Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  It was a face I knew, one that in life had been intelligent but now was fixed in an expression of eternal surprise.

  There was a third eye in Clyde Fontenot’s face, where someone had shot him, and my guess from the look on his face was that he had known who it was.

  NINETEEN

  Over the next three hours I gave three separate statements. The first was to Sheriff Staples, who made his way carefully down to the water’s edge in his double-wing shoes and directed his deputies from there. The second was to a state policeman named Connell, who wrote quickly on a pad and told me I’d have to come in and sign my statement later. And the third was to Sheriff Buford Cooney of West Feliciana Parish, a gray-haired heavyweight in denims, who stomped across the sand in his cowboy boots, spat tobacco to punctuate his commands, and reminded me that our paths had crossed once before, at a Tunica burial site. It was Cooney who pointed out that the body had been found against the cut bank on the west side. He was countered by Staples, who made it clear that the body was now on the east side and that, in any case, the fact that it had nested against the cut bank only showed that the water ran faster on that side and that Fontenot might well have been killed on the east bank and fallen into the stream.

  Cooney only spat more juice and skewered him with pig eyes.

  The state policeman retreated tactfully, knowing enough not to be caught between two rural political bosses.

  I was reminded of the situation after Doug Devlin had been shot: It was impossible to get any sort of coordinated investigation under the circumstances.

  Bertha, in the meantime, had been assisted uphill, professing heat exhaustion. I’d had David drive her back to Baton Rouge with the rest of the crew.

  By five o’clock the ambulance had taken away the body, and I went to Clinton to sign my statement for Staples and the state trooper. Cooney had growled that I was expected in St. Francisville tomorrow to do the same, and I nodded. While in the Clinton office I overheard one of the deputies saying that Mrs. Fontenot had last seen her husband leaving the house at dawn.

  Maybe when I appeared in Cooney’s office I could find out whether the lawman had known old Timothy Devlin.

  Once I was done in Clinton, I drove back west, toward the survey area, but instead of turning north before Thompson Creek, I kept on straight and turned in at Cyn’s.

  I had to know where she was when it happened.

  But her station wagon was gone, and my knocks on the door went unanswered. I went out to the road and checked her mailbox, but the little flag was down, and the box was empty, so someone must have picked up her mail.

  I started back to town, feeling sapped.

  I hadn’t given my theory to the officials, but I thought I knew what had happened. Clyde Fontenot had gone hunting, but not for the ghost of an assassin, as he claimed. Instead, he had taken his homemade metal detector and gone searching for an assassin’s fortune. But there had been someone else out there who had known about Oswald and who had his own designs on the money. He had shot Clyde, the same way they had killed Douglas Devlin last year.

  The police report was wrong. Doug Devlin had been murdered, just as Clyde Fontenot had been murdered. They had been murdered because of something that had begun thirty-six years ago during a hot New Orleans summer. First there had been the schemers, and then their tool, Oswald, and finally there had been the man with money, Timothy Devlin.

  I wondered how many others had also been involved.

  Because men like Timothy move in packs. Hatred doesn’t thrive by itself, it always attracts fellow haters. And in those days the Felicianas had been full of them. Rich white men with plantations, who saw blacks as little more than slave labor and resented anything the Kennedy administration might do to liberalize voting rights. They had been men of power, men of prestige, men of incredible arrogance. Men, I thought, like Sheriff Buford Cooney.

  Of course, Cooney would have been young then, maybe thirty, and not a political boss yet, but he may have known. If not at the time, then later.

  Sheriff Cooney, I got some information for you. Something big. You just got to help me out now …

  I knew enough about Louisiana to know that was the way it went, all the way up to the governor’s mansion.

  The trouble was that there wasn’t any way I was going to get Cooney to tell me.

  And did it really matter? Timothy was gone. Anyone he had brought into the scheme was probably gone. Clay Shaw and David Ferrie and the rest of the New Orleans crowd that D.A. Jim Garrison had linked to Oswald were gone. Even Garrison was gone. The only one who was left, who had been close to Timothy and Doug, was a man too addled to speak.

  But he hadn’t always been addled. Once, Blake Curtin had been able to use his tongue. Once, when he had gone deer hunting with old Timothy and his son …

  Something nudged at my consciousness, but I couldn’t force it free. Something about Blake Curtin in his marine field jacket …

  When I reached the office only David was there, with what remained of a six-pack of dark beer in front of him and his feet up on the sorting table. He hadn’t changed from his field clothes and he looked as haggard as I felt. I saw an empty six-pack on the floor next to him.

  “I figured you’d be in sooner or later,” he said and shoved a beer into my hand.

  “I had to sign some papers,” I explained.

  “Right.” He swigged his beer and then slammed it down onto the table so that the artifacts in the sorting trays jumped. “Well, Bombast’s gone back.”

  “And?”

  “She’s stopping work.”

  “What?” I’d been afraid that might happen.

  “That’s right. She says she’s writing a Stop Work order tomorrow. Says it’s too dangerous out there, says it’s a crime scene and until this is all cleared up, it exposes the government to too much liability.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s what I said. Well, maybe she’ll wreck on the way back to New Orleans.”

  I twisted off the cap and took a long pull of the bitter brew.

  “Remember when I started working here?” David asked. I nodded.

  “Seven years ago. I was a senior in college. My family thought I was crazy. First I drop my rabbinical studies, I go into religious studies here at LSU, then I get interested in the anthropological study of religion and switch over, and then I end up in archaeology. Took me six years to get my degree.”

  “You were always pretty slow,” I said wryly.

  “I remember the first job you ever gave me. You sent me out with a crew to the damndest swamp I ever saw. I had to make a transect through water halfway to my balls. I stepped on two snakes and gave every mosquito in the state a blood sample. We got to this little island and nobody could find the surveying flags, and we didn’t know if we were on course or if we’d lost the path somewhere back there in the swamp.”

  “Rough one,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “That was when I knew this was what I wanted to do.”

  I had a memory of a mud-smeared face with hollow eyes, not too unlike the one that now confronted me. He’d gone on to graduate school for his master’s degree, and when he finished two years later, I’d taken him in as a full-fledged project manager.

  “The bitch is that I still want to do it,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “So you want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

  I shrugged and related my suspicions.

  “And I thought you were against conspiracy theories,” he said.

  “I was. But there seems to be some good evidence here.”

  “What about the woman?”

  A wave of nausea passed through me. Maybe I’d had too much sun. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there something between you?”

  “Ask me next week.”

  “Well, maybe Bombast will relent,” he said. “Maybe they’ll solve the murder. Maybe …”

  “Yeah.”

  He tossed his
empty bottle into the trash. “You know, even if it’s true about Oswald, nobody’ll ever believe it. It’s been too long. The case is closed.”

  “I know.”

  I got up slowly, feeling every bone in my body complain.

  “Go home,” I said. “Get some rest. By the way, anybody check on Meg?”

  “She’s gone,” David said. “I meant to tell you, but I didn’t want to depress you anymore.”

  “Gone?” I spun to face him.

  “Checked out with her parents. Said they were going back to Maryland. I heard her old man was royally pissed. He doesn’t want her down here in yahoo land anymore.”

  “Christ.”

  Suddenly it seemed almost too much effort to move. At last I drifted out to the Blazer and sat in it a long time, only vaguely aware of the cars passing on the street. I made myself insert the key and start the engine, and only when I had the air conditioner blowing in my face did I come halfway to myself. I felt better after a shower, but not by that much.

  It was the stress, of course. It always knocked the wind out of me at first, but in the past I’d always managed to catch my second wind.

  Like the day I’d fought Ernie Slagle in the fourth grade. He’d ground my face into the dust and twisted my arm behind my back and he kept yelling something, taunting me.

  And when I couldn’t stand it anymore I’d found a source of energy I didn’t know I had and rolled over, spilling him into the dirt. And when I drove my fist into his face and felt his nose crack, I’d had the satisfaction of seeing the surprise in his eyes.

  Afterward neither of us would tell the principal what it was about, and I’d blocked most of the episode from my memory, except for bits and pieces.

  But suddenly, alone now in the old house, thinking back to that terrible fall of 1963, when a man named Oswald had changed our lives, I remembered. And most of all I remembered what Ernie Slagle had been screaming.

  I was standing in the middle of the living room, trembling, staring at the painting on the wall, the one I had grown up with, when the door chimes shook me out of it.

  Cyn. It had to be. She’d heard what had happened and come here.

  And yet even as I reached for the doorknob, I pulled my hand back.

  So what would I tell her? I’d found a name for my own bogies and now I wanted to hear about hers?

  The chimes sounded again, and I opened the door.

  “Dr. Graham?”

  There was a man standing on my porch, and it took me a while to recognize him. When I did, I cringed inwardly.

  Because the man in front of me was the man who’d threatened to sue me only yesterday, the man who’d killed me with his eyes and taken his daughter out of my clutches.

  Norman Lawrence, Meg’s father.

  TWENTY

  “May I come in?” he asked.

  I nodded and stepped back. He shut the door behind him, gave the room a cursory look, and then turned to face me.

  “You know we’re taking Meg back home with us.”

  “So I heard. In fact, I thought you were already gone.”

  “I felt it was best to get her out of the hospital, but we’re staying in a motel. Her roommate will keep the apartment until the fall, when Meg comes back. But I’d like for some doctors at home to see her.”

  The better to sue me with, I thought.

  “I understand. But Mr. Lawrence—”

  He held up a hand, and his gold Rolex gleamed in the light.

  “Let me finish. When Meg decided to come down here to school, her mother and I were naturally disappointed. She could have gone to any of a number of excellent schools in the area. Catholic University, William and Mary, even St. John’s. But she claimed to want a change of scenery and she threatened to drop out entirely unless we sent her to Louisiana.”

  Which, I thought, had confirmed all his worst fears.

  “She’s been enrolled for a year now. Her grades are good, but frankly, we knew she wasn’t getting the education she would have gotten at one of the better schools. Last year, when she took that field school business, I thought she’d get all this out of her system and come home, but instead she insisted on staying for the whole year. We held our breath through the entire school year, waiting for her to come back on vacation. Then she called and told us she was going to work for you this summer.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. I wondered if he wasn’t hot in the coat and tie. But then I realized he probably didn’t own any comfortable clothing.

  “Naturally, Louise and I were disappointed. I suppose, to be honest, that I, at least, hoped she’d fail.”

  It was not an admission I’d expected to hear.

  “She didn’t,” I told him quietly. “No matter what happened, she did an excellent job.”

  He nodded. “I guess she must have.”

  Norman Lawrence walked over to my mantel, picked up a small vase, turned it over in his hand, and then carefully set it back down.

  “I suppose you know some of this is quite valuable.” It was as if he were advising a client.

  “Yes.”

  “In any case, when this happened to Meg, it just confirmed what I wanted to believe. You have to understand, sir, she’s my only daughter.”

  “I think I understand,” I said. “I was an only child.”

  “To have to leave everything, come down here, not knowing how badly hurt she was …” His chest slowly rose and fell. “Well, I imagine I was pretty impatient with you the other day.”

  “A little,” I said.

  “More than a little,” he insisted. “After I got Meg out of the hospital, she let me have it with both barrels. Louise got involved, too. They let me know I was just one notch higher than Attila the Hun.”

  I felt some of the tension dissipate. He wasn’t going to sue.

  “Believe me, Mr. Lawrence, I’m as upset about this as you are.” And more, I thought, because today somebody was murdered over it.

  “I’m sure. Well …” He turned back to the door, suddenly at a loss. “I suppose I’d better get back to my family.”

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Lawrence.”

  “I’m glad I did.” He gave me his hand and we shook. Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached into his coat pocket. “By the way, here’s my card. You can contact Meg through me if you don’t have her address. And if there’s anything I can do to help you, don’t hesitate.”

  We shook hands again.

  I watched him walk down the sidewalk and under the camphor trees to his car.

  I glanced at his card:

  S. Norman Lawrence III, Assistant General Counsel, General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C.

  I put the card in my wallet and closed the door.

  At least we wouldn’t get sued, which was small comfort, since a defunct corporation, as my own lawyer once explained, has virtually no exposure. The beauty of the law.

  It wasn’t the law I was worried about now, though, it was my own demons.

  The year had been 1963 and when I remembered that year, what usually came to mind was my father’s ashen face and the stricken expression of my mother.

  “The president was pronounced dead at 1 P.M. this afternoon at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.”

  My parents had cried and I had cried.

  They were gone now, but the demons weren’t.

  If Pepper had been here I could have talked it out with her. My resentment boiled up, and I told myself I was being unreasonable.

  “It’s an unstable situation,” she’d said. “I can’t just move in with you, and I don’t think either one of us is ready for marriage. We need time.”

  We.

  I couldn’t stay in this house tonight.

  I dialed Cyn’s number, but no one answered. Forty-five minutes later I was pulling into her drive, but her car was still gone. Blake Curtin’s pickup was there, though, and there were lights on in the house. I got out and went around to the back, picking my way carefully in the darkness.


  When I came to the back door I stopped. There was a sound of hammering inside. I went up the steps and peered through the glass of the back door. Blake Curtin was up on a ladder in the hallway, fastening a new duct cover for the central air.

  I tried the door and it opened. I waited until he’d finished his job and then cleared my throat.

  “Hello, Blake.”

  The man on the ladder jerked around, almost falling, and I went forward to steady his perch. For an instant his hand with the hammer hovered inches above my head, and then he started down slowly rung by rung.

  “I’m sorry to startle you. I was looking for Mrs. Devlin.”

  Curtin frowned slightly and then shrugged.

  “Have you seen her today?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Any idea where she is?”

  He made a great circle motion with his left hand, and I took it he was saying she was far away.

  I changed the subject. “Did you hear about what happened to Clyde Fontenot?”

  Curtin stepped back suddenly, striking the wall with his back.

  “Somebody killed him. He was found not very far from where Doug Devlin was found. Somebody shot him, too.”

  The handyman licked his lips, and his eyes hunted for an escape.

  “Have you been here long? Has anybody else been here looking for Mrs. Devlin? Any policemen?”

  He shook his head violently.

  I could tell he was about to bolt, so I backed away.

  “Well, sorry to bother you.”

  He gave a half nod, and I felt his eyes on my back as I went out the way I’d come. I backed out to the road, then saw the flag on the mailbox was still up. So no one had taken in today’s delivery.

  I sat beside the highway for a few minutes with my motor running, trying to think. But thoughts wouldn’t come.

  When I was small and the frustration had been more than I could live with, I’d once run away, legs pumping until there was no breath left. Now, thirty years later, I drove.

  I went west to U.S. 61, then north through St. Francisville, Wakefield, and across the line into Mississippi. I rolled down my window and let the night air whip in and lick my face. The air was warm and smelled like the river half a mile to my left. I arrowed through Woodville and down through the Homochitto bottoms.