One Drop of Blood

by Thomas Holland

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “The maid?” he questioned the room. “At midnight? At this motel? I don’t think so.”

  He replayed it all in his head, over and over. He’d dozed off, with the curtains open, he was sure of that, and then he woke up, with the curtains open, he was sure of that. Had he closed them before going across the street? He didn’t think so. He thought back. He’d slipped his shoes on, tied them, taken his wallet and key from the dresser, and…and then he’d walked out the friggin’ door. He hadn’t closed the curtains. And if he hadn’t, then someone else had.

  Kel sat back onto the bed and tightly closed his eyes, willing a plausible explanation to the surface. It had to be the maid.

  Kel slipped his shoes back on. He opened his door and looked out. He saw more heat lightning and heard a thousand crickets arguing against the waning night. It had warmed up since he returned from dinner, or was it he that had warmed up? He walked quickly to the main lobby, his untied shoes clumping and scuffing on the cement. It was open and the lights and television were on. A young Bob Eubanks was asking four newlyweds, “Ladies, will your husband say he has a whoopee cushion?”

  “Hello?” Kel called out. There was a dim light on in the small office behind the counter. No answer. One of the newlyweds was giggling.

  “Hello?” He called louder. He was preparing to try again when Sam came bustling out wearing a long-tailed lilac-colored shirt and dark-green shorts.

  “Yes sir, yes sir,” he said quickly, and then, recognizing Kel, he asked, “Yes sir, Mr. 12A, what can I do for you, sir?”

  “I hate to bother you at this hour…Sam,” Kel replied, not really sure how to best angle his question, “but by any chance did the maid clean my room a little while ago? Maybe an hour ago?”

  Sam looked at him strangely, as if he’d just pulled a hard word at a spelling bee. “No sir, my wife, she is asleep, sir. She will be cleaning your room in the morning, sir. Can I be of help to you with something now, sir?”

  “You’re sure she hasn’t been in my room recently? It’s okay, I simply need to know.”

  “No sir. I am certain, sir. You are having a problem?”

  “Anybody been by to ask for me? Or Mr. Levine? Maybe someone lookin’ for Levine got my room by mistake. Anybody been by that you are aware of?”

  “Only Mr. Levine, sir.”

  It took Kel a moment to digest the answer. “What do you mean, only Mr. Levine?”

  “Mr. Levine, sir, he was here asking about you, sir. Wanted to know if I knew where you were or when you were coming back.”

  Kel pinned Sam to the wall with his look. “When was Mr. Levine so interested in my whereabouts?”

  “Sir?”

  “When was Mr. Levine askin’ about me?”

  “About an hour ago, sir.”

  “Thank you, Sam.”

  “Open up, you sonofabitch.” Kel was prepared to kick the door in if necessary.

  “Hold on. Hold on. Doc? Is that you?”

  Kel was pounding so loudly on Levine’s door that he almost didn’t hear him. Almost. “Yeah,Fed, it’s me all right. Open up this goddamn door.”

  “A minute, a minute.”

  Kel could hear the chain being removed and the latch thrown. When the door finally opened, Levine stood there in a New York Knicks T-shirt and boxer underwear. The light on the stand beside his bed was on. The television was off.

  “What the hell’s the matter? You okay?”

  Kel pushed passed him into the room. “You bastard, you paranoid fuckin’ New York prick.”

  “Glad to see you too, Doc,” he said, rubbing his face. As he did so, his T-shirt rode up on his right arm exposing the pale curdled skin of an old scar on his shoulder. “Mind telling me what this is all about? I was getting ready to have an erotic dream, and you don’t exactly figure prominently in it.”

  “Were you in my room?”

  Levine squinted hard and turned his head slightly to the side. “Say again.”

  “Were you in my goddamn room?”

  “When?…No. I haven’t been in your room at all.”

  “No?”

  “No—unlike you—I might point out—who happens to be standing inmy room. You want to clue me in, Dr. McKelvey? Or is this going to be twenty questions?” The early effects of a shallow sleep had worn off and been replaced by a growing ire as Levine realized he was being blamed for something. He simply didn’t know what it was.

  “Somebody’s been in my room. What do you know about it?”

  “No shit.”

  “Shit.”

  “Anything missing? What’d I tell you about shitbirds? They steal anything?”

  Kel’s feet were separated and his hands were on his hips. The body language was unmistakable; he was spoiling for a fight. “No, nothin’ was stolen—best as I can tell. Just looked at. Examined.Investigated is probably a more appropriate description. Some case files, maybe my computer, don’t know what else—why don’t you tell me.”

  “Whoa. Timeout, timeout, Gomer. You think I did it?” Levine moved to close his door, looking out to make sure there was no one else outside his room. He locked and chained the door.

  “Who else? Who the hell else would have any interest in some files in my room?”

  “Not me, that’s for damn sure. Maybe someone interested in this case?” He seemed to notice Kel’s stance for the first time. “And I suggest you back your attitude down a notch before I forget my New York manners and kick your hillbilly ass out to the curb.”

  “Someone interested in this case? What case? Do you hear yourself? There is no case, haven’t you figured that out? Certainly not as far as I’m involved. All I’ve done since I got here is eat nut pie and insult old women. There is no case. I’m an anthropologist, I look at human remains—you see any remains? I don’t see any remains. You see remains? No, of course not. You have no human remains, remember? None, zip.” He hadn’t completely backed down, but he softened both his tone and features somewhat—enough. Not that he was afraid of Levine, but he also didn’t relish the idea of being punched out by a guy in his underwear. And Levine looked as if he might be quickly getting to the punch-out stage. “Face it, Special Agent Levine, there isn’t anyone in this town that gives a shit about what I’m doin’ here. They don’t know what I’m doin’ here. Hell,I don’t know what I’m doin’ here. In fact, the only reason I’m still here is that I needed to get out of my office before I had a meltdown and because my commander wants to mend fences with the FBI for somethin’ we didn’t do. I’m here because you can’t keep your alphabet straight and requested help from the C-I-L rather than the C-I-D or the C-I-A or the Kiss-My-Ass.”

  “Sit down,” Levine instructed as much as offered. Kel hesitated. He compromised by leaning against the dresser while Levine sat on the end of his bed. Levine rubbed his face again and took a deep breath. “Are you sure someone was in your room?”

  “Positive.”

  “Did you consider the maid?”

  “This is the Sleep-Mor, Levine, not the Hilton. Sam’s congeniality does not extend to midnight maid service. No turn-down service; no mints on the pillow; that includes no snoopin’ through files. But yes, for the record, I checked with Sam. The maid’s been asleep for hours.”

  Levine seemed to consider the response. “Well then who?”

  “Well ding-dong, Elliot Ness. I believe that’s what I want to know. The only person who might, just might, give a flyin’ rat’s ass about what I may be writin’ down in a report would be someone paranoid enough to not want the truth of this investigation to get out.”

  Levine looked genuinely puzzled. “You thinking Sheriff Elmore?”

  “Elmore? Are you out of your goddamn government-issued mind?”

  “Who else has a reason to keep a lid on this case?”

  “Well, not Elmore. Not anybody here. There is no case, there is no lid, no case, no lid—can’t you get that through your head? Who? You want to know who? I was thinkin’ a
bout someone who may not want his boss to know what a goat rope this whole investigation is turnin’ out to be. Someone in hot water with his boss to begin with. Someone that might be worried that I’ll write an After Action Report saying that the FBI has way too much time on their hands and way too little brains in their goddamn skulls. Someone who couldn’t wait for me to get off the plane so they could tongue whip me and tell me they were goin’ to piss down my throat. Someone who said they were in charge and that they’d be watchin’ me. Remember that? That’s who.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Yeah? And just what did you mean?”

  “I meant I was going to cover my ass. C’mon, McKelvey, put yourself in my place.”

  “What place might that be?”

  “Here in Crackerland, U.S.A. In case you haven’t figured it out,Doctor, the Bureau would like nothing better than to bury me here. It’s a no-win situation for me. I crack the case and you know what they’ll say? They’ll say I was doing my job. Period. But if I fail, if I fail they’ll drive another nail into my coffin. So put yourself in my place. I ask for someone from the Smithsonian and I get you. What would you assume?”

  “I’d assume you’re better off. We’re the Pros from Dover. Not the Smithsonian.”

  “So you say. From where I sit, the Bureau’s covering their bet and making sure I fail by sending me the same Gomer that screwed the pooch in that Gonsalves case.”

  “Aw goddamn. I’m so goddamn tired of hearin’ that shit. It’s you boys that screwed that case to the wall, not us.”

  “So you say.”

  “Yeah, so I say.”

  “All I know is that I don’t want to get hung out to dry in the process.”

  “Shit, G-man. If I wanted to hang you out to dry, you’d be a goddamn strip of jerky by now.”

  Levine’s eyes narrowed to slits and he glared at Kel for a moment as he measured his response. His voiced dropped a couple of degrees in temperature. “I’ll say this once, Dr. McKelvey. Once. I didn’t go into your room, I won’t go into your room without an invitation—or a warrant, I don’t care what you have in your room. You can be writing letters toPenthouse magazine for all I care. Yeah, maybe my career is in the tank already, but I’ve got less than two years till retirement, and while I’m holding on by my fingernails, I’m still holding on. I’ll leave when I hang it up—and not a minute sooner—unless you screw this up for me. What that adds up to, in case you don’t have a calculator, is that I don’t give a shit about anyreport you might write—as long as it’s accurate.”

  “Screw you, Levine.”

  “No, screw you, McKelvey.”

  Kel grabbed the sides of his head as if his skull was about to explode. “I don’t believe this,” he said, as much to himself as to Levine. “I don’t have to put up with this shit.”

  “You do until you earn my respect.”

  “Respect?” Kel almost shouted. He squared his shoulders. “Your respect? That’s a two-way street, cowboy. When are you goin’ to show me a little respect? Respect, such as not searchin’ my room. Why don’t we start there?”

  “I believe we settled that.”

  “So you weren’t in the lobby askin’ Sam where I was and how long I’d be out of my room?”

  “What? No.”

  “No?”

  “Look,” Levine replied, taken slightly off-guard. He exhaled deeply and tried to calm his voice. “Look, Doc, yeah, I was asking where you were. I was going to suggest that we leave here tomorrow morning at eight-thirty rather than nine o’clock, and I couldn’t call you since neither of us have phones. So I went to your room, and there wasn’t any answer. I thought you might be at the office getting some ice or something so I went down there. When I saw you weren’t there, I asked Sam if he’d seen you, I knew you didn’t have a car and I figured you were around somewhere; took a walk or something—you enjoy this freakin’ weather so much. I told him that if you came by in the next thirty minutes to tell you to stop by my room. But I did not ask him how long you were going to be gone. If he told you so, he’s mistaken.”

  “Then who was in my room?”

  “Beats me, Doc. Not me.”

  He certainly seemed sincere. Maybe Kel had imagined it all.

  No, he hadn’t. Someone had been in his room.

  The two men faced each other, both breathing deeply. Both struggling for calm.

  Levine finally broke the silence. “And Doc, let’s have another understanding. You ever come beating on my door again, you ever accuse me of something like this again, and I’ll feed you your nuts on a slice of toast. We clear?”

  Kel paused long enough to save some semblance of face. “Perfectly,” he said.

  Chapter 21

  Split Tree, Arkansas

  FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005

  They left at eight-thirty the next morning. Not surprisingly, the conversation was strained and limited to essentials, at first. Kel had lain awake most of the night thinking and rethinking the evidence of someone having been in his room. Try as he might, he couldn’t convince himself that it hadn’t happened. He thought of the fisherman he’d seen smoking out in the parking lot when he’d walked over to the diner, but that theory gained no traction. He thought again of Levine and his paranoia and disdain for anything bipedal, but while he didn’t completely trust Levine, he also found it hard to believe that he had nothing better to do than break into his motel room. Levine, more than anyone else, knew that there wasn’t a case, no evidence, nothing to see, nothing to snoop around for. And he couldn’t really believe that Levine might be concerned with something Kel might write home in a memo—no matter how much of a waste of time this trip was turning out to be. By his own admission, Levine was a pariah at the FBI, and pariahs typically don’t give a damn; or worse, give a damn about the wrong sorts of things. But in any case, it didn’t add up to Levine being the culprit. It had been a long and unproductive rest of the night.

  Despite rationalizing away any involvement Levine might have had, or not had, Kel wasn’t about to swallow a large enough bolus of pride to apologize for the chest-beating behavior of the night before. So the car ride started quietly.

  The plan was to take the same route they had taken the other night when Levine had picked Kel up at the airport—only in reverse; north on Highway 1 until they reached Forrest City and then catch Interstate 40 over to Memphis.

  Kel looked out his passenger window as they drove, as much to avoid Levine as to marvel at the undisturbed floodplain, so flat that a marble dropped out the window wouldn’t be able to decide which direction to roll. Unlike Locust County, which was still dominated by cotton, most of northeast Arkansas was acres and miles of flat lowland fields of deep-green rice and sun-crisped soybeans—all badly in need of rain.

  Although still early in the morning, it was already in the lower nineties and a blue-brown haze of hot, saturated air and powder-fine dust obscured the horizon. Levine had turned the radio on to disrupt the silence, and one of the Memphis stations was matter-of-factly reporting the number of heat fatalities from the previous day: four in the metropolitan area alone.

  Kel made the first move at serious reconciliation by asking about Levine’s family and background. The agent’s responses were short and obligatory at first. Enough to establish that he’d grown up in Brooklyn, in an apartment above his father’s grocery store. That he’d served with the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division in Vietnam. That he had a wife and two high-school-aged daughters who played lacrosse and stayed on the phone. With time and distance, the details were caulked into the cracks: an epileptic Irish Setter named Gretchen, a split-level house in Ijamsville in Frederick County, Maryland, how the house had been the absolute right place to buy when he thought he would finish out his career at the Hoover building. Two-story neo-Colonial with a finished basement. One and a half acres. Lots of trees. Good schools. How he was now renting a small apartment in Memphis, and his family was functioning smoothly without him. How it was no use maki
ng the children change schools because their dad couldn’t keep his mouth shut—or more accurately, couldn’t keep his fingers off the e-mail send button. How he had hopes of getting back there soon to visit. Had hopes of getting back there soon, permanently, if he could simply crack the code on the Jackson case and stay out of the line of fire.

  The conversation continued to warm along with the morning, and the more vivid aspects of the previous night faded into a dull sensitivity. Still a sore spot, but it could be worked around, provided neither one of them brought the matter up. Both men forced civility.

  “You going straight back to Splitsville after you pick up a car? Or are you going to take in the big city of Memphis—do the tourist thing and see the Peabody ducks, have some barbeque at the Rendezvous? I’ll deny ever having said this, but this town does have a few nice features.” Levine’s eyes didn’t leave the road.

  “Not sure. I was halfway thinkin’ about runnin’ over to the Navy Casualty office in Millington.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a couple of things I want to check on. You? What’s your plan?”

  Levine was silent for a while. His mouth was a tight line but the gristle behind his jaw was working and pulsing as he thought. Finally he glanced at Kel and then back to the road. “Couple of things I need to check.”

  Kel didn’t ask.

  Kel thought they made good time, but he’d also dozed off somewhere around Forrest City and that helped the miles go by. Levine had the air-conditioner running full blast but with the morning sun in the southeast, and them headed northeast, Kel took its drowsy brunt from his seat on the passenger’s side. That, combined with the pleasant white roar of the tires, had been a powerful sedative.

  He’d been dreaming. It had been a funny dream. Even funnier because he could recall it so clearly later. He’d been standing in a field of waist-high elephant grass; wet and slick from a morning rain. The sky was hazy and thick and smelled of freshly mown hay, but also of smoke and kerosene. He felt that he was in Hawaii, but he wasn’t, and he seemed to know that. The mountains lacked the dramatic pleated folds of the Waianaes or Koolaus; they were round and soft, more like the Ouachitas of his youth—or the backbone of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Wherever he was, his wife was there too, young and pretty and looking like she had in high school. She had on a thin yellow sundress. His boys were there as well, except they had grown to recognizable manhood. They had their backs to him, but he knew it was them. His wife was mad and saying something, and she held something in her hands that Kel couldn’t see at first. He’d had to move and rise up on his toes to see past his sons. It was a bird. She was holding a large black-and-white mockingbird cupped in her hands, and he could hear his wife now, she was scolding the men, her sons—his sons—for killing the bird. And they were protesting and kept saying it wasn’t dead. Kel moved toward her and reached between the two men to touch the bird. None of them paid him any attention. It was soft, and when his fingers touched it, it sprang up and began singing. First it was the meadowlark, then a chickadee, then the troublesome jay. It sang and sang, using every voice but its own.