The Reapers

by John Connolly

  Wooster believed in preventive policing. People ended up in his cells only when they’d done something seriously wrong, or when every other attempt to persuade them to follow the path of righteous and decent behavior had failed. He knew the people in his charge, and he made sure that his men knew them, too. The boy and his family had not once required his attention during the first nine years that he had been chief, not until Deber appeared and wormed his way into the affections of the boy’s mother, if that was truly what he had done. There had been nothing in Deber to suggest that he was capable of arousing the affections of anyone, and the chief suspected that threats and fear had been more responsible for the gestation of the relationship than any depth of feeling on the part of either party.

  Then the mother had been killed, her battered body found lying in an alleyway behind a liquor store. There had been reports that Deber had been seen in that same liquor store less than an hour before the discovery of the body, and someone told of hearing a male voice and a female voice raised in argument at about that time. Deber, though, was like the boy now seated in the interrogation room: he hadn’t broken, and the killing of the boy’s mother remained unsolved. Deber had returned to the house full of women and taken up with the boy’s aunt, or so local gossip had it. The women were frightened of him, and had good cause to be, but he should have been frightened of them, too. They were strong and clever, and nobody thought it likely that they would tolerate the presence of Deber in their house for much longer.

  And then, not long after the commencement of that particular relationship, someone had taken the metal whistle that Deber used to summon his work crews, separated its two halves, and replaced the pea with a wad of homemade explosive. When Deber had blown the whistle, the charge had torn most of his face off. He’d lived for a couple of days afterward, blinded and in agony, despite the efforts of the doctors to keep him medicated, then had passed away. The chief was pretty sure that, wherever Deber now was, his agonies were continuing and were likely to do so for all eternity. Deber was no loss to the world, but that didn’t change the fact that a man had been killed, and the person responsible had to be found. It wasn’t good to have people wandering around freely creating booby traps out of household items, didn’t matter if they were targeting blacks or whites. Guns and knives were one thing. They were commonplace, just like the people who used them. There was nothing particularly unnerving, beyond the occasional brutality of the act itself, about a man who’d carve up another man because he crossed him on a bad day, or one who’d put a bullet in the head of the guy next to him in an argument over a woman, or a debt, or a pair of shoes. As chief, Wooster knew where he stood with men, and women, of that stripe. They were neither strange nor startling. On the other hand, someone who could kill a man with his own whistle represented a whole new way of thinking with regard to ending lives, and one that Chief Wooster was in no hurry to encourage or embrace.

  Wooster had obtained a warrant for the boy’s arrest on the day Deber had died. The state cops had laughed down the phone at him when he’d informed them of what he’d done. Deber, they told him, had so many enemies that their suspect list resembled a phone book. He had been killed by a miniature explosive device, cunningly constructed and designed to ensure that only its intended target would be affected, and that the target would not survive. It had involved a degree of planning not usually associated with fifteen-year-old Negroes living in a shack by a swamp. Wooster had pointed out that the Negro in question was attending a high school that, thanks to a charitable donation from a southern trust fund, had a reasonably well-equipped science lab, and one that could easily have provided the iodine crystals and ammonium that an examination of the remains of the whistle had revealed as the constituent components of the explosive used to kill Deber. In fact, Wooster continued, they were precisely the components that a bright kid, not some expert assassin, might use to create an explosive, although, according to the report on the whistle, it was a miracle that it hadn’t blown up long before it reached Deber’s mouth, as nitrogen tri-iodide was a notoriously unstable compound that was supersensitive to friction. The technician who had examined the whistle suggested that the compound, even the reconstructed item itself, had probably been kept soaked in water for as long as possible by the killer, so that it had only just begun to dry out by the time the victim had raised it to his mouth for the final time. It was this information about the nature of the explosive used, and the absence of any other leads, that had convinced the state police to send, however reluctantly, two detectives to interview the boy.

  Now one of those detectives stood and left the interrogation room. A moment later, the door to the chief’s little observation cell opened and the same detective entered, a cold soda in his hand.

  “We’re not getting anywhere with this kid,” he said.

  “You need to keep trying,” said Wooster.

  “Looks like you did some trying of your own.”

  “He fell over on the way to the men’s room.”

  “Yeah? How many times?”

  “He bounced. I didn’t keep count.”

  “You sure you read him his rights?”

  “Someone did. Not me.”

  “He ask for a lawyer?”

  “If he did, I didn’t hear him.”

  The detective took a long draught of the soda. Some of it dribbled down his chin, like tobacco spit.

  “He didn’t do this. It was too slick.”

  Wooster wiped his brow with his sodden handkerchief.

  “Too slick?” he said. “I knew Deber. I knew the people he ran with. They’re not the slick kind. If someone in his own circle, or someone he’d crossed, wanted him dead, they’d have shot him or stabbed him, maybe cut his balls off first just to send a message. They wouldn’t have wasted their time separating and then soldering a whistle so they could pack it with just enough explosive to tear his face off and turn his brain to sludge. They’re not that smart. That kid, though-” He stood and pointed at the glass. “-that kid is smart: smart enough to break into his school and smart enough to put together a little homemade blasting powder. Plus he had motive: Deber killed his mother and was fucking his aunt, and Deber wasn’t the gentle kind in the sack.”

  “There’s no proof that Deber killed his mother.”

  “Proof.” Wooster almost spat the word. “I don’t need proof. Some things I just know.”

  “Yeah, well, the courts look at things differently. I’m friends with the men who interviewed Deber. They did everything short of hooking him up to a battery and frying him to make him talk. He didn’t break. No evidence. No witnesses. No confession. No case.”

  In the interrogation room beyond, the boy’s head moved slightly, as though the men’s voices had carried to him, even through the thick walls. Wooster thought he might even have seen the ghost of a smile.

  “You know what else I think?” said Wooster. His voice was softer now.

  “Go on, Sherlock. I’m listening.”

  Sherlock, thought Wooster. You patronizing piece of shit. I knew your daddy, and he wasn’t much better than you are. He was a nobody, couldn’t find his shoes in the morning if someone didn’t hand them to him, and you’re still less of a cop than he was.

  “I think,” said Wooster, “that if that kid hadn’t killed Deber, then Deber would have killed him. I don’t think either of them had a choice. If it wasn’t the boy sitting in there, it would be Deber.”

  The detective gulped down the remains of his soda. Something in the evenness of Wooster’s tone suggested to him that he had overstepped the mark seconds earlier. He tried to make amends.

  “Look, Chief, you may be right. There’s something about that kid, I’ll give you that, but there’s only so much longer we can keep going with this before we have to decide whether to shit or get off the pot.”

  “Just a few more hours. You talk to him about the women, about maybe using a threat against them to loosen him up some?”

  “Not yet. Did y
ou?”

  “Tried. It was the only time he spoke.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me that I wasn’t the kind of man who’d hurt women.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he right?”

  The chief sighed. “I guess so.”

  “Shit. There are other ways, though. Informal ways.”

  The two men looked at each other. Eventually, the chief shook his head.

  “I don’t think you’re that kind of man either.”

  “No, I don’t believe that I am.” The detective crushed the soda can and aimed it, inexpertly, at a trash basket. It bounced off the edge and landed in the corner of the room.

  “I hope you shoot better than that,” said Wooster.

  “Why, you figure I’m going to have to shoot somebody?”

  “If only things were so easy.”

  The detective patted Wooster on the shouder, then instantly regretted it as his hand was soaked with the chief’s sweat. He wiped it surreptitiously on his trouser leg.

  “We’ll try again,” he said.

  “Do that,” said Wooster. “He killed him. I know he killed him.”

  He didn’t look at the detective as he left the room. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on the young black man in the room, and the young black man stared back at him.

  Two hours later, Wooster was at his desk, drinking water and swatting at flies. The two detectives had taken a break from the questioning and the stifling heat of the interrogation room. They were sitting outside the station house in their shirtsleeves, smoking, the remains of hamburgers and fries on the steps beside them. Wooster knew that the interrogation was almost at an end. They had nothing. After almost two full days of questioning, the boy had uttered only two sentences. The second was his judgment of Wooster. The first was to tell them his name.

  “My name is Louis.”

  Louis, the way Wooster’s brother-in-law, who lived down in Louisiana, might have pronounced it. The French way. Not Lewis, but Lou-ee.

  He watched the two detectives speaking softly to each other. One of them came back inside.

  “We’re going to get a beer,” he said.

  Wooster nodded. They were done. If they came back at all, it would only be to get their car, assuming they could remember where they’d left it.

  In the waiting area outside, across from the main desk, a black woman was sitting, clutching her handbag. She was the boy’s grandmother, but she could have been his mother, her face was so youthful. Ever since the boy’s arrest, one or another of the women in the boy’s family had kept silent vigil on the same cold, hard chair. They all had a dignified air about them, a sense that they were almost doing the room a service by sitting in it. This one, though, the eldest of them, made Wooster uneasy. There were stories told about her. People went to her to have their fortunes read, to find out the sex of their unborn infant, or to have their minds put at rest about missing relatives or the souls of dead children. Wooster didn’t believe in any of that stuff, but he still treated the woman with respect. She didn’t demand it. She didn’t have to. Only a fool would fail to recognize that it was her due.

  Seeing her there now, waiting patiently, certain in the knowledge that the boy would soon be released into her charge, Wooster could spot the similarities between the woman and her grandson. It wasn’t merely physical, although both carried themselves with the same slim grace. No, something of her own disconcerting calm had transferred itself to him. For some reason, Wooster thought of dark, still waters, of sinking into their depths, going deeper and deeper, down, down until suddenly pink jaws opened amid pale luminescence and the nature of the thing itself, the creature that hid in those unknown reaches, was finally and fatally revealed.

  Wooster figured his day couldn’t get a whole lot worse, although as far as he was concerned this business wasn’t done with, no sir, not by a long shot. The boy could go home to his aunts and his grandmother and whoever else shared their little coven in the woods, but Wooster would be watching him. Wherever that boy walked, Wooster would be stepping on his shadow. He’d break that boy yet.

  And there was still the fag card left to play. Wooster had his suspicions about the boy. He’d heard stories. The only women with whom Louis spent time were those in his own household, and over at the Negro school he’d had to fight his corner a couple of times. Wooster knew that kids were often wrong about these things: any sign of sensitivity, of weakness, of femininity in a man and they would be on it like flies to a cut. Most of the time they were wrong, but sometimes they got it right. There were sodomy laws in this state, and Wooster had no difficulty in enforcing them. If he could get the kid on a sodomy beef, then that could be used as leverage on the Deber killing. Spending time in the pen on a queer charge was pretty much a guarantee of pain and misery right there. Better to go in with a reputation for having taken another man’s life. At least that bought some respect. Wooster wasn’t even interested in seeing the boy go to the chair. It would be enough for him to have proven others wrong: the state cops, his own people who had laughed at him behind his back for believing that a Negro boy could have committed a crime of such sophistication. Wooster wondered if he could bait a hook for the boy. There were one or two men in the town who wouldn’t be above offering themselves up for the chance of a little dark meat. All it would take would be an agreed location, a specific time, and Wooster’s fortuitous arrival on the scene. The older man would be allowed to walk, but the boy would not. It was a possibility.

  As things happened, though, Wooster’s day was about to worsen considerably, despite his own convictions to the contrary, and any plans for entrapment would soon turn to dust.

  “Chief?” It was Seth Kavanagh, the youngest of his men. Irish Catholic. Mick through and through. There had been issues with some of the people in the town when Wooster hired him, and he’d even had a friendly visit from Little Tom Rudge and a couple of his fellow pillow-case-wearers, suggesting that he might want to reconsider hiring Kavanagh given that this was a Baptist town. Wooster listened to their pitch, then gave them the bum’s rush. Little Tom and his kind made Wooster’s skin crawl, but more than that, he felt incipient guilt whenever they came his way. He knew about the things that they had done. He knew about Negroes being beaten for still being within the town limits at sundown, even if those town limits seemed to change according to how much the local crackers had drunk at the time. He knew about unexplained fires in Negro cabins, and rapes that were brushed away as a little fun that had gotten out of hand.

  And he knew about Errol Rich, and what had been done to him in front of a great many of the very people who praised God alongside Wooster in church every Sunday. Oh, yes, Wooster knew all about that, and he had enough self-knowledge to recognize his complicity in that act, even if he had been nowhere near the old tree from which Errol had been hanged and burned. Wooster hadn’t cemented his grip on the town, not at that point, and by the time he heard about what was happening it was too late to do anything to stop it, or so he told himself. He’d made it clear, though, in the aftermath, that such an act was never to take place again, not in this town, not if he had any say in the matter. It was murder, and Wooster wouldn’t condone it. It also got the Negroes all steamed up for no good cause. It overstepped the mark to the point where their anger threatened to overcome their fear. Furthermore-and it was this point, more than any other, that got shitbags like Little Tom thinking-it had the potential to bring the feds down on their heads, and they weren’t understanding of the way things were done in small towns like this one. They didn’t understand, and they didn’t care. They were looking to make an example of people who didn’t appreciate that the times they were a-changin’, as that folk singer fella liked to put it.

  And that was another reason for making sure that the boy Louis was punished for what he had done to Deber. If he got away with murder this time, then what would follow? Maybe he might take it into his head to move on to t
he men who had killed Errol Rich, the ones who had driven the car out from underneath his feet so that he kicked at dead summer air; the ones who had doused him in gasoline; the ones who had lit the torch and applied it to his clothes, turning him into a beacon in the night. Because there were whispers about Errol Rich and the boy’s mother, too, and you could be certain that the boy had heard them. A man’s father dies like that, and it could be that he would take it upon himself to avenge him. Damn, Wooster knew that he would, in the same situation.

  Now here was Kavanagh, another of Wooster’s little experiments in social change, bothering him with shit that he was certain he could do without. Wooster wiped his face with his handkerchief, then wrung it dry into his trash basket.

  “What is it?”

  He didn’t look up. Once again, his gaze was fixed upon the wall before him, as though boring through it and the observation room beyond to reach the boy who had defied him for so long.

  “Company.”

  Wooster turned in his chair. Through the window behind him, he watched the men emerge from their cars. One was a standard-issue Ford. He smelt government, a suspicion confirmed when Ray Vallance rolled down the passenger-side window and tossed a cigarette butt on the chief’s yard. Vallance was the ASAC of the local FBI field office. He was an okay guy, as far as the feds went. He wasn’t trying to move folks faster than they could walk on this civil rights thing, but he wouldn’t let them dawdle either. Still, Wooster would have words with him about that butt. It showed disrespect.

  The second car was too good to have come from any government pool. It was tan, with matching leather upholstery, and the man who got out on the driver’s side looked more like a chauffeur than an agent, although Wooster thought that he also seemed like one mean sonofabitch, and he was pretty certain that the bulge underneath his left arm didn’t come from a tumor. He opened the right rear passenger door, and a third man joined them. He looked old, but Wooster guessed that he wasn’t much older than he himself was. He was just the kind of man who had always looked old. He reminded the chief of that old English actor, Wilfrid-Something-Something, guy was in the movie of My Fair Lady that had come out a few years back. Wooster had seen it with his wife. It had been better than he was expecting, he seemed to recall. Well, that guy, the Wilfrid guy, he had always looked old, too, even when he was young. Now here was one of his near relatives, up close and in the flesh.