Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  "In uniform or out?"

  "Out,"

  "With Scotch or without?"

  "With." Anna hung up. The sexy sheriff would have to wait till her hormone level returned to that befitting a professional woman in her middling years.

  At Rocky Springs Anna changed into Levi's and, in honor of her first dinner date in Mississippi, a teal blue silk shirt that was not only clean but ironed. She cared for Taco and Piedmont then, guilt as heavy upon her heart as the crippled dog's brown eyes were on the back of her neck, abandoned them once again.

  Day had slipped into evening. A clogging beat mellowed to liquid breezes that didn't so much blow as saunter through the tops of the cornfields, running loving fingers through leaves too green-to be of this world. Red clover on the banks of the road turned from carmine to blood in the angled light, and the wisteria glowed as if lit from within. Only in nature could the red and yellow and lavender coexist in such harmony. On a scarf or a dress, the colors would have clashed.

  Alive, they enhanced one another's beauty.

  To either side of the road, tucked between acres of forest land, were cleared fields. Cattle and horses, hides iridescent with sunlight and high living, were scattered about as if placed by a talented photographer creating a postcard of pastoral peace.

  Beauty soothed Anna as always. After years of being a law enforcement ranger, anonymity soothed her as well. She was just a middleaged lady in a Rambler. Speeders were none of her concern. Lost tourists wouldn't flag her down. Bored visitors wouldn't buttonhole her with tedious stories. Malcontents wouldn't pour complaints into her ears.

  By the time she rolled into the Clinton pullout, she had lost her taste for park business, but such was the force of habit, it never crossed her mind to simply laugh, drink Stilwell's Scotch and let unanswered questions lie.

  Two vehicles were already there, a white 1997 Honda Accord with Hinds County tags and a mint-condition cherry-red 1949 Dodge pickup truck with chrome bumpers. In each of them sat a lone man stalwartly not looking at anything but the blank wall of trees beyond the picnic table. As Anna was parking next to the pickup, the Honda backed out and left. Through the Rambler's open window, Anna could see Steve lounging behind the wheel of the truck. He didn't look at her till she was standing on the passenger side of his vehicle, her hands on the door.

  "Hey. It's you," he said. "I was afraid to look. If you'd been much later, Yd've been in grave danger of losing my manly virtue. Hop in." Anna did, and he passed her the Scotch bottle. She took a swig. The stuff was foul-tasting, but the activity was comradely. "How so your manly virtue?" she asked, admiring the exquisite detail in which the interior of the vintage truck had been restored. No street rod for Stilwell. Anna was willing to bet the engine in the old truck was, if not the original, at least manufactured in 1949.

  "That guy in the Honda made two trips to the woods," Steve said, as if that explained things. "It was all I could do to stay behind the wheel." Anna was mystified but not sufficiently intrigued to play along with Stilwell's riddles. "Come on," she said. "I want to show you something." Steve got out of the truck, the Scotch bottle held by the neck, swinging loose in his right hand. "When you do it, you look raffish and collegiate," Anna remarked. "If I did it, I'd look like a skid row drunk."

  "It's a talent," he admitted modestly. "Openly enjoying wickedness is sufficiently rare these days as to pass for a brand of innocence." At that moment, Anna liked Stilwell so much she nearly told him.

  "This way," she said and followed one of the social trails into the tangled woods. "If you're planning a picnic, let's go to the city dump," Stilwell said from behind her. "This place is AIDS Central." Anna had stopped in the midst of the tissue and condom bushes.

  "This is it. What the hell is it? There was a pornographic picture stuck up on that tree with a note: "Follow Me."

  "

  "Yuck. What a mess," Stilwell looked around, both arms held high, keeping his hands-or more likely his Scotch-above the level of the contamination. "This has gotten bad. Tell George, and he'll send his guys in to clean it out. They'll bitch and moan but... yuck!

  "You knew this was here?" Anna asked. "Can we talk about it somewhere else? Microbes are crawling up my pantleg. I just felt one go over the top of my sock." Back in the pristine cab of Steve's truck, fortified by another swallow of the communal Scotch that Anna could tell wouldn't taste half bad in another shot or two, she realized what Steve had meant with his cryptic comments about his manly virtue and the threatened compromise thereof. It made sense when taken with the local cars, parked here after work, each empty or containing a ]one male occupant. "This is a homosexual trysting place," she said. "Yes and no." Steve sipped his booze, said "single malt" and went on.

  "There's several hot spots on the Trace. Here, some north. I've busted a few. You know, the usual charge: disturbing the peace.

  Though, the way I look at it, I'm the one doing the disturbing of the piece. There's strong feeling against it in these parts. Had a guy up in Tennessee at one of the pullouts come on to two good old boys. They beat the poor bastard to death. The verdict was accidental death. Seems they accidentally hit him about twenty-eight times. Strong feeling against it. We've run some sting operations. Tupelo wanted to run one down here with me as the bait." Anna raised an eyebrow. "What? You don't think I'm cute enough?" He cocked his head. Salt and pepper locks fell over his forehead. Stilwell was definitely cute enough. "I declined. Not my bag.

  Out of sight, consenting adults. Let the chiggers get 'em is my motto."

  "A benevolent soul," Anna said. "I like to think so. But back to homosexuals. These guys don't think of themselves as gay or homosexual.

  They're upstanding pillars of the community with wives and families who stop off-and every man of 'em claims it's the first time they've ever done it, naturally-for stress relief. That's how they see themselves."

  "I wish they wouldn't litter," Anna said, and Stilwell laughed. "Tell George.

  That's his area." Warmed by the Scotch and the good humor, Anna trotted out the day's slings and arrows.

  "I'll back you on the schedule issue," he promised. "But Randy's trouble. The proverbial bad apple. He's on a lot of people's bad sides.

  He never gave me any problem."

  "Why? Because you're white and male?"

  "Careful," Stilwell cautioned. "Paranoia is the single most contagious of all the mental illnesses. Did you know that?

  Nope, he didn't give me any trouble because I was just acting district ranger, just passing through. There was nothing to get out of me, so he opted for ass kissing. Never know whose ass is suddenly going to appear right above your lips on the ladder to success." The Scotch was beginning to kick in.

  Anna didn't mind. She took another swallow to catch up. "I'll be careful," she promised. She told him about the suicide of Leo Fullerton, and he voiced the niggling suspicions that had been dancing in her head like poisonous sugar plums. "Fullerton. He was one of the guys in the campground the night of your murder, wasn't he?" k Anna mildly resented Danni Posey being labeled her murder, but she said yes. "Fishy?" Stilwell thought aloud. "A man's there. A girl's killed.

  A man commits suicide. Coincidences do happen but... fishy."

  "One does wonder, don't one?" Anna said. "We've got no proof it was suicide. Fullerton, Pastor Fullerton, is presumably on the bottom of the Big Black river with a Volkswagen bus transmission shackled around his ankles-"

  "What year?"

  "I don't know what year."

  "Could be worth something."

  "Anyway, no suicide note. Just the word of his two buddies, also at Rocky Springs the night of the Posey murder."

  "You think he might be tied into the girl's death?"

  "Makes me nervous is all." They pondered over another round of Scotch.

  Drinking from the bottle, passing it back and forth in the cab of an antique pickup truck, created a mood of timelessness, of grassroots, round-the-campfire humanity. Anna felt utterly at home
, a sensation she'd been missing since she'd accepted the promotion to the district ranger position in Mississippi. "Was Pastor Fullerton connected in anyway to the Poseys?" Steve asked. Dusk had crept out of the woods and was caressing the truck. He turned the key and switched on the radio, his only concession to modern automotive luxury. The station featured oldies, very oldies, Fats Domino singing

  "Blueberry Hill" in a voice as rich as Mississippi mud. "No connection I know of," Anna said. "Sheriff Davidson left me a report a day or two ago. He'd talked with the Poseys.

  No church connection. No schools, hunting camp, social club that jumped out at me.

  I'll ask again, given the new developments. I was thinking maybe Fullerton knew something. Saw something be shouldn't have, and his comrades-in-arms shut him up, but Paul said-" Anna hesitated a moment, feeling the odd and pleasurable sensation of saying the "boyfriend's" name out loud. The Scotch was kicking in in her brainpan as well. "Paul said the three of them were near and dear, boyhood pals."

  "We mostly get offed by family and friends," Steve said philosophically.

  "Murder's like Christmas, people seem to want to be with their loved ones when it comes around."

  "Williams-one of the two pals in question-said he'd gotten a call from Fullerton saying he was going swimming with the VW engine and rushed to the pastor's aid too late to save him. If it was murder, my money's on Williams. Who else?"

  "Hey. Do alligators eat carrion?" Stilwell asked suddenly. "I wonder if the pastor will be munched." Anna didn't know much about the culinary habits of alligators.

  "They like dogs," she offered. "Maybe they taste like chicken." Their conversation was sliding gently into the Scotch bottle. That was okay by Anna. "If Fullerton was murdered because be saw something and he was murdered by Williams-always go with the obvious is my motto-then did Williams have any connection to the Posey girl?" she asked.

  "Can't help you there. Getting hungry?"

  "I could eat," Anna said.

  "Taco Bell?"

  "Better than that," Steve said as if better than Taco Bell was pretty doggone hard to imagine. "I am a man of many talents." Bending his wiry frame into intriguing shapes, he reached over the back of the seat and fished around. Finally he emerged with a paper sack, the top rolled to keep the contents from escaping. "You cooked?" Anna was impressed. "I constructed," Stilwell corrected her. "Cooking is a modest art compared to that of engineering the perfect sandwich." By the light of the April moon they dined on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and Scotch and listened to the rising chorus of frogs and golden hits from the thirties, forties and fifties on 93.9 FM.

  Afterward they drank coffee from a thermos Steve had under the seat.

  Coffee, lacking the insouciance of alcohol, was dispensed in separate but equalcups.

  Business was laid to rest. They didn't so much talk as swap stories, funny stories. As often as not, stories in which the teller was the butt of the joke. Anna could not have planned a more perfect evening. When the disk jockey announced it was ten of ten, she was amazed. Surely time had stopped the moment the truck door closed. The rude interjection of the clock reminded Stilwell he had to be up at four-thirty to get to Tupelo in time for a seven-thirty class he was taking on agricultural methods.

  He waited till Anna was safe in her Rambler, then drove off, the guttural roar of the pickup's engine recalling a time when power was new and raw and had moving parts.

  Not ready yet to start the forty-minute drive to Rocky, Anna sat behind the wheel of her car and closed her eyes, letting the raucous celebration of night sounds swirl in her head. On the mesas of southern Colorado, night was a time of stillness. Predators moved with stealthy grace, quiet as shadows. Birds ceased singing.

  Cicadas hushed their clatter, Compared with that, Mississippi could have been the template for Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen.

  It sounded as if all manner of strange things had come out to play.

  In this fecund matrix of mating frogs, pollinating bats, creeping kudzu, things procreating, eating and being eaten, growing and dying, where even the stars lost their distant and pristine coldness to hang close to the Earth, as integrated into the frenzy as the fireflies that blinked their need in the cloaking scrub, Anna's mind turned on the men that, in their need, risked family, position and disease to relieve themselves with strangers in her woods. And litter during the process.

  What pressures built in them that brought them here? Did they sit at their desks in offices, feeling dull and lonely? Did they worry about mortgages and braces for the kids, then, feeling overwhelmed and afraid, turn their thoughts to the end of the day, to excitement with a stranger, a sense of freedom and physical comfort for a moment? Did it matter what the strangers looked like, or just that they were strangers?

  Did they talk? What if it turned out to be someone they knew? Was there shame or a secret shared?

  The phenomenon had to be emotionally costly. Secret lives, though they paid dividends in thrills, had a nasty habit of growing as burdensome as the life they had been constructed to escape from. To keep the payoff coming, stakes had to be constantly raised, new risks taken.

  It was an area where Anna's knowledge was, at best, secondhand. TO arrest an addict did not require an understanding of the mechanics of addiction. That was Molly's stomping grounds.

  Her mind drifted, taking her back to when she'd first had an inkling of the humble pullout's kinkier aspects. Barth had been driving. He'd turned in. He'd said... what? Anna searched for his exact words.

  "Clinton pullout's kind of a problem area." When he said that, Anna had assumed an explanation would be forthcoming, but that hadn't been the case. Barth suddenly shut down, told her the cars belonged to nonexistent joggers and sped away as if pursued. The next day he'd been distracted, depressed and, unless her instincts failed her, acting guilty as sin. Was Barth gay? Or whatever these guys who littered the public's little patch of woods were? Barth had a wife and children, but that was meaningless. According to Steve, this particular brand of park visitor lived the rest of his life as a practicing heterosexual right down to procreation and probably homophobia.

  Barth as a frequenter of homosexual trysting grounds didn't fit.

  For one thing, in his own district, he would be far too recognizable.

  Besides, be hadn't gotten weird till after they'd driven into the parking lot in front of the picnic table. That's when he'd changed. And stayed changed.

  Anna sat up straight, rubbed the encroaching sleep from her face and scrubbed her fingernails through her cropped hair to stimulate thought.

  It was the truck. There'd been three cars and a truck at the pullout when she and Barth had driven through. The truck had a rebel flag on the bumper with the words HERITAGE, NOT HATE stenciled across the bottom.

  "Ob shit," Anna whispered. She knew why Fullerton was dead.

  And she knew why Barth Dinkin had donned a hair shirt.

  Guilt decreed that Anna stretch out on the Navajo rug in front of the cold stove and spend some quality time with Taco, the crippled wonder dog. Scotch and the sandman ambushed her there. She awoke just before dawn aching in most places a body can ache. There had been a time she'd been able to spring up mightily from a night on a hard floor-or a time creative memory insisted she had-but during the intervening years her bones had become cantankerous.

  She made coffee and drank it in the shower, trusting the heat within and the heat without to melt the precocious rigor mortis and restore a semblance of life.

  The precarious optimism lent by hot water and coffee was threatened when, on leaving, she found a paper sack on the top of her patrol vehicle. Inside were the dismembered parts of some small animal, probably a squirrel. Grim and chilling images of The Godfather and waking up with the severed head of a horse in one's bed were stirring her hackles to the vertical when she discovered the note. "Went squirrel hunting. Nothing like good red meat for a sick dog.

  Frank." On her way out, Anna thanked the main
tenance man for the thoughtful gift, then surreptitiously dumped it in the garbage can in the tiny visitor's center, careful to bury it beneath a layer of other refuse so Frank wouldn't inadvertently see it and get his feelings hurt when he collected the trash.

  Barth was already at the ranger station by the time Anna arrived.

  Randy wasn't due on duty till four Pm. That suited Anna just fine.

  It galled her to feel driven from her space by one of her own rangers, but she'd lived with wormwood and gall off and on since joining the park service. Unlike some, she'd never developed a taste for the bitterness.

  Long ago she'd promised herself, should she burn out, begin to grow bitter, she'd quit and get a job waiting tables or welding.

  Sitting at his desk, Barth had the look of a man who needed a good night's sleep, but when he looked up at her, his eyes were clear and his face animated. Either he'd recovered his equilibrium in the aftermath of Fullerton's death or he'd found something to distract himself with.