Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Her eyes narrowed and I saw her stiffen.

  “I think,” she said, “you’d better take me back.”

  As I slowed in front of Byron’s house, she was already opening the door and was out of the Blazer before I could pull in at the curb. I sat for a moment with my motor idling and then drove back to the office. I got out the topographic map and the big aerial photo the Corps had sent me and studied them. I didn’t know what I was looking for, and nothing jumped out at me. Finally I put them aside and went home.

  The next morning, Saturday, I drove up to Jackson, parked in front of the post office, and went in. The barbershop was probably a better place to get information, but there were too many ears there. I was hoping I could find Adolph Dewey and that he’d be alone. I was in luck.

  “Can I help you?” he asked from behind the counter, a visor shading his face.

  I told him who I was and he nodded.

  “I remember. You went off with Clyde. Well, did he confuse you enough?”

  He was sixtyish, with gray, western-style sideburns and a thick mop of gray hair poking over the green eyeshade.

  “No, but I’m pretty confused anyway. I thought maybe you could help.”

  Dewey nodded. “If I can.”

  “The land that used to belong to Sam Pardue on the East Feliciana side: I understand it’s leased to a hunting club.”

  “Two Parish Club it’s called. Why?”

  “Know who belongs?”

  “I reckon so. I’m the secretary.”

  “Could I get a list of the members?”

  “Ain’t no secret. There’s me, there’s Gus Winchell, the barber, that you met; there’s Gene McNair—he’s the president—and there’s Doc Childe from the hospital. Oh, and five or six from over near Clinton. Why?”

  “What about Clyde Fontenot?”

  “Clyde don’t hunt.” The postmaster smiled. “He wouldn’t know which way to point the gun.”

  “I see. Of course, you’ll be losing the hunting club if this dam goes through.”

  Dewey shrugged. “Can’t do nothing about that. Why? Is somebody in the club giving you a hard time?”

  I told him about my cut tires and bump on the head.

  “I doubt that was our folks. We’re sportsmen, not poachers. Now, if I was you, I’d be looking at somebody who had no business being there. Somebody with a ax to grind.”

  “Any names come to mind?”

  “Can’t say.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “But Sam Pardue’s always felt like that land was his. We had a deal with him when he owned it, see: He could still hunt it without paying club dues. When he sold it, we agreed to keep him in, like before. But when he found out they planned to develop it, he kind of went off his rocker. Said he hadn’t sold the land for no dam and the McNairs had taken advantage of him. He was hot as hell. I’m not saying he did anything more’n talk, now, but I’m saying that might be where you oughta look.”

  “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “Sam? Over the other side of Clinton on Highway 67.”

  I wrote down the directions and thanked him.

  “By the way, you hear about this Lee Harvey Oswald business?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I heard about it.”

  “Got an opinion?”

  He set down his pencil and rested both hands on the countertop.

  “I only know he was here.”

  “You know it?”

  The postmaster nodded. “That’s right. I saw him with my own eyes.”

  He stared at me as if daring me to say he was wrong.

  “You saw Lee Oswald here in Jackson,” I said.

  “No, it wasn’t here, it was in Clinton. Late August, 1963. They were having some kind of voter registration drive for the niggers. I was a deputy sheriff then and I was in the old sheriff’s office in the courthouse. He come up to me and asked me where he was supposed to go to register to vote.”

  “To vote?”

  “That’s right. He was looking for work, and somebody told him he might be able to get on at the state hospital, but he’d do better if he was a registered voter in the parish.”

  “He told you his name?”

  “Yeah. I remember saying it was a name they didn’t have around here and where was he from, and he said New Orleans. Afterward I went out to see how the voter thing was going and I seen him get into this big Caddie with a white-haired fellow driving.”

  “And you recognized him later, after the assassination?”

  “After I heard the name of the assassin. That’s when I remembered. I looked at the pictures, and it was the same man. There’re others who saw him here, though. I’m not the only one.”

  “You’ve heard about the stories that he went to the cabin on the Devlin place?”

  Dewey snorted. “That’s just kids. I don’t believe none of that. I think the man went to the hospital and applied and they turned him down and that was the end of that. But that don’t make as good a story as saying he went to this cabin and hid out.”

  “I guess you told your story to the investigators.”

  The postmaster shook his head. “Warren Commission never sent nobody to talk to us. Wasn’t ’til Garrison started his thing in New Orleans anybody listened to what we had to say. I testified at the Shaw trial. Didn’t do no good.”

  “You think Clay Shaw was the man driving Oswald around that day?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Some said it was.”

  I started away, then stopped. “I understand that Doug Devlin was killed with the same kind of gun that killed Kennedy.”

  Dewey nodded. “I hear tell. Can’t matter, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oswald’s dead. Jack Ruby shot him in Dallas. Dead man can’t kill nobody with no kind of rifle. Now can he?”

  It was hard to argue with that kind of logic.

  The Pardue house was a brick, ranch-style structure with a wooden wagon wheel on the front lawn. The grass was well trimmed, and there was a sign over the door that said, Sam and Angie. A pickup truck was in the drive, and as I got out, a collie came bounding up to greet me. I heard hammering from the back and let the dog lead me around the side of the house. A huge pecan tree shaded most of the backyard, and there was a ladder leading up to one of the branches. At the top of the ladder was a wood structure, and as I approached, I saw a man halfway up the ladder, hard at work, while a woman held it steady from below.

  She turned as I approached.

  “Sam,” she said.

  The man at the top of the ladder looked around and laid aside his hammer.

  I told them my name, and Sam Pardue started down the ladder, moving a few inches at a time, as if the whole business might fall on top of him if he wasn’t careful. When he got to the bottom, I saw that he’d been a big man in his prime. But now he seemed hollowed out, his cheeks stretched taut over the bones and his eyes sunk into his head. His wife moved toward him protectively.

  “Trying to build the grandchildren a tree house,” he said, panting. “Been promising for a couple of years now. Finally decided I better do it now if it was gonna get done.”

  I told him my business. “I was wondering if you knew of any Indian sites or anything else of historical value on the property you sold to Mr. McNair.”

  Sam Pardue stared at me for a second, sucking in his cheeks. His shoulders were rounded, and he hunched over like his bones had melted.

  “Did he tell you to come here?”

  “No,” I said.

  Pardue nodded.

  “The whole damned bunch of ’em are crooks. They stole my land. Knew I was sick, that I needed money for the radiation treatments. Sent that Gene McNair up talking so sweet you’d of thought he was sucking honey. Said he’d buy it and keep it as a hunting club. Two months after I sold it, I heard they were going to sell it to the state for ten times what they paid me.” He broke into a fit of coughing, and his wife clutched his arm. “Now I’m running out of money for my treatments. I had to sell o
ff part of the back forty.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All I want to do is finish this tree house. I promised the grandkids. I promised I’d get it done before I go.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere yet,” his wife said, but from the pallor in his face I could see the truth, and it was clear that he knew it.

  “Do you remember when Mrs. Devlin’s husband got killed?” I asked. “I think he was found on your land.”

  The old man gave me a level stare. “I remember.”

  “Do you think it was a hunting accident?”

  “No. It was August. That isn’t deer season.”

  “Any ideas on who might have done it?”

  He rubbed his nose and turned around.

  “Ask the sheriff. Now I got to get back to my tree house.”

  I saw that I wasn’t going to make any headway, so I turned around and left. But one thing was clear: Sam Pardue knew something. And he didn’t want to say what.

  SEVEN

  I drove back to Jackson, noting that the pasture land on both sides of the road was given to stock raising rather than farming. The soil was too poor to allow profitable agriculture. I was thinking about Cynthia Devlin and her big house and wondering how she managed to survive. The cattle I’d seen were Herefords, not Brahmas, and there weren’t that many of them. Maybe there had been more cattle while her husband was alive and she’d had to sell them. There were questions I needed answered, and I could only think of one person to answer them and that was Clyde Fontenot.

  His wife told me he was out back and then went inside quickly, as if she didn’t want to be involved. I walked around the house to the garden, all roses and lilies fringed by elephant grass, and looked for Clyde. There was a toolshed at the rear behind the birdbath, and after a minute I heard something inside, like the clash of metal. I went along the path, stepping from one flagstone to another, and saw Clyde inside, bent over something that I at first took to be a lawn mower.

  “Mr. Fontenot,” I said.

  His head jerked up, and for a second I thought his glasses would fall off. Then he straightened them with both hands and smiled.

  “Dr. Graham. What brings you up here?”

  I saw that what he was working on wasn’t a lawn mower, but a wooden pole with some kind of disk on the end and wires going to a box on the floor. He thrust the contraption to the side and turned his body so that he blocked my view of his project.

  “I used to be a science teacher,” he said. “I’m sort of an inventor, you might say.”

  “Maybe you could invent a lie detector to tell me when folks around here are telling me the truth,” I said.

  He squinted at me, and then his face cracked into a smile.

  “Getting a runaround, are you? Who is it, Cyn?”

  “Partly. Nobody seems to want to say just why her husband got killed. Sam Pardue sounds like he knows, but he won’t tell. Cyn says he was stalking a poacher, but why isn’t clear. I mean what would a poacher be doing on that land? Then there’s the land itself: I didn’t see a big agricultural operation. The tree growth is fifty years old, so nobody’s made any money logging anytime lately. And the cattle aren’t a prize herd. The place needs work, but there’s a man who hangs around—this Blake Curtin. When I parked on the McNair tract, somebody cut my tires and slugged me from behind, but it’s Curtin who ran away. In the sheriff’s office they don’t seem to know anything. So I thought I’d come to the town historian and ask if you know what the hell’s going on.”

  The little man cackled.

  “Getting the treatment, eh?”

  “You could say that. And I don’t feel comfortable putting a crew out in a place where there are things happening that I don’t understand.”

  Fontenot straightened up the rest of the way and wiped his hand on a rag. I glimpsed a car battery and a tangle of wire on the cement floor by his feet.

  “What else have you heard?”

  “I heard that Lee Oswald haunts that cabin on Buck Devlin’s place.”

  Clyde exhaled like a leaking tire, then stooped down, picked up a screwdriver, and put it on the shelf.

  “And you don’t believe it.”

  “Oswald’s been buried for thirty-six years.”

  “Buried,” Fontenot repeated. “But that doesn’t mean he’s really dead.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The kids around here claim to see him. I heard it all the time when I was teaching. It was a story long before Doug Devlin got killed. The kids used to come in and tell me about it: A slight, young-looking man walking through the woods or along the creek. Sometimes in broad daylight. One of the boys asked him what he was doing, and the man said he was looking for something. But more often it’s at night. They see his face in the window, or they hear his voice.”

  “I’m sure it makes a good story.”

  “Sure does. Now let me ask you something, Dr. Graham: I want you to try to put yourself in somebody’s place, all right?”

  “Sure. Whose?”

  “Well, try to imagine you’re young, you’re unhappy, you’re out of work, and your marriage is in bad shape. You run into some people who say they can help you—older men, men that seem totally in control, who seem to care what happens to you, to value what you have to say. Men who want to help you.”

  “All right.” I wasn’t sure where he was going.

  “Then suppose they get you a job. All they ask is that on a certain day you do them a favor: You don’t show up for work. So you stay home and then you hear a horrible thing’s happened: Somebody’s killed the president of the United States, and it seems like the shots came from where you work, the sixth floor of the building. You hear the police are looking for you, so you leave your house and hide in a movie theater. But they find you and drag you out. You swear you’re innocent, but they parade you in front of the cameras. Then, two days later, while they’re moving you somewhere else, a man steps out of the crowd and shoots you.”

  “Then you’re dead,” I said.

  He brought his face close to my own, and I smelled coffee on his breath.

  “Do you believe in life after death, Dr. Graham?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Then isn’t it also possible that this man, who has been set up, framed by people he thought were his friends, accused of a terrible crime, and then assassinated himself—isn’t it just possible his essence, or personality, or psyche, as the Greeks called it, might return to a place that he associates with a turning point in his life on earth?”

  “Yes,” I said again, “it’s possible.”

  I didn’t add that I also considered it possible that the sun wouldn’t rise in the morning.

  “So now maybe you understand better.”

  I remembered Dewey the assistant postmaster asking if Clyde had managed to confuse me. I saw what he meant now.

  “You’re saying, among other things, that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and that Oswald wasn’t involved except as a dupe.”

  Fontenot nodded slowly, his eyes hard on mine. I looked for the kind of glaze that indicated madness, but, oddly, I didn’t see what I expected.

  “That’s right. I’m saying that the brains behind the Kennedy murder was somebody else.”

  “Clay Shaw?”

  Fontenot shook his head. “Shaw was an underling.”

  “Then who?”

  The little man gave me a sideways glance. “Not who. How many.”

  “Senator Buell McNair? He was younger then than I am.”

  “Young but on his way to power.”

  “Old Timothy Devlin?”

  Fontenot smiled. “Timothy hated the Kennedys. He was a states’ rights man.”

  “Who else?”

  “I didn’t say anybody. I’m not a fool. Some of ’em are still alive.”

  “They killed Douglas Devlin?”

  Fontenot shrugged. “He was too close maybe.”

  “What was his financial situation? Did he have
a successful farm?”

  “Now you’re close, too.”

  “You’re saying it was blackmail? That Doug Devlin was blackmailing the conspirators to make up for losses?”

  “I’m not saying anything. It’s too dangerous.”

  “And Doug’s brother, Buck?”

  “How do you know that’s really Buck? When was the last time anybody around here saw Buck? How do we know who sent him?”

  “Then what does the dam project have to do with it all?”

  Fontenot licked his lips.

  “The land will be flooded. The cabin will be taken down.”

  “And?”

  “The spirit will have nowhere to go. Don’t you see?” He leaned close to me then. “The only one who can bring it all to light is the ghost: Lee Oswald’s spirit. They have to destroy that. They have to kill Lee Oswald again!”

  EIGHT

  When I got back to the office, there was a message on the answering machine from Meg Lawrence asking me to call.

  I punched in the number she’d left and waited, still trying to reconcile the rational description of history I’d gotten a few days ago from Clyde Fontenot with the eccentricity I’d just encountered. Meg’s voice jerked me out of my thoughts.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but David said there was a copy of Swanton’s Indians of the Southeast I could borrow but we couldn’t find it here and he said maybe you’d taken it home. The library’s copy is checked out and …”

  “I took it home a couple of days ago,” I said. “I can bring it in Monday, or you can come by and pick it up.”

  “Would it be a lot of trouble if I came by your house?”

  I sensed the enthusiasm in her voice and smiled to myself.

  “Why don’t you come by in an hour?” I said and gave her the address.

  I finished up a few things at the office, picked up a hamburger at Burger King, and then drove home. It was two o’clock, and the few fishermen along the cypress lake were hunched down under their straw hats. One or two hardy souls jogged along the bike path, sweat streaming down their bodies, and when I got to the Interstate overpass, some cooler heads were parked underneath, waxing their cars. I passed the golf course, where little knots of players huddled at the holes and bounced along in their electric carts. There was a canebrake where the old railroad trestle went over the road. When I was little, I’d cut bamboo for fishing poles there. But that had been a different world.