“Well, I can see that, Mose. You got it up to your eyes. I would say you look half like a nigger, but Ms. Ciampi here would report me for racial insensitivity.”
“I would not, Sheriff,” said Marlene. “I would give you a pass on that. I would report you for incompetence and corruption, maybe.”
The sheriff laughed. “Well, then it’s a good thing for me you’ll be leaving soon.”
“Yes, it is. Did you check out that pistol I took off Bo Cade?”
“Yes, I did. But I’m so incompetent, you probably don’t even want to know what the state lab found out. I probably can’t even read the report with my tiny little brain.”
She moved a marble and gave him a considering look. “I take it back, then. You’re not incompetent. You’re competently corrupt. What did it say?”
“Wasn’t the .38 that killed Lizzie Heeney, is what.”
Marlene was somewhat let down by this news, but took care to disguise it. “Well, then, I’m sure you’ll redouble your search for the actual murder weapon.”
“Oh, hell, you know he could’ve pitched it anywhere in the county, down some mine probably. This is an easy part of the country to lose things in. Is that what you done, Mose? Pitched it down a mine?”
“Uh-huh,” said Mose cheerfully, nodding his head and studying the board like Boris Spassky contemplating a tricky endgame.
“See?” said the sheriff.
“What can I say, Sheriff? It’s just like Perry Mason. You’ve totally outsmarted my client.” She moved another marble, hardly looking at the board. “Just between us, now, who do you think really killed the Heeneys? I kind of like Earl and Bo Cade for it, although it’s hard to believe that they’re organized enough to actually pull it off. There must have been someone else involved.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Sheriff Swett grinned around his big teeth and rubbed his right eye with the heel of his hand. “And it ain’t my job to speculate. I will tell you one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I think your client just outsmarted you.” He gestured to the board, where Mose was just placing a blue marble. He looked up, his mouth an O, and bounced on his bunk like a four-year-old. “I win! I win!” he crowed.
The sheriff and the cops and the other inmates roared. After a while, Marlene did, too.
“It must be something in your water,” she said, and thought, grinning up at Swett, you just gave me an idea, Sheriff.
11
“WHY DON’T WE,” MARLENE SAID, “find that gun?”
“What gun is that?” asked Poole without much interest. They were dining at Rosie’s in the courthouse square, McCullensburg. Rosie’s served what Marlene always thought of as mom food, although Marlene’s actual mom had not served the sort of food Rosie served, or rather Gus served, Gus being the current Rosie. Gus’s meat loaf on Thursday was famous throughout the county, as was the fried chicken on Wednesday and the batter-dipped catfish on Friday. Sugar was the major condiment in Gus’s cuisine, and grease the prevailing flavor. The food was, however, always served very hot, and in large quantities, which seemed to meet the needs of the locale, and Marlene’s needs, too, as it was a welcome relief from the food fascismo prevalent at the time in lower-Manhattan upper-bourgeois circles. The place was friendly, the service was swift, the atmosphere was full of the good-natured joshing that passes for wit in the provinces, where everyone knows all the jokes and everyone else’s foibles. Tonight, Marlene was going with the chicken-fried steak and mashed pot., w/peas; her partner had the open roast-beef sandwich, w/fries.
“The murder weapon,” she said. “I think I know where it is.”
A fork of Rosie’s grayish roast beef was poised halfway to his mouth and stopped there when she said this. “Excuse me, but I thought we had agreed to leave all that to the pros from now on.” He ate the morsel. He was eating better since Marlene had arrived. He wondered whether he would go back to being a nonfunctional drunk when she left.
“Yes,” she said, “but this is practically a gimme.”
“A gimme?”
“Yeah. It was the boots, and something Swett said this afternoon. He said the killers would’ve tossed the incriminating stuff down an old mine shaft, the gun, I mean. He suggested that Mose did just that. But they didn’t, the actual killers didn’t do that at all. They threw the bloody sneakers into the laurel and the bloody boots off the 130 bridge. Why? Because besides not being criminal geniuses in the first place, they were drunk. One of them tosses his sneakers in the laurel when he gets back to the car. The other one doesn’t notice his boots are blood-covered until later, and he throws them off the bridge as they pass by, and at that point he remembers, oh, the gun, the pistol, they can trace that, so the pistol goes in there, too.”
Poole looked at her narrowly, still chewing slowly. “If you’re serious, I think our pollution is starting to affect your brain. That’s not only a stupid idea, it’s a McCullensburg-stupid idea.”
“Oh? And why is it stupid?”
“It’s pure speculation based on associating facts that have no logical association, like our fella who thought the weather had something to do with the moon shot. Shoes in the laurel, shoes in the river, hence gun in the river. Why not gun in the laurel? Or shoes in the river but gun down the mine. Or keep the gun. They don’t like getting rid of weapons in Robbens County anyway. The people are poor, and they typically have so little to fear from the law. Plus, everyone in the county knows that Dummy Welch goes frogging under that bridge and sleeps there from time to time. Maybe the boots were a crude attempt to frame our client. Which worked, as it turned out.”
“You never mentioned that before,” said Marlene accusingly.
“The greatest legal mind in Robbens County is more functional than it was a short while ago.”
“I think it’s worth a look, anyway,” said Marlene, deflated somewhat. “There’s hardly any water in there this time of year, I’m told. Two, three feet at the most.”
“And opaque. What were you planning to do, feel for the gun with your toes? And what if you find it? How is that going to help our client? You expect to find prints on it after weeks in the sort of corrosive water that flows through the lovely Guyandotte? You’d be lucky to find more than a rusted frame.”
Marlene shrugged. “Maybe. It’s always nice to have the murder weapon.” She turned her attention to her steak, although her appetite had faded in the face of the resentment she now felt welling up in her. Now she was getting legal lectures from a man she was recently hosing down in a bathtub to get him sober enough to walk. It was unbearable, especially as the idea she had germinated was revealed as a stupid one, a typical bit of girl-detective nonsense. On the other hand, she had experienced odd ideas in the past that had paid off. She had figured out cases, including ones far more complex than this one, against far smarter criminals than these appeared to be. It was all very well for Poole to dismiss her smugly like that, like a man . . .
Marlene was by no means a doctrinaire feminist. She had never had many problems competing with men, and the one area where she admitted some inferiority was nicely evened up by a two-hundred-pound guard dog and, where necessary, a pistol. But just now, with Karp coming to take the whole thing away from her, and Poole acting as if he just had, some darker mud had been stirred up, thick and toxic like the sludge below the Guyandotte, and she started to obsess.
“Can I get you folks some dessert?” asked Mamie, the waitress. Unlike waitpersons in more civilized places, she did not describe what was on the menu, since nearly everything was displayed in cake stands on the lunch counter, and what Rosie’s had on offer had not changed in twenty years.
Poole wanted blackberry pie. Marlene laid some money on the table and stood up. “I just remembered something I have to do,” she said, and left.
She drove back to the Heeney place. “What do you think, huh?” she said to her companion. “Don’t you ever have instincts where you know you’re right? Of cou
rse you do. That’s all you do have, is instincts. If you were half the dog you should be, you could dive into that river and come out with the goddamn gun between your teeth.”
And more of the same. The dog let her rant and licked the fragrance of chicken-fried steak from her hand.
“Dan, have you got a magnet?” He was watching a Yankees-Orioles game on the TV, with a thick text on his lap and a beer at hand.
“What kind of magnet?”
“You know, a big, strong one, for dropping in water and pulling stuff out. Magnetic stuff.”
“Yes, magnets don’t work on nonmagnetic stuff. I speak as a professional physicist here. How about that one?” He gestured to the door to the dining room. At its foot was a black object the size and shape of a small brick, with an eyebolt growing from its center.
“The doorstop?”
“Yeah, we got it from mail order when we were kids. We used to use it to find stuff underwater.”
“That’s what I want it for. Can I borrow it, and some strong rope?”
“May I ask?”
“You may, but I’d be embarrassed to tell you. Did you ever get an idea that you knew was dumb, but you had to go ahead and try it or you couldn’t get any peace?”
Dan felt himself blushing. His idea of that category was to get on a plane and drop in on Lucy Karp, unexpected and uninvited. “Yeah, most of my ideas are like that. You’re looking for the gun, right?”
“You got it. Oh, also, do you have, like, waders?”
“Emmett had a pair. I think they’re still in the cellar.” Dan got out of the bed. “Come on, we’ll fix you up.”
An hour later, Marlene found herself on the muddy banks of the Guyandotte River, in the shadow of a green-painted steel-and-concrete bridge. The river here was not more than a hundred feet wide, at this season running sluggish and shallow between high, slaty banks. The water itself was red-ocher with an uninviting sheen on it like beetles’ wings, and it smelled faintly like the cabinet under her mother’s sink. Gog the dog was wisely not splashing about in it but patrolling the bank, investigating holes and sprinkling the shrubbery.
She knew that she now stood on the spot where Moses Welch had found the boots. Assuming they were flung at approximately the same time from a moving car . . . She swung the magnet around her head a couple of times and heaved it out into the river. Nothing. Then: a can; another can; nothing; a muffler; something too heavy to move; a piece of angle iron; a Delco alternator.
The light was starting to fade, as were Marlene’s expectations that this project was anything but what it had initially seemed, a stupid waste of time. No, the murder weapon was not going to magically appear on your magnet, you silly girl.
The dog barked sharply, twice. Marlene looked around. A boy was standing ten yards away, at the head of the little trail that led down from the road. He was about twelve, Marlene estimated, thin, and weirdly pale, like a mushroom. He was dressed in worn bib overalls on top of bare skin, and his feet were in old sneakers with the toes ripped off. His hair was the color of dead grass, and like grass on a hummock it stuck up in all directions. The dog bounded up to him and gave him a sniff-over. He neither flinched nor tried to pet.
“Does he bite?” He had a thin, nasal voice.
“Yes, but only bad people.”
“Does he mind?”
“Yes. Come here, Gog.” The dog came down the trail and stood by Marlene. She flung the magnet into the water again, telling herself it would be the last one.
“What’re y’doin’?” the boy asked after the magnet came back with a piece of auto chrome.
“Looking for something. Want to help?”
“It ain’t there.”
“What isn’t there?”
“What all you’re lookin’ fer. It ain’t there.”
“How do you know what I’m looking for, and how do you know it isn’t there?”
“He says,” said the boy confidently. “He says, tell her she ain’t gonna find nothing in that river. He says to take you up the holler and he’ll tell you who killed them and how it was done.”
Marlene felt the thrill sweat pop out on her forehead and her lip. “Who are you?”
“Darl.”
“Darl? Okay, Darl, you got a last name?”
“I cain’t say. You come on with me now. He said.” Darl turned and walked up the bank. At the top he stopped and made a beckoning gesture. Marlene gathered up her magnet and line and tromped out of the waders. At the truck, she parked Gog in the back and let the boy into the passenger seat. When she was in herself, she asked, “Where to?”
“Just straight.” He pointed. It was full dusk now; she turned on her lights.
They drove north on the highway, which flanked the river and the railroad tracks that stitched the valley. The boy said nothing and ignored Marlene’s conversational gambits until: “Turn right here.”
She turned onto a county road, whose number she didn’t catch, and after a mile or so, the boy turned her right again onto dirt and gravel. It was now quite dark. Every so often, the boy would say “Right up ahead” or “Go left,” and she would hump the truck, in four-wheel drive, up some primitive track. Branches whipped against the windshield. The truck rolled and heaved like a small craft in a seaway, its headlight beams sometimes pointing to the heavens.
“Are we almost there yet?” she asked finally.
“It ain’t fur now.”
She checked her watch. They had been driving for about ninety minutes, and she had no idea where she was, except that it was somewhere on Belo Knob, the northern edge of it. After more driving, once along what seemed to be a rocky creekbed, the boy said, “Slow down here. Turn right.”
She looked at him. His face seemed to glow in the dash lights, in a way that ordinary flesh should not. “Turn where? There’s no road.”
“There is. Just go through them bushes.”
She hit the gas and wrestled the wheel around. Branches made shrieking sounds on the metal. It was a track at least, a steep tunnel through rank overgrowth. Then they were clear, and she felt on her cheek the changed air that meant open space. The high beams cast out across a small mowing, the grasses chest-high, and the edge of a structure.
“That’s it,” said the boy. “You can shut your lights off now.”
She did so, and the engine, too. The sound of crickets and the faint breeze in the grasses. A nightbird called. As her vision adjusted, she saw a dim light ahead, a window in a small building. She walked toward it, following the boy.
It was a farmhouse, long disused. Tall grass grew through the sun-bleached steps. There was no door. The boy made an odd gesture, like a headwaiter motioning toward a table. She entered and found that a sheet had been hung from a low ceiling, behind which there was a kerosene lantern, the only source of light. She could make out the silhouette of a seated man.
“Sit down,” said a low voice, an old man’s voice, rough and rumbling.
A stool had been placed in the center of the floor. She sat.
“I got me a gun here, so don’t go a-gettin’ no ideas about coming round this cloth. You understand?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Never you mind that. I know what I’m talkin’ about though, so listen good. I reckon you know that slow Welch boy didn’t do those Heeneys.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“You’d like to know who did do it though.”
“Yes, I would.”
“It was Earl Cade, and Bo Cade, and Wayne Cade, and George Floyd. They done it on orders from Lester Weames, on account of that union business. Red Heeney was going to get an investigation of the union goin’ and Lester couldn’t stand that. So he had to go.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know what happens on Belo Knob.”
“Well, good for you, but so what? I don’t know who you are, or where you got your information. Why should I believe you?”
“They was paid, warn’t they? Cades’ll kill for
fun, but this wasn’t no fun killin’. They was paid cash money, seventy-five hundred dollars. Earl was boastin’ on it. How’d he get that fancy truck of his? No Cade ever could keep a secret.”
“But you’re not a Cade.” Marlene’s thoughts went back to the barbecue supper with the Heeneys, back to things Rose had said, things Poole had let slip. The boy’s not telling his surname. “You’re a Jonson, aren’t you? What’s your name?”
He ignored this. “Listen. They cain’t touch him, the law’s no good around here. But you’re from away. That’s why I’m tellin’ you. You check the money, Weames’s money, you’ll see.”
“What about the pistol? The boy said you might know where the pistol is.”
“Well, they didn’t throw it down a mine. You look around them all, it’ll turn up. Now, that’s all I got to say.”
The shadow moved, growing large, then shrinking as the man approached the lamp. Marlene heard a clink and a hiss of breath. The room went dark, leaving Marlene blinking at the ghostly afterimage of a white rectangle that shrank into nothing. She stood up, knocking over the stool, and fumbled in her pocket for her keys. She pressed the stud on the tiny key-chain light and the room glowed in its beam. No one was behind the sheet. A back door swung loose on a single hinge. She listened for footfalls or the sound of a car engine, but heard nothing more than the eternal crickets and the wind in the grass.
Through this grass she walked then, guided by her light. She found the truck, let the dog into the shotgun seat, slipped behind the wheel, and thought, idly rubbing the dog’s ears to improve concentration. The hidden man had seemed to know what he was talking about. At the very least he had confirmed her suspicions. The question was going to be how to prove it in court. Not my department anymore; wait for Butch, and then what? Offer it up and depart? Probably. How did they know I’d be at that bridge? Somebody told them. Who knew? Poole and Dan. Couldn’t be Dan, had to be Poole. Ask him, but not now. Now, should she continue her string of stupid moves and try to find her way off this mountain on steep, unmarked trails in the pitch dark, or should she just sit here with her dog and wait for morning light? She put the question to the dog and got the sensible answer she expected.
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