“You’re gonna get the only answer I can give you on that, son. I don’t doubt that Carson would’ve been more than capable of something like that, and he sure as hell was pissed enough to do it. Did he frame his kid brother and put him in jail for the rest of his life? I guess only Carson can answer that question because, as far as I’ve heard, Evan doesn’t remember a good goddamned thing about it.” Sperling sighed audibly. “Evan was a drunk, not a good one at that. And he was a musician, too, and they’re always hightailin’ it toward crazy.”
“Thanks for the heads-up on that, Doc,” Evie said, “now that I got myself all involved with one.”
Sperling smiled. “You wanna know something, Evie Chandler? I’ll tell you now, and there’s been a couple others who’ve commented on it … You got the same kinda spirit as Rebecca. You don’t look like her. You don’t act like her. But there’s something about you that seems kind of similar. And whatever she may or may not have done, and however much she betrayed Carson, what he did to her was not right, and we let him do it. There are only a couple of things I’ve done in my life that I’d take back, and that’s one of them.”
“So help us take it back,” Henry said. “Help us find her … if not for Evan, then for Rebecca.”
“You got all you’re gonna get outta me, son,” Sperling said, and then he hesitated for a second, his expression thoughtful. “I don’t have the same sensibility as you. I would open that damn letter and see what the hell Evan thinks he needs to say to a daughter he never met. Maybe Carson is right, though. Maybe telling her is exactly the wrong thing to do. Who knows what kind of whirlwind you’ll let out of the box. All I can tell you is that whatever this is about, you got Carson Riggs badly rattled. Don’t see him backing down, do you? Don’t see him giving you anything but heartache. He’s a tough son of a bitch, has a real mean streak, and I wouldn’t choose him as an enemy.”
“I think it’s a little too late in the game for that,” Henry said.
“I’m no lawyer,” Sperling said, “but Garfield was my best buddy for years. Old legal adage he used to quote: Set the rules of the game, and the game’s already won. Seems he’s got you on the back foot. Always has had. However, every man has a weakness, and Carson Riggs is not the only officer of the Redbird County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Alvin Lang,” Evie said.
“Redbird County is a real small county, and the sheriff has a great many responsibilities, everything from catching escaped felons to assessing local taxes, collecting past dues, seizing property, all sorts of things. It’s a political function as much as anything. Man with that much authority and influence, hell, even after the voting is done, the sheriff has to be approved by higher powers. Gotta make sure they don’t got some crazy son of a bitch runnin’ around with a six-shooter, right? Degree of scrutiny is applied to anyone in that job, and unless he does an awful good job of hiding his skeletons, then they can come out to haunt him.” Sperling smiled conspiratorially. “Sheriff has the power to deputize anyone, however. Same degree of scrutiny does not apply to a deputy. That’s the sheriff’s job, and the buck stops with him. You tell Alvin Lang that you know why he will never make it to sheriff, even after Carson Riggs is long gone, and he may be more help than you think.”
“But we don’t know—”
“In my time I have taken care of a great many improprieties,” Sperling said. “As a doctor I am bound by oath not to divulge the details of my patients’ concerns. However, let’s just say that Alvin Lang came to me for some advice maybe half a dozen years ago. He didn’t come as a patient, but as a confidant. He knew to come to me because of some things that happened back before Carson Riggs became sheriff of Calvary. He knew I would keep my mouth shut. It was May of sixty-six, to be exact. Seems he had been involved with someone he really shouldn’t have been involved with … a married woman, no less, and she needed a certain procedure very quickly, very quietly. Far as I know, that procedure was carried out in Nueva Rosita, a good place, a place where they don’t ask too many questions. But they do keep records. Dumb son of a bitch didn’t have the sense to get a fake ID, something he could so easily have done from his position as deputy. Carson knows, as do I, but the husband never found out. He’s still in West Texas, the wife as well, and though whatever indiscretion that took place is now over, it is still very present in Deputy Lang’s thoughts.”
“We’re going to blackmail Lang into helping us,” Henry said. “This is really looking up, isn’t it?”
“Fight fire with fire, son,” Sperling said. “Doesn’t seem to me that Lang would miss a second’s sleep if you wound up back in Reeves with your good ol’ buddy Evan Riggs.”
“Thank you, Roy,” Evie said. “We really appreciate this.”
“Well, that’s me done and gone,” Sperling said. “Anything else you need to know, then I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Henry and Evie watched Sperling leave the diner and drive away in silence.
“The more we dig, the deeper it gets,” Henry eventually said.
“You scared what we’ll find?” Evie asked.
Henry shook his head. “Nope,” he replied.
“Good. So let’s go rattle Alvin Lang’s cage, huh?”
FORTY-ONE
“My affairs are my affairs,” Carson Riggs told his father.
“That is just bullshit, Carson, and you know it. That girl is part of this family.”
“That girl slept with my brother the night before she agreed to marry me, and now she is pregnant with his child.”
“I am not saying that she didn’t do a terrible thing, son. And if you want to know the truth, it probably had more to do with Evan than Rebecca. But sending her up to Ector is just plain wrong. That is just the worst thing I can imagine. I may as well have found out that you killed her with your own bare hands—”
“Don’t think I didn’t consider it,” Carson replied.
“You are letting your heart rule your head, son. Sometimes you gotta love someone even though they let you down every imaginable way.”
There was a heartbeat’s pause, and then Carson said, “The way you love me, despite the fact that I have always been a disappointment to you? Is that the kind of love you’re talking about, Pa?”
“Carson … Carson …” William Riggs said, but he was stalling for time, and Carson knew it.
“You have no idea how obvious it has been all these years. You have no idea how it feels to stand in the shadow of your golden boy, Pa. Even with Rebecca … Hell, I knew what was going on. I knew the only reason she married me is because she was too damn scared to marry Evan. You don’t think I knew that? Well, Evan may be bright and brilliant and a fucking musical genius, but he’s also a drunk and a liar and he fucked my wife and got her pregnant, and then he disappeared and he doesn’t even know what the hell is going on.”
William Riggs stood on the veranda of his house, a house he’d built, a house that had seen him raise up a family, where he and Grace had tried to create the best life they could for the past thirty years. He was fifty-two years old, but he felt like a hundred. Was it better to stop loving someone suddenly, or—even when they were blood and kin and all that such entailed—to just never really love them at all? Who had committed the greater crime here? Evan, Carson, or himself?
“Son, no matter what’s happened in the past—”
“The past matters, Pa. I used to think otherwise, but now I see it’s true. The past determines everything. The past is where we all came from, good, bad, or otherwise. Even Evan used to tell me that. People tell you to forgive and forget. Well, I can’t. You don’t think I thought about it? You don’t think I wrestled with this? You don’t think I tried to find some way around this? Well, I did. I thought about tracking him down, wherever the hell he is, and telling him what happened. I thought about letting him take her and the child, about just giving her up.” Carson shook his head. “I have been married five months. To be honest, I have never really been marr
ied. That wedding was a sham and a lie. You can’t build a life with someone when there’s a secret that big right at the start of it. It doesn’t work.”
Carson backed up from the railing and sat down in one of the veranda chairs. The sun was setting. The shadows were deepening, and from where William stood, he could barely see his eldest son’s face. His voice came out of the gloom, and there was a chilling clarity and decisiveness in his tone.
“You don’t think I thought about killing her? You don’t think I thought about killing the pair of them? I want them to hurt for what they did to me, and killing them just seemed too darned easy. Now, to take her child away … That’s a different story. Take away that bastard child and make sure she never sees it. That seemed like a much more fitting kind of justice. And Evan? Never tell him. He’d find out where she was in time, and then maybe he’d find out that she’d had a child … and he would always wonder, wouldn’t he? He would forever be haunted by the ghost of doubt. Hell, if he learned when she had the baby, then it would all make sense, but there’d be no way to get to her and no way to find that child. I will make that child vanish forever, and my lying son-of-a-bitch brother and his whore mistress can tear the world apart looking for it and—”
“Carson,” William said, interrupting his son. “Carson, you’re starting to sound like a crazy man. What you’re saying is wrong, just plain wrong, and I cannot let you do this—”
Carson laughed softly. “You cannot let me do this? What do you mean, you cannot let me do this? It’s done, Pa. It’s all done and dusted. Rebecca is up at Ector. She ain’t never comin’ out. Soon as that bastard child is born, it will disappear. Doesn’t matter what you or Evan or Ma or Ralph Wyatt or anyone else says or does; it is over.”
“I know where your mind is at,” William said. “I know you’ve been talking to those oil people. You think I don’t know what you’re cookin’ up? You do this … hell, Carson, you go through with this and—”
“And what? You’ll cut me off? Write me out of your will? Give the farm to Evan so he can cut it up and sell it, pour the proceeds down his throat while we all go to hell? I made my decision, Pa, and there ain’t nothin’ gonna change my mind.”
Carson rose from the chair, stepped out of the ever-deepening shadow, and faced his father.
“You think you have the right to tell me what to do, how to live? You expect me to treat you like a father when you never treated me like a son? Think again, Pa. The past catches up with you.”
Carson took a step forward with such suddenness that William Riggs had to move rapidly to avoid being knocked on his ass. It was a physical challenge, and one that he did not rise to. William Riggs knew that he’d lost his son to whatever vengeful passion now coursed through his blood. He knew that Carson was stubborn enough to smash everything to pieces as long as he got his own way in the end. He had seen it before, all the way back to his childhood. The same fierce drive that made him sheriff at twenty-five years of age was of sufficient force to bulldoze everyone and everything that he considered contrary to his intent.
William watched as Carson got into his car and pulled away from the Riggs place. It was a symbolic departure. William felt it in his bones and his blood. He had lost his eldest son. Yet, even as the taillights disappeared into nothing, he had to ask himself whether he’d ever really been a father in the first place.
On the morning of Friday, August fifth, William Riggs sat outside Warren Garfield’s office until Garfield appeared. He did not challenge him right there on the street, but marched the man inside and closed the office door behind them.
“If you say a word to Carson, I will have you ruined for what you did, Warren Garfield.”
The words left William Riggs’s lips like bullets. His anger was not only audible in his tone, but visible in the coldness of his eyes, the tension in his face.
“I have no idea what sway he has over you people,” Riggs continued, “and I don’t want to know. Whatever leverage he has brought to bear upon you and Sperling is none of my concern.”
“William … you have to understand—”
“What, Warren? What do I have to understand? Very little, as far as I can tell. The girl done wrong. I understand that. Goddamnit, Warren, there is also no doubt in my mind that Carson and you and Roy Sperling done plenty wrong in your lives as well. Tell you what. Every time anyone ever does anything that upsets Carson Riggs, let’s throw them in the crazy house and lose the key. How about that for a grand idea?”
“William—”
“To hell with you, Warren Garfield. Only reason I come over here is to deliver these documents. As far as business is concerned, that’s you and me done.”
William Riggs handed a bundle of papers across the desk to Garfield, and then he rose to his feet.
“William … come on. Let’s talk about this. Let’s be reasonable here—”
“Reasonable? Are you out of your mind, Warren? You talk about being reasonable? The same degree of reasonable you and Roy Sperling applied to my daughter-in-law? That kind of reasonable?”
“You don’t understand, William—”
“I understand plenty good, Warren. I know what goes on up at that place … and she is pregnant, for God’s sake, man. The girl is pregnant and you sent her up there to satisfy Carson’s vengeful nature. They are gonna kill her, Warren, and her death will be on your hands. Roy Sperling’s, too. As for my son, I will deal with him, and what I have done here today is the first step. What I have delivered to you is legally binding, and if you tamper with it or destroy it, I will see you ruined. I will see you absolutely and completely ruined. You understand me?”
Warren Garfield just looked back at William Riggs. The blood drained from his face, his eyes wide.
“I will take your silence as the answer I want, Warren. You file those papers I gave you, you understand?”
“Yes, William, I understand.”
William Riggs glared at Warren Garfield for a moment longer and then turned and left the office. He slammed the door shut behind him, making Garfield start.
Garfield stayed motionless for a good minute, and then he reached forward and lifted the telephone receiver.
“Roy, it’s Warren. You had a visit from William Riggs yet?”
Garfield closed his eyes as Sperling replied.
“Well, you’re gonna get one. Man’s blood is up. He’s on the warpath.”
Silence for a moment.
“Hell no. Don’t call Carson. Jeez, we got ourselves into this, and no one but us is gonna get us out of it.”
Garfield leaned back in his chair, shook his head. “No, Roy, leave it be. What’s done is done. You don’t think Carson’d fall on his own sword to see us done for? He’s crazy, and that’s a fact. We always knew it’d come back to this. I just never guessed it’d be so soon. You do nothing and maybe we got a chance. You go turnin’ rocks over, you’re gonna wake up more snakes than we could ever run from.”
A moment’s hesitation.
“We are not doing anything, Roy. No matter what you do, the past always catches up. You think I want to be in this position? We helped each other, remember? An opportunity presented itself, and we took advantage of it. We made a lot of money, you and me and Carson Riggs. You don’t think it’s haunted me, too? Well, this ain’t no different, Roy. I’m asking for you to stand by me the same way I stood by you. That’s all I am asking of you, and you cannot deny me that.”
Garfield gripped the receiver. He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly as if everything was now testing him.
“No, Roy. You listen to me now. As long as that girl stays up at Ector, we have a hope of keepin’ ourselves out of Reeves County Farm. Piss off Carson Riggs, and he’s gonna get his high-an’-mighty friends to use whatever influence they got to see us burn in hell. That’s the beginning and end of it, and I ain’t hearin’ another word.”
With that, Garfield leaned forward and hung up the phone.
He rose from his chair, walked to the
window of his office, and looked down the length of Calvary’s main drag.
“Lord Almighty, what have we done?” he asked the empty room. He did not expect an answer, did not need one, for he knew it well enough already.
FORTY-TWO
They sat side by side in Henry’s pickup outside the Chandler place. They’d killed the brights so as not to disturb Evie’s father. It was getting late. Evie was tired, said she was burned out with everything.
“It’s like untying one knot, only to find there’s another knot beneath that, and then yet another,” she said. “And Evan? You think Carson framed Evan?”
“I think Evan is just as likely to have done that all by himself.”
“You said he remembered nothing.”
“He said he remembered nothing. Wakes up after drinking himself blind, there’s blood on his hands, and in the hallway outside his room there’s a dead guy with his brains beaten out. Circumstantial maybe, but … Jesus, how do you even defend yourself against something like that?”
“You don’t,” Evie said. “Wonder if he knew about the kid by then.”
“Maybe not,” Henry said. “Rebecca got pregnant in February of 1949. Had the kid—when?—November sometime, right? Evan killed the guy—if he did, in fact, kill him—in August. He may have gone to jail knowing nothing about it.”
“I wonder when he found out that Rebecca had died,” Evie said.
“He didn’t really speak of her. He only told me about the daughter right toward the end of my sentence. Way I’m thinking right now is that he told me only enough to get my word. I don’t think Carson was ever Sarah’s legal guardian … maybe in name, but certainly not in any other capacity. I think Evan told me that because he knew Carson would contradict it. He wanted to put me in enough mystery so I wouldn’t quit.”
“He knew you well enough to know how stubborn you’d be.”
“Maybe so,” Henry said.
“And you’re really not gonna open that letter, are you?”