He noticed a legal pad. It wasn’t written on, but someone had just torn the top page off of it, and the heavy inscription of a pen had been embossed in the texture of the paper beneath. He held it up to the light, shifting it, trying to find angles on it. Words, in old gnarled writing, began to emerge: Moved body? Little Georgia? Strangled?
Hmmmmm again.
He felt a smug little blast of triumph. Wouldn’t Mr. Bama be pleased?
He heard a clatter of noise, the swift thump of feet and the door blew open.
“What the goddamn hell are you doing?” said Sam Vincent.
The old man drove home heavily agitated. His imagination foundered against one significant problem. Who on earth in 1955 in West Arkansas would have considered it worthwhile to engineer a great conspiracy to place the blame for the death of a young girl on an innocent black boy? What would be the point?
He could see no point. But he tried to break it down into parts and see how it fit together. And he kept coming back to one thing: someone didn’t want anybody to know that Shirelle was killed at Little Georgia. Little Georgia was the key.
The significance of moving the body had to be that there was evidence, somewhere, somehow, that linked the killer to Little Georgia.
If someone had found the body at Little Georgia, then by God, there was some obvious, physical link to Little Georgia which would have led inexorably to the killer. What could that have been? What would have placed someone at Little Georgia?
He tried to think what he could do to dig up the connection, what it could be. There had to be a document, or at least something prominent in the memory of someone easily accessible at the time.
Maybe a land-use permit.
Maybe a site examination, as from an engineer or an architectural firm.
Maybe a bill of sale.
He tried to consider all the documents that could relate to a piece of land or a section of the county.
Suddenly, he screeched to a halt.
Panic hit him.
Suppose he forgot this? Suppose it had vanished in the morning in that great black fog that rolled in across his mind so frequently? Home was still ten minutes ahead. The office was only five back.
He cranked into a U-turn, bumping up on a curb and crushing what had to be someone’s bushes, and with a blast of acceleration headed back.
“What the goddamn hell are you doing here?” demanded the old man. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Ah—Mr. Sam, it’s Duane Peck, the deputy. I, uh, seen your lights on. I came up. Hell, you left the door wide open and the lights blazing. I’se just checking to make sure nothing was missing or that there weren’t no prowlers.”
The old man didn’t blink or back down; he didn’t retreat into confusion.
“The hell you say! I did no such goddamned thing. I turned my goddamned lights off and locked my office. What are you doing here, sitting at my goddamned desk like you own the place?”
Pugnaciously, he advanced. His shrewd old eyes ate Duane up. He saw that Duane was holding the tablet in his hand.
“What the hell are you doing with that?”
“Nothing,” Duane said.
“You were snooping! You were spying! You damned spy, what the hell are you doing?”
Then his eyes knitted up into something tight and knowing.
“Who you working for? You working for them, ain’t you, you no-’count piece of white trash.”
“Sir, I ain’t working for nobody,” Duane said, rising awkwardly. Still the man advanced on him.
“You ain’t working for the sheriff. No sir, I know the sheriff, and you ain’t working for him. Who are you working for? You tell me, you trashy dog, or by God I will beat it out of your scrawny hide and hang you out to dry in the morning.”
“Sir, I ain’t working for nobody,” Duane said, alarmed at the old man’s fiery temper.
“Well, goddammit, you better believe we’ll find out about that. Yes sir, we will get to the bottom of that.”
He pivoted slightly to pick up the phone. He dialed 911.
Duane watched him, stupefied. It was happening so quick. He tried to think what to do. His mind was blank, a vapid, empty hole.
Would they make him tell about Mr. Bama? What about the money he owed, would he still owe it to Mr. Bama? What about his new job, and how well he was doing on it? What about working for Mr. Bama personally?
The flashlight rose in his hand, almost as if on its own will, and Duane brought it down with a thunderous thud on the back of the old man’s neck. He felt the shiver of blunt instrument striking meat and bone and in the impact thought he heard or felt the sensation of something brittle breaking.
“Sheriff’s Department,” came the voice over the phone.
The old man stiffened, reached back for his wound and turned, his face black and lost, his eyes pools of emptiness. Duane smashed him again, this time where the neck met the shoulder, a powerful downward diagonal blow that made the head twitch spastically. The phone fell free and banged on the floor and the old man took a stricken step backwards, face gray, old tongue working pitifully in an old mouth, then toppled to the earth as his eyes rolled upward.
“Sheriff’s Department? Anybody there?” Duane recognized the voice as Debbie Till’s, the night-duty dispatcher.
He hung it up.
He was breathing hard. His knees felt weak. The old man lay still, but was still breathing.
Duane tried to figure what to do next. He could just leave, and they’d find him here and ascribe it to a prowler. But then there’d be an investigation. Suppose someone had seen his car parked outside?
Then he had it.
He wiped the phone off with his handkerchief, in case he’d left prints. Then he quickly turned off the lights, pausing to rub the switches with the handkerchief. He stuffed the tablet with the engraved words into his shirt. Then he hoisted Sam under his arms, feeling the old man’s lightness and brittleness. The old man stirred weakly, then went limp. Duane hefted him, because he knew if he dragged him, he’d leave a trail in the dust, and got him to the head of the stairs. He paused for just a second.
This is what Mr. Bama wants, he told himself.
He took a deep breath, gathered his strength and then launched the old man into the air. Sam hit on the fourth step, shattering his teeth, and rolled, legs and arms flopping, down the stairwell, gathering speed and violence as he went, until he smashed to a halt on the downstairs door-jamb.
Duane breathed heavily.
He went back to the office, pulled the door shut and heard it click. He wiped his prints off the knob.
Then he went down the stairs, stepping over the body.
28
After the fight, Bob bypassed Blue Eye and caught the Boss Harry Etheridge Parkway and took a straight shot north up to Fort Smith. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the shooting site.
“From now on, we operate as if we can be jumped at any time. Do you understand? They are hunting us. We only got out because the boss man didn’t trust his troops and had to control the thing from the air and I saw the plane. Without that jump, I wouldn’t have had time to make a plan and we’d be dead.”
Russ nodded gravely, as if he understood, as if he were functioning normally. But he was not. He was still half in shock: so much carnage, so fast, so much noise, so much smoke.
“It was so … confusing,” was all he could think to say. Then it poured out.
“I mean, my God, it just happened, the shooting was so loud, Jesus, the explosions, we were so lucky, the whole thing just went berserk, I never knew the universe could go so psychopathic, so twisted. Jesus, you were unbelievably calm. You were like ice. I could hardly breathe.”
Bob wasn’t listening; he was thinking aloud.
“And I want to stow this truck as soon as possible. It’ll take the police two days’ worth of forensic examination before they realize there was another vehicle involved and another weapon. Then they?
??ll find our tread type and match the paint we left on that boy when we cropped him, and come looking for us.”
“I don’t think there’s enough left of that car to get a sample of its own paint much less any of ours,” Russ said.
“You can’t be too sure. I’ll long-term it at the airport and we’ll rent a car. Next, I got to find that Frenchy Short.”
It was six before they were checked into a Ramada Inn on 271 south of town, the truck hidden, and Bob set about finding Frenchy Short. First, he called a friend he knew at the Retired Marine Officers’ Association in Los Angeles, a retired gunnery sergeant who ran the clerical section of the association, and quickly came up with the number of a former captain named Paul Chardy, whom Bob placed in memory as having worked with Frenchy at SOG. He dialed the number, in some town called Winnetka, Illinois, and got no answer until, after several subsequent tries, he connected around 8:30 P.M.
A woman answered the phone.
“Hello.”
“Ma’am, I’m trying to reach Captain Paul Chardy, USMC, retired.”
“May I ask what this is in reference to?”
“Yes, ma’am, he and I served together in 1969 in the Central Highlands. I’m trying to locate a third man both of us knew.”
“One second, please.” He heard her yell, “Paul, Paul, honey. It’s some marine thing.”
The voice came on.
“Hello?”
“Captain Chardy?”
“Well, no one’s called me that in quite a while. I’m a high school basketball coach now.”
“Sir, I don’t know if you’ll remember me. I NCOed up at Base Camp Alice near Cambo and briefed you when you came in country in August ’68. I served with you for six months before I DEROSed home. My name is Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger and—”
“Bob the Nailer! My God, yes, I remember you. You were the best recon team leader SOG ever had and when you went back for your third tour—well, Gunny, it’s an honor to talk to Bob the Nailer. Hell yes, I remember.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you, Gunny. You had a hell of a war. You showed the rest of us how to do it.”
“Sir, reason I’m calling, I’m trying to find another man in country with us. He was civilian, spook type. You were closer to him than I was. You and him ran a number of missions together as I recall.”
“Frenchy.”
“Yes sir.”
“Oh, Christ, I haven’t thought about Frenchy in years. Poor old Frenchy.” Bob thought he heard something in the man’s voice, some odd tone: regret, buried pain, the stirring of memories best left untouched in the darkness.
“Sir?”
“Well, Gunny, the Frenchman didn’t make it. His adventures caught up with him.”
Bob cursed silently.
“Frenchy was pure spook, that I’ll tell you. He crammed several hundred lifetimes into one.”
“Yes sir.”
“Yes, well, he recruited me. I spent, well, it’s not worth going into, a long story, not a very pretty one. After the war, I spent four years on an Agency contract and Frenchy was my case officer. I went back for a hitch TDY in ’82. But Frenchy, well—”
He paused. Bob could sense the pain.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. It’s all off the record, you never talked to me. Frenchy was captured and killed by a Soviet GRU colonel in Vienna in 1974. Tortured to death. Not a pretty story.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Bob said, and then had to ask the next question: “What happened to the colonel?”
“Somebody blew him out of his socks,” said Chardy in a voice that said he didn’t want any more questions asked.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead, Gunny.”
“What was Frenchy Short capable of? Under orders, or not under orders, what would he do?”
Chardy thought a bit.
Finally, he said, “Anything. He was capable of anything. The truth is, even though they had his name on a plaque on the wall at Langley, Frenchy sold me to the Russians in 1974, when I was in Kurdistan. There were unpleasant consequences. He had no conscience. He was a great man who was capable of great evil, not that uncommon a combination. Whatever you think he did, he probably did. And worse.”
“Did he ever say anything about a job in Arkansas in the fifties? An Agency scam, something very black involving infrared stuff.”
“Gunny, he never talked about the past. And if you’d seen him operate, you wouldn’t want to know about the past.”
“Yes sir. Thanks very much.”
“You okay, Gunny? You need help or anything?”
“No sir. I’m fine. You told me what I needed to know.”
“Good luck to you, Sergeant. Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi, sir.”
He turned to Russ. “Good man. But goddammit, now where we going to go?”
“What about—to dinner?” Russ said.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Bob.
They went to the motel restaurant and sat down. Bob ordered a cheeseburger, Russ the tuna salad. But Bob wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. Russ had never known a man quite like this: he just locked himself off, still, almost in repose, his face dark and wary, his eyes alert, but a definite No Trespassing sign impressed in the set of lines. He only pretended to eat. Something about Chardy or Frenchy, or that lost war and the men it devoured, was dogging him, Russ guessed.
“Uh, I have an idea,” said Russ.
“What?”
“I said, I have an idea.”
“Lord spare us,” said Bob.
“Frenchy Short is gone; you’re not going to get anything out of the Agency, that’s a given. So we have to move from what we’ve got. Our first principle: your father knew something. That’s what got him killed. Well, my thought is that we should locate whoever is left of the people he spoke to on the last day. Not casually, but his friends. Your mother is gone. Sam, we spoke to Sam, he didn’t say anything. But didn’t he mention—”
Bob nodded.
“Miss Connie,” he said. He remembered her too, from all those years ago: an imposing, beautiful woman, in her fifties, who came from the East and was married to and widowed by Rance Longacre, the county aristocrat. She had a son: he died young too. She had a kind of doomed quality about her: everybody she ever knew or loved died. He had some memory coming home on leave back sometime in the early sixties, before the war, that someone—his mother possibly?—had told him she’d left and gone back. No, his mother was dead then. Sam. Sam knew her.
“She’d be in her nineties now,” Bob said, “that is, if she’s alive, if her mind hasn’t gone, if we could find her, if she would talk.”
“Maybe Sam would know where she went.”
“He would have said something. I have the impression—I don’t know why—that there may have been something between them but it ended badly. He never talks about her.”
“Um,” said Russ, digging into his salad.
“Damn, boy, don’t you ever eat meat?”
“It isn’t good for you.”
“Hell, it didn’t do me any harm. I’m fifty goddamned years old and I may live another two or three days if I’m lucky.”
He smiled finally, and Russ saw that he was joking again.
“But it’s a good idea,” he continued. “It’s a damned good idea. Maybe Sam will know, wouldn’t that be nice. We’ll call him tonight. Maybe he’s found that coroner’s brief or whatever it was.”
They got back to the room and called, but there was no answer, and Russ tried ten more times.
“I wonder where that old bastard is,” Bob said.
“Maybe he’s got a new girlfriend,” Russ said.
Finally, in the morning, somebody answered at Sam’s.
The voice, vaguely familiar, confounded Bob.
“Sam? Uh, I’m trying to reach Sam Vincent.”
“Who is this, please?” asked the man.
“Ah, my name is Bob Lee Swagger and—”
“Bo
b! Bob, it’s John Vincent, Sam’s eldest son.”
John was a physician in Little Rock, Bob knew; and he also knew the tone of voice, that hushed, exhausted tone that communicated in its remoteness the bad news.
“Is something wrong?”
“Bob, Dad died last night.”
“Oh, God,” said Bob, who really thought Sam would live forever, like some magnificent old black-maned lion howling toothlessly at the moon. He felt the news as a physical pain, a loss of breath and stability. He sat down on the bed.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
“You know, Dad was slipping in and out of gears. Well, last night, he went to his office late on some fool errand or other, something in the way his mind worked. He was wearing my mother’s bathrobe and no socks and two different shoes. He slipped and fell at the top of the stairs and broke his neck in two places. At least it was clean, and over in an instant.”
“John, I owe my life to your father.”
“He was a damned good man but you couldn’t tell him anything. I pleaded with him to move in with us; there was plenty of room. He could have gone to any of his children. You know there was money for a nurse, a home, anything, but Dad was set in his ways.”
Bob could say nothing.
“They found him at seven this morning. I got a call at seven-thirty and just got here. Lord, I don’t know what got into him. He tore his house apart and he tore his office apart. He was looking for something.”
Bob realized he was looking for that coroner’s document.
“I just saw him a day or two ago. He was big as life and twice as mean.”
“You know, he loved your father. He thought your father was the best man that ever lived. And he loved you, Bob. I’m glad you got to spend some time with him before it happened. The funeral will be in a few days, Friday, I think. And after, we’ll hold a family wake. We’d really like to see you.”