'"Bye, Eddie," I said. "Come again when you can't stay longer."
After he'd gone, I wandered into the kitchen looking for something to eat. Edna was sitting at the table playing solitaire and half watching an old black-and-white movie on the portable television we keep in the kitchen.
"I take it you overheard my conversation with Shaloub?" I said, sitting down beside her with a plate of cheese and crackers and a glass of wine.
She kept her eyes on the cards, scanning for a likely play. "I heard some of it when I was on my way to the bathroom. Totally by accident, of course."
"Of course." I nibbled on a piece of the cheese. "Play that Jack of spades, why don't you?"
She shot me an annoyed look. "You know I hate it when you do that. You wanna play, get your own deck of cards." She played it on the Queen, though.
"What did you think?"
She played two more cards, sighed hugely, then turned over the remaining cards. "There's the three of hearts I was missing," she said.
She pushed the cards into a pile and began reshuffling.
"I think that man has the shiftiest eyes I've ever seen. And he lies like a rug. But how do we prove he's not lying? Your theory sounds farfetched even to me, and I'm on your side. No wonder the cops think you're crazy."
28
I'd set the alarm clock for seven a.m., but the rain woke me early. I propped myself up on a pile of pillows and watched it falling softly but steadily through my bedroom windows. Edna had paid a neighborhood teenager to mow the lawn on Saturday, and the smell of damp fresh-cut grass wafted in through my window. It was perfect sleeping weather, with the kind of rain that makes you want to burrow down deep among the pillows and quilts and sleep the morning away.
Good for lovemaking, for being kissed awake and caressed into consciousness. But my big carved walnut bed was empty, except for me. It had been a long time since I'd awakened every morning with the same familiar someone beside me.
Two years, to be exact. Two years since Matt, my lieutenant in the property crimes unit, had gotten the letter of acceptance to law school and moved up to Athens and the University of Georgia. We'd drifted apart before then, but the career change made things permanent.
A few months after that, Edna moved in. She'd sold the big house, the one we'd grown up in, and was at loose ends. She didn't want the hassle of a big house all to herself, but she wasn't ready to move to the retirement community my sister Maureen had thoughtfully picked out for her. I had a yard she could garden in, a spare bedroom and bath, and I could always use help with my house note.
Friends were incredulous. "Live with your mother? Why don't you just move to a convent?" My sisters and brothers had predicted disaster and dropped hints that Edna was just bailing me out from a lifetime of spinster-hood. But the arrangement had worked surprisingly well. Maybe because we were both fiercely independent, yet social enough to want somebody else around a lot of the time.
"Who else but a Garrity could stand to live with a Garrity?" I'd asked Edna.
It would have been nice to have someone special in my life again, but Edna wasn't preventing that. It's like my friend Paula says: All the good men are married or gay. Paula always says she wants to be reincarnated as a gay man in Atlanta. "They have tight little butts, fabulous houses, and they get all the cute guys," she says.
As I'd done every morning and night since discovering the lump, I ran my fingers over my right breast. Every morning I expected a change. Maybe the skin would glow red as a sign of the cancer, or the lump would be bigger or smaller or, yes, gone. But every morning it was there, a silent threat, my own time bomb. The bruises ached to the touch.
Tomorrow, I promised myself, if we got Ardith bailed out of jail and I made some progress on the case, I'd think seriously about scheduling the biopsy. What, I wondered, would Dick Drescher think of my bruises?
I glanced at the clock again. Quarter to seven. The rain hadn't let up any. I wondered if McAuliffe would stand me up. I decided to get dressed anyway, maybe get some breakfast at a drive-through on the way to L'Arrondissement.
By the time I got out of the shower I could smell coffee brewing. The kitchen was empty. Edna had apparently gotten up, started it, and gone back to bed. She knows how I hate morning.
I poured the coffee into a thermos bottle, grabbed an old rain slicker by the back door, and threw it on over my jeans and sweatshirt. My old hiking boots made loud clunking noises on the kitchen floor. I felt like a Girl Scout off for a day of hiking and camping.
Once I got on the highway I decided to skip breakfast and head straight for the country store where McAuliffe had promised to meet me. If I was too early I could always drink coffee and read the Sunday Constitution, which I'd picked up out of the driveway.
It was not yet eight, but the green Wagoneer was already parked at the store. I pulled alongside it and McAuliffe motioned for me to cut the engine and join him in his car. I jumped in the front seat, clutching my thermos and my newspaper.
"You're early," he said grudgingly. "I wouldn't have picked you for a morning person."
"I'm not," I admitted. "The rain woke me up and I couldn't get back to sleep."
"That hot?" he said, gesturing toward the thermos. I poured some into the empty Styrofoam cup he held out. We sat there sipping our coffee, watching the rain ease from steady drizzle to intermittent drip. The inside of his Jeep smelled like damp dog.
"Where's Rufus?"
"Left him at home asleep." He grinned. "Rufus hates morning."
"Sun's up," he said, peering skyward. "You still want to do this? It rained pretty hard. It'll be muddy as anything back in there."
I nodded stubbornly. "I'm sorry to drag you out in the rain. You know, I halfway expected you to stand me up."
"I halfway considered it."
"But you're not that kind of guy."
"Not usually," he agreed. "If we're gonna do it, let's go. At least we won't have to worry about company in this weather."
I moved the van around to the back of the store where it wouldn't be so conspicuous and made a dash back to the Jeep.
Seated beside him, I had time to give McAuliffe a closer inspection. His hair had probably been red once. Now the ginger color was mostly gray. He wore a neatly trimmed beard, and his face had the look of someone who'd spent a lot of time outdoors, but not on a chaise lounge. I glanced surreptitiously at his hands on the steering wheel. There was gray hair on their backs and on his arms beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. No wedding band and no telltale white band of skin. I put his age at over forty-five, a little too old for my taste normally, but just this once, I thought, further study might be in order.
"How's your case coming?" he asked, startling me out of my carbon-dating process.
"OK."
"Just OK?"
"I don't know," I said. "Even my own mother thinks I'm crazy to think we can get Ardith off. There's so much evidence against her: the fight in the motel room, the scratches on her hands, the skin under Kristee's fingernails. Then there's Rich's. The body was found in the fur vault, and Ardith had been there two days earlier applying for a job."
"You didn't tell me this was the murder where they found the body at Rich's," McAuliffe said. "I think I read about that in the newspaper."
"Yeah, buried way back with the tire ads at the back of the paper. Rich's is the Constitution's biggest advertiser. It wouldn't do to publicize what a swell place their fur vault is to store a corpse."
"Doesn't look nice," he agreed. "Why did you take the case?"
"Who knows. Maybe I was just pissed off that Bo Beemish was getting away with something. I hate his type. Maybe I just love hopeless causes."
"Here we are," he said.
In the three days since I'd last been there, the construction crews had made substantial progress in completing the stacked rock wall. There were new NO TRESPASSING signs, and it looked as though the workers had finished building the guard shack, although it was empty this mornin
g.
"Bastard's too cheap to hire a guard," McAuliffe said.
The new road was awash in liquid red mud. Streams of it gushed past the shack, splashing the sides of the Jeep.
"That's illegal right here," McAuliffe said, pointing at the gushing rainwater. "He's supposed to have sediment fences and hay bales in place all through here, to prevent this runoff. See how it's headed straight for the river?"
"Yeah, but they wouldn't shoot at me to keep me from seeing that," I said. "And it was dry and sunny the day I was here."
McAuliffe cruised slowly down Lilah Lane, stopping now and then to roll down his window and peer out at the ongoing construction. Another street had been paved since my last trip, and two or three lots had SOLD signs on them.
"Look at that," I said excitedly, pointing to a pile of felled trees that had been bulldozed to the middle of one of the lots.
"Trees," McAuliffe said. "What about them?"
"That oak tree was standing the last time I was here," I said. The tree in question must have been ninety feet tall, which meant it could be 180 years old or more. Now it was lying on the ground, its roots sticking up obscenely in the air. "Isn't there a law against cutting a tree that old? I thought the county had a tree ordinance."
"Fulton has a tree ordinance," he agreed, "but it doesn't prohibit a developer from cutting down trees on his residential property."
He pulled the Jeep into the cul-de-sac I pointed out and parked, then reached behind the seat and brought out the khaki hat I'd seen him wearing before and jammed it on his head.
"You packing a rod?" he said offhandedly.
"You mean a gun? You've been reading too much Mickey Spillane, McAuliffe. I have a little twenty-two automatic, but it's at home, in the nightstand beside my bed."
"Just wondering."
The hiking boots had been a good idea. As soon as I got out of the Jeep my feet sank two or three inches into the mud. Walking slowly, sliding some of the way, we slogged our way through the muck toward the river-bank. In several spots we could see places in the bank where the rainwater had cut a ditch and the river was a red-brown swirl.
"I see what you mean about runoff."
"Show me where you were standing when Beemish's guys spotted you," he said.
I pointed the way down the bank, and we walked until we were beside the dump. "Right here," I said, kicking a Pabst Blue Ribbon can. "Those construction workers made a trash dump on one of the prettiest lots on the river. Why would they do that?"
He edged some trash with the toe of his boot. "It's a borrow pit," he said. "They've taken soil from here and put it someplace else on the property, then filled the hole with construction debris. But it's strange for them to have used such a choice riverfront lot. Usually they put the trash pit on the smallest, least desirable lot, figuring it'll be the last to sell. Just before the lots are all gone, they'll cover it with dirt, run a motor grader over it, throw some grass seed around, and it'll look good as new—until the trash starts to degrade and the ground settles and some poor guy finds the foundation of his million-dollar house has two-inch cracks in it."
McAuliffe stood up and circled the pit, kicking, bending, poking at the trash. I followed in his tracks, doing much the same thing.
"Wait a minute," I told him. "Over on the side there, I saw a strange rock. Like a piece of an old granite house foundation or something."
"Show me."
I waded across the trash pile, looking for something to remind me of what I'd seen. "Here it is," I said, spotting a glistening gray stone poking out of a nest of old Whopper boxes. I stooped over and pushed trash out of the way so he could get a look. He squatted down beside me. "I saw a number on a corner here, somewhere," I told him, scrabbling with my hands in the trash. "Like a date or something. It might have been 1923, I couldn't be sure. Right after I saw it is when the guy in the golf cart started gunning for me."
He pulled a pair of leather work gloves from beneath the windbreaker he was wearing and handed them to me. "Here. You'll cut yourself."
I picked and prodded until I'd cleared away enough trash to reveal a twelve-inch section of the rock. "There," I said finally, running a gloved fingertip over the carved date. "It's 1928."
McAuliffe studied the rock for a minute, then stood up. "Be right back. I want to get something out of the Jeep."
I stood in the trash pile, in the early morning chill, with the rain dripping down all around me, and felt the hairs on my neck stand up. There was something here.
McAuliffe was carrying a shovel and a rake when he came back. He handed me the rake. "See if you can clear the trash away from the rock while I dig around it," he said.
I wrinkled my nose against the stink of the rotting garbage but kept raking away. After ten minutes, McAuliffe stood back and rested his elbows on the handles of his shovel. "That's it," he said grimly. "That's what Bo Beemish doesn't want anybody to see."
Our digging had exposed a smooth round-topped tablet. A single lily bloom was carved on it and there was old writing, but we couldn't make out much of it, what with the crumbling rock and a coating of green-gray lichens and red mud.
"An old gravestone," I said. "What's it mean?"
"Where there's one old headstone like this, there are usually others," he said. "This is an old graveyard, probably been inactive for years."
"And?"
"And disturbing it is strictly against the law," he said patiently.
"Even though it's his land?"
"The land is his, but the graves belong to the heirs of the people buried here," McAuliffe said, sifting through the rest of the trash with the edge of his shovel. "I wonder how many other graves there are."
"Is this really that big a deal?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah. There are small graveyards like this all over Georgia. A lot of them aren't marked on any surveys. But once you discover one, you've got a big headache on your hands. Like in De Kalb County, when MARTA was putting in the east train line, they found an old graveyard with more than two hundred graves. It was a mess. They spent all kinds of money contacting the heirs and moving the bodies. Delayed the project by nine months."
"Is that what you're supposed to do?"
"Yeah. Contact the heirs, which can take forever, to get their permission to disinter the bodies. If you can't find any heirs, you get a court order. Then you've got to get a permit from the county health department to have the remains exhumed and relocated."
"Why didn't Beemish do any of that?"
"Mr. Beemish doesn't seem to think nit-picky regulations like those apply to him," McAuliffe said dryly.
"So he had his people bulldoze those graves into a pit and cover it with trash so no one would know they were there."
I looked down at the trash around my feet and felt squeamish. I stepped out of the pit and scraped my boots off on a rock, hoping McAuliffe wouldn't notice.
"You know," I told him, "some portion of this property belonged to an old lady named Inez Rainwater. Beemish had to buy her land in order to be contiguous with Kensington Park's city limits. I wonder if she knew anything about the graveyard."
He shrugged. "Would it matter if she did?"
"Maybe. At least Beemish couldn't claim his people bulldozed it without his knowledge. The city clerk told me Beemish paid Miss Inez eighty thousand dollars, more than twice what the property's worth. Maybe that's why he paid her so much, because she was selling off the family burial ground."
"Eighty thousand, did you say? Look around you, Garrity. This land is worth much more than that. But the county hasn't reappraised land up here in decades. You've got the former governor of the state living in a two-million-dollar mansion on the river not half a mile from here, and the house and the three acres it sits on are appraised at a hundred and two thousand."
I'd apparently hit a nerve. McAuliffe talked on and on about property values and millage rates and such, but by that time I'd tuned him out. I looked up at the sky out of boredom. The sun was trying to brea
k through a plum-colored bank of clouds.
"Say, Mac," I said, "have you got someplace else you need to be this morning?"
"Why? You wanna dig up some of these stones and see if Jimmy Hoffa's out here?"
"No. I want to see if I can locate Miss Inez."
He muttered something about needing to do some yard work and feed Rufus, but he didn't head back to the Jeep.
We slogged through the muddy carpet of fallen pine needles for five minutes or more, dodging stray branches and looking for signs of civilization.
Through a clearing in the trees, I finally spotted a flash of turquoise. As we got closer we could see it was an ancient house trailer, one of the early ones with the rounded edges that made it look like a toaster on wheels. A strand of shiny Christmas tinsel was garlanded around the front door, and two orange kittens darted in and out from beneath the trailer's concrete block underpinnings. A rough wood picnic table stood beneath a tree in the clean-swept clearing that served as Miss Inez Rainwater's front yard. Around the edges of the clearing she'd scattered pots filled with red, blue, pink, and purple plastic flowers. In the center of the yard a concrete black-faced jockey boy held a ring to which was tethered a bawling baby goat.
Before we could get any closer, the door of the trailer swung open and a wizened old lady stepped out holding a painted porcelain pot.
She wore a black baseball cap, and her main garment appeared to be a yellowing cotton slip, which she'd topped with a threadbare man's plaid flannel bathrobe. Her stringlike legs were covered in some kind of thick black hose, and on her feet she wore a tattered pair of red high-topped sneakers. She was a tiny thing, not even five feet tall, and her face was a mass of wrinkles. But she wore no glasses and the buttonlike brown eyes were surprisingly clear.
"Miss Inez?" I said tentatively.
"Who's that?" she cried. "Waddya want?"
McAuliffe stood still a few feet behind me, but I approached her with my hand held out.
"Callahan Garrity, Miss Rainwater," I said. "I'm a private investigator."
She set the pot down quickly on the front stoop and disappeared back into the trailer. She came out again, holding a white business-size envelope, which she handed to me.
Every Crooked Nanny Page 20
