Phantom Nights

by John Farris

  Blood roiling in his ears. His heart would not slow down. Knock at the door. Leland staggered up and put on a robe. There was a middle-aged colored woman outside. "Everyone will know what you did," she said.

  Leland backed away from the door. "What?"

  She looked startled, afraid of him. He still smelled of another woman's perfume and pussy.

  "Does you be wantin' me to turn down your bed?"

  This time Leland heard her correctly.

  "No. No, I was half-asleep already."

  "Sorry for botherin' you then, Senator."

  "That's all right."

  She was halfway down the hall before he closed the door.

  Calling him Senator. He felt revived, yanked out of the doldrums by her expression of respect. Well, he was all but there, and everybody knew it! Little more than a week to go. His closest primary rival trailed him by twelve points in the polls. Sinking like a leaky rowboat. Didn't matter a damn who the Republicans offered up in November. Steady course now, stick to the script, nothing to worry about.

  Except for what Mally had known about him, and what she had done with the information his old man had provided to humble an unloved son.

  Back in bed, he washed down three aspirin with warm Coca-Cola.

  The preliminary search of Mally's house, by flashlight, hadn't turned up anything, but he knew Jim Giles was right. Even a small house like hers had so many rathole hiding places it would be necessary to take it apart board by board to find the incriminating documents.

  Giles had come up with an ideal solution, and Leland agreed immediately.

  Eventually he fell asleep with a comforting vision of flames in his head, Mally Shaw's remains atop the pyre, all of his potential troubles vanishing in smoke.

  Halfway to the funeral home, a pain hit fiercely and Ramses Valjean doubled over midsentence as if a rifle ball had buried itself in his gut.

  "What's wrong?" Bobby said.

  Ramses gestured for him to pull off the road.

  "Pain."

  "What is it?"

  "Cancer. My medical bag. Morphine."

  Both his valise and his medical bag were in the back of the station wagon. Bobby helped Ramses out of the front seat and around to the tailgate, eased him down inside. Ramses took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt cuff while Bobby found his supply of morphine ampules in the medical bag. Two dozen of them. Stood by to block anyone else's line of sight while Ramses wrapped a piece of rubber tubing around his arm just below the bared elbow, held it tight with his teeth. Shot himself up, then sagged for a couple of minutes, legs dangling.

  "How long have you been doing that? Morphine."

  "About three weeks. Before that, codeine tablets. Eight, then twelve a day."

  "Where's the cancer?"

  Ramses was able to take his first deep breath in a while.

  "In my pancreas." He looked up with the starry pupils of morphia.

  Bobby couldn't help wincing. Ramses smiled slightly.

  "Inoperable, of course. But it does have the virtue of being swift." He rolled his shirt sleeve down, buttoned the cuff. "Thank you for your patience and courtesy. We can go on now."

  "How long is that shot good for?"

  "Up to four hours. Although the duration shortens every day."

  Bobby closed the tailgate, and Ramses walked without assistance to the front seat.

  Bobby didn't restart the engine right away. A few cars passed on the road.

  "How long, do you think?"

  "Three months at best. Or worst."

  "Did Mally know?"

  "I hadn't told her. There wouldn't have been anything she could do for me until close to the end, a matter of a couple of weeks."

  "Mind my asking, how was your relationship with Mally?"

  "Cordial. But she felt closer to me than I to her. Shouldn't we be on our way? I told them at Godsong and Wundall that I'd be coming back; they're waiting."

  Bobby drove. Ramses said, "Unfortunately, I've lacked the normal capacity to be close to anyone. Even my own daughter. I left most of her raising to my in-laws in Nashville and returned to France when she was ten. We didn't see each other again until she was a sophomore at Fisk."

  Morphine had relaxed Ramses's tongue, unwound whatever inhibitions he ordinarily would have about revealing much of himself to a white lawman less than half his age, whom he had known for half an hour. But that was Bobby's strength. It was his nature to invite confidences, uncover the secrets of men who had the most reason to dissemble and attempt to conceal themselves from him.

  "What about Mally's mother?"

  "Were we close? In a morbid sense. She was a naked obsession. The inevitable doom of a man who cannot love, should he be so unfortunate as to meet a fille méchante like Dawn Bird Hollins."

  "I don't speak the French language, but may-whatever doesn't sound good."

  "Dawn Bird was privileged, for our race. Half-Choctaw, adopted by a prominent Nashville family. She was a hotheaded beauty with an undisciplined brilliance, wanton and often mad. Also incapable of loving. I was proud and too arrogant to believe she could ever matter deeply to me. As we carried on our affaire maudite, I believed that I was keeping my distance. Even as I was consumed."

  "How long did it last?"

  "True obsessions are forever," Ramses said with an aficionado's bitter smile. 'Solitary griefs, desolate passions, aching hours'—to quote a fellow sufferer whose name I have forgotten. I last saw Dawn Bird twenty-one years ago next month. Although I returned to France during the Depression, I woke up each day with the expectation that today she would be coming back to me."

  "So she left you."

  "Once she had explained, quite reasonably to her mind, that if she did not leave she would soon kill me while I slept. Acting, no doubt, on the advice of her Spirit Guide, some demon of outer darkness. Oh, there was another man by then, of no real consequence to her. Perhaps he slept well during their relationship, but I have my doubts."

  Before he pulled back the rubber sheet covering the body on the autopsy table, Ramses offered Bobby a small blue jar of Vicks. Bobby wiped a gob under his nose and handed back the jar. Ramses likewise anesthetized his sense of smell. Two loud window fans were going in the dreary basement room where the cracked concrete floor, painted over many times in various shades of green, sloped from all sides to a central drain.

  "By the way," Ramses said, looking over one shoulder at Bobby, "what has become of Mally's car?"

  "Towed this evening to the county's impound at Starke's Body Works. Was there something inside that you wanted?"

  "No. I believe I found everything of consequence when I examined the Dodge earlier."

  "What were you looking for?"

  "Evidence that Mally did not drive her own car to Little Grove."

  Bobby nodded, grimly curious. "I didn't see a need to look over every inch of her vehicle. Keys in the ignition was all I needed to know."

  "I've labeled the glass containers lined up on the table there. The quart jar contains scrapings from the brake and clutch pedals of the Dodge, as well as the rubber floor mats front and back. They appear to be dried gumbo mixed with field detritus and cow manure. There were also two Brach's candy wrappers. Envelope number one. The cigarette butt in the ashtray had lipstick on it, probably Mally's. Envelope two."

  Bobby looked over the items on the long table and picked up the quart jar with part of a Hellman's mayonnaise label stuck to the clean glass.

  "The largest crust of gumbo, from the accelerator, contains an imprint that may have been made by a steel toe plate. There also are impressions of heavy-duty stitching that don't match the stitches on the sole of Mally's sandal, which is wrapped in cheesecloth at the end of the table."

  Bobby unwrapped the sandal, found it caked with the same material that Ramses had collected in the mayonnaise jar.

  "In the second jar you'll find scrapings of mud that contain bits of grass and weed from the Little Grove cemetery parcel where Mally'
s body was discovered. It looks very different from the field gumbo and manure mixture."

  Bobby took a long breath.

  "No matter how closely you examine the sandal, you won't find a trace of the mud from the cemetery on it, which would be the case if she were fighting for her life to escape a pack of wild dogs."

  Bobby's face was getting hot. He didn't know if he was angry at Ramses Valjean for his dry, critical lecturing tone or himself for being a poor observer of a death scene.

  "Those are your reasons for thinking she was brought there and dumped?"

  "There is other evidence of what I conclude to be a fact. During your investigation, were photos taken?"

  "That's our procedure if there has been a death, accidental or not. They won't have been developed yet."

  "I had Eddie Paradise Galphin take a few pictures as well." Ramses held up a hand at Bobby's wrathful change of expression. His face was so charged with blood now it felt as if the roots of his hair were on fire. "Only as a precaution, should something go awry with the county's documentation. Not for release to any news organization."

  "For your sake I hope not, Dr. Valjean. What else was there I should be aware of myself?"

  "I am in no way offering my findings as a form of condemnation. I quite understand what your reaction must have been when you arrived at the cemetery early this morning. A multitude of paw prints in soft earth and on her torn body, the blood. You felt no need to look further for the cause of Mally's death?"

  "Now you're going to tell me it wasn't dogs?"

  "No. That's what puzzles me. She was mauled, and by several large, vicious dogs. There in the smallest jar is a broken canine tooth I extracted from one of the deeper wounds between her ribs. But it couldn't have happened, as I've said, at Little Grove. Oh, a dog was brought there. But only one dog, I'm sure, probably on a short leash, made to trample the soft ground before her body was . . . dumped."

  "One dog?"

  "Every paw print I found was exactly the same size." With that Ramses turned and folded the rubber sheet down to Mally Shaw's waist.

  "As you must already have observed, the rip in the side of her throat, tearing the left carotid, was responsible for Mally's blood loss." Bending over her, he seemed at a loss himself for several moments. When he straightened and looked around at Bobby there was distance in his yellowed eyes and he had his classroom voice back.

  "Do you recall the pattern of blood across the face of the tombstone closest to where the body lay?"

  "No. I mean, there was no pattern."

  "The absence of one is significant. Blood spurts rhythmically from an artery as the heartbeat pushes it through a severed end. This forms a distinctive stippled pattern on a relatively flat, blank surface such as the limestone grave marker. All of our photographs will show that the stone in question was all but washed in blood, like cleaning water tossed from a bucket. I think analysis will show it was animal, not human, blood. Everything we were bidden to look at in that little plot of cemetery ground was staged. Why?"

  Bobby nodded, looking at a drippy faucet in a sink, the raffling window fans that were getting on his nerves. And Mally's corpse's face, a gray clayish thing with dark coagulate everywhere, bone showing near a sinkhole where an ear had been.

  "Go on, cover her up again, Dr. Valjean; for God's sake cover her up now! And if you don't have the love in you and can't cry for her, then leave her to those who knew her best, leave the grieving to them!"

  Pee-Wee Cobb was undressed down to his underwear shorts, listening to the Cards' announcer Harry Caray in a delayed broadcast and studying the major-league baseball statistics in The Sporting News when Bobby came around and knocked on the back door of Pee-Wee's Good Eats.

  "Bobby, you hear about that one-arm hermaphrodite stripteaser down in Naw'luns, calls herself 'Penis de Milo'?"

  "Must be a handful," Bobby said, not cracking a smile while Pee-Wee guffawed. Then he said, "Need a bottle, Pee-Wee."

  "Sure! Be your pleasure, Dickel or Beam?"

  "Dickel."

  "Want to drink it inside?"

  "No. Got somebody with me."

  Pee-Wee looked past Bobby at the dark figure of Ramses Valjean standing near a couple of fifty-five-gallon garbage drums.

  "Who's that there?"

  "Mally Shaw's daddy. Pee-Wee, you never saw either one of us tonight."

  Pee-Wee cocked his head. "What's that? Did I hear somebody? Naw, must've been a old hooty owl." He disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned to hand a square fifth of sippin' whiskey and some picnic cups past the screen door.

  "Little short tonight," Bobby said.

  "Pay me Tuesday." Alert to some nuance in Bobby's expression, he amended, "Tuesday week I'm talkin' about."

  After sharing half a fifth of whiskey and no conversation under the stars, Bobby looked up and across the picnic table in Pee-Wee's Colored arbor and said to Ramses, "Finding a body and not reporting it, call that a mortal sin but there's no statute applies. Removing a body to another location and trying to cover up what you've done is a felony. Somebody needed to take a big risk."

  "Why?" Ramses's eyes looked amber in the glow from the cigar he drew on.

  "I don't know. Pour you another, Dr. Valjean?"

  "If you wouldn't mind, sir. Also if you don't mind—Ramses, please."

  "Half-French and all, would've figured you for a wine drinker."

  "I can only claim to be a Francophile, and, yes, always wine with a good meal. But serious down-home drinking requires the presence of Mr. Dickel or Mr. Daniels of Lynchburg."

  "Big amen to that," Bobby said, savoring his own fine Havana cigar, which Ramses had produced from a traveling humidor in his pigskin valise. The leaves of the chestnut trees stirred above their heads and they could faintly follow the progress of the baseball game on Pee-Wee's radio. Pee-Wee had stayed discreetly out of sight behind the pull-down shades of his two rooms. The game seemed to be in extra innings, but Bobby had lost track of time.

  "Whoever moved Mally needed help. That's my thinking right now. One man just couldn't have done it all, and then where did he go? Left the car there, so he would've been on foot, and Cole's Crossing is a good long hike from anywhere."

  "Two men possibly. Two vehicles, one of which might have been a pickup truck. But again, what could have been the motive for moving her?"

  "They weren't wild dogs. They were somebody's dogs that got loose and attacked Mally. Matter of liability then."

  "Who keeps dogs with the potential for attacking human beings?"

  "Who doesn't? Even good dogs penned up long enough can turn savage if they're running free and something provokes them. Like a scared woman on the run herself."

  "From the dogs? Or from men?"

  "You have a reason to suggest that?" Bobby said sharply. Ramses had put down his cigar; his face, his expression, was no longer readable in the darkness.

  "No. Not yet."

  "Maybe I need to get over to Mally's place first thing, have a look around."

  "I should go with you. There will be effects to dispose of. I believe Mally owned the house, which will be a matter for probate."

  "Where did you plan to spend the night?"

  "Eddie Paradise Galphin kindly offered accommodations while I must be in Evening Shade."

  "Oh, he did? His mother's house? Passel of half-grown kids using up the accommodations there, a mattress on the porch is the best you'd get. In your condition . . . Anyway, I'm liking you to stay away from Eddie for a couple days. I don't trust his ambition."

  "I suppose I could beg shelter for the night from one of our local preachers?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'm not a religious man. I would find it difficult to accept a preacher's hospitality and have to participate in rituals from a 'sacred' text made up of equal parts of myth, superstition, and wishful thinking. Are you a religious man, Bobby?"

  "Off and on. And don't be calling me 'Bobby' anywhere there's a possibility somebody else might
hear you."

  "I thought we had settled a little something between us with this bottle of good sipping whiskey."

  "Well, yes and no." He had the sense that Ramses was smiling. "I drink with any man anytime and anywhere I please, and that's nobody's business. I respect you as a man and I'm sorry for your loss even if you don't realize yet how much you've lost, and I'm sorry for—"

  "My fate?" Ramses suggested.

  "That too. Just respect me for who I am and need to be." Bobby took another drink. "My daddy was sheriff twenty-three years and they called my daddy Robert. Goddamn it, they call me Bobby."

  "I understand."

  "The mattresses are thin down to the jail, but it's quiet Sunday nights."

  "Is that where you want me to go now, Bobby? To spend a night in jail?" There was no denying the amusement in Ramses's voice.

  "No," Bobby said. "Tell the truth, I just don't know what to do about you."

  Bobby sneaked into the conjugal bed hoping Cecily wouldn't wake up, but she rolled over and put the back of a lax hand against his cheek, a caressing moment.

  "Thought I heard you talking to somebody."

  "You did. We have company. Just for the night."

  "Oh. Who?"

  "Ramses Valjean. He didn't have any place else to go."

  After a few seconds Cecily said, "That was good of you, Bobby." She sniffed his hair. "Cigar?"

  "Uh-huh."