"This here's my social," she said. "You check it, Susie. It's not a penny more than it should be. I don't get no food stamps. The lady over to the post office told me I don't qualify."
I pressed the envelope back into her hands. "No, Miss Rainwater," I said. "My name's Callahan. I'm not from the government. And I'm not here about your social security check. I just wanted to ask you some questions about the land you sold Mr. Beemish."
She narrowed her eyes and glanced back at McAuliffe. "What'd you say Bubba's name was? Is he with the government?"
"He's a friend. Could we ask you a few questions?"
She looked at the jar on the front stoop. "Wasn't expecting no company," she said. "Just finished listening to the Hour of Power on the radio. I love that Robert Schuller fella. Looks like you caught me emptying my chamber pot."
So that's what the jug was.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," I told her hastily. "We didn't mean to intrude. Maybe we could just sit out here at the picnic table, since the rain stopped. See, it's starting to get a little sunny."
She squinted up at the weak yellow rays trying to break through the tops of the pine trees surrounding her clearing.
"I reckon," she said. "Y'all set. I'll be right back."
She grabbed the pot and hurried off through the undergrowth, surprisingly surefooted for an old lady who looked at least eighty.
The picnic bench was soaking wet, so we both took off our rain slickers and used them as cushions. McAuliffe had a silly sort of grin.
"What?" I said. "What's so funny?"
"I was just wondering if Beemish knows Miss Inez is emptying her chamber pot at L'Arrondissement. I was wondering how they explain her presence to potential home buyers."
Before we could discuss the matter, Miss Inez was back, popping into the trailer, then out again. She sat lightly at the table, in apparent disregard for the wet bench.
"What's that jackleg Beemish want now?" she said. "I done told that real estate lady he sent over here I can't move till the Idle Hours Comfort Care Home has a room ready and till I find a home for Katie."
She smiled indulgently at the baby goat, who was busy nibbling at some plastic poinsettias. "I told her all that, didn't I?"
"I don't know what you told her," I said pleasantly. "Has Mr. Beemish been pressuring you to move out of your trailer here?"
She snorted. "Has a cat got a climbing gear? Before I signed his pieces of paper it was 'Take your time, Miss Inez; you can stay as long as you like, Miss Inez; no hurry, Miss Inez.' Then, after I signed, quicker than you can say Billy-be-damned, seems like the next day his people were out here pesterin' me to get out. Cut off my lights and water last month. Said they were burying underground lines for the new houses. Huh! Inez Rainwater knows when she's being messed with. But like I told them, I can't leave till me and Katie got a place to go. And Idle Hours won't take no goats. So I'm a-staying. Got me a kerosene lantern to see by, a camp stove to cook on, and a chamber pot to piss in. Let's see 'em cut that off."
"Miss Inez," I said, "do you know anything about an old graveyard back in the woods? Right by the riverbank?"
Her wrenlike face flushed then, and she hopped up from the table. "Ain't gonna talk about it. No, ma'am. Inez Rainwater don't flap her gums."
McAuliffe reached out and touched her hand lightly. "Miss Inez, we found some old gravestones. We saw where they'd been bulldozed into a big trash pit and covered over. Do you know who was buried there?"
Her eyes got watery and she sat back down. "Rainwaters and McAdoos and Peepleses, my husband's folks. My folks are buried over at Flowery Branch.
None of them Rainwaters was any real kin to me. All been dead and gone sixty years or more. Figgered it wouldn't hurt nothing."
"But wasn't your husband buried there?"
"Shoo-oot," she said, extending the word to two syllables. "James Rainwater wasn't fixing to be buried in no piny woods. He's buried in his World War One infantry uniform right there in the National Cemetery in Marietta. Been out there since 1972, something like that."
"Did you know Mr. Beemish was going to bulldoze the cemetery on your property?" I asked.
"Didn't say he did, didn't say he didn't," she said mysteriously. "Give Miss Inez cash money. Miss Inez done paid for her own funeral and a nice cherry-wood coffin and a room at the Idle Hours Comfort Care Home with cable television, forty-two channels. Miss Inez Rainwater don't owe nobody nothin'."
McAuliffe looked over at me and shrugged. "It sounds like Beemish got permission to move the graves. If she really is the last Rainwater descendant, it might be legal. Well, partly legal. I doubt if the people who buy that lot will be told it's an old cemetery. And bulldozing isn't exactly disinterring. Come on," he said, half rising from the bench. "We better get out of here. Now that the rain's stopped, Beemish's people might decide to get in some overtime. And I don't particularly like getting shot at."
"Wait," I said. Miss Inez seemed unaware of our presence. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she rubbed at it with the sleeve of her bathrobe. She seemed unaccountably sad about some long dead in-laws she'd never even known.
"Miss Inez," I said gently, "what about your son? The one who was killed in the logging truck accident?
Was he buried with your husband? Or did Beemish bulldoze his grave too? Did he, Miss Inez?"
The old lady didn't bother to brush away the tears that streamed down her face. She sat, looking straight ahead, her hands clenched tightly on the table, crying silently. The goat, Katie, wandered over on its chain, put its soft gray head in her lap, and butted her playfully.
"He did, didn't he? Bo Beemish tore up your boy's grave right along with the others, didn't he?"
Without warning, she jumped up again from the table, so suddenly the goat bawled in surprise. The only sound in the clearing was the metallic bang of the aluminum trailer door slamming shut.
McAuliffe and I sat there, not knowing what to do. But after some hesitation, I followed her, opening the aluminum door slowly, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the sudden dark.
The inside of the trailer was cramped but clean and tidy. An old butt-sprung leather sofa and a coffee table took up one end of the room. Hanging in the place of honor was a sepia-tinted framed photograph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the other end of the room there was a tiny kitchenette, with a green Coleman stove set on top of the counter. Aside from a narrow door that looked like it led to a bathroom, there was only one other room, a bedroom so small as to be closetlike.
I could see her from the doorway, sitting on the edge of a narrow bed that was neatly made up with a faded pink chenille bedspread. She held something wrapped in a tattered quilt in her lap.
"Miss Inez," I called. "May I come in?"
She nodded her head mutely. I scraped the mud from my boots and stepped inside, feeling like a giant in a parakeet's cage. I seemed to fill the room.
I looked down at her. Wrapped in the quilt, she was cradling a fairly new-looking headstone, with one corner chipped off. "Was that your son's?"
She ran a fingertip over the writing.
James Malcolm Rainwater, Jr.
beloved son of James and Inez
1954-1976
"Always called him Big Boy," she said. "Doctors told Miss Inez she'd never have no babies. Like Sarah in the Bible. I didn't, either, till I was forty-five. Jesus gave Miss Inez her Big Boy. Weighed twelve pounds, eight ounces. Walked when he was eight months old. Had the sweetest disposition you ever saw."
"I understand he was killed in a logging truck accident," I said. "You must have been heartbroken."
"Jesus needed Big Boy in heaven," she said simply. "He's gone to be with his daddy now."
The bedsprings sagged mightily when I sat down on the bed beside her. "Can you tell me what happened to his grave?"
"Those dirty dogs," she said. "Those dirty damned old lying dogs. Mr. Bo, he told me the Rainwaters would be moved, proper-like. Said they'd put 'em in a back corner of the property
, with a pretty little fence around it and a place for me and Big Boy to be together. I signed him a piece of paper sayin' it was all right. Then one morning early, before daylight, I heard a racket over in them woods. I got over there, and those dirty dogs had machines digging up the ground, breaking up headstones, piling trash and dirt on top of 'em."
She looked at me solemnly. "There were open caskets. I tell you it put me in mind of what the Bible says about Judgment Day. 'Lo, the Lord empties the land and lays it to waste; he turns it upside down, scattering its inhabitants.' Isaiah," she said wearily. "You know your Bible, Susie?"
"Not like I should," I admitted. I didn't bother to explain that most Catholics aren't big on Scripture quoting.
"I run over there hootin' and screechin' at 'em to stop, but they acted like I wasn't even there. The boss man told me to get out of that private property before they called the police. It was all I could do to get Big Boy's stone and drag it back here before they chopped it up and buried it with all the others."
"Oh, no," I whispered. "How awful. Did you call Beemish? You should get a lawyer, you know. There are laws against what he's done here. You could have him put in jail."
"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord," she said, grinning wickedly. "Ain't nobody out here in Kensington Park fixing to put a rich man like Mr. Bo in jail just on crazy old Inez Rainwater's say-so. And Miss Inez, she ain't got no truck with no jackleg lawyers. Talk about it." She cackled. '"Woe to the wicked man! All goes ill, with the work of his hands he will be repaid.' That's Isaiah too, Susie. Miss Inez done got the gold star at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church for Scripture reading."
She hugged the headstone tighter to her chest and looked up at me. "Susie, what'd you say Bubba's name out there in the yard was again?"
"It's McAuliffe," I told her. "Andrew McAuliffe."
"He your daddy or somethin'?"
I smiled and shook my head. "Mr. McAuliffe does work for the government, Miss Inez. And he tells me what Mr. Beemish is doing on this land is illegal. He's going to help me get Mr. Beemish to do right by you, Miss Inez. I promise."
She ran her fingers lovingly over the headstone. "That's all right, then. Want me a burial plot for me and Big Boy," she whispered. "Want what was promised me."
29
OUTside McAuliffe sat at the picnic table tossing pieces of an apple in the air and watching the goat leap up to catch them. "Good girl, Katie. Get it, girl."
He looked a little embarrassed when I sat down beside him. "Had a piece of apple in my jacket pocket, and the damned thing wouldn't leave me alone till I gave her some."
"I didn't know goats could jump like that," I said. "Oh, yeah. Goats are smart. My Uncle Omer kept goats for years. They'll outsmart a human every time." He tossed the last of the apple to Katie and stood up. "Let's get. You can tell me about Miss Inez later."
He walked so fast I had to trot to keep up with him, which left me too out of breath for any clever conversation. Back at the Jeep, he unlocked my door, but I was barely seated before he threw the car into reverse and began speeding away from the cul-de-sac.
"You really are in a hurry," I said. "Got a heavy date or something?"
He shot me a look. "I'm an employee of the Atlanta Regional Commission, not a private investigator. We're on private property out here, and I don't have any good explanation for why I'm with you. I'm just being cautious. Do you mind?"
"No, not at all."
McAuliffe wheeled into the parking lot of the country store where we'd left the van. It was still deserted, but an occasional car now whizzed by on the road in front of it. He parked in back beside the van and cut the Jeep's engine.
"What did the old lady have in that trailer? A bag of bones, a witches' cauldron? More goats?"
"She had her son's headstone, wrapped up in a quilt. Beemish promised her he'd move the cemetery to another lot in a remote corner of the property, even promised her she could be buried there with her son. Of course, as soon as he had tide to the land, he sent his men in before daylight and started bulldozing. She barely managed to drag her son's headstone away before they plowed it under with the others."
"Can she prove any of that?"
"It doesn't matter. She's in her eighties, Mac. She's got no money for lawyers. She already spent the money from the land sale to pay for her own funeral and burial plot and the nursing home fees. She's not in any position to fight Beemish. Not in court, anyway."
"What do you mean?"
I laughed for the first time that morning. It felt good. "That's some gutsy old lady out there. One of the reasons Beemish is so keen on security is that there have been all kinds of vandalism at L'Arrondissement. Shaloub, who's head of the police committee, told me truck tires had been slashed, someone put sugar in the gas tank of a piece of heavy equipment, and the construction trailer was broken into and some expensive office equipment stolen. Miss Inez didn't exactly confess to doing any of that, but she did throw some Bible passages at me that suggested the Lord had directed her to retribution."
"Praise God," McAuliffe said, laughing with me.
"Amen to that, brother," I said. "You wanna know what else she said to me?"
"What?"
"She asked if you were my father."
He threw his head back and guffawed. "Not bloody likely, thank you very much."
"Well, just how old are you?" I asked.
He stopped laughing rather suddenly. "How old do you think?"
"Hmm," I said. I reached out and traced the laugh lines around his eyes. "Lemme see your hands," I ordered.
He thrust them out in front of me. The nails were square and cut short, the skin weathered and freckled. The hairs on the back of his hands were white. There were calluses on the palms.
"I do a lot of yardwork," he said defensively. "Play a little golf."
"What kind of music do you like?"
"Early rock and roll, some Motown ... hey, no fair."
"You're forty-two," I said, deliberately underestimating. He was forty-six if he was a day.
"You're a crappy liar, you know that, Garrity? I'm forty-nine and I look it. So how old are you?"
"Guess."
"What kind of music do you like?"
"Early rock, some Motown, Carolina beach music to dance to," I said teasingly. "Give up?"
He reached out and ran a finger along my cheek, the one with the scrapes. I hadn't bothered with makeup that morning.
"Nice skin," he said offhandedly. "You're maybe, what, thirty-six?"
I slapped his hand away. "Thirty-two, damn you."
"Jesus," he said, looking stricken. "I really could be your father."
"Well, technically, I guess. Speaking of fathers," I said, trying to sound casual, "what about you? Any kids?"
"A daughter, Gillian. She's twenty, a junior at Auburn. She lives with her mother in Birmingham when she's not at school."
"You're divorced?"
"Yeah. It's been eight or ten years, I guess. Long enough that I forget sometimes I ever was married. My ex-wife got remarried right afterward. What about you?"
"My sister enjoys referring to me as the family spinster," I told him. "I've come close, but somehow I've never made it to the altar."
He lightly traced the bruise and the scrape on my face. "Where'd you pick up this little beauty?"
So I told him how I'd been stomped by a couple of skinheads at Little Five Points.
He listened, asked questions, commiserated, but he didn't seem horrified or shocked, and he didn't try to tell me I'd asked for trouble by walking home alone.
"You seem to be one of those people stuff happens to," he said. "You get shot at, beat up. Is your life always like this?"
"Not usually this violent," I said thoughtfully. "But yeah, I do seem to attract—uh, stuff. Maybe it's negative ions in my magnetic force field. I can't even wear a watch. It stops."
"What other kinds of things happen to you?"
"Name it. It happens."
"And you think
it's caused by negative ions."
"It's just a theory. It's not for sure or anything. Although now I don't know."
"What? Has somebody got a contract out on you?"
"Actually . . . there's a chance I might have cancer."
"Cancer. That's scary."
I studied his face to try to see what he was thinking. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. I haven't told anybody, not even my mother. In fact, I think this is the first time I've even said the c-word. My doctor and I have been dancing around it, calling it a lump, or a mass, or suspicious tissue, like a Kleenex with a bad attitude."
"Where is this mass?"
I pointed my chin downward, toward my chest. "Right breast. It's just as well; that right one has always been a half a size larger than the one on the left."
"What are you going to do?"
"Rich, that's my doctor, wants to do a biopsy. There's a history of breast cancer in my family. He's been after me for weeks to get in to his office and discuss it, but I sort of hid out. He's supposed to call tomorrow and see about scheduling the procedure for this week at the Women's SurgiCenter."
"And will you do it?"
I rolled down my window and took a big gulp of the rain-washed air.
"The timing is difficult."
"How so?"
"I'm right in the middle of a murder investigation," I said. "My client gets out of jail tomorrow. Several of our best cleaning jobs canceled this week, thanks to Lilah Rose Beemish. And the cops, thanks to Eddie Shaloub, have given us a citation for operating a business in a residential neighborhood. I don't have time to get cut on this week."
"That's bullshit," McAuliffe said.
"Excuse me?"
"You know what I mean," he said. "You didn't ask my advice, but since you dragged me out here in the rain on a Sunday when I could have been home tying flies, I'll give it to you. Let your mother or somebody else run the cleaning business. Hire a lawyer to fight the citation thing. And let the public defender take care of getting your client out of jail and lining up evidence against Beemish. That's his job. Get your ass into that hospital and have the biopsy. Quit being such a wuss."
Every Crooked Nanny Page 21
