by James Sallis
“What about the third time?” she said.
“That I drew my weapon.”
“Yes.”
“That time, it was my own partner.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a lot more to it,” I said.
“There would be.” She looked off into the trees. “Listen.”
I did, and for this one perfect moment silence enveloped us, absolute silence, silence of a kind most of the world and its people have forgotten. Then the frogs started up again and from miles away the hum of cars and trucks on an interstate reached us.
Chapter Eight
A year or so into playing detective, I pulled the chit on a missing-persons case. Rightfully it should have gone to Banks, who was senior and next up. But Banks was actively pursuing leads, the Lieutenant told me, on a series of abductions and rapes at local private schools. Would I mind.
A patient had disappeared from an extended-care facility. Patricia Pope, nineteen years old. Shed been out with friends celebrating her birthday with slabs of pizza and pitchers of Co’Cola. As they ferried home around eight in the evening, a drunk driver smashed head-on into their car. He’d been drinking since he got off work at five and somehow had entered the new interstate by an exit ramp. The other four in the car were killed. Patricia, riding in the front passenger seat, went through the windshield and onto the hood of the drunk’s F-1 50. She’d received acute care in Baptist Hospital’s ER, from there had been moved up to neuro ICU for several days where a shunt in her head dripped fluid into a graduated cylinder, then onto a general ward, finally to a separate, step-down facility. She made no acknowledgment when spoken to, reacted but slightly to pain. (In ER they pinched nipples and twisted. Upstairs, kinder and gentler, they poked pins about feet, ankles, forearms, torso.) Her hands had begun curling in upon themselves, first in a series of contractures pitching muscle against bone. Eyes rolled left to right continually. She was incontinent, provided nutrients through a tube that had to be reintroduced with each feeding. Caretakers threaded these tubes down her nose, blew in air through a syringe and listened with a stethoscope to be certain the tube was in her stomach.
The incident occurred on April 3. Patricia had been relocated to the EC facility on April 20. When oncoming nurses went in to check patients early in their shift on the morning of June 17, Patricia was absent from her bed. That was the way the administrator put it when he called. Absent from her bed. Like it was summer camp. The call came in at 7:06. Half an hour later, 7:38 by the brass-and-walnut clock on the wall, I was sitting in the administrator’s office with a cup of venomous coffee in hand watching said administrator, Daniel Covici, MBA, CEO, rub a thumb against the burnished surface of his desk. It was the facility’s desk, of course, but I had no doubt he thought of it as his own.
Most investigations are little more than paint by the numbers. You ask a string of questions in the proper order, when they don’t get answered you ask them again, sooner or later you find your way to the husband or wife, spurned boy- or girlfriend, business partner, parent, younger brother, gardener, eccentric uncle, jealous neighbor. This was no different. Within the hour, down in the Human Resources basement office looking over a list of recent terminations, I came across the name of an orderly who had quit without prior notice at the end of his shift on June 16, saying simply that he was going on to another, better job. He’d been with the hospital sixteen years. Douglas Lynds. Address out by what was at that time Southwestern, a tiny freestanding wooden house.
From the street I caught glimpses of the university’s Gothic spires and buttresses among the trees. The house sat ten or twelve yards back, though the frontage could scarcely be called a yard. Traces of old foundation showed, like teeth rotted to gum level. Probably there had once been a stand of such structures, housing for graduate students maybe, of which only the one remained. It was in immaculate condition, however, freshly painted pristine white, window frames and trim a light, minty green.
Things were a lot looser those days. When I didn’t get a response to my knock, I went around back, knocked again there, then shimmed the kitchen door. If it ever came to it, I’d just say the door was ajar, I heard sounds inside, suspected intruders.
Three rooms. Kitchen with counters and stove immaculate, bath just off it to the right, living room straight ahead, bedroom to the left. That’s where I found her. She was propped up with pillows, dressed in a pale pink nightgown with small blue flowers at neck and hem and larger blue flowers for buttons. Her hair, clean and bright, lay on the pillow, framing a face wherein eyes rolled left, right, left. Mucus ran out of one nostril and snarled towards the slack mouth.
“Please don’t hurt her,” a voice said behind me.
I told him I wouldn’t, told him who I was.
“I’ve been out shopping. I never leave her alone any more than I have to.” He put the bag of groceries on the floor by the door. “She needs changing. All right if I do that?”
Yes.
Going to the bed, he unbuttoned the nightgown and unpinned the towel doing service as diaper. The strong chemical smell of her feces spilled into the room. He took the diaper into the bathroom, to a covered pail there. He ran water till it was warm, and wet a facecloth. Brought it out and, holding her up effortlessly with the flat of one arm, wiped her clean. He took the facecloth back into the bathroom, rinsed and hung it on a rack there, washed his hands. He replaced the diaper, buttoned her gown and smoothed it. Then reached up to snap a fingernail against the IV feed, checking patency, drip rate, level.
“I thought I’d have longer with her. Just the two of us.”
“I’m sorry.”
He hadn’t meant for this to happen, he told me, standing there looking down at her, into her face; hadn’t intended to cause any trouble. He only wanted to take care of her. That’s what he’d been doing at Parkview, for a long time now. Cleaning and bathing her, seeing after her feeds. But there was always too much else to do, too many others needing attention. She deserved better than that.
“What will happen to her now?”
“She’ll go back to the hospital.”
“Parkview, you mean.”
“Right.”
“And I’ll be going to jail.”
“For a while.”
“Any notion how long?”
“Hard to say.” God knows what they’d charge him with. Kidnapping, endangerment? Excessive kindness? “A year, eighteen months, something like that. After that you’d be on probation.”
He nodded.
“Once I’m out, I’ll be able to visit her.”
Chapter Nine
Breakfast was strong coffee and bagels. There were five kinds of bagels in a paper bag in the freezer (shipped in from Memphis? Little Rock?), butter, homemade fig preserves and cream cheese with chives below. Also a package of lox we both agreed should be put to rest. I washed my face and did what I could by way of brushing teeth while Val assembled it all; then, once we’d eaten, took care of the kitchen while she showered and dressed.
In the yellow Volvo on the way into town I thanked her.
She smiled. “Any time. It’s a pleasure to have someone to talk to. You like my house?”
“I like your house a lot.”
At the office she signed out the forensics kit and told us she’d be in touch when word came down. I walked her to the car.
“You get caught in town again, there’s always my spare room,” she said.
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”
“Take care of yourself, Turner.”
I watched till the Volvo was out of sight. Eyes swiveled towards me when I went back in the office.
“Guess you two hit it off,” Don Lee said.
“Guess we did.”
“House look good?” This from Sheriff Bates.
You’d better believe it, I said, and filled him in on what I’d seen. Floors taken down to bare wood, missing pieces of banisters and mouldings pieced in, layers of paint painstakingly rubbe
d away.
“Wish there were more like her,” Bates said. “Most of those old places have been torn down by now. Or fallen down. We won’t ever see their like again. Coffee?”
“Sure thing.” I chewed my way through half a cup of it. Busy day in town. Every four or five minutes a car passed outside. The phone rang and went on ringing in the real estate office next door.
“The mayor’s mail?”
“Beg pardon?” Don Lee said.
“What you found on the body. Outgoing mail or incoming? Circulars? Bills? Bank statements? Personal letters?”
“Bills, mostly. That’s what he put out for pickup. Clipped them to the front of his mailbox with a clothespin. Same clothespin’s been out there eight or ten years.”
“His mailbox at home.”
“Right.”
“On the porch or streetside?”
“These parts, they’re all by the street.”
As Bates was pouring more coffee, a fortyish woman pulled the door open and stepped in. She stopped just inside, blinking. Ankle-length pants that had started off black and with repeated washings gone purplish gray, red-and-blue flannel shirt over maroonish T-shirt. She was tall. The shirt’s sleeves, left unbuttoned, came halfway up her forearms.
“Billie,” Don Lee said. “How you doing?”
“C. R.’s left again.”
“Honey, he’ll be back. He always comes back. You know that.”
“Not this time.”
“Course he will.”
“You think so?”
Bates walked over to her. For a moment before she looked off, their eyes met.
“Thought he liked the new job.”
“Job was okay, Sheriff. What he didn’t like was me.”
Steering her to the desk, Bates said, “You had any breakfast? I could call across, have something sent over.”
“Kids ate good this morning.”
“They always do.”
“Pancakes.”
“Billie does great pancakes,” Don Lee told me.
“Put pecans in, the way they like them.” Her eyes swept the ceiling. “Woodie has to turn in his geography project today. I made sure he packed it up safe.”
“You get any sleep, sweetheart?” Bates asked.
“I don’t think so. I made brownies, for the kids. C. R. likes them too. It was dark outside. I think maybe I burned them.”
“Don Lee, why don’t you take Billie on home, see she gets settled in. That be okay with you, Billie?”
She looked wildly about for a moment at the door, window and floor, then nodded.
“He’ll take her out by the ballpark,” Bates said once they’d left. “They’ll sit in the bleachers a while. Don’t know why, but that always seems to calm her down.”
“Is she okay?”
“Basically. You couldn’t ask for a better person. Just sometimes, every six or eight weeks, things get too much for her. Get too much for all of us sometimes, don’t they?”
I nodded.
“Been going on for three or four months, we figure-the missing mail. That’s how far in arrears the mayor’s bills had fallen. Gas, water, electric. Near as we can tell, he didn’t know.”
“Which tells us he doesn’t bother balancing his checkbook.”
“Mm-hm.”
“And service was still being provided?”
“Things don’t get shut off much ’round here. Just not the way we do it. And he’s the mayor, after all.”
“What about credit cards?”
“Looks like he paid those from the office. Those and the phone bill.”
“He works at home?”
“Town this size, there’s not a lot of mayoring needs doing. Not much call for regular office hours.”
“So why would he pay the phone bill at the office? Some reason he doesn’t want his wife seeing the bill, maybe? I assume there’s a wife.”
“Oh,” Bates said, “there’s a wife sure enough.”
“Can we get a warrant for his phone bills? Home and at the office? See who he called, who called him?”
“No need for all that.” Fie grabbed the phone and dialed, spoke a minute or two and hung up. “Faxing it over. Give her half an hour, Miss Jean says.”
“That simple.”
“Seems simple to you, does it?”
I understood. As a cop on city streets you learn to dodge, duck, go along, feint. You find out what works and you use it. Same here, just that different things worked.
“Where’s the mayor live?”
“Out on Sycamore. Far end of town.”
“Anyone else on that route have mail missing?”
“There’s only the one route. And if so, they didn’t notice.”
“Or didn’t report it.”
Mug cradled in both hands, Bates swung his chair several degrees right, right knee rising to a point northeast, then a few degrees left, right knee dipping as the left V’ed northwest. “Hard as this may be for you to believe, Detective, we did get around to asking after that. Took us a few days to think of it, most likely. Probably have it written down somewhere.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, Sheriff. I’m only here because you asked me, doing the job you asked me to do the only way I know how.”
Our eyes met.
“All right,” he said at length.
“So you found the mayor’s mail in this guy’s pocket.”
“Right.”
“But no wallet, no identification.”
He shook his head.
“Don Lee mentioned a notebook.”
“Nothing much there, far as we could tell.”
“And he’d been holding some of this mail for what? Three, four months?”
“Right.”
“Thought he was some kind of postman,” I said.
“Undelivering mail.”
Chapter Ten
I’d known Sally Gene for two or three years. She’d done a couple of ride-alongs back when she started with Child and Family. I remember giving her a hard time, claiming she couldn’t be much older than the children she was investigating, and her saying, “You’re kidding me, right,” my partner not getting it at all. Sally Gene and I had crossed paths professionally five, six times since. What she did was to her the most important thing in the world. I think deep down it may have been the only thing she really cared about. A lot of people who are outstanding at what they do seem to be like that. The rest of us look on, at once admiring and critical; vaguely ashamed of ourselves and our wayward lives.
That Sunday, she was waiting for me outside the station house.
“Think I might get a ride, Detective?”
“Sure thing, little girl.”
She’d already cleared it with brass. Bill took one look at us coming out together, chucked me the keys, and got in back. “What the hell. So we give up an hour or two of knock-on-doors-and-ask-questions excitement.”
Recently the department had bolstered the auto pool with half a dozen new blue Plymouths. We pretended we were being sly, but two guys that looked like Joe Friday driving around in a plain car with no chrome trim, black tires and no radio were pretty obvious.
“And what lovely suburb of the city might the three of us be touring today?” Bill said.
Round about the airport, as it turned out, in those years an undeveloped region of cheap motels and eateries. We nosed down the highway that led into Mississippi and turned off into a subdivison of tiny, plain houses once part of the army base. Trucks sold pecans, watermelons and peaches at the side of the road. The smell of figs and honeysuckle was everywhere.
I stood a few paces back as Sally Gene knocked. We weren’t supposed to have much of a presence on these calls. Bill stayed by the car. I’d already had a look around. A vegetable patch ran alongside the west side beneath a double clothesline, okra, tomatoes and green peppers, all of it pretty much gone from lack of care. No car in the driveway, and what oil spills there were, were old ones. Four or five Press-Scimitars lay unr
olled and unread at the back of the driveway, one near the front door, another halfway into the front yard.
The door opened. Flat, uninflected sound of TV from within. Cartoons, maybe, or a sitcom. But then I heard “Willa Cather tried in her own inimitable way… ” I watched Sally Gene’s head tilt forward and down as the door came open. A child’s face stared up at us. Twelve, maybe. Wearing a yellow nylon shirt he’d grow into in another four or five years and a serious expression.
“Daddy says not to let anyone in.”
Sally Gene introduced herself.
“Daddy says not to let anyone in.”
“I told you my name. What’s yours?”
“William.”
“William. I’m sorry, I know this is confusing, and I’m not saying your daddy was wrong, he wasn’t. But I have to come in. Hey: I’d rather be home watching TV, too. But the people I work for tell me I have to come in and look around. They’re kind of like your parents, you know? Always telling me what I have to do?”
The merest flicker as his eyes strayed to me, but I caught it. He was looking for a way out.
“How you doing, William?” I said. “Friends ever call you Bill?”
After a moment he shook his head.
“You hungry, William?”
Again the head went right, left, right. “I fixed breakfast. I know how to cook. I have a load of clothes in the dryer. Oughta get them out.”
“Are your parents home, William?”
“They’ll be back soon.”
“How long have they been gone, William?”
He just looked at me. More than he could handle, I guess. Like so many things in his life.
“Miss Sally Gene and I need to come inside. Look: here’s my badge. You hold on to it till I’m ready to leave. That should be okay, shouldn’t it?”
After a moment he nodded and undid the chain.
In one bedroom we found a four-year-old girl locked in a closet. She’d very carefully defecated only in the rear corner by boots and old shoes, but urine had gone its own way, she’d had no control over that. A plate near the front held frankfurters and slices of American cheese.
