Devil Red

  “Right from the warehouse where the originals were made,” I said.

  “You are the man. Have I ever told you that, Hap? You are the man?”

  “Whenever I have something you want me to keep having around, yes, you have told me that.”

  “Like Dr Pepper?”

  “Like that.”

  “And vanilla cookies.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that whole ‘you are duh man’ bit has power?”

  “A little.”

  The rain was brutal now. It hit the house hard and the windows rattled. We got ourselves more to drink, turned out the lights, and went into the living room and sat in the dark.

  “Isn’t this where we say something like ‘Well, the farmers need the rain?’ ” Leonard said.

  “I suppose it is.”

  The file Marvin had given me was still lying on the coffee table. I glanced at it. Leonard glanced at it. We both glanced at it. Neither of us picked it up.

  “You ain’t been quite yourself for a while, Hap.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I haven’t. And you haven’t been all that hot since John has been gone.”

  “Guilty as charged. John’s brother is trying to convince him that God can make him straight. His brother says being gay goes against tradition.”

  “I don’t always have turkey on Thanksgiving. That’s a tradition. But the world keeps spinning even if I don’t eat turkey.”

  “Yep. It’s silly.”

  A peal of thunder made the house shake.

  “Okay,” I said. “That makes me think God is on the side of the traditionalist.”

  Leonard laughed.

  12

  Here’s how it had gone down the day before.

  At the coffeehouse, Marvin took out his big folder and gave us each a small folder from inside of it. He had asked that the information be prepared, and Mrs. Christopher, with Cason’s help, had done just that.

  Marvin said, “Before we open them, let me lay some things out. General information that may or may not be important. Mrs. Christopher is a widow. She has been rich all her life. But not so it shows. She lives simply. Nice home, but nothing flashy. Drives a standard automobile. Inherited money from her husband, who died of a heart attack. She had a nervous breakdown after her son’s death, spent some time in a mental institution. Nothing severe. Just there to be watched and evaluated. She came out a couple months later. As far as the death of her son goes, the police believe this is a done deal. That whoever did it is long gone and there’s no way to find them. Mrs. Christopher obviously doesn’t believe the police know what they’re talking about. She believes it wasn’t what it appears to be.”

  “Do you think she’s wrong?” I said.

  “I’m open to another view if there’s evidence to suggest it,” Marvin said.

  “This Cason Statler,” Leonard said. “He seems to believe her.”

  “Yeah,” Marvin said. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “He seems solid enough,” Leonard said.

  “You just liked the way he looked,” I said.

  “If he’s that pretty, he’s honest, and noble, loyal, and trustworthy,” Leonard said.

  “That’s a lot of the Boy Scout oath,” I said.

  “He wears tight pants and has broad shoulders and is really nice-looking,” Leonard said, “so, I thought I’d give him some good attributes.”

  “I can show you some things in this,” Marvin said, tapping his folder, “that are definitely true. So let’s pretend this is our first day at school, and we’ve got our supplies in front of us, and one of those is a nice folder like this one, and I’m gonna be the teacher, and I’m gonna say, Shut up, and open ’em up.”

  We each opened our folder. There was a photo on top.

  “Damn,” Leonard said.

  The photo had been snapped near a run of water, and at first I couldn’t decide what water it was, and then I realized it was the creek that ran by the university at Camp Rapture, wound its way through a very nice park of pecan trees and oaks, and twisted on through the poorer part of town and went on to somewhere beyond my knowledge.

  Brett and I had actually gone over to Camp Rapture once to look at a used car. We ended up buying it. I drove our old car, and she drove the one we bought to that park to have a picnic. Brett knew the place and told me about it. I remembered it well. I even remembered that we had tuna sandwiches with bananas cut up in them, along with crushed potato chips. Something Brett came up with. I thought it was a terrible idea until I ate one.

  The park was along the edge of a hiking and jogging trail. The trail was wooded on both sides, and beautiful. There were wide spots with picnic tables, and there were big hickory and pecan trees there. We took a walk along the trail. There was a large Hoss apple tree near the edge of the creek. Its thick limbs twisted in unusual ways. We stopped next to it and kissed. The tree was in the photo.

  Near the tree, there was woman lying facedown by the side of the trail, not far from the creek. Her hair was dark as sin and her body was pale as bone and she was amazingly thin. Her ribs stuck against her flesh like the framework of a canoe. Her clothes, what looked like shorts, underwear, a bra, and T-shirt, were heaped nearby. All of her clothes were black. Including the underwear.

  “Shot in the back of the head,” Marvin said. “Name’s Mini Marchland. She was on her last outing with Ted Christopher, Mrs. Christopher’s son. Turn your page, class.”

  I lifted up the photo and placed it aside. There was another. A man lying dead on the trail with his face turned to the side. The creek was not visible. He was wearing black jogging shoes, jogging pants, and a dark green T-shirt.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Two years ago,” Marvin said. “The couple had gone jogging, and when their car was found in the park driveway, and no one came to claim it, people went looking. The bodies lay there for half a day maybe.”

  “On a jogging trail?” I said.

  “That day, the only two people feeling like they needed to be physically fit were these two. They would have ended up better had they sat on the couch in front of the TV at home and ate cheese doodles and sniffed glue.”

  I looked at some of the other photos. They were more of the same at closer and different angles. There was one close shot of their heads so you could see where the bullets had gone in. Close photos of the girl’s clothes heaped up. Close-ups of the ground and shoe marks, and a close-up of Ted’s shoe bottoms.

  “How did Mrs. Christopher get all of this material?” Leonard asked.

  “She knows a lot of people,” Marvin said. “And Cason knows a lot of people. Money and connections solve a lot of problems.”

  “Was the girl raped?” I asked.

  “No,” Marvin said. “Just stripped. Some of the cops thought maybe he was interrupted.”

  “If he was,” Leonard said, “wouldn’t shooting her in the head have been a bigger interruption? Did anybody notice gunfire?”

  “Nothing about that in the files,” Marvin said. “The guy’s wallet was taken.”

  “He had it in his jogging pants?” I asked.

  “That’s what they figure. The pants have a back pocket. He didn’t have a wallet on him, and there wasn’t one in his car. Also, his ring finger was cut off. His mother said he wore a high school graduation ring.”

  “Did it ever turn up?” I asked. “A pawnshop, that sort of thing?”

  “Nope,” Marvin said. “Not yet.”

  “Anything stolen from her?” I asked.

  “Her shoes were missing. And her socks.”

  “Anyone see the couple earlier that day?” I asked.

  “Nothing here to indicate that,” Marvin said.

  “So how did anyone know they went jogging?” I asked.

  “When they found the car and found the bodies and jogging clothes, they put two and two together. Jogging clothes. Jogging trail. No brains were overheated in figuring that part out.”

  ??
?Did you guys notice the bottom of the Christopher kid’s shoes?” Leonard said.

  We picked up our photos and looked.

  “Nice tread,” I said.

  “Yep,” Leonard said, “and I have noticed something that we elite in the crime business like to call a clue.”

  I turned the picture left and right. I said, “The shoes are clean.”

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “If they were new, and he did a bit of jogging before he got interrupted and shot in the head, maybe they’d look kind of clean, but these look really clean. I think someone at the police department thought the same. Otherwise, why would they take a close-up of the bottom of his shoes?”

  “Damn, Leonard,” Marvin said, “that may be the first time you’ve ever had a good idea. You’re like a regular Miss Marple.”

  “And her shoes are missing,” Leonard said. “So maybe they got taken away before she was dumped. They got the clothes dropped all right, but forgot the socks and shoes.”

  “So, you’re thinking they weren’t shot on the trail?” I said.

  Leonard nodded, and now he had about him an air of superiority. That’s how he was, one good idea and for a day he thought he was Einstein. “And the car, it could have been left there when the killer dumped them. Or maybe the car was dropped off later. I don’t know. It’s just an idea.”

  “It kind of makes sense,” I said. “I was bothered by the fact the bodies lay there that long and no one found them. Could have been that way, but I been to that place, and it’s pretty busy with people running, walking, picnicking, screwing in the bushes. But if they were killed somewhere else and dropped off early … Any information on time of death?”

  “They were killed in the morning, was their determination,” Marvin said. “That’s all the report there is about that. As I said, half a day maybe, if they were lying there the whole time. It’s a guess. They’re country cops and country doctors. Not stupid, just not geared toward that sort of thing. The place doesn’t have a real coroner.”

  “What about blood evidence?” I asked. “That would let you know something about where they were killed.”

  “There’s no blood evidence information here,” Marvin said, shuffling through some pages with writing on them. Leonard and I shuffled through the same pages. I said, “Isn’t that a little odd? I mean, they got all this information, but nothing on that?”

  “Again, the Camp Rapture police aren’t noted for efficiency,” Marvin said. “They do have a hell of a fund-raiser with an assortment of different kinds of barbecue, including raccoon and possum, and a country band once a year, but blood evidence tools … not so much. The chief over there is new, and the one before him was an educated idiot. Degrees out the ass and all the common sense of a duck. Anyway, the new lady they got is all right. Before her it was just good old straightforward corruption, so they’ve moved up a notch.”

  “You think this is something the cops of that time were in on?” I asked. “Some kind of cover-up?”

  “I think they were just incompetent,” he said.

  We sipped coffee, looked at the photos and the information for a while. When I was through, I looked up, said, “There’s a kind of neatness about it.”

  “That’s what Mrs. Christopher thinks. That it’s all too neat.”

  “What does she think really happened?” I asked.

  “She thinks it was a hit,” Marvin said. “She thinks he made someone mad, or knew something he shouldn’t, so they killed him, made it look like another kind of crime. A lot of that is just motherly instinct, but Cason thinks maybe there’s something to it.”

  “So you care about what he thinks?” I said.

  “He is an investigative reporter. You grow some instincts, you do that enough.”

  “And maybe,” I said, “Mrs. Christopher is just grieving and trying to make more sense of this than just a standard old murder. The idea that anyone can die for any kind of stupid thing is hard to take, especially if it’s someone close to you.”

  “That’s also possible,” Marvin said. “The daughter, June, Ted’s sister, thinks there’s nothing to it.”

  “You talked to her?” I asked.

  Marvin shook his head. “That will be your job. Mrs. Christopher said Ted and his sister didn’t get along well, not even when they were kids. She also said June was bothered that Mrs. Christopher planned to leave her money to Ted. Which on the surface sounds tough, but she said she planned to do that because June married into money and divorced real well. Ted, without family money, would have ended up with the lint in his shorts. I should note too, that the private detective she hired didn’t believe it was a hit either.”

  “So we’re sloppy seconds?” I said.

  “Yep,” Marvin said. “She told me that right up front. I knew the guy she hired, Jimmy Malone. Used to run into him from time to time doing police work. Not exactly on the up-and-up. When he didn’t find anything, Mrs. Christopher let it lie for a while, then got it on her mind again that it was a setup, and hired us.”

  “So,” Leonard said, “she thinks Malone took the money and did nothing?”

  “My guess is,” Marvin said, “that’s what Cason thinks and is afraid we’re gonna do the same. Me, I don’t know. Jimmy was a shit, and a womanizer, and he liked money too much, but he usually did the job. He just didn’t always do it the way it ought to be done. He didn’t mind playing angles. But the thing is, he didn’t find out any more than the police knew.”

  “We could talk to him,” Leonard said.

  “Only if you talk to the dead,” Marvin said. “He retired, then promptly drowned in a boating accident out at the lake.”

  Leonard said. “What’s this?” He was holding up one of the photos of the dead girl.

  “Kind of obvious, don’t you think?” Marvin said.

  “Not the girl. The tree.”

  “Let me see,” Marvin said. “I’m going to go for Hoss apple.”

  “The other tree,” Leonard said.

  “Hickory nut,” I said.

  “No. What’s on the tree?”

  We each found our copy of the photo and looked at the hickory tree. There was something on it all right. It was an angled view but it was some kind of drawing. What I could make out was a horned head and a partial face. It was painted there in red. Spray paint, most likely.

  “Graffiti,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “but is there anything about it in the notes?”

  “No,” Marvin said. “And that’s because no one thought it meant anything. Kids paint on trees and underpasses and walls all the time. Why would someone kill them and then make a design on a tree?”

  “All I’m saying,” Leonard said, “is Mrs. Christopher may be right. It might not be a random murder.”

  “That whole mystery clue thing with paintings on trees and feathers and moles in the shape of the state of Rhode Island on a blonde’s ass, in real life, it doesn’t happen much,” Marvin said.

  “He’s working his way through the Sherlock Holmes series,” I said. “He’s gotten a little obsessive about mysteries. He found a pair of socks he’s been missing for a couple of months, and he thinks he’s full of deductive reasoning now. Like maybe the socks had some kind of plan to hide out.”

  “Listen, Ace,” Marvin said. “You and Hap just go out and ask questions and bumble around. I’ll do the real detective work from the office.”

  “Ouch,” Leonard said.

  13

  So that’s how it went. Now we were sitting on the couch looking at those same photos and reading the information that came with them, thinking back on our meeting with Marvin.

  It had started raining hard again, and the atmosphere had settled on the house like a woolen cap. The electricity blinked and crackled a few times but stayed on. It was so dark outside we had to turn on a light.

  “So,” Leonard said. “Where do we start?”

  “Same place the cops did, with the people who knew the victims.”

  ??
?There’s a long list here,” Leonard said, flipping through the folder.

  “I think we should do what Marvin suggested. Talk to the sister.”

  “To do that,” Leonard said, looking out the window at the rain, “we have to get off the couch. And drive around. We could wait until tomorrow.”

  “We weren’t hired to stay home and play Scrabble.”

  Leonard’s eyes lit up. “It’s a perfect day for Scrabble. Me and John used to play Scrabble when it rained.”

  “I’ll get us a couple of rain slickers and we’ll go to work.”

  “So,” Leonard said, “you’re not suggesting we sit on the couch in rain slickers and play Scrabble and call that work?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Dang it.”

  We left Leonard’s wreck in the driveway to let the rain work the hardened bird shit off his windshield, took my car.

  Before we left, Leonard got something out of his car and slipped in beside me. He laid what he had on the seat between us and pulled off his slicker and put it in the backseat with mine. He picked up what he had laid down and put it on his head.

  “What in the hell is that?” I said.

  “It’s a deerstalker cap.”

  “A deerstalker cap?”

  “You know, Holmes wore one in the movies.”

  “I know, but what are you doing with one?”

  “I’m wearing it.”

  “Should I wear a bowler and carry an umbrella and let you call me Watson?”

  “Would you?”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I bought it last Halloween, for a party.”

  “You dressed up like Sherlock Holmes for Halloween?”

  “I don’t get to dress up often,” Leonard said. “John went as Watson.”

  “So why are you wearing the hat now? Halloween is long past.”

  “We’re on the hunt. The game’s afoot.”

  “Leonard, you are not wearing that foolish cap.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you stand out like a hard dick in a nunnery.”

  Leonard quit looking at me. He turned and stared at the windshield.

  “So you’re gonna give me the cold shoulder?”