Cold moon over Babylon

  After the station wagon was raised and drained, and the two corpses had been removed to the funeral home on the south side of town, an examination of the wounds and an analysis of the dried blood on the sword proved that it had been the murder weapon, had killed both Evelyn and Jerry Larkin. Moreover, that portion of steel found beneath the front seat of the station wagon matched, perfectly the broken blade discovered in the trunk of Warren’s care Fingerprints were unfortunately lacking.

  The news spread widely in Babylon that next day, and before Sunday school and after church, no one talked of anything else.

  Early that morning, Ginny visited Warren in Jail. She brought with her the assurance that her husband was willing and anxious to represent him in this case, and they wouldn’t even mention fees until it was all ewer and done with. And, just as his wife had promised, Charles Darrish showed up just at eleven, and conferred with his client some length, making a few notes on Warren’s movements since Wednesday night.

  His one telephone call—Hale would have allowed him as many as he liked, but Warren had no one else he wanted to talk to—was to his mother in Atmore. She was inexpressibly shocked by what had happened, and declared she was sure that Warren hadn’t done it, but that she couldn’t possibly bring herself to visit him in jail, that she had never been in a jail before in her life, that her husband had committed suicide before he was carried off to jail, and that she felt it would be harmful to her fragile emotional and physical condition if she were to make the trip to the Babylon town hall. Warren said that he understood, that he had not for a moment expected that she would come down to see him, and that if she liked, he would call again, sometime before the trial, to let her know how things progressed.

  Hale heard Warren's end of this call, and looked with pity on the accused boy. It was an odd thing that only two days before he had resolved to keep Belinda away from the man, fearing for her safety. But now he called Belinda at home, and asked her to go out and buy some barbecue for Warren and bring it to the office, and in fact, to bring enough for the three of them. They would take a little supper together, in hopes of cheering Warren up.

  “Daddy,” said Belinda doubtfully: “But you think he did it, don’t you? I mean, everybody in town says that they were surprised he hadn’t cut somebody’s head off before this, and don’t know why he waited so long to start tying high school girls to their bicycles and throwing ’em off of every bridge in the north part of the county, and I don’t know what all else.”

  “Honey,” said Hale softly: “I really don’t think that Warren did do it. And even if he did, that’s no reason why we cain’t bring him a little barbecue, and share it with him.”

  “I guess not, Daddy,” said the cheerleader, even more doubtfully; but half an hour later, she showed up smiling at town hall with boxes of barbecued chicken, a carton of French-fried onion rings, and two quarts of Dr Pepper.

  Warren was touched by the simple meal eaten around Hale’s desk. They did not talk of the deaths of Margaret, Evelyn, and Jerry Larkin at all, but of Belinda’s plans for the coming school year, and of the Rattlesnake Rodeo, which would begin in another couple of weeks.

  Dr. Dickinson, the county coroner, completed his investigation late Sunday afternoon, and turned the bodies over to the undertaker. Because the Larkins, despite what Hale had heard from Charles Darrish, proved to have no family that could be located readily, it was decided to proceed with the funeral as soon as possible. Evelyn Larkin had a burial policy, which in this case was stretched to cover two. This was possible, the undertaker agreed, because it was a double closed-casket ceremony, and he could supply both coffins, with only slight interior damage, at a much reduced rate. It would not be possible however to have concrete vaults in the cemetery.

  The small embarrassed funeral was held Monday morning, with services only at graveside. The sheriff showed up with Belinda beside him, Ginny and Charles Darrish were chief mourners, and behind them were the multitudinous curious of Babylon, who were disappointed that the Baptist minister made no reference, in his brief eulogy that served to commemorate both grandmother and grandson, to the manner of their deaths. The common remark that morning was that no one had seen a family plot fill up as fast as the Larkins’ had.

  Standing distant among the evergreens were reporters from the Mobile Press-Register and the Pensacola News- journal. The Press-Register called Ted Hale aside, and demanded confirmation of the rumor that he had sheltered the maniac for the past twelve months above his garage, when the man was wanted in three states of the Southeast for similar crimes.

  While the sheriff was reluctantly admitting it was true that Warren Perry had signed a lease that many months in the past, the Pensacola News-Journal persuaded Belinda to return to the graveside, where she posed with a sorrowful face beside the two open graves. The two black cemetery workers flanked her, their upraised spades dramatically filled with soil about to be tossed atop the coffins below. The photograph appeared in the later afternoon edition, and Belinda bought fifteen copies of the paper, one of which she proudly carried to Warren Perry in his cell.

  Chapter 36

  While the coffins of Jerry and Evelyn Larkin were being lowered into the single wide-dug grave in the Babylon cemetery, Nathan Redfield was collecting winnings of $163 at the racetrack in Cantonment. He didn’t often recover money that he had bet, but today he wasn’t surprised that luck had fallen his way. With all that had gone right for him, it seemed improbable that anything so small as the picking of Mr. Pudding as the winning dog in the third race, would go wrong—and it had not.

  He was returning to Babylon now after a leisurely oyster supper on the municipal pier in Pensacola. The moon was within four days of waxing full; and on this cloudless warm night it shone feverishly across the tops of the trees in the dense pine forest, shimmered over the tin roofs of the few houses on this road, held distractingly in Nathan’s eyes all the way back. Though he turned sharp curves in the road, the moon cast implacably through the same spot in the windshield.

  Nathan was pleased with the events of the last few days, and as he drove through the silent forest, beneath the waxing moon, mused contentedly, certain that at last, he was coming into his own.

  Nathan had been born a rich man’s son—though James Redfield’s fortune at the end of World War II was actually rather modest, in so small and poor a place as Babylon it seemed substantial indeed. Nathan’s early life had been predictable: He grew up proud and recalcitrant, was sullen with his father and impatient with his mother while she lived. When James Redfield remarried, Nathan did his best to irritate his stepmother, but this imperious woman didn’t brook interference from an adolescent, and she had Nathan packed off to a military school in Ohio. Ben, because he was more docile, was not required to accompany his brother. When his stepmother died, Nathan Redfield came back to Babylon for the funeral— and he never returned to the military school.

  He took at once to himself the title of “rich man's son,” and set about to enjoy himself as much as was possible with his father not yet dead. He attended the University of West Florida for a year, while living at home, but after an argument with his father, he left school and joined, the Air Force.

  Things were never the same after this in the small family; the rift between the father and his two sons only widened. Ben completed high school, speaking to his father only every three days or so; and when Nathan returned from his stint in the Air Force, he was given a job at the CP&M, though he sat at a desk as far removed from his father's as possible. Nathan sought advancement not because he was ambitious, but rather because he knew it would irritate his father, who liked to regard him as a disappointing self-willed offspring. During the period of convalescence following James Redfield’s first automobile accident, in which a senior vice-president of the bank had been killed, Nathan rose to be acting manager of the CP&M; he relinquished this to his father a few months later. But shortly thereafter came the second accident, which completely incapacitated James Redfi
eld and Nathan took over the bank entirely.

  Still, although this succession seemed easy enough and only right in the critical eyes of Babylon, it was not an easy inheritance. James Redfield was ill-disposed toward his sons; his was a bitterness that could not be dispelled by any number of years of good behavior on the parts of Nathan and Benjamin. He had a general mistrust of their ways and motives. Nathan knew that just some small, arbitrary thing could cause his father to change his will in favor of Ginny Darrish, leaving him and Ben with insultingly small trust funds and possibly not even control of the bank.

  Nathan had no desire to give up his present comfortable life, and he had some time ago begun to make plans to get money on his own, money over which his father had no control. He knew he hadn’t the instinct for good investments, and he hadn’t the energy for entrepreneurship, and so he had determined to wait patiently until something showed itself.

  He had discovered his chance in the first visits of the Texaco representatives to his father. James Redfield had wanted to keep these secret, but Ben had informed his brother of the unexpected appearance of the yankees at the house. Nathan had demanded the full facts of his father. But James Redfield had unconscionably delayed the signing of the exploration leases, only to irritate him, Nathan was certain. They might already have been a couple of hundred thousand dollars richer.

  Because he didn’t know what else to do, Nathan began to buy up small plots of land south of Babylon, five- and ten-acre farmsteads, and twenty-acre tracts of scrub woodland. But these tiny parcels of land were scattered, and even when colored in on a map that he kept hidden in his chest of drawers they seemed insignificant; it was unlikely that the oil companies would decide to drill twenty wells on just those morsels of land that he had purchased at random. Moreover, Nathan hadn’t the liquid capital to purchase much more; his income was only a little more than moderate, but he gambled and he spent money in Mobile, and his savings account was embarrassingly small for a banker—he would be able to afford little more land.

  Then had come the discovery in the oil representatives’ hotel room in Mobile—that Texaco was interested in the land north of the Styx. Nathan had surreptitiously written to the lawyers of the man in Boston who owned most of that property, but he was not interested in selling. He turned his attention to the Larkin blueberry farm, and wondered how he might secure it for himself.

  Nathan remembered Jim and JoAnn Larkin’s disappearances and he more than anyone else in town had a good idea of what had happened to them; it seemed all the more fitting then that he should try to wrest the blueberry farm from Evelyn Larkin’s hands. A few times he had spoken to the old woman, casually, of the possibility of selling the farm if circumstances required and the right buyer presented himself; but Evelyn Larkin had said that she would never sell, that the farm was all she had ever known, and that she would have nowhere else to go. The blueberries supported both her and her grandchildren and if only rust for their sakes, she would remain.

  If was shortly after this that Nathan Redfield had first taken serious note of Margaret Larkin, not only because she was a young, lithe, handsome girl, but also because she was Evelyn Larkin’s granddaughter. Nathan had contrived to sit next to Margaret at two football games, since her place on the North Escambia High School Typhoons pep squad was at the end of the top row. She had shyly accepted his interest, without really understanding it, and had nodded and spoken to him whenever they passed on the street or saw one another in the CP&M.

  Once, on driving home from the bank, he had passed her on the street; he turned the car around, and offered her a ride out to the blueberry farm. She accepted, but insisted that he let her out just at the bend before the river, so that her grandmother might not see her approach in his car. Margaret’s willingness to engineer this small deception led Nathan to believe that the girl could be coaxed into greater concessions. Nathan liked young women, especially those still in high school; in fact, he hadn’t any use at all for females who had passed the age of seventeen.

  After that, whenever he saw Margaret on the street, he would drive her out to the farm; he mentioned this to no one, and was certain that she never said anything of it. If they had been seen together in so small a town as Babylon the word would have got back to him in the form of lighthearted ribbing. But he had never been accused of having a romance with the adolescent blueberry heiress, and so was certain that no one knew of their casual meetings.

  One day early in February, instead of letting Margaret out at the bend before the river, he turned the Scout onto the disused logging track, and drove up to the bluff above the Styx. He pulled a blanket out of the back, and spread it beneath the pines. He poured out bourbon into Dixie cups. The young girl was excited by the illicitness of the impromptu picnic with the older man, and unused to the liquor, became quickly drunk. In time, Nathan pinned Margaret beneath him and raped her. Afterward, she crawled off a few feet and threw up.

  He drove her back to the Babylon highway and pushed open the door for her. She climbed silently out. “Just give me the high sign when you’re ready to do it again,” he laughed, and drove off. In the rearview mirror, he saw that she had not turned toward her house, but stood unmoving in the middle of the road, pale and gray, staring vacantly after him.

  Now, recalling that moment, Nathan glanced in the mirror. A dozen yards behind the car stood Margaret Larkin, gray and still. But the car moved forward so quickly, and the forest was so dark, that she was gone before Nathan’s brain had even registered his fear. He shuddered, stamped down on the accelerator and drove faster, to flee the vision. The moon shone down through the windshield and seemed almost to blind him.

  She appeared again on the road ahead. He immediately took his foot off the accelerator and was about to apply the brakes, when the gray figure suddenly shifted into a wisp of fog, so common on Escambia County roads on warm humid nights. The thin cloud swirled and dissipated when the Lincoln swept through it. Nathan breathed more easily—what he had seen in the mirror was no more than just another column of fog, altered by the moonlight, the distorting mirror, and his own imagination. Margaret Larkin lay very still and quiet in her grave, slowly liquefying.

  Nathan tried very hard not to look again at the dark silent road that so quickly retreated behind the Lincoln, but every ten seconds or so, his glance would dart to the mirror; fee would fear to see something, see nothing, and breathe deeply in relief. He wished for other patches of fog, to reassure himself of his mistake; yet began to fear that the clouds would take on other shapes as well, and so dreaded to find them.

  He tried to think of something else, but could not rid himself of thoughts of Margaret Larkin.

  After the incident in the woods, the girl had not spoken again to Nathan, until she had called him up at home to tell him that she was pregnant, and that it was up to him to do something about it.

  Nathan’s first reaction was to accuse Margaret of having mistaken the symptoms—fourteen-year-old girls, he told her, didn’t get pregnant. He had never even heard of such a thing. With adolescent embarrassment, Margaret recounted the signs. Nathan said nothing for a few moments, certain now that he was in great trouble.

  Then he denied that the child was his, but Margaret stated simply that she had never had sexual intercourse with any other man, and that further, she did not intend to have an abortion. He could marry her, or he could not marry her, as he preferred, but he must acknowledge and provide for the child. No one else, neither her grandmother nor her brother, knew of it.

  He tried then to reason with her, pointing out that a marriage between them would be wrong, ludicrous, and unhappy; but Margaret only stubbornly repeated her belief that if he was capable of getting her pregnant, he was capable of marrying her. The question was, she said, was he ready to have it known that he had slept with a girl not yet even in the ninth grade?

  Nathan at last acquiesced to her demand, and only begged that she give him a few days in which to break this news to his father. At the end
of that time, she would be free to tell her brother and her grandmother, to order the invitations for the wedding, to choose the place where they would honeymoon.

  It was while he spoke these comforting words that Nathan decided that he would kill Margaret Larkin. Certainly, he would never marry her: Her grandmother— and probably the laws of the state—would not allow that Even if she could be persuaded to have an abortion, the news would probably leak out, get back to his father, and destroy that already tenuous relationship. James Redfield had declared that if either of his sons did anything that shamed his name, he wouldn’t hesitate a moment to call in Charles Darrish to change the will, cutting out both Nathan and Ben. Nathan had the idea that James Redfield expected that he and Ben would fake a robbery of the daily cash run from Pensacola to Babylon. But impregnating a fourteen-year-old girl would probably do just as well.

  Nathan was certain that Margaret had told no one yet; she was too earnest a child to have lied about that. Within a few days he had laid his plans carefully; he had seen her in the bank once and whisperingly reassured her that all would go through, and they would be married in only a few weeks’ time. Marveling that she accepted this, he cautioned her to say nothing yet of it to anyone. She nodded gravely.

  On Thursday, the first of June, he discovered by anonymously telephoning her grandmother, that Margaret was spending the afternoon with Warren Perry at the high school. He drove to the school in a vehicle that could not be identified as his own. The week before, the CP&M had foreclosed on a ribbon mill worker who lived well south of town. This man had given up the large black fishing hearse that he and his two sons used for weekend trips to the Gulf of Mexico. Nathan, who had access to the keys, had brought the vehicle up to Babylon, and parked it behind the football stadium.