Marlene made agreeable noises and hugged her back, thinking at the same time that their natural positions had somehow been reversed, that Lucy was being understandingly parental and she childish. This thought occupied her mind for the two minutes it took her to get off the property and out onto the dark road. She punched up the radio: AM, oldies. Marlene had a tape player in her console but rarely used it. She liked the local stations, liked the way they waxed and waned as the miles vanished under the wheels, little driblets of what remained of regional culture in America. The station took her into the City, around the fat underbelly of Brooklyn and over the Verrazano to Staten Island and Jersey. The sun was well up when she drove onto Interstate 78 in the middle of the Garden State, which, to her surprise, was quite gardenlike in these parts, and took it west into Pennsylvania.
By noon, she was in Youngwood, Pennsylvania, and hungry. She drove off the turnpike, ate at a Hardee’s, walked and fed the dog. Full of unhealthy greases and sugars, she continued onto the 70 cutoff and then south on 79 to Charleston. South of Charleston, the land rose, the divided highway petered out at Logan, and she found herself on winding, two-lane blacktop running along mountainsides covered with dark second-growth timber. The radio was all country and western and static now, the little stations fading in the valleys and bursting out again on the ridges. As she drove deeper into the southwestern part of the state, she began to see the marks coal had made on the country. Scrapes of blackness against hillsides, with huge gallowslike structures rising above the hills, and factories with brick smokestacks and square yards of smashed windows. Once she crossed on a narrow bridge and saw a newer industrial complex of some sort tucked into the curve of the river below, lines of ocher buildings, shooting out white smoke and yellow, and a smoky flame like a badly trimmed candle twisting above a tall pipe. The river was a bright medicinal green. By three she was in Robbens County, climbing a steep grade and then descending past several roadside crosses and an escape road for runaway trucks. McCullensburg was at the bottom of a fourteen-mile-long, seven-degree grade, built on what looked like the only halfway flat patch in the county.
It was not a pretty town. The usual strip development hung on its outskirts, gas stations and fast food and little, sad, hopeful businesses in concrete-block structures, a beauty shoppe, an upholsterer, a lawn-mower guy. She turned left on Market as directed and passed through the business district. Like many towns in this part of the world, it had peaked around the late nineteenth century when coal was king. The two-story brick and stone buildings were of that era, and the courthouse square had a courthouse in it, this a handsome Federal-style building flanked by old trees, complete with white columns, a portico, and a tall cupola. Six streets and the town was gone. She proceeded along Route 199 into the scant suburbs, small bungalows with aluminum siding mainly, and squat, ugly, manufactured housing, with the occasional faded wooden carpenter-Gothic Victorian. She took a turnoff marked 3112, whose blacktop soon became rutted gravel hairpinning back and forth across the steep face of a mountain.
The large mailbox that said HEENEY had been shot full of holes. The house itself was set in a grassy field surrounded by a neat white fence, and hanging over it loomed a group of large, dark oaks. The renovated farmhouse had a cedar shake roof, two cobble chimneys, and a fieldstone foundation, obviously of considerable age, but well maintained; two stories, painted buff with dark red shutters and trim. The original barn of the place stood broken-backed and sagging, covered with creeper, but a weathered shed near the house served as a garage. She saw the Heeneys’ GMC there and a very old and dusty Ford next to it. She parked and got out, groaning and stretching. She let the dog out, who did the same.
The front door of the house popped open and there was Dan Heeney, looking worn and even younger than he had on Long Island.
“You got here.”
“I did,” she said. “Here I am to save the day, just like Mighty Mouse. But first I need to pee.”
“Uh, sure, right,” he said, as if unsure, and led her (and she her dog) into the house. It was spacious and well furnished with local stuff, hooked rugs and country chests, set off nicely by a few pieces of the kind of fine old cherry and mahogany accumulated by families that were well-off in the late 1800s. Marlene thought of Rose decorating this place on a fairly tight budget, out of trips to swap meets and castoffs from her family, and felt a pang of loss deeper than expected for a woman she had scarcely known.
In the bathroom (which showed the grungy effects of two young bachelors living there alone) she heard voices raised. She finished and followed these into the kitchen. Dan and his brother were standing across the room from one another, glaring and calling each other unpleasant names.
“What’s up, boys?” she said cheerfully.
Both young men had red faces. Marlene didn’t know whether it was from anger or embarrassment, nor did she care.
Emmett actually stamped his foot and yelled at his brother, “Goddamnit, what the hell did you think you were doing?”
“We need help, Em, and you’re too damn boneheaded to see it.”
Emmett cursed and got redder and made a move toward his brother, from which he was brought up short by a rumbling growl from Gog.
Marlene said, “Emmett, you’re upsetting my dog, and you’re upsetting me. We both prefer peaceful discourse to yelling. I have just driven twelve hours straight to help you all out, and whether or not you are personally willing to accept my help is beside the point. Right now, I’m a guest of your brother in his home. I’m sure your folks taught you better manners than what you’ve been showing.” She indicated the enameled kitchen table. “Let us sit down and take counsel with one another and see where we are.”
All three sat. After a brief silence, Marlene said, “Welcome to McCullensburg, Marlene. Did you have a pleasant trip? Would you care for some refreshment? A frosty glass of beer, perhaps? A mint julep?”
Dan looked startled for an instant and then broke into a sputtering laugh.
Emmett tried to keep his face grim and failed. “Dick-head.”
“Shit for brains,” said Dan kindly. “I think I can offer you a beer,” he added, rising to open the refrigerator. The bottom two shelves were completely packed with cans of Iron City.
They popped, they drank. “How was your drive?” Dan asked.
“Pretty good,” she said. “Your state seems extremely mountainous, however. I guess you noticed that already.”
They laughed and told several mountaineer jokes, mainly hinging on people or animals having legs on one side shorter to compensate for the slope. Judging the ice to have been sufficiently broken, Marlene said to Emmett, “I couldn’t help overhearing—I take it you don’t approve of what Dan did. Calling me, I mean. Would you mind telling me why?”
Emmett looked uneasy as he replied, “Oh, you know, nothing personal, but Dad always told us to handle things ourselves. There’s no need to have you all bothered about our troubles.”
“That’s good advice, generally,” she agreed. “But if it’ll make you feel any better, I don’t intend to do very much. Dan said that the police had a man . . .”
“Moses Welch,” Dan put in.
“Right. Who Dan thinks is a frame-up. What do you think?”
Emmett dropped his head for a moment, considering. “Yeah, I guess. I mean we all know who really done it. Or hired it done. Mose, all they got on him is the boots. And him being . . .” He tapped his temple.
“Okay,” she said, “so the first thing is to look into his case. If, in fact, he’s innocent, we want to get the charges dismissed so that the cops will keep looking for whoever really did the murders.” She saw them nod in agreement. “Okay, Emmett, tell me about the night of.”
“It was about a week after they stole the election. A Friday. We had a meeting here, about twenty guys from the union. Dad was telling them about him going to Washington and his meeting at the Department of Labor. They were real depressed at first, but he got them up again. He thou
ght DOL would throw out the results and call another election and supervise it and then we’d win. The meeting went on till about ten, ten-thirty. Then everyone left. I went over to Kathy’s house—that’s my girlfriend—and stayed over. I usually do on weekends. The next morning, we slept in and then I came back here. I came around back and saw that somebody’d taken off the storm door in the back and tossed it down next to the stairs, and the back door into the kitchen was all ripped up around the lock, like with a wrecking bar.” Emmett paused, swallowed.
“I found them inside. Mom and Dad in their bedroom. Lizzie in her bed.” He paused and took several breaths. “It was pretty bad. Do you want to see where it happened?”
“Later. What did you do?”
“Well, they were dead. Anyone could see that. They used a shotgun on Dad and Mom. He must have known they were coming because he was out of bed and he had his pistol. He had a .38 he kept under the mattress. Lizzie was in her bed. They shot her sleeping. In the head.”
“You said, ‘they.’ What makes you think there was more than one of them?”
“Had to be. Lizzie was a light sleeper. Her room was right next door to theirs. No way she wouldn’t have got up to a couple of shotgun blasts. But she was shot in her bed, sleeping like I said. You could tell that.”
“I take it she wasn’t killed with a shotgun.”
“No, a pistol. Which they didn’t find on Mose or anywhere around his place. They said he must’ve tossed it.”
“I guess they probably didn’t look all that hard,” she said. “Blame the lame; it’s a famous stupid cop trick. He’s confessed to it, naturally.”
“Sure,” said Dan. “They promised him a dish of chocolate ice cream is what I heard.”
“And what was his lawyer, what’s-his-face, doing while all this was going on?”
“Ernie Poole,” said Emmett. “Sleeping, probably. That’s what he mostly does. He stands up to be counted in the court and then takes a nap. It’s a joke.”
“Good. I love a joke. So after you found them, you called the cops.”
“Right. Swett came over with a couple of his guys. They found Dad’s wallet was missing. He always carried a bunch of cash on him, so they said that was probably it, a random robbery. They said the killer came on foot.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Well, that part made sense,” Emmett admitted. “After they shot our dog, Dad rigged up one of those sensors like they have in gas stations, across the drive. At night it turned on the floodlights and rang a little bell in the house. They said that would’ve got him up, and it would have.”
“I see. Did they do any crime-scene work? Take prints, vacuum for fibers, like that?”
Emmett let out a bitter laugh. “Hell, no! Those jerks don’t do any of that stuff. They just about good enough to grab drunks and kids smoking weed in the bushes. The state cops do all that kind of thing.”
“And did they call the state cops?”
“Yeah, they sent a team of guys out from the barracks in Logan. They took up the carpets and all and sprayed a lot of black powder around. They said they would be back and not to touch anything. I stayed with Kathy that night. Then the next day, Mose Welch came to town to show off his new boots, and they arrested him. It went with what they said about the car. Mose can’t drive.”
“I see. How convenient. And then . . . ?”
“Nothing. I called the sheriff and he said the case is over, you can move back in, so we did. I got some people in to help clean up and fix the back-door locks. I still haven’t put the storm door back on. Not that we need it any with this weather. We’ve been here since.”
Marlene made some notes on her pad. “Tell me, does this Moses Welch have any relatives, a guardian of some kind?”
“I don’t know about a guardian,” said Emmett, “but Fairless Holler got a load of Welches. It’s their home place.”
“And of these Welches, which do you think would care the most about old Mose?”
The two Heeneys considered this for a moment. Then Emmett said, “I guess that would be Betty Washburn. She’s his sister. He used to live in a busted-up trailer back of their place, and I guess she kept him fed and dressed, more or less.”
“Good, we’ll go see Mrs. Washburn,” said Marlene briskly. She turned to Dan. “Meanwhile, did you get any paperwork from Poole?”
“No, sorry. He wouldn’t give me any. He said it was none of my concern.”
“Technically, he’s right. Well, we’ll have to change that. Starting with me. Show me a place I can get cleaned up and changed, will you?”
Neither of the Heeneys had ever seen Marlene in any apparel but the sort of rags she wore around her farm. She now emerged in a gray Anne Klein silk and linen suit over a pearly, loose-necked blouse, dark nylons, and Blahnik sandals. Her face was made up and her expensive haircut had been arranged the way her hairdresser had intended. A whiff of L’Aire du Temps hit them; their eyes widened; she grinned back at them.
“What do you think? Good enough for Robbens County?”
“I guess,” said Emmett. “What are you going to do?”
“A couple of things. One is I have to get up to speed on local criminal statutes and procedure. I don’t suppose you have anything around town like a library with a computer connected to the Internet?”
They both laughed. Dan said, “Uh, I think so. We got electricity and indoor plumbing, too. Follow me, lady.”
He led her to a bedroom, a teenager’s den, posters on the wall, dirty clothes strewn about, an unmade bed decorated with books and magazines, and on a table, a squat, black IBM tower, a large monitor, and a DeskJet printer.
“Oops,” she said. “I forgot MIT. Sorry.”
“No problem. What do you want? I got a satellite hookup.”
“Great. Get me the state criminal code and the rules of criminal procedure for a start. While you’re doing that, I’ll take a ride with Emmett.”
She went to leave and then stopped. “No, wait. Could you bring up a word-processing program?”
He did. She sat and typed out a short document and printed it. “Emmett! Let’s go see Mrs. Washburn.”
They drove back through town, north on 130, and off the blacktop onto a rutted gravel road that wound back and forth across a narrow stream on timber bridges. Through gaps in the trees Marlene could see little groups of structures—small, rickety houses with washing flapping on lines in their yards, some newer mobile homes, and weathered gray sheds falling back into nature. Every dwelling had several elderly vehicles in front, in various stages of demolishment or repair. From time to time a glint of metal indicated a dump in the woods. The GMC jumped and shook; a rooster tail of tan dust rose behind it.
“This is Belo Knob,” Emmett told her. “I mean the mountain we’re on. The town’s on a flat place where five mountains come together, like in the middle of a flower. Belo’s on the north side, say twelve o’clock. Then Hampden’s at three, where our place is, Hogue is at six, down south of town, then Filbert Ridge, that’s the highest one, at seven through nine o’clock. And then Burnt Peak’s up at ten or eleven.”
“And the hollows are on the mountains?”
“Up in there. The hills are all cut up by streams and those make the hollers. This is Peck Creek we’ve been going over, and Fairless comes into it, just up here a piece.”
They turned off the gravel onto an oiled dirt road and off that onto a driveway marked by a white-painted truck tire. The Washburn home was a one-story affair with pale green siding and a narrow porch in front, on which stood an ancient round washing machine and a rocking chair. An old-fashioned “streamlined” aluminum house trailer with no wheels squatted on concrete blocks just to the rear of the house. In the front yard were a rust-red, twenty-year-old Ford pickup and an El Camino with the hood gaping. Among these stigmata of rural poverty stood, jarringly, a satellite dish eight feet in diameter, round and white as the moon. When they pulled up, two yellow dogs ran out from beneath the house and
ran around their truck, barking and snarling.
The woman sitting in the rocker yelled at the dogs, to which they responded not at all. She rose heavily, picked up a baseball bat, and started toward the GMC. The dogs retreated. Emmett and Marlene left the car and walked up to the woman. Marlene thought she must have weighed 250 pounds; her upper arms looked the same size as Marlene’s thighs. Her hair made a long, dirty-blond braid down her back; her eyes were small, almost colorless, and wary. She wore denim cutoffs and a pink, sleeveless sweatshirt with a picture of Tweety bird on it.
“How’re y’doing, Betty,” said Emmett.
“Fair,” said the woman. Marlene noted she continued to grip the ball bat. “I’m sorry about your loss, Emmett, but you know my brother didn’t have nothin’ at all to do with that.”
“I know that. That’s why we’re here. This here’s Marlene Ciampi from New York City. She’s a lawyer. She wants to help get Mose out of jail.”
The woman stared at Marlene unbelievingly. “We can’t pay nothing.”
“There’s no need to pay, Mrs. Washburn,” Marlene said. “I’m taking your brother’s case pro bono.”
“Who?”
“It means I’m working for free.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Why’d you want to do that?”
“Because Rose Heeney was a friend of mine. Lizzie played with my kids. I have two boys her age. Someone killed them and I want them to pay for it, and the first thing we need to do to make that happen is getting your brother free of the false charge that he killed them.”
Betty Washburn flicked her eyes rapidly between Marlene and Emmett, and Marlene could see how difficult it was for her to accept anything a stranger said at face value. Finally, her features relaxed a trifle, as did her grip on the ball bat. “Well, you all better come on in, then.”
The house was cooler than the yard, but musty. The ceilings were low and made of pressboard. Everything in the house was old and worn. It was clean, though, the furniture and floors rubbed down past the finish so that their substance was slightly ground away. They sat in the kitchen around a wooden table covered by sticky lace-pattern plastic. Betty Washburn served them thin, over-sweet iced tea in jelly glasses. Marlene explained that before she could do anything for Mose, she had to be named formally as his attorney. She asked whether Betty was his official guardian.
Absolute Rage Page 12
