Right of Redemption

by Jenna Bennett

  “I’m going to have to ask you folks to leave,” Yvonne said. “We don’t hold with that kind of talk here.”

  The talker smirked and started to push his way out of the booth.

  “After you pay your bill,” Yvonne added, and he subsided back into the seat. I guess maybe he’d been hoping to make his escape without that. “I’ll be right back.”

  She flounced off toward the front, and toward Maureen, who had the ticket ready to go. Yvonne snatched it from her fingers with a couple of words. Maureen nodded. Yvonne turned on her heel and stalked back to the table, where she slapped the bill down. “Pay and leave.”

  The kid on the other side of the booth made a production number out of pulling out his wallet—it was attached to his belt loop with a chain—and fishing out a couple of twenties, which he put down on top of the bill with the expression of someone who thought that having two twenties in his wallet made him an important person.

  Yvonne snatched the bills and took them to the cash register to make change. Cletus followed her. They exchanged a few words, a conversation that ended with Yvonne patting Cletus on the arm, and then Cletus headed outside while Yvonne made her way back to the table. “I kept twenty percent for your waitress,” she informed the two young men as she put the rest of the money down on the Formica. “Take the rest and go. And don’t come back. Your kind isn’t welcome here.”

  She went back to the hostess station. The two young men looked around, maybe hoping to see approval on someone’s face, but if so they were disappointed. Everyone in Beulah’s looked like they were on Cletus’s side.

  So the pair moved out of the booth and swaggered toward the door, making sure to bump into as many people as possible along the way. Nobody said anything, although every pair of eyes in the restaurant, from the kitchen staff to the waitresses to the guests, was on them as they made their way to the door in utter silence. In one final act of spite, the guy with the darker hair, not the one who had spoken to the little Johnson girl, reached out and knocked over a stack of menus sitting on the counter.

  “Oops.” He grinned offensively. Yvonne’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything, just watched as they sauntered to the door and out.

  The door shut behind them with a slam, but nobody moved or said anything. I think we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop. Outside in the parking lot, there was the roar of an engine, and then the sound of spitting gravel. Some of it hit the side of the building, and the windows. Charlotte flinched.

  I leaned toward the window and peered out. It was no surprise to the see the truck we’d parked beside, the one with the Confederate flag sticker and steel balls hanging from the hitch, peel out of the parking lot and hit the blacktop with squealing tires. Of course it would belong to these two. They were just the types who’d need to hang a steel-plated scrotum from the back of their truck to compensate for the real balls they ought to have between their legs, but that they clearly lacked.

  I squinted, but they were going too fast and kicking up too much dust for me to catch more than a couple of digits of the license plate. A number 4 and a K, followed by maybe a 3 or an 8.

  And then they were gone, out of sight down the Columbia Highway in the direction of Sweetwater. “They’ve left,” I said, and we all drew a collective breath of relief. The other conversations started up all around us.

  “That was scary,” Charlotte said, and I guess maybe it had been.

  I mean, for a second or two, just after they walked out and before I heard the truck start up, the thought had crossed my mind that they might come back inside with an automatic weapon each, and would blow us all to kingdom come. It’s the kind of thing you have to worry about these days.

  But they hadn’t, and other than that, I hadn’t really been afraid at any point. Maybe all this time spent in Rafe’s company, and all my encounters with rapists and murderers, had knocked most of the fear out of me. I’d been angry, but I hadn’t been scared. At least not for myself.

  “You OK?” I asked Darcy.

  She nodded, but her lips were tight. “Nasty buggers.”

  They had been. “It makes you wonder about the kind of people who can look at a sweet little girl like that, and say something that ugly.”

  And then I wondered whether Darcy had ever been on the receiving end of comments like that. And whether Carrie would be. They were both lighter-skinned than Cletus’s little girl, but they weren’t white.

  I didn’t ask, though. Darcy was already upset, and having to answer that question would only upset her more.

  “Where were we?” I said instead, trying to infuse some brightness into my voice. “Before this happened, how far had we gotten on discussing the Morris mess?”

  “You’re going to the courthouse tomorrow,” Charlotte said promptly, “to look at the trial records.” I got the feeling she was eager to put the whole event behind her as quickly as possible, too.

  I nodded. “I don’t know that it really matters whether he was guilty of the murder or not. As long as someone thought he was, and thought he got away with it, that would be reason enough to kill him. Although I guess I would like to know whether he actually did it and he was just let off on a technicality, or whether he was actually wrongfully arrested in the first place.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Charlotte asked.

  I shook my head. “There’s no need. If you want to read the transcript, we can get together afterwards. I’ll stop by the office—” I glanced at Darcy, “so you can make a copy. In case you want to read it, too.”

  She nodded. “While you’re in Columbia, do you think you might try to figure out whether Morris started the process to redeem the house, or whether we still own it?”

  “He’s dead,” Charlotte said, looking from her to me and back. “Doesn’t that mean we do?”

  Darcy shook her head. “If he went ahead and filed a motion, his estate will get the house. The only way we keep it, is if he didn’t do anything.”

  Then I’d definitely look into that, too. The sooner we knew one way or the other where we stood, the better.

  * * *

  ”Ugly event at Beulah’s earlier,” I told Rafe that evening, after I had returned to the mansion from lunch and after he had brought Carrie back from their excursion to Dix’s house after the game was over.

  “How so?”

  He was cooking tonight, which meant I was getting steak and baked potatoes done in the microwave. The only concession to healthy eating was a tossed salad I had put together so we’d have something green to eat along with the protein and starch. Rafe had curled his lip at it, but of course he didn’t have to worry about his weight.

  “Cletus Johnson was there,” I said, from the island where I was sitting, watching him work, “with his mother and his kids.”

  He nodded.

  “And as they were leaving, Cletus stopped at our table to say hello. He went on a date with Darcy once, did I tell you that?”

  Rafe shook his head.

  “It was soon after Marquita died. Darcy said he wasn’t ready for another relationship, and she wasn’t, either.”

  Rafe nodded.

  “So Cletus was standing at our table, and one of the guys in the next booth said something to the little girl. Cletus’s daughter. And the next second, Cletus transformed into the Incredible Hulk.”

  “No sh… kidding?”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t hurt anyone, but he looked like he wanted to. He got right in the guy’s face, and you could tell the guy wasn’t expecting that. He was young—probably just in his early twenties, so almost a decade younger than Cletus—and about half his size, too.”

  “What did he call the little girl?” Rafe asked.

  I told him, and watched his eyes go flat.

  I bit my lip. “Have you ever—”

  He glanced at me, and I trailed off into, “Um…?”

  “Oh, darlin’.” His voice was light, but there was nothing happy about his expression.
“I’ve been called every name in the book. I can’t rightly recall every instance, but I’m sure that’s one of’em.”

  No doubt. “Surely not when you were small, though? I mean, she can’t be more than five…”

  And she was beautiful. Just as he must have been. Just as Carrie was now, and I hated, with a passion, the idea that she would be exposed to that kind of ugliness.

  He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “When I was little, folks called me a monkey. My grandpa called me a niglet.”

  “Old Jim was a bastard,” I said, working hard to keep my voice even in spite of the flashes of hot and cold that threatened to make me howl in outrage.

  Rafe shrugged. “I’ve been called a pickaninny. I’ve been called ‘boy’ more times than I can count. Long after I stopped being one.”

  “The sheriff calls everyone ‘boy,’” I protested, since I’d certainly heard Bob refer to Rafe as a boy more than once. I’d even informed him that Rafe was no boy anymore, he was all grown up. Or growed up, as people say in these parts. “He calls Dix and Todd boys, too.”

  “But not in that same voice.” His lips curved. “I ain’t upset with the sheriff, darlin’. We’ve worked things out. But him calling his son and your brother ‘boy,’ is different from him calling me ‘boy.’”

  Maybe it was. I mean, he should know. And the way he said it, with that old-fashioned Southern drawl, certainly made it sound different.

  “Well, these two called Cletus’s little girl a jiggaboo. Yvonne came over and told them to leave, and they did. But you could tell they thought the whole thing was kind of funny. They were nervous, because Cletus is a big guy, and he was angry, and he looked like he wanted to hit someone...”

  “I’ve been hit by Cletus,” Rafe said, poking at the steaks. “I know what he looks like.”

  Of course he did. I remembered that black eye, and the memory made me wince. “Nothing happened, though. He didn’t hit them. And they were still cocky when they swaggered out of there. One of them knocked over a stack of menus that was sitting on the hostess stand. On purpose.”

  Rafe nodded. “I know the type.” After a second he smiled. “Hell, I used to be the type.”

  “You were never that type,” I said. “These guys had a pair of steel balls in a sack hanging from their trailer hitch, probably because their own equipment is so insignificant that they have to compensate. That’s not a problem you have.”

  And I meant that both physically and metaphorically. There’s nothing wrong with the size of his equipment, but he also has metaphorical cojones to spare.

  He grinned, but didn’t take the bait. “You saw their truck?”

  “We parked next to it when we got there,” I said. “Then I recognized it when they tore out of the parking lot, spitting gravel. They headed south.”

  Rafe nodded.

  “Black truck, maybe a Chevy or a Dodge. Could have been a Ford. Not new, but not old, either. The license plate started with 4K, and then either a 3 or an 8.”

  “Some reason you’re telling me this, darlin’?”

  “I was just thinking,” I said, “that two guys who would say something like that to Cletus’s cute little girl, might know something about what you’re working on.”

  He nodded. “Might, at that.”

  “There was a Confederate flag on the tailgate of the truck, next to an oval sticker with the number 88 inside it. Maybe it’s a NASCAR number or something. They looked like the type who’d watch… No?”

  He shook his head. “88 is a Nazi symbol.”

  Nazi? “It’s a number,” I said. “How can it be a Nazi symbol?”

  “The eighth letter of the alphabet is H. 88 is HH. HH stands for—”

  “Heil Hitler.” I grimaced. “I can’t believe I didn’t know that.”

  “I didn’t know it either,” Rafe said, “till last week. I haven’t spent much time dealing with Nazis.”

  No. Most of his career had been spent dealing with South American Theft Gangs, which aren’t the same thing as Nazis at all, even if they’re ruthless in their own way.

  “You should talk to Cletus,” I told him. “And get a description. I can give you the basics, but he looked at them more closely than I did. I mostly ignored them, to be honest, because they were staring at us when we walked in.”

  “Gimme what you can. I’ll get Cletus to fill it in.”

  I gathered my impressions, obediently. “Two guys, early twenties. One had light brown hair, the other dark brown. They were both white, obviously. The guy with the light brown hair looked like he might have had a bad case of acne as a kid, or maybe measles or something like that. His face was kind of pockmarked. They were both skinny, and average height. They paid with cash, so no credit card you can trace. The guy who paid kept his wallet on a chain attached to his belt loop. They both wore jeans. One of them had on a black hoodie and the other one a plaid shirt over a T-shirt.”

  Rafe nodded. “Might be enough to identify’em. Starting with the truck.”

  “If you want to do that now,” I offered, “I can finish dinner.”

  He smiled. “It’s no hurry, darlin’. They ain’t going nowhere. They’ve got World War III to prepare for.”

  “With that much at stake, you’d think they’d avoid drawing so much attention to themselves. Especially over something so stupid as calling a little girl a bad name.”

  “They can’t help it,” Rafe said, forking the steaks onto plates. “There she was, cute and little and brown, and scaring her, just ‘cause they could, was too much of a temptation.”

  I uncurled the hands I’d curled into fists at his words, and examined the half-moon nail marks I’d inadvertently left in my own palms. “I really hope you get these guys.”

  “Oh,” Rafe said, putting my plate in front on me, “we’ll get’em. It won’t be tomorrow—we’ll wanna follow’em around for a while and see what they’re up to—but we’ll get them.”

  He took the seat next to me and cut into his steak. Blood oozed out. I averted my eyes and attacked my own steak, but not before a superstitious shudder had had time to make its way down my spine, like a slow trickle of ice.

  Thirteen

  I ran into Todd outside the courthouse again the next morning. We must be on the same Monday morning trajectory.

  Or maybe this was always Todd’s trajectory on Monday mornings, and I just happened to have been here for the past two weeks, intersecting with him.

  After the usual pleasantries about Marley and Oliver, and Rafe and Carrie, he asked what I was doing, and I explained that I was on my way to the court house to see if I could get my hands on a set of old trial records. He wanted to know why, of course, and which trial, and when I told him, he made a face. “I heard about that.”

  “The murder?”

  He nodded. “Your name didn’t come up, though.”

  “No reason it would.” Not for Todd’s purposes, anyway. “You weren’t here during the first trial, were you?”

  “The mistrial?” He shook his head. “I was still in Atlanta.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t know whether he was guilty or not, then.”

  “We don’t tend to prosecute people unless we believe they’re guilty,” Todd said.

  I smiled sweetly. “Of course you don’t. It’s OK. You weren’t here, so it’s no reflection on you. And I’m not suggesting that anyone did anything wrong. I’m just wondering whether he actually committed the murder or not, seeing as he was let go the second time.”

  “The first trial ended in a hung jury,” Todd said. “But because he wasn’t from around here, had no family and no ties to the community—”

  “Other than his house.”

  Todd nodded. “—bail was set very high. High enough that he couldn’t come up with the money. Even selling the house wouldn’t have given him what he needed. So he stayed in jail waiting for a new trial.”

  “And that was last week?”

  He nodded. “Between the first trial and th
is one, one of the witnesses died. A neighbor who testified that she’d heard Morris and the victim arguing a couple of days before the murder.”

  I felt a little buzz at the back of my brain. “Died?” That seemed very convenient, didn’t it?

  Although if Morris had been in jail, it wasn’t like he could have killed her. And not like anyone else would have wanted to.

  “She was old,” Todd said. “There was nothing suspicious about it. But because she couldn’t testify again, and because the defense dug up Morris’s old girlfriend, who drove here and testified in his favor, he was acquitted.”

  “Were you involved in the second trial?”

  “Only on the periphery,” Todd said. “The DA sat first chair. The ADA from the first trial sat second chair. I wasn’t involved beyond doing some research.”

  “Do you think the transcripts from the new trial are available, too?” Or was it too soon?

  “We can find out,” Todd said and gestured for me to precede him up the stairs and through the doors.

  * * *

  In the end, I ended up with transcripts from both trials, and took them both with me back to Sweetwater, where I presented them to Darcy like a prize. “You want to make copies?”

  “I’m not sure how much time I’m going to have to read,” Darcy said, “but I might as well.”

  She stuffed them into the copier and pushed the button. While the machine scanned and spit, I situated myself in front of the desk for a nice chat. “How are you?”

  “About the same as yesterday,” Darcy said. “Your husband showed up here an hour ago and wanted a description of the two guys from Beulah’s yesterday.”

  “I told him about what happened. I think he thinks—and I think so, too—that they might be involved in that case he’s working down in Laurel Hill. The guys yesterday had a Nazi sticker on the back of their truck.”

  Darcy’s eyebrows winged up. “There are Nazi bumper-stickers?”