Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  From what the maintenance head had told her on the tour he’d given her her first day in Mississippi, Mrs. Wentworth was a bank manager in Jackson. She’d be at work. Knowing depression as she did, Anna figured Lockley would be home. Probably with the shades drawn and the television on.

  She was right on both counts.

  Lockley Wentworth answered the door clad only in a pair of sweatpants that looked to be in danger of losing the war with gravity. He blinked against the sunlight like an owl dragged out at noon. When he saw who it was, he snatched an old T-shirt from the back of a chair and put it on before coming out onto the porch.

  The kid probably wasn’t eating right, wasn’t sleeping well—hadn’t been for days—yet health and strength positively shimmered around him. He was an athlete in the peak of his form and the best of his youth. Muscles moved like wind on a wheat field, rippling his silky skin.

  Sleepy, depressed, blinded, Lock moved with grace and precision. Maybe he was destined to be one of the greats: Michael Jordan, Nolan Ryan, Babe Didrikson, Tiger Woods. Before the beauty of his physicality could sway her, Anna brought to mind another roster of athletes. This list started with Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, and Mark Gastineau.

  “Dad’s not here,” Lock said, pulling the shirt down to cover a stomach so flat Anna couldn’t imagine such venal necessities as liver, pancreas or intestines could be packed within.

  On a hunch, she decided to go in quick and fast. “We’re here to see you,” she said flatly. “We know you and Danni Posey were lovers.” Anna hadn’t known, not for sure, but when her words hit Lock and the years dropped away till he looked like a little boy close to tears, she knew it was true. “We know you were with her the night she died.” That fact she based on the semen found in the autopsy. If it wasn’t DeForest’s, Lock was the next likely candidate.

  Anna left it at those two statements. She didn’t want him to be officially a suspect, and she hadn’t enough to arrest anybody at this point. But he didn’t know that.

  Lock looked from Anna to Barth. Barth kept his face like stone, betraying nothing, not a shard of compassion or pity, though it must have cost him.

  Without warning Lock toppled, the movement so sudden, Anna’s hand twitched toward her Sig-Sauer. With a groan reminiscent of a tree breaking in a high wind, he fell against the ironwork of ivy leaves and pineapples that supported the porch roof. The framing shook under his weight. He slid down till his butt rested on the flooring. “God, oh God, oh God,” he mumbled into his hands.

  Anna stepped away and nodded at Barth. Moving ponderously, as if to accentuate his age and nonthreatening qualities, the ranger moved to the steps and sat down several feet from Lockley.

  “Talk to me, son,” Barth said quietly.

  “Dad’ll kill me,” the young athlete managed. “This’ll kill Mom.”

  Too much death in the sentence for Anna. Maybe the stakes were that high.

  “Nobody’s killing anybody,” Barth said reasonably if not accurately. “Just tell us what happened.”

  “I killed Danni,” Lock said. He didn’t uncover his face; the words were forced out past the heels of his hands. “I killed her.”

  A heaviness came over Anna, a weight so intense she didn’t want to go on standing. Duty and common sense wouldn’t let her crumple on the welcome mat, so she forced air into her lungs and held her post.

  Barth was feeling it too. Anna could see it in the slump of his shoulders and the way his head hung, like the weight of it was too much for his neck.

  “What did you hit her with, son? A tire iron?” Barth asked gently.

  Lock lowered his hands. He looked hard at Barth and something like anger enlivened his eyes. “I’d never hurt Danni,” he said. “Never.”

  Barth waited and Anna waited.

  Lock looked around at the shaded yard, the ancient pecan trees, the mailbox with the sunflower painted on it, as if he’d never seen them before. Or wouldn’t be seeing them again for a long time.

  “I loved Danni,” he said. To Anna it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than them. For a long time, he didn’t say anything else. Anna grew impatient. The misery of children was pushing hard on her mind. She wanted to move, talk, handcuff somebody. Anything to ease that pressure. Shifting her weight to the balls of her feet and resisting the temptation to crack her knuckles, she waited for Barth to handle the situation.

  Barth never looked at her. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk between his feet. “It’d be easy to love a girl like Danni Posey,” he said after a minute. “She was as pretty as they come.”

  “I loved her.” Lock was beginning to sound obstinate.

  “You better tell me about killing her, son. You’re going to have to tell somebody sometime. May as well be me now. Here, where we’re comfortable.”

  Lock eased out from the post he’d slid down and scooted his butt over till he sat beside Barth, unconsciously mirroring the older man’s pose. After a time had passed to sanctify the new position, he started to talk. Two men on a porch stoop in the spring sunshine. It was as if Anna didn’t exist.

  Catlike, she crept closer to bear witness but didn’t call attention to herself.

  “Danni and me met after a game,” Lock said. “We’d played Jackson State. Whipped some ass big-time.”

  “Fifty-three to seven. I remember.”

  “I was hot that game. I mean I could do no wrong. That ball was mine.” Both men rested on that, reliving the glories of the game—or so Anna surmised.

  “Girls were all over me afterward. I mean all over me. I could have lifted my little finger and had half a dozen hot bitches begging me to do’em.”

  Barth just nodded. Anna was glad he was point man. The weight of sorrow was beginning to lift. Having to arrest young Wentworth was looking less odious every minute.

  “Then Danni comes in. I didn’t know she was no sixteen. She was looking fine. Cool as ice. Smilin’ and talking like she owned the place. This white girl never been there before. She wasn’t tarted up, just cool, you know, in a little yellow dress, linen or nice cotton or something. Kind of stiff and ironed. She doesn’t give me a glance.” Lock laughed, remembering the courting dance, forgetting the last dance.

  “We got to talking after a while and Danni’s no rich bitch slumming with the nigger football star. Away from people she was this sweet thing. Almost shy sometimes. Then she goes and does something makes me blush, man. One minute she’s like a little kid, never been to the big city before. Next minute it’s like she grew up in Paris or something. I’d never met anybody like Danni. She just lit me up and smoked me like a good cigar.”

  Quiet settled again, the men were enjoying the glories of a different game. Anna’d put aside her fantasies of busting Wentworth. When he’d begun talking about Danni, his voice had changed. A note of what sounded like affection and respect wove between the dissonance of the language he used to express himself.

  “We got tight pretty fast. Danni liked playing the mystery woman—wouldn’t tell me her last name, where she lived or anything. Said she worked at Victoria’s Secret in the Metro Mall.”

  Barth blew air out through his nostrils, the sort of whuffing noise Taco made when Anna or the cat was particularly stupid. The message must’ve been the same between men as between species.

  “Oh yeah, I could of found out. But it was the game, man. I didn’t want to know.”

  Barth nodded again. He could understand that. So could Anna. Mystery, romance, the unseen, the unknown and, most intoxicating, the imagined. While it lasted, it must have been a heady affair for two very young people who’d never been anyplace more exotic than the watermelon festival in Mize.

  A cardinal flitted into the pecans, bloodred and jewel-like. Leaves swallowed him from sight. Anna shifted her weight to keep her feet from going to sleep, not wanting to risk a move that might break the mood.

  “Then comes this fucking prom. Danni wants me to take her, so she’s got to tell me who she is, right? I f
ind out she’s sixteen. Sixteen! A high school kid and she wants to go to the prom and show me off to her girlfriends. ‘One of ’em’s black,’ she tells me. Jesus. Now I’m gonna feel right at home? Shit. And she’s sixteen. I been boinking a sixteen-year-old! No way I’m going to some fucking high school prom.”

  That should have been the end of the story: lovers part, hearts are broken, life goes on.

  But it wasn’t.

  “I break up with her, right?”

  Lock looked at Barth, who said, “Right.”

  “Everything’s cool. She’s callin’ me every night telling me about this Brandon guy. How he’s Mr. High School Football—like this is going to rack my bones. I’m cool with that. Hey, let her go to her prom. Then she calls me that day. She’s gotta see me. So I go pick her up at her house. She’s screaming at this shit-for-brains white guy, then up and runs and jumps in my car. It’s her brother, and he’s jumping around like he’s got his dick in a grinder. Danni and me leave. We get it on. She starts in on the prom thing. I tell her I’m not going. She’s crying and shit. I take her home.”

  Not the best love story Anna’d ever heard, but probably one that was a lot more common than the happily-ever-after kind that Danni—like every other American girl—was raised to believe was her God-given right.

  Barth looked at Anna and nodded once. Despite their differences, black, white, big, little, male, female, Southerner, Yankee, she’d seldom worked with anybody as seamlessly as she worked with Bartholomew Dinkin. She knew instantly what he meant. In a smooth leap, the dramatic effect only slightly lessened by the fact her legs had grown stiff from standing so long, Anna was over the porch rail and standing on the sidewalk in front of Lock Wentworth.

  “So you met her at Rocky Springs and bashed her brains out,” Anna said.

  Lock jerked as if she were an evil djinn who’d materialized from the center of the Earth.

  “No!” he cried out, and she saw the bravado drain from his face. “No!” he said again, and his features began to blur. Tears filled his eyes, spilled down his face. “If I’d gone to the fucking prom, she’d still be alive. I loved Danni,” he whispered.

  This time Anna almost believed him, but she pressed on: “She called you. You met her. You killed her.”

  Lock was so deep in his own private hell, he didn’t even hear. Or if he did, he was an actor of such a high caliber that he was wasted on football.

  “Tell us what happened on prom night,” Barth said gently. Anna stepped back and to the side. If Lock suddenly dropped the tears and innocence and made a run for it, she didn’t want to be in his way. The beefy young quarterback would go through her as if she were made of straw.

  “She begged me to go,” he mumbled. “Begged me, and I just blew her off. She told me she was going to go with her old boyfriend. I said fine. I mean, who cares? She wants to go to the fucking prom that bad, she can go. Then next day she turns up killed. Sometimes Danni was downright stupid, I mean a fucking idiot. She probably blabbed about her and me and he killed her. He fucking killed her.”

  Tears were still flowing. Maybe they’d started out as grief or guilt, but they’d heated up. Now they were tears of anger. Wentworth was clenching and unclenching his hands. Anna could see the strength in them as the muscles bunched in his forearms.

  “Danni said she was coming to see you,” she said coldly. “She met you and you smashed her skull so she wouldn’t interfere with your journey to the Football Hall of Fame. Like a cracker like you would ever make it in the pros.” Anna had no idea whether “cracker” was color specific. Maybe only whites could be crackers. Her aim was to rattle him. She succeeded.

  In a lightning move that must have wowed them on the field, he swung a roundhouse left and smashed his fist into the cast-iron railing with such force that the entire porch rang with the reverberations. He was on his feet, glaring down at Anna. Tears were gone. Anger turned cold and aged his face. Under the threat of his bulk and youth, Anna’s neck felt as fragile as a flower stalk, her arms like matchsticks. Loosening her locked muscles, she prepared to move quickly.

  “You’re dying to pin this on me, aren’t you? Let that lily-white bastard waltz on up to Ole Miss and pretend to play football so his daddy can brag at the Rotary. I didn’t kill Danni. If she said she was meeting me, she was lying. I never went nowhere that night. Never met nobody.”

  Barth was standing too, though Anna’d not seen him get up. “Easy, Lock,” he said. “Nobody’s pinning anything on anybody. Just tell us where you were that night. That’s all you gotta do.”

  “I was in my dorm room at Alcorn,” he said. The fire went out of him as quickly as it had flared up. He let Barth put a hand on his shoulder and ease him back down till he sat again on the step.

  “You got a roommate?” Barth asked.

  “Oh shit.” Stark terror flitted across the football player’s face, chased by what looked to be despair. “He wasn’t there,” he said dully. “He went home that weekend to go to his cousin’s wedding.”

  Stillness, deeper and richer for the agitated racket that had preceded it, settled around the three of them. Overhead, in the boughs of the pecans, squirrels scuffled. A car passed, bound for the metropolis of Hermanville.

  “You going to arrest me or what?” Lock was looking at Anna.

  Halfway through this interview, she’d been convinced Lockley committed the murder. Now she was more or less of the opinion that he didn’t. What had changed her mind wasn’t the tears, the anger or the protestations of love. It was the fear she’d seen when he realized his roommate hadn’t been there, that there was no one to vouch for the fact that he’d been tucked up in his dorm room all night like he claimed. If Lock had murdered Danni, he would have known no one could alibi him, he would have been prepared for the question. The possibility that he was acting still existed, but Anna doubted this volatile young man was the Laurence Olivier of the gridiron.

  “We didn’t come here to arrest you,” she said, as if she hadn’t just accused him of murder half a dozen times. “We just wanted to talk with you. You said Danni’s ex-boyfriend killed her. Tell us about that.”

  Wentworth made a few stabs at it, but it rapidly became clear that he had nothing to add to what they already knew. He just figured DeForest for the killer because he’d been Danni’s date and because, though he wouldn’t admit to it, the other boy was a rival.

  Anna asked if he knew anything against DeForest, the kind of cheating or violence that might be known in high school or sports circles but that wouldn’t necessarily come to the attention of authority. Lock wanted to say something against DeForest, but the only thing he could dredge up was that Danni’d said DeForest was a practical joker and the jokes weren’t always all that funny to the victims.

  Anna was impressed Lock didn’t succumb to the temptation to make something up about the other boy.

  After the usual mutterings that boiled down to “Thanks for your time” and “Don’t leave town anytime soon,” Anna went back to the patrol car. Barth stayed behind, said he wanted a private word with young Wentworth.

  Anna’d almost given up on finding anything on the radio to listen to besides country or Christian when Barth rejoined her. “What was that about?” she asked as he buckled his large person into the passenger seat.

  “Nothing official. I just told him to clean up that mouth of his. There’s no call for that kind of language in front of a lady. Or even a female ranger. And I told him if he doesn’t get off the pity-pot and get back in school, then you’re going to be right; he doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the pros and he might as well just move on up into the Delta and get himself a job gutting catfish at the factory for all the good he is.”

  Anna started the car and cranked up the air-conditioning. Summer was breathing down April’s neck. “That kid’s a briar patch of emotions,” she said. “Guilt, fear, insecurity, pride, anger. I don’t suppose you suggested he see a psychologist for a while?”

  “He d
oesn’t need therapy,” Barth said succinctly. “He needs to play ball.”

  “Guilt is a cunning and powerful adversary,” Anna said. “Maybe more powerful than pigskin.”

  Barth, who’d been dragged out of whatever doldrums he’d sailed into by working with Lockley Wentworth, went into relapse. Anna could see him change as clearly as if the word “guilt” had opened a stopcock and the juice was draining out of him. In the few minutes it took to regain the Trace, he was looking lumpy, partially deflated, his hands between his knees and his strange gray-green eyes focused about ten inches in front of the windshield.

  Anna pushed her mind back to what they’d been talking about before the Wentworth interview. It seemed a very long time ago, though less than two hours had passed by the clock. Mississippi, with her soft air and scented breezes, unraveled time at night and melted it during the days. Had she been living among the magnolias, egrets, kudzu and possums, Anna felt she could have synchronized her body clock to that of Mother Nature. But since she’d rolled into Claiborne County, her time was divided between cars and talk, neither of which was conducive to getting in touch with the Earth’s rhythms.

  Leo Fullerton, the Baptist preacher who’d suicided by VW engine, was Barth’s pastor. That was the news that had knocked the stuffing out of her ranger. Guilt had come to Anna’s mind before. It was back now. What the hell, she thought. He doesn’t much like me anyway.

  “Why are you feeling guilty over Pastor Fullerton’s suicide?” she asked bluntly.

  Barth looked at her, a new energy in his face. Dared she hope it was a spark of respect? Before he answered her—and she could have sworn he was going to—the spark was doused with distrust. Maybe he’d suddenly remembered she wasn’t from around there. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and Anna knew she’d get nothing more out of him. At least not by being straightforward and aboveboard.

  Thigpen’s patrol car was parked in front of the ranger station. Anna felt her shoulders tensing and forced herself to relax. If he was going to wage a war of nerves, then she would be nerveless. Maybe she was overreacting. He had, after all, done nothing overt. And he’d responded quickly when she called regarding the alligator. It was possible the conspiracy to leave her in the lurch over the Posey/Doolittle car stop was a onetime thing.