Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  He walked to the door.

  “Maybe you and Cyn deserve each other. But watch out for her. She’s a black widow.”

  The door closed after him, and I sat on the floor, ashamed and humiliated. I’d been terrified of the pain he’d inflicted, and that had kept me from rushing him, even as he did everything he could to force me to do it. And he had dismissed me as harmless because I was afraid.

  I got up slowly, rubbing my solar plexus where he’d punched me, and looked at the mirror. The glass was shattered, but it could be replaced. But that wasn’t the point. He had violated this house, he had violated my parents’ room, and he had violated me. My eyes fell on the bed and the pistol, and I winced. He hadn’t even considered me enough of a threat to take the gun when he’d gone.

  I collapsed beside the ancient weapon and stared at the floor. I wondered what my parents would have thought if they’d witnessed this scene. But a voice in back of my head counseled me to back off. It was too easy to let myself sink into self-pity. Buck Devlin had been trained to kill and I had not. Where was the shame in that? He had come here, ostensibly, to check me out and to make me so angry that he could determine whether I was the killing kind.

  But what if that was all just a lie? What if Buck had done the killings himself? What if he was using me to provide an alibi for himself? The outraged brother, pursuing his kinsman’s murderer.

  I had nothing to be ashamed of. That’s what I told myself as I went downstairs slowly, trying to make myself stop shaking. But the rage was still in me. It had been a long time since I’d hated anyone, and that had been on the playground when I was ten and a bully had rubbed my face in the dust. But I’d managed to bloody his nose and won the fight. The vice principal had read us a lecture about fighting and had threatened to call our parents, but I had the sense that secretly he was glad the bully had gotten his comeuppance.

  Now I had an urge to give Buck Devlin his deserts.

  Except that wouldn’t necessarily do anything to solve the problem at hand.

  No, his best deserts would be if he had killed his brother and I could prove it.

  I thought of going back to the office, but there was no way I could face the others. David would know me well enough to realize something was wrong, and I didn’t want to have to tell everyone about being disarmed and humiliated in my own home.

  The only thing I could do now was go back to where it had all started, Jackson, and try to find the man who seemed to know the secrets but was unable to tell.

  It was time to force Blake Curtin’s hand.

  I found him at Cyn’s, working downstairs. He’d finished the kitchen and now he’d moved to the hallway, where he was working with spackling compound and a trowel. I could see him through the window as I stood in the backyard, up on the ladder with his back to me, smoothing, applying more of the white paste, and smoothing again. He reminded me of an automaton, tireless, working with the same movements, as if time itself were pursuing him.

  I went up the steps and into the kitchen, walking quietly. His work from the last time I’d been there was already dry, and I wondered how long it would take him to fix every hole and crack in the creaky old house and decided that whenever that was, he’d probably turn to painting. He was that kind of person.

  For a long time I listened to the sound of his spatula smoothing the spackling, and I tried to think of some better way to get his attention than by disturbing him. But I knew the answer before the question was fully formed, and so I walked down the hallway and into the room where he worked, knowing I was changing a life.

  “Hello, Blake,” I said.

  He froze, and then the spatula came down slowly in his hand.

  “We need to talk,” I said. “It’s important.”

  He stared at me, and for an instant I thought he was going to launch himself from the ladder.

  “Listen,” I said, “this thing has gone on long enough. Two people are dead. It has to stop.”

  His tongue flicked out to touch his lips, and he gave a little half shrug.

  “I don’t think you killed anybody,” I said. “But I think you know what’s going on.”

  He jerked his head violently in denial.

  “It started a long time ago, didn’t it? It started with Timothy Devlin. He was your friend because his son Doug was your friend. I know you didn’t have anything to do with what happened back then, but thirty-six years is too long to keep it all bottled up. I know, I’ve been keeping something bottled up, too. And it cost me a lot of effort. Maybe we both need to let go.”

  His face was the color of the plaster on the wall now, and he seemed to sway. His lips opened and I saw yellow teeth.

  “Two dead people are a hell of a load. You know their names, don’t you?” I took a step toward him, steadying the ladder with one hand. “No, I’m not talking about Doug and Mr. Fontenot. I’m talking about the first two. You know their names …”

  He was shaking now, and the spatula dropped out of his hand and clattered onto the floor.

  “The first man was somebody we all knew. We saw him on TV with his wife. We saw him standing there without a hat when he was inaugurated. And then we saw him in that motorcade. You know his name. It was Jack Kennedy.”

  His mouth yawned open in pain, and he sank down onto the top of the ladder, his back falling against the surface he had just finished.

  “Jack Kennedy was killed because of something that happened here, and you know it. You know the truth. You may be the only one left who does know the truth.” I was whispering now, my face a few inches from his, and I saw his eyes were screwed shut, as if he could will it away.

  “Because the other dead man was Oswald. You were here when he came. You know what happened. You’ve got the truth locked up inside you, and if you tell it, we can find out about the others, Fontenot and Doug Devlin.”

  All at once a sound rose out of him like wind on the tundra. It was a kind of howl I had never heard before, at once lonely and hopeless. He plowed past, knocking me backward, and I tripped over the ladder, grabbing it for support and feeling it fall down on top of me. It took precious seconds to disentangle myself and get back to my feet, and by that time I heard the motor of his truck starting.

  I lurched after him, reaching the back door in time to see the truck disappear around the house in a cloud of dust. I ran after it, reaching the Blazer where it was parked in front of the house and then making a circle in the front yard.

  Curtin had turned south, toward Highway 10, but I didn’t think he had any plan—he was just running. If he continued on this road, he’d end up in St. Francisville, but even as I tried to close the gap, I saw him shoot left onto Highway 965, a narrow, tree-canopied blacktop that angled southwest. I followed for two miles and saw him swerve left again, this time onto another blacktop. This one led to Star Hill, a small community six miles to the west on Highway 61.

  Maybe, I thought, he’d run himself out, like a horse that had yet to be broken. Maybe if I just kept back …

  I tried hanging behind, but his truck only grew smaller in the distance, so I gunned to keep up. The road was narrow and shady, with curves, and I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off the asphalt. There was nowhere else to go, so even if he was out of sight now, I knew he was up there.

  The road bent left alongside a cemetery, and I saw the stop sign for Highway 61. Which way had he gone? Right toward St. Francisville, or left toward Baton Rouge?

  If he went left, he could cross Thompson Creek and hit a road that connected with Highway 68. From there it was only ten miles to his trailer.

  My best bet was that he was heading for home.

  I was on a winding stretch of two-lane, curving down out of the hills and onto the floodplain. There was no place to pass and no way to see further than the next bend in the road.

  I urged the Blazer a few feet from the tailgate of a station wagon and realized we were coming to the place where the road widened to four lanes at the base of the hills, swing
ing out over Thompson Creek in an arc. I shot past the station wagon as the road opened up and accelerated.

  And then stomped on the brakes.

  Because near the end of the bridge, on the West Feliciana side, there were cars stopped and people getting out. As I slowed, I saw a black smudge of skid marks. Someone had gone across the bridge too fast, lost control, and tumbled over the side.

  I pulled onto the side of the road and stopped.

  I didn’t have to see who it was, because I already knew, but I forced my eyes over anyway.

  The pickup was upside down, the camper top crushed, and its wheels were still spinning. There was a lump of clothing on the sand at the base of the bluff. The people who had seen it were still standing beside their cars, shocked.

  Finally, a couple of them started down the creek bank toward the lump of clothing that was Blake Curtin.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  They took him to Earl K. Long, the charity hospital on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge. The emergency waiting area was crowded with the usual unfortunates and their families, and I stepped out into the parking lot with my cell phone and called for Cyn at the motel. The desk clerk said she wasn’t in her room. I went back and waited until the doctor came out and told me Blake Curtin was out of danger. He wanted to know if I was family and then told me Curtin had taken a bump on the head and was resting. Aside from that and a few cracked ribs he was okay, but there wouldn’t be any talking to him before tomorrow. I called Cyn again at the motel, got no answer, and drove home.

  This time there was no gray car outside, and I fell onto the couch in my clothes and closed my eyes.

  I’d tried to solve a couple of murders and almost ended up getting a man killed. Good work, Graham.

  Maybe there were some things best left alone. I’d never believed that, of course, but now I wondered if it didn’t make sense. Did innocent people have to get killed to write an end to a story that was already over? And if Fontenot had gotten in the way, well, he had known the risk when he’d trespassed. Maybe I should just go to Staples and tell him about Fontenot’s metal detector and let the law handle the business, even if it meant not handling it at all. There was a gentle swish of traffic outside on the boulevard, and I remembered when I had been small, my father taking me by the hand and leading me along. The worst thing then had been the possibility of stumbling over a broken piece of sidewalk, where the roots of the oaks had pushed up the concrete. Another world …

  The ringing phone took me out of my thoughts, and I forced myself over to pick it up. Maybe, I thought, it was Cyn, telling me she was back.

  “Alan Graham?” I came awake instantly. It was Norman Lawrence’s voice.

  “Mr. Lawrence?”

  “Norman, please. Look, I’ve got what you wanted. It took some doing, but never underestimate the fear a voice from the General Accounting Office can instill in people.” He chuckled to himself, and for once I was glad of a strong, implacable federal bureaucracy.

  “You’ve got times and places?” I asked.

  “Partly. For the rest I’ve got a promise of cooperation.”

  I waited and heard paper rustling as he turned pages.

  “Let’s see. You wanted to know about this Buck Devlin.”

  “Yes.” My heart started its thumping again.

  “Well, a lot of it’s not in the personnel records. Classified and all that. You’d need a lot more muscle than I have to get to it. But I did call a fellow at the Pentagon, and he gave me what they had. And what he said was that the records show that on the date you gave last year, Colonel Francis Devlin was out of the country.”

  “Out of the country?”

  “In one of the Arab Emirates, to be exact. The nature of his mission isn’t clear, but he was definitely there for the period you mentioned.”

  “If it was a spook mission, how can anybody be sure?”

  “Well, because of what he got when he came home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a medal for meritorious unspecified duties in the national interest. The medal was awarded in the White House Rose Garden by Bill Clinton.”

  I felt suddenly weak. Lawrence was right. The president of the United States was not going to give a man a medal for duty overseas when he hadn’t really been there.

  “Is that bad?” Norman Lawrence asked.

  “No. Just takes out the main suspect up to now.”

  “Sorry. On the other, Sheriff Cooney told me to go to hell and bark at the moon—his words, but I have a promise from Sheriff Staples to help you. He said he’d open his files as a special favor.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “You told me he used to be with DEA, so I started with them. They let slip that he was trying to get their support as part of an application for some federal funds to fight drug problems. I told him who I was and mentioned his grant application. Fear works wonders.”

  “So is he going to get his grant?” I asked.

  “I can’t say. From what they said, the drug problem was bigger down there a few years ago, and I had the feeling they sensed he was just trying to expand his empire.”

  “Imagine that.”

  Lawrence chuckled again.

  “Meg says tell you hello. It’s all I can do to keep her at home. She really wants to go back.”

  “Tell her to come ahead,” I said, wondering at the same time if there’d be any work for her or for any of us.

  I thanked him and went back to sit on the couch.

  Buck Devlin had seemed like a good bet. He knew how to kill without being traced, and it wouldn’t be the first time one brother had killed another. I’d thought he was a good candidate from the first, and after today I wanted him more than ever.

  But there didn’t seem to be any way he could have done it, at least Doug’s murder. That only left the others.

  I got out a sheet of paper and wrote down the names.

  Sam Pardue. True, Pardue was in poor health, but he could have killed Doug Devlin three years ago and maybe even managed to get up enough strength to kill Clyde Fontenot a few days past.

  Dr. Alvin Childe. That didn’t make any sense to me, but he was worth checking, because he belonged to the hunting club that used the Pardue land.

  Gene McNair. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who could kill, but then how did such people look? He had a motive for keeping the project under way. But why would he have killed Doug Devlin?

  Blake Curtin. I was on thin ice here. Curtin impressed me more as an unwilling witness than a killer. Still, he might as well be checked out.

  Adolph Dewey. The assistant postmaster had had opportunity, but that was all that came to mind. I wrote his name, but I felt like I was reaching.

  Pat Staples. I wrote his name and set the pencil down. Did I really suspect the sheriff of East Feliciana Parish? I wasn’t sure. I only knew he’d had the means and that he was ambitious. His motive was something else.

  And after I’d written all the names I could think of, I came to the one name I didn’t want on the list.

  Cynthia Jane (Brown) Devlin.

  I must have drifted off to sleep soon afterward because it was dark when I woke up. The phone was ringing, and when I found it, I heard Cyn’s voice.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Farmerville,” she said. “The clerk said somebody’d called a couple of times, and I figured it must be you.”

  “Blake’s in the hospital,” I said. “He had a wreck on 61.”

  I heard her gasp.

  “Is it bad?”

  “Not as bad as it should’ve been. He missed the bridge at Thompson Creek and ended up over the side, but the doctor says all he got was a few cracked ribs and a mild concussion.”

  “Thank the Lord. Where is he?”

  “Earl K.,” I said. “They said he can have visitors tomorrow.”

  “How did it happen?”

  I got my courage together and told her.

  “I just wanted
to see where he was headed. I guess I screwed things up.”

  “Poor Blake,” she said. “He probably didn’t know where he was going. Do you really think he knows anything about Kennedy’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you have to do what’s necessary to find out.”

  “Thanks for understanding.”

  “I’ll leave right away,” she said. “I should be home in four hours.”

  The next morning, Wednesday, I phoned the office to say I’d be late and got a chewing out from Marilyn for letting the business slide. I called Cyn’s home, got her, and told her I’d meet her at the charity hospital on Airline in Baton Rouge. The hospital was named for a former governor who’d gone crazy while addressing the legislature, and it catered to the indigent.

  Cyn met me in the parking lot, dark places under her eyes from lack of sleep, and we went inside. The nurse told us Mr. Curtin was awake but a little groggy. She said we could go in at visiting hours, so we hung around for a while until they allowed people into the ward.

  He was inside a curtained cubicle, his head swathed and propped on a pillow. He was staring at the ceiling, his eyes sunk back in his skull, and for a little while I wasn’t sure he was breathing. Cyn leaned over him.

  “Hello, Blake,” she said.

  Dead eyes rolled slowly over to where she stood, and I wondered if he was going to smile, but he didn’t.

  “They say you got a bump on the head,” she said. “But you’re going to be okay. They say they’re going to throw you out of here in a day or so.”

  His mouth opened slightly and his lips moved, but no sound came out.