“Well, no, but…”
He sat down, as if his legs had given out. “What will it take for you to help?”
“A deputy,” I replied stupidly. “Otherwise I just won’t have time.”
Jack Littlepage grinned. “I can do that,” he told me, and went from my office, whistling.
CHAPTER 7
Within two days I had my deputy. Richmond cop looking for some quiet, I was told. By the way Boris slunk away from him, I guessed there was a lot more to the story. Two phone calls later, I had it.
Brian Craig, 26, veteran of the war in Iraq, trained as an MP before the Army kicked him loose. He did a year and a half with the Richmond department, where he didn’t work and play well with others. His gratitude to my cousin Littlepage was effusive. Everything else about him made me nervous. A human time bomb tick-ticking away. You could practically see the countdown in his eyes, which were icy pale and yet gave an impression of blackness.
Unfortunately, beggars can’t be choosers. I welcomed him to our miniscule department, introduced him around, and took two days off, one to sleep. I made it through a few hours of sleep before I got a phone call.
“Sheriff Eller,” said Jack Littlepage’s crisp voice, “I hope your deputy is satisfactory.”
I told him yes, and hung up. I’d gotten another hour’s sleep when the phone rang again. Kim this time. “He called me honey!”
“I’ll yell at him,” I promised, and turned off the phone. That gave me four hours of sleep, broken by a pounding at the front door. Aunt Marge answered it, calling up to me, “Lil, dear, I think this is for you.”
I staggered downstairs in my pajamas—old t-shirt and gym shorts—to find Jack Littlepage on the doorstep. Immaculately attired in golf shirt, tan trousers, fragrant with aftershave. I gargled a tired “Ugh,” and sat on the stairs to bully my neurons into firing properly. “Wha?”
“I came for an update on my sister’s case.”
Boris uttered a completely snotty “Mreow!” Quite clearly, he’d told Jack Littlepage to perform an anatomical impossibility. I sniggered, swallowed it, and told my cousin, “I’ve got appointments in Charlottesville tomorrow.”
“Good!” he beamed. All those perfect teeth blinded me. He must’ve gotten them bleached monthly to keep them white. “I look forward to hearing about it.”
I had an appointment with my gynecologist in the early morning, and another with my dentist in the afternoon. Not what Jack wanted to know. I smiled him off the porch, grunted as I sat on the steps shivering as the dew settled on me. “Great.”
“Improvise, dear,” said Aunt Marge, shooing me back inside and up to bed as if I was ten years old. “You’ll manage.”
“Boris, help me out here,” I pleaded. He raised his head from his food bowl, snorted, and went back to his dinner. With a disgusted snort of my own, I trudged back to bed to contemplate the hell of being indebted to a Littlepage.
***^***
Charlottesville is home to the University of Virginia, and about 40,000 people who mostly work for the university, or for the students, one way or another. The county around it is packed with what locals call come-heres. That is, people who came here because of that magazine that kept calling Charlottesville the number one place to live, and ruined it down to number seventeen. That said, if you want restaurants or shopping, Charlottesville’s the place to go. Unless you’re a come-here from New York or Northern Virginia. They all say Charlottesville doesn’t have any stores. I guess all those strip malls on US 29 north of town, or the gigantic one on Barracks Road, or the downtown mall all don’t count.
I’d been looking forward to getting my annual checkups out of the way, and doing some shopping. When you’re my height, and female, finding jeans is an all-day challenge. Instead, I endured the gynecology exam, and went to Lee Park to meet Anora Johnson. She stood near the equestrian statue of Lee, sipping something from a Starbuck’s cup, slim in that way women have when they count every calorie and run six miles a day. I used to be like that. I sucked in my tummy as I walked.
She gave me a big fake smile. “You must be Sheriff Eller.”
I’d dressed in old dockers and a pullover. Not my most impressive outfit. “Ms. Johnson,” I said crisply. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Well, since you’re Lisa’s cousin…” A slight shrug, as if to say otherwise, I was beneath her notice. I had an urge to let her know I’d graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown.
“Let’s walk,” I suggested, and we strolled through the confines of the park as we talked. I asked her about the party, a fancy deal at the Omni to raise money for an art center, and heard that it was “the usual people, pretty boring, really, but it’s a great way to network”. I learned that Lisa had been celebrating her pending divorce, but had not drunk anything. “She never does.”
I commended myself to the angels that watch over cops. “She was legally drunk when she died.”
Anora gaped. “Lisa? That’s… Someone’s wrong.”
“She’d had a lot of beer.”
“She wouldn’t even touch champagne,” the woman gasped. “She’d never touch beer!”
I checked my list of questions, moved on. “What was she wearing that night?”
Anora shrugged, this time a big loose one of bewilderment. “Uh, I think… Yeah, she was wearing this navy blue sheath. She got it someplace on the Downtown Mall.”
I didn’t much care where she’d gotten it. “Did she change? Maybe spill something on herself?”
Anora shook her head. I asked a few more questions, got nothing, and trotted off to my car. I kept looking down to see where Boris was. I’d gotten so used to having him with me that it felt strange to think of him at home, lazing the day away. I could’ve used him, too. Aside from acting as furry therapy, Boris told me plenty by his reactions. He could smell drunks ten feet away, and had that marvelous instinct for danger we humans have managed to educate into oblivion.
After the dentist told me to floss more, I met with three more people who had seen Lisa that night. No one knew who had driven her home, or to the party, but I got a valuable tidbit out of Deena Lewis.
“I think,” she said in that faux whisper people use to indicate scandal, “she was going to another party. After. I caught her coming out of the restroom in this red dress cut way up and down.” She indicated the up and down with her hand, nodded primly. “You know what I’m saying.”
“Did you see where she went?”
“Nope, she just walked out. Toward the parking garage.”
I jotted that down, puzzled over it as I drove to Fashion Square Mall to hunt for jeans. Why would someone who had not driven to the party need to exit to the parking garage? Alone? A pre-arranged pick-up time, maybe. Yet why go home to Crazy? Why not just stay in town with her friends? According to three of them, they’d taken the party home to Deena’s condo, and crashed there.
I bought my jeans, a couple of new shirts, and drove back to Crazy with my thoughts spinning. Where was the navy blue dress she’d changed out of? Why had she changed? Where had she gone? The time of death had been around two in the morning. She’d left the party at the Omni around ten-thirty. What had she done? And with whom?
According to her friends, she’d never mentioned a man, unless you counted her cursing her soon-to-be-ex. How could that be possible? How could no one know? A man for whom a woman drinks beer and wears revealing red dresses is usually a hot topic of conversation.
None of which Jack Littlepage wanted to hear. I could sympathize. It gave me a headache, too.
***^***
Brian Craig wasn’t my dream deputy, but his existence meant I could regain some semblance of a life. The first day I came home at six instead of eight at night, I heard thumping and clattering in the cellar. I trotted down to investigate, wondering what Aunt Marge had in mind, and found Donny Tucker struggling with an old dining room table. The legs were wobbly, and some kind of bracing pieces had come unglued, which accou
nted for it being in the cellar. I couldn’t say the same of Donny Tucker.
I’ve mentioned he kept himself to himself, but I don’t want to give the impression he was surly or unfriendly. Reserved, I think, about covers it. Still, he gave me a quick flash of a lazy smile before he wiped his hands on a rag and put one out. “Sheriff Eller. Sorry about the noise. Your aunt wanted me to fix this.”
Facts slid into place, formed a picture. “For the shelter lobby,” I remarked. “Need help? I’m clueless but willing.”
“I’ve got her clamped,” he said, and I saw that what I took for rags were cushioning the wood against being marked by massive C-clamps. A nice touch. The table was antique teak, and Aunt Marge valued it highly.
We stood a minute in peculiar silence. I’d never had reason to spend time in his company, and I had no idea what to say. I gave up trying to think of something, heading for the stairs, and he blurted, “Would you like to see something special?”
His mild tone masked the precision of his speech. Apparently Mrs. Perkins had gotten through to someone.
He led me to the cellar stairs. “See how they’re put together?”
I looked hard. I had to ask him what the up parts and horizontal parts were called (risers and treads, it turns out), and saw they’d been fastened to two long planks out of which right angles had been cut. There were four of those planks, two at each end, and two down the middle. I nodded to show I’d seen, and he showed me the underside of the stairs leading to the second floor. No support planks. Just the risers and treads.
“It’s all held together by joints,” he said, hazel eyes glowing with admiration. “My grandfather used to do work like this. Real craftsmanship. You don’t see it anymore.”
He reached up, touched the underside of the age-darkened stairs with a sort of reverence. I blushed at the intimacy of what he’d shown me of himself in that gesture, would have fled if I could’ve found a way to do it without looking like a teenager. I fumbled for words, found, “Art. Instead of skill.”
He smiled again, a fleeting surprise in his face. “Yeah,” he approved. “Art.”
I heard Aunt Marge bang the screen door, and went upstairs to greet her and the latest plans for the animal shelter. I had the most disturbing sensation of having been shown something no one else in town had ever seen: who Donny Tucker really was.
***^***
The following morning dawned with my mood taking a turn for the better. September was about to end. I’d even managed not to remember the conversation my fiancée and I had after the rehearsal dinner, to the effect we’d both rather not have the wedding. I had a hell of a time getting rid of the dress. Women who stand a fraction shy of six feet tall don’t get off-the-rack wedding gowns. I ended up giving it to Aunt Marge, who thriftily converted yards of silk shantung into lace-trimmed pillow shams. Somehow, that memory made me feel good instead of sad, and I bounced out to the cruiser, Boris mrow-chirping eagerly next to me.
People wonder how a town so small can need a sheriff of its own, let alone a deputy. Eddie Brady’s one reason—out of jail now, charges dismissed—and drinking is another. Aside from hunting, it’s the number one recreational sport around here. The town is dry, as decreed by the Littlepages and the good folks at First Baptist, but the Episcopalians of St. Mark’s don’t have any grudge against alcohol, and we’ve got some good ole boys (and women) who brew their own. I’ve heard some hard-core drinkers swear it’s just for fun, or to “take off the edges”, but alcohol does exactly one thing: it brings out the jackass in everybody. And Virginia, for reasons I will never understand, allows you to sell cold beer at gas stations. Fill up and grab a cold fo’tie, and crack it open on the way home.
I pull over, on average, three or four DUIs a week outside tourist season. During tourist season—say, April 15 to November 1—I see ten or twelve. And there’s all the other alcohol-related crap: domestic disputes, fistfights, the occasional knife-fight, and plain stupidity. That morning, a report of cries for help from up Elk Hill behind Fourth Street. I left Brian to deal with the speed-trap on Piedmont, and trudged past clumps of sumac, the leaves tinged scarlet. I heard what the caller had complained about: a rustling, muttered curses, and a sort of groaning despair.
I got past a couple of beeches to find a trail of empty beer cans. I followed the aluminum can road to the creek. Sure enough, they’d tried the Chute.
The Chute is an exposed face of greenstone through which the water has cut a channel over the course of only God knows how many years. There are lots of interesting rocks around the county—blue quartz even—but greenstone’s probably one of the most common. It’s not really green, more a greenish-gray, and it’s used crushed as roadside gravel all over the place. The point being, the Chute is a smooth expanse of the stuff you’d never notice if not for the narrow channel cut in it by the water. Kids slide down it in summer when there’s enough water running, into a pool about six feet deep. I did when I was young, and so does every kid in town under the age of twelve or so. It’s a great ride, especially since there’s a slight convexity to the face, so you plummet the last twenty feet.
The point is, the Chute is something kids do. The reason being, it’s narrow. At the top, it’s fairly broad—maybe four inches deep and a yard wide. A third of the way down it narrows to maybe twelve inches across. And there, stuck tighter than a cork in a wine bottle, was Derek Brady, Eddie’s cousin. He’d grabbed hold of a branch overhanging the stream and that was the rustling I heard, as he tried to pop himself free. Further down, his skinnier friend was also wedged tight. Both were shivering with cold and a little blue around the toes and fingers. The air temperature was maybe sixty, but that water couldn’t have been more than fifty, and they’d been sitting in it for a few hours.
I stored up my laughter for later, while Boris huddled close to my feet. On pavement or mown grass, he’s a terror. In the woods, he seems to recall he’s descended from many similarly tasty little morsels, and goes all skulky-quiet.
“So,” I said. “You okay there, Derek?”
Derek gave me an anguished look. At least he’d left his pants on. A bottomless Derek would’ve finished me off right then. “Get me out!”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Lee Tucker,” stuttered Lee Tucker, shivering. Most of the water had been diverted away from him by Derek’s wider ass, but he was still soaked. “G-get me out please?”
“I bet,” I said, remembering how hot the previous day had been, “you thought this was going to be fun.”
Derek swore at me. I sighed, radioed Kim to get the county here, and used a branch to inch out enough to get a closer look. I didn’t like the way Derek or his buddy looked. Both had to be hypothermic, and there’d be consequences from being wedged so tight all night. I went down to the cruiser to deposit Boris, who regained his swagger the minute he hit civilization, and get the blankets from the trunk. I left a note on the windshield for the EMTs and took the blankets up to Derek and Lee. Lee caught his and wrapped it gratefully around his upper body. Derek whined, “I can’t,” and I ended up using that overhanging branch as my sole lifeline while I inched barefoot onto the water-scored rock to get the blanket into Derek’s hands. I was massaging my toes into feeling when the EMTs arrived, and watched as they and the county police and firefighters calmly strung ropes and went about rescuing the idiots.
I was back at the cruiser filling out the report when Lee Tucker was brought down by stretcher. Trembling, he was paler than he’d been in the Chute, but reached out to grab my hand. “Sheriff,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Lee, they’ll…”
“I gotta tell you somethin’.”
“Tell away,” I said, thinking it’d be a confession of pot use or moonshine.
“I know somethin’ ‘bout that girl got killed.”
I waved the EMTs out of easy earshot, dropped my voice. “Don’t play me, Lee.”
“You come found us,” said Le
e. “I figure I owe you one. I seen a truck on Littlepage Road that night. I was comin’ out of…” He blushed, whispered, “Mrs. Campbell’s. Behind the post office.”
Mrs. Campbell was Missy Campbell. When her husband died in Iraq, she’d been left with three kids under six and a job at the movie rental place. If she accepted presents from her gentleman callers, no one wanted to know, least of all me.
“Okay,” I said hastily. “What time, about?”
“Midnight, little after.”
This was important. No trucks belonged to the Littlepages except my uncle’s ridiculously fancy Mercedes SUV. I thought, however, I’d better check. “Pickup or an SUV?”
“Pickup, a little one, it had flames all sparkly on the side. Like you see them Mexicans drive.”
I winced. But I knew what he meant. Los machos love to trick out their wheels. “Okay. You sure that was the night?”
“Yeah.” Lee got sheepish. “I got paid ‘cuz it was end of the month, and…”
I understood, interrupted, “Thanks, Lee. You did good.”
He smiled as let go of my hand. My own burned from cold. I glanced at the paramedic, who shrugged, and decided to say a little prayer for Lee Tucker. If it turned out to be nothing, so be it, but at least someone wanted to help me.
CHAPTER 8
I tapped on Missy Campbell’s door with a sour twist in my gut. Her husband lay untroubled in the cemetery on Little Mountain, and she had only her bitterness and a double-wide someone had charitably dubbed a “prefabricated home”. And three kids with the big-eyed pinch-faced look of youngsters who don’t understand why their childhood has no joy. I gave the oldest a smile, but she didn’t return it. Instead, she trotted quietly to get her mother, while the boys sat on the couch alternately watching Cartoon Network and me.
Missy Campbell emerged from the bedroom, shutting the door carefully behind her. The house was clean; the children clean; the furniture shabby but clean. The pride in the place put a fine patina on the poverty, but couldn’t hide it.
Crazy, VA Page 7
