fallen victim to union violence.

  “I’m not aware of any specific threats. He liked to brag about his little power plays and how he always came out on top. But he never told me anything that sounded dangerous or sinister.” He closed his eyes and slumped back in his chair, holding his ice-filled glass to his right temple.

  Wallace couldn’t help noticing the stark contrast between Glenn’s demeanor and that of his mother. Where Dorothy had been a chaotic jumble of anger and grief and despondence, Glenn seemed to be a study in casual indifference to his father’s fate.

  “Your father was going to hold a press conference this morning. What can you tell me about that?”

  “That’s news to me.”

  “I’ll be interviewing members of his office staff tomorrow.”

  “Talk to Garrett Landry. He was my father’s chief legislative aide. He’d probably know.”

  Wallace wrote the name in her notebook and also scribbled a reminder to ask Dorothy about the press conference. “It doesn’t appear that the killer broke into the house,” she said, changing directions with her questions. “Do you know who had access to the place?”

  “Well, him. My mother. He had some woman who came in to tidy up. Beyond that, I wouldn’t know.”

  “Can you think of anyone he might have invited in or brought in with him?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about you? Didn’t you have access to the house?”

  “I understand he kept a key out somewhere, for the cleaning woman, if that’s what you’re asking. But I’ve never been inside the place.”

  “How could that be?”

  Glenn closed his eyes again and brought the glass back to the side of his head. “We weren’t that close. Until recently, I was living in Florida. Had been for quite a while.”

  “What brought you back to Louisiana?”

  “When I was a kid, I got sent away to boarding school. After that, college and career. Even though I’m from here, I never felt like I belonged anywhere. But, after all those years away, I started to feel like something was missing. So, I came back to look for it. At great expense, I might add.” With his drink hand, he gestured grandly at the house and the grounds.

  “This is certainly a beautiful home,” Wallace said, slowly taking in the wide expanse of the residence. “Very large for one person.”

  “You applying for residency?” He laughed, then refilled his glass. “Right up until the day of the move from Florida, I was a married man. For the second time, but married, nevertheless. At the last minute, my wife decided life on the bayou didn’t sound as compelling as life in South Beach.” His mouth turned down.

  “I’m sorry. That had to feel pretty awful.”

  “My parents never met my second wife. They never even knew I had gotten married, if you can believe that. They knew about the first one, but it didn’t last long enough for the folks to get too invested. Then, when Layla came along, things weren’t really clicking back here, so…”

  “Do you know if your father had any other children?”

  “None that Momma and I know about.” He looked at her and laughed again—a joyless sound that made Wallace uneasy.

  “Do you have any suspicions, in that regard?”

  “I suspect his marital vows meant little to him. How that translated into his actual behavior…” Glenn shrugged and looked off in the distance.

  Glenn and his mother seemed sure Herbert was a cheater, but they also appeared uninterested in knowing the particulars. Wallace assumed that made it easier to hide from the humiliation of betrayal. In any event, her line of inquiry seemed to have reached a dead end.

  “Tell me again, what it was that brought you to Baton Rouge.”

  “Uh-oh. Looks like I’m back in the crosshairs. Dear Diary is gonna get an entertaining earful tonight.”

  Wallace saw hurt in his expression.

  “Some things just needed to be cleared away.”

  She kept her focus on him, sensing his hesitation.

  “So, how is my very uninteresting life story of any relevance to your investigation, anyway?” Glenn’s voice pitched higher and he seemed to struggle against something that was threatening to have its way with him. His bleak expression begged for a reprieve.

  Wallace waited and agonized as the silent seconds ticked by.

  “My life had a way of going fine for a while … until it didn’t.” Glenn’s voice faltered. “And I could almost predict when things would start to go wrong, almost down to the day and the hour, but I could never figure out why it had to be that way.”

  “Family things?”

  “A friend of mine down in Florida, the pastor at a church I was going to, the place where I met Layla, he suggested I might be working too hard at ignoring things I needed to confront instead.”

  He looked at Wallace. She co
uld see he was trying to gauge her response to what he was telling her.

  “It all seemed a bit New Agey, to me,” he continued, waving his left hand airily. “But he kept at it, and after a while it started to sound like there was some logic to it. If you set up a row of dominos, then tip one over, it’s easy to see that each one knocks over the next one, all the way to the end. He finally convinced me that emotional cause and effect were not nearly so clear-cut. Something inside you, that you might not even be aware of, could reach into your life and knock things over. Other times, it could be something you are fully aware of, but it affects you in ways you wouldn’t anticipate or even notice until it’s too late, until the damage is done.”

  “Sounds like a smart fellow.”

  “He’s big on what he calls forgiveness theology.”

  “So, did you come back to forgive or be forgiven?”

  “Both. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to even attempt something like this.”

  “You said earlier that you were ‘sent away to boarding school.’” She let the statement hang as if it was a question.

  “I also said he and I weren’t that close.”

  The afternoon was quiet except for the muted tinkle of ice cubes as Glenn rolled his glass between his palms. Wallace could tell he was weighing whether to continue.

  “I could never quite figure out who I was to him.” He set the glass on the table and looked squarely at her. “Which do you think would be worse, Detective Hartman? To never have a father or to have one that kept himself out of reach except when he needed to rub your nose in one shortcoming or another?”

  Glenn closed his eyes and held his head high, as if he was listening for something. Then he stood and took a few steps. With his back to her, he spoke. “Can you imagine trying to love someone, but never being able to figure out how to get that accomplished?”

  “No,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

  “What would you do to get that person’s attention? Any attention at all?”

  Wallace thought she could see where Glenn’s questions were leading. She had seen it often enough in the children she grew up around. The ignored child of the self-absorbed parent, the child who was willing to do anything, even destructive things, if that’s what it took to get the parent’s attention.

  “And did you get that attention?”

  “Off and on for a while.” Glenn looked away. “But when I turned twelve … it was gone for good, unless you count disciplinary measures as attention.”

  Glenn’s expression made her blood run cold.

  “That was a confusing time. Let me tell you.” His voice grew strained. “I kind of went off into a wild, ragged orbit.”

  “Is that why they sent you away? Because you were getting hard to handle?”

  “My oh my, you are a quick study, Detective. But, yes, I did do some things. So they—more precisely, he—stuck me where he wouldn’t have to see the problems he’d caused staring him right in the face every day.”

  Without warning, Glenn hurled his drink against the wall with the runaway gate. Glass fragments showered back around him. He pressed his palms to his face and took a few long, slow breaths.

  “Glenn?”

  “What’s the fucking point?”

  “To what?”

  “To any of this,” he shouted. He looked down at himself, then opened his arms, preacher-style, and gestured at everything around him. “See if you can get your mind around how it feels to find out that the thing you need the most is the thing you hate the most.”

  Wallace looped her fingers through the toe straps of the well-worn leather sandals he had left next to his chair and then stood, dithering over whether to go near him.

  She gave him a wide berth, approaching slowly as if he were a skittish horse, and then held the sandals toward him. “Bare feet and broken glass don’t play well together.”

  “Thank you,” he said, still not looking at her. First with one hand, then the other, he held on to her shoulder for balance as he slipped the sandals on his feet.

  Wallace stiffened at the unexpected touch, but Glenn seemed not to notice. He stepped back and surveyed the mess he had made.

  “Glenn?” She waited until he was looking directly at her. “I admire you for coming back.” Her tone was soft. “For trying to fix this.”

  “And that’s about as far as it got. Trying. Just when things were starting to show some promise…” He looked past her, his nostrils flared, eyes focused in the distance. “Now you know why I flaked out on you and Mother. Why I found me an out-of-the-way place with long hours and good booze and just crawled on in.”

  He closed his eyes. With both hands he pulled hard at the hair on the sides of his head. A cry of frustration escaped through his gritted teeth.

  “He was a real bastard, and yes, we fought, and it got ugly, and yes, there were times when I just wanted to kill him.” Glenn’s eyes were brimming and his face was congested with anger. “If there’s a hell, he’s roasting in it now. But, goddamn him, when he went, he took what I needed with him.”

  In two long strides, Glenn was at the table. A second later, the pitcher of Virgin Mary hit the wall.

  THIRTEEN

  Peter Ecclestone was unnerved by his encounter with the detective. He wasn’t worried about her turning him in for trespassing, but he was worried about her dragging him into something that involved more exposure than he and his little sideline career needed.

  Once the detective had cleared out, he’d Googled her name and found the stories about the Herbert Marioneaux homicide. After that he ran through the images on his camera and deleted all the shots of Eddie Pitkin. This was not something he needed to get involved with, especially not something as touchy as what looked to be a race-based execution-style killing. No matter who his testimony helped or hurt, somebody would be gunning for him. Now looked like the perfect time to find a new place to roost for a while—a really long while.

  As soon as he was sure she was good and gone, he did a few quick errands that her appearance had put him behind schedule on, and then he returned to the lake house. He backed his SUV into the carport and began moving things out of the house. The loading was almost complete when he heard tires crunching on the gravel in the driveway. Imagining a surprise return of the detective, his mood sank.

  Peering between the boxes and the luggage already stacked inside the cargo space of his vehicle, Peter watched as a jacked-up gray dual-cab pickup eased to a stop a couple of feet from his front bumper. Glare off the windshield kept him from seeing who was behind the wheel. The man in the passenger seat looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place him. That was usually a bad sign.

  Just as Peter was about to close the last of his camera cases, he remembered where he had seen the face. Instead of closing the case, he worked the camera free of its cutout in the foam padding, then popped open the little hatch on the bottom and extracted the memory card.

  The man in the passenger seat opened his door and stepped out onto the gravel.

  With his left hand Peter brought his paper cup of convenience-store coffee to his lips and drained the last of it. With his other hand he dropped the memory card into the cup and crumpled the cup into a ball.

  The man closed the passenger door of the pickup and strode into the carport.

  Keeping his eye on the approaching figure, Peter reached for the dumpster behind him. He lifted the lid a few inches and let the cup fall inside. It made a faint kissing sound as it landed on the bag of household trash he had dropped in a few minutes earlier.

  Standing forward of the door, the man pulled open the driver’s door of Peter’s SUV, letting it thump against the carport wall.

  “What can I do for you?” Peter asked, acting startled.

  The man walked back around the front of the SUV, to the passenger side, and stopped at the rear corner, just a few feet from Peter. The open driver’s side door blocked Peter’s avenue of escape on his left. The man was blocking his path t
o his right.

  “Get in your vehicle,” he said. “You and I got business to discuss.”

  * * *

  Burley looked nervous. Wallace couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him like this.

  Just as Burley had predicted, before he and LeAnne had finished their search of Eddie Pitkin’s house Renata Pitkin, Eddie’s wife, had called in the camera crews. Renata turned out to be as skilled as her husband at managing public perceptions.

  The TV stations must have put a tape of the event on a continuous loop, and in almost no time, it got picked up by the national media. Wallace watched it on the television in the corner of Burley’s office.

  Renata was standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, with her wide-eyed three-year-old grandchild, thumb in his mouth, peeking worriedly from behind her right leg. She lobbed question after question at the officers. Heartbreakers such as, “Why are you taking our stuff?,” “What have you done with my husband?” “We need him at home,” “Haven’t you-all done enough to us already?,” “How do you expect our family to survive with you-all ripping us apart like this?,” and “Can anybody explain why you-all think he would have done what you’re accusing him of?”

  She never cried or raised her voice. She never made a move in the direction of the officers. She just stood there, asking her questions and looking desolate, and resigned, and victimized.

  To Wallace’s trained eye, it looked like a very garden-variety warrant search, but with Renata’s melancholy commentary it would appear to the public like a Gestapo maneuver. Grim-faced officers carried boxes out the front door to a police van parked at the curb. Neighbors clustered at the periphery looking sympathetic.

  And now that there was the possibility of an alibi, the whole operation could’ve been for nothing. Even worse, it could be spun as harassment of a black man who just happened to have an agenda that made white people uncomfortable with their past.

  And there was Burley, stage-managing the entire business—barking orders and directing his officers to keep the onlookers at bay.

  Wallace looked at him now, sitting on the couch in his office, anxiety practically oozing out of his pores. At one time, all of this would have rolled off him—back when he still felt like he had something to prove. Now, like many in the late stages of their careers, he would just feel like he had something to lose.