Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

19

As Graydon McCarthy had said, the motel was owned by one Harvey Blackburn. Harvey was easily found, again in the nearest bar, and Gaines explained the situation as far as Webster was concerned.

Blackburn was a drunk, was drunk when Gaines found him, would be drunk for the rest of the night. From Gaines’s first impression, the man was a chiseler and a thief. Somehow or other, he’d wound up owning the property—a dozen or so falling-apart motel rooms built in a crescent, the neon sign in the center driveway, now broken down and out of action, a small office to the right. This was the kind of place that had been in its prime in the midfifties, a simple, clean stopover joint for interstate travelers, some headed south to New Orleans, others north to Jackson, perhaps even Memphis. There would have been a catalog of house rules, a wedge of pages with a hole punched through the upper-left-hand corner and hung from a nail behind the door of each cabin. No smoking in the bed. No milk to be left in the room upon vacating. No music. No dancing. No loud talking after nine p.m. On it would go—item by item—until it seemed that whatever brief sojourn might be endured there would involve nothing more than standing silent and immobile in the corner of the room, your unpacked suitcase ready for collection at the door, your shod feet encased in polythene bags to prevent inadvertent marks on the carpet or scuffs on the baseboard.

Now Blackburn charged by the hour, the day, the week, the year, whatever you liked. He catered to all and sundry.

Gaines knew that whatever Blackburn told him, there would always be some other story hiding just beneath the surface. He was curious as to how such a small man could bear such a burden of secrets.

Gaines told Blackburn that Webster’s motel cabin was a crime scene, that it was to be treated as such. There would be no entry, not even for Blackburn, and he—Sheriff Gaines of Whytesburg—would be overall responsible for any and all matters that related to the investigation.

He asked Blackburn how long Webster had lived there.

“A year,” Blackburn said. “Maybe a year and a half.”

Gaines didn’t wait for questions, and it seemed Blackburn didn’t have any. Blackburn seemed like a man well practiced in keeping his mouth shut tight, just in case he opened it and the truth inadvertently fell out.

Gaines told Hagen to call in to the office, to get Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton out there. Every resident of the motel needed to be questioned, their particulars taken. Gaines wanted to know—first and foremost—if any of these people had known about this. Had Webster ever spoken to anyone of these twenty-year-old events?

Chantry and Dalton arrived. Gaines gave Hagen the responsibility of overseeing the actions there, the canvassing of the neighbors, the collection of whatever information they could glean about Webster himself, about his comings and goings during his residence at the motel. Lester Cobb had said that Webster was upstream regularly, but had Webster been seen in the proximity of the buried body? Did he make a habit of returning to the scene of the crime?

Hagen produced the release document. “I typed this up,” he said. “Get Webster to sign it soon as you can.”

Gaines read it through, folded it, and tucked it into his pocket, and with Hagen and the deputies then organized, Gaines steeled himself for the task at hand. He would search the room, the bathroom, the front and rear of the cabin.

Once again, he covered his face, and once again he entered Lieutenant Michael Webster’s motel cabin, the first room of which was dark, unsettling, and stank like rotten meat.

Gaines switched on the lights, and it was only then—in the glare of two stark and shadeless bulbs—that he appreciated the level of filth and chaos that had consumed Webster’s cabin. It was said that the state of a man’s living space was a reflection of his state of mind. Gaines’s own quarters were somewhat stark, an evident lack of personal touches, but he lived with his mother, cared for her there, and thus had considered all things from her perspective and for her comfort. When she died, if she ever died, then her things would go. Gaines would not want to live with constant reminders of her presence. And then the house would be empty and he would have to start over.

But here? Here was something beyond all comprehension. In the darkness of the unlit room, those minutes when he had first spoken with Webster, his attention had been on Webster. Now Webster was not present, the room no longer dark, and Gaines could see the reasons for the unbearable funk of the place. To the right was a small kitchenette and eating area, and it was here that the vast majority of the garbage was concentrated. Takeout food boxes, a half-eaten pie, trash bags spilling over with mold-infested waste, dirty plates, articles of unwashed clothing, a heap of skin mags, clothes, shoes, boxes of ammo, three handguns, a rusted bandolier, napsacks, a suitcase full of 45-rpm records, many of them broken. Amid this bedlam were ashtrays piled high with the roaches of joints, a couple of plastic bags of weed, twists of paper, within which was amphetamine sulfate. And then Gaines found a grocery sack filled with prescription medication bottles, many of them bearing names that were not Webster’s. Uppers, downers, everything imaginable, a concoction of which would have killed any man of regular constitution. Webster was able to stand, to talk, to act, but his mind, his imagination, his rationale, had to be utterly fucked.

Gaines found a heap of clothes in the corner of the room. Using the tip of his pen, he lifted the pants, held them up, saw the thick, dried mud that traveled as far as the knees. He gagged, felt the tension in his throat fighting against the urge to just puke, to just let it out, to release the entire physical reaction to this terrible, terrible thing. But Gaines held it down.

He dropped the pants, headed back to the car for some bags, returned with a pair of gloves as well. Carefully, trying to ensure that none of the dried mud fell away, he bagged the pants, a shirt, a pair of boots. If this mud could be identified as the same mud from the riverbank, then it would corroborate Cobb’s statement that he had seen Webster there. It was of no great consequence, of course. So Webster liked to go looking for garter snakes. So Webster took a walk by the river every once in a while. Perhaps, Gaines thought, he himself was looking for nothing more than any small certainty he could find amid the ocean of uncertainties that faced him. He put the bags in the trunk of his car, and then he took a few moments to breathe deeply, to gather his thoughts, to steady his nerves before he searched further.

He stood for a while, almost as if he believed that he could become acclimated and insensate to the smell. He could not, and he would not, and he knew he was merely postponing the inevitable.

He maneuvered his way through the garbage to the back of the room. Here were the boxes he had seen behind Webster. There were a good half dozen, and he lifted down the first and started looking through it. At first, Gaines had the impression that here was nothing but a mountain of random newspaper clippings, but then a certain pattern seemed to emerge. Fires, collapsed buildings, mining disasters, floods, storms, hurricanes, typhoons, ships lost at sea, car crashes, train wrecks, bridges dropping into ravines and rivers, forest fires, farming accidents and gas explosions. On it went, both natural disasters and man-made calamities. The common thread, sometimes so obvious from images of individuals being carried from the ruins of some building, other times revealed in the third or fourth paragraphs, were the survivors. Sometimes one, sometimes two or three, but always a small number in relation to those who had lost their lives. And the clippings had been collected from newspapers right across the country, not only local but national, covering everything from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to the Boise City News and the Charleston Post and Courier. The boxes were dated in sequential years, starting as far back as Christmas of 1945 and running all the way to the present. Gaines counted six boxes, each box covering five years, the last box having started in 1970 and still incomplete. If nothing else, Webster had been obsessive in his organization. He had underlined the number of survivors in each case, and where they had been mentioned, he had underlined their names.

What this meant, Gaines could not even begin to conceive, but it had to represent something.

And then Gaines had it. The reference Webster had made to his section in Guadalcanal.

November third, I was in a foxhole with my section. Nine of us left, all hunkered down to weather it through, and they hit us direct. Eight dead, one living.

And after that, what he had said about making a deal. How he had made some kind of deal. And then something had happened in 1952, and they had started calling him the luckiest man alive. Who were they? People in general, or some specific people?

And he had gone on to say that he had been dead already, dead ever since the moment he’d made the deal.

What was this deal? A deal to survive the war? And with whom? Such a thing had to exist solely in Webster’s deranged mind. Did he believe he had made a deal with some divine or arcane force and thus had survived Guadalcanal while everyone else in his section had been killed? And what was this thing in ’52? Had he murdered Nancy Denton and performed some bizarre ritual on her as some kind of payback for the life he’d been given? Is that what Michael Webster actually believed?

Gaines was even more uncertain than when he had left the office. He started to put the newspaper clippings back where he’d taken them from, careful not to disturb their original order, and it was then that he found the Bible. Battered, dog-eared, the leather cracked in places, it seemed not only old, but neglected. Flicking through it for any marker or inserts, of which there were none, he noticed the occasional underlined passage. Inside the front cover was a handwritten scrawl. This helped me. E. Who was E? Right now it was of no great concern. Maybe it was a war buddy of Webster’s, someone from the VA perhaps. As Gaines stacked the boxes once more, he found the photo album. It was there, down against the baseboard, and he nearly missed it. But something drew him to it, and even as he opened it up to look at the first picture, he hoped that here he would find something more than circumstantial evidence and the ramblings of a crazy man to connect Michael Webster to Nancy Denton.

In the pictures she was alive. So utterly alive. She seemed always to be smiling, and when she was not smiling, she was laughing. There were images of her with three or four others, the same faces appearing time and again. There was no mistaking the presence of Lieutenant Michael Webster, sometimes in his own clothes, sometimes in uniform, and in these pictures there was no mistaking the familiarity and affection that seemed to exist between Webster the killer and Nancy the victim. Wasn’t it the case that more than eighty percent of murders were perpetrated by people who were known to the victim? The others that recurred constantly included a girl who seemed a year or two younger than Nancy, two young men who bore similarities enough to be related, and every once in a while a much younger girl. A crowd of childhood friends, it seemed, and their images looked back at Gaines from the monochrome snapshots of years gone by, and he wondered what had really happened on the August night in 1954 that saw Nancy Denton dead.

Gaines took the album and the Bible to the car. He put them in the trunk. He closed up Webster’s room and drove back to the office.

Once there, Gaines instructed Hagen to secure everything in the evidence room, itself little more than a store cupboard with a lock, but it sufficed for those very rare occasions when Whytesburg needed somewhere to secure items of significance or value.

Gaines then called Dalton out at the motel.

“We got anything?” he asked.

“Not a great deal, Sheriff. They’re all saying the same thing. Quiet guy. Kept himself to himself. Hardly ever saw him. Kind of intense. Apart from that, squat.”

“I reckoned that would be the case. So finish up there, and then get back here.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“What is it, Forrest?”

“Figured we’d maybe be done for the night. We’re already a couple of hours over shift hours, Sheriff …”

“Have a sixteen year-old-girl here, Officer Dalton. Sixteen years old. Don’t much care that it happened twenty years ago, but I have a whacko in the basement who sawed her pretty much in two. You got a choice. You can either come back here and keep an eye on him, or you can go out and spend the night consoling her mother.”

“Yes,” Dalton replied. “Understood, Sheriff. Sorry about that. I’ll see you at the office.”

20

Gaines went on down to the basement to see Webster. He found him there on the bunk, outside the door a plate with a couple of fried pork chops and some rice and beans. Webster hadn’t touched it.

Gaines recognized the expression on Webster’s face. It was called the thousand-yard stare. In Gaines’s experience, mostly those he had known at the VA, all veterans had it at one time or another—the odd moment, perhaps a week apart, growing ever more infrequent as the months elapsed. Seems that Webster had it almost all the time. Once again, the man seemed to possess the ability to look right through Gaines, and he did it with such intensity that Gaines felt like nothing at all. It really was that intense. If Webster had just reached out in that moment, Gaines knew Webster’s fingers would touch him and then pass right on through.

“Michael?” Gaines said.

A faint smile crossed Webster’s lips.

Gaines had also seen that smile before—the haunted, guilty survivor’s smile—at the VA, at the Veterans Hospital up in Jackson, in the awkward silence of the Demobilization Center as those who had served their tours were processed out of a war and back into a world that neither could, nor would ever, understand. But above that smile were the eyes. Nineteen– and twenty-year-olds with a look in their eyes they should not have possessed until they reached their forties. Perhaps they still believed they wouldn’t make it, that their lives could be taken at any moment, so they thought it best to assume such expressions now while they still had a chance. Cynical, bitter, world-weary, battle-fatigued, hardened in so many ways, save those ways that were useful in any other life.

Webster looked like that, as did Gaines, but Gaines knew he was still fighting against it, still escaping from it, and one day he perhaps would.

“Sheriff,” Webster said.

“Mike . . . I need you to tell me what happened to her heart.”

Webster closed his eyes, opened them again, almost in slow motion. “It went into a box, Sheriff. A box that could not be broken by root nor animal nor lightning nor rain. That was what needed to be done. Four yards east, twelve yards north from where the body was planted under . . .”

“Planted under?”

“Want something to grow, well, you gotta plant it under, right?”

Gaines was silent for a moment. “You put her heart in a box.”

“I did.”

“What kind of box did you use, Mike?”

“I used a strong metal box that had belonged to my father, and I emptied out the nails and screws, and I wrapped Nancy’s heart in cloth, and I tied the cloth tight, and then I buried the box, like I said.”

“Four east, twelve north from where you buried her body.”

“ ’S right.”

Gaines turned and walked to the base of the stairwell. He turned and looked back at Webster. Webster was gone again—into the thousand-yard stare, into whatever world existed behind those dark and distant eyes.

Back upstairs, he told Hagen to load the car with as many torches as he could find.

“And get sawhorses, crime-scene tape, rope as well.”

Hagen complied without questioning their purpose. Perhaps he had now reconciled himself to the fact that from here it would likely get worse rather than better.

Gaines checked with Barbara Jacobs if there were any outstanding messages, learned there were none, and then he headed out front to the car. What it was that alerted him, he did not know, but before he reached reception, he was aware that trouble had arrived.

Gaines had been anticipating the inevitable appearance of ex– deputy sheriff Eddie Holland, alongside him his sidekick, Nate Ross, one-time legal eagle around these parts, now nothing more than a retired lawyer with too much time and money. Even when he’d worked under Don Bicklow, Holland had been contrariwise. Always against the grain of things, sometimes stating opinions simply because they countered the consensus. Disagreeable for disagreements’ sake. Whichever ways considered, something of an asshole. However, he had mellowed with age, it seemed, and though he spent a good deal too much attention concerning himself with the affairs of others, Gaines did not dislike him. He did not dislike either of them, truth be known, but they always had too much to say when he had too little time to listen. Ross had been a very successful attorney, at first a public defender, then owning and managing his own practice, and then, finally, he had become a state prosecutor. Maybe he had tired of listening to his clients’ lies and bullshit and decided that jail was a better place for them. Once retired, he started looking for someplace to drown his sorrows and relieve his boredom. He used to live up in some fancy place in Hattiesburg, but then his wife died, and the three kids they’d wrestled into adulthood apparently felt there was no need to come home now that their mother had passed. Ross had rattled around the empty halls and emptier rooms for a handful of months and then sold the place for three times more than he’d paid. New money from the North was buying into the appearance of old-South wealth and style, and some stationery and office supplies tycoon had snapped up the Ross mansion. Gaines had seen the place one time—reputedly bought with money earned from prosecuting black people for things that had never happened or had been perpetrated by whites—and it looked like a three-tier wedding cake. So Nate Ross came to Whytesburg, had arrived back in the fall of 1970, just a few months after Gaines had graduated from Vicksburg and taken the job in Breed County. The sorrows Nate Ross was trying to drown still weren’t dead. They had some brave pair of lungs, or maybe some secret supply of oxygen unbeknownst to Ross. Regardless, he kept sluicing down those sorrows with good, hard liquor in the hope that he’d wake up happier tomorrow.

Holland and Ross were rarely apart, both widowed, both lonely, both a great deal more interested in other people’s affairs than was healthy. The ex-cop and the ex-lawyer, minds set on interfering and getting involved, had somehow gotten word about Webster and had come down to see what was happening.

“Nate,” Gaines said, “and Ed. Well, what a great pleasure it is to see you pair.”

Ross was a good ten feet from Gaines, but Gaines could smell the liquor.

“Don’t bullshit us, Sheriff,” Holland said, grinning broadly. “We’re the last people in the world you want to see, and that doesn’t just count for this evening.”

Gaines paused. Inside, he just counted to ten.

One.

“Seems we got ourselves a situation here . . . ,” Ross said.

Two, three.

“A little bit of a situation, wouldn’t you say?”

Four, five.

“Seems to me we have a responsibility to ensure that everything—”

Six, seven.

“—is done right and proper.”

Eight, nine.

“Wouldn’t want you making a mess of such an important case as this, would we, Sheriff?”

Ten.

“We’re doing just fine here, gentlemen,” Gaines said. “We have everything under control . . .”

“You sure now?” Holland asked. “Don’t seem that Whytesburg’s had such a case for as long as I can recall . . . not only a murder, but the butchering of a young girl—”

“Now, where d’you go and hear such a thing?” Gaines asked, knowing full well that Victor Powell would have told his wife, who would then have told her friends, and before lunchtime half the folks of Whytesburg would have been fully apprised of the situation.

“Honestly,” Gaines went on, “I don’t know that there are two more advised and responsible people in this town, and I’d have thought that such a responsibility, you with your police experience, Ed, and you, Nate, being so legally educated and wise, would feel nothing less than the full burden of care in such a matter.”

Neither Holland nor Ross said a word. They looked at each other, then back at Gaines.

Gaines leaned closer, the confidant, acknowledging both Holland and Ross as equals, if not superiors.

“If I can’t rely on you guys to manage this business with confidentiality and discretion, then who can I rely on? Place like this, Whytesburg, depends upon its elders to keep order, to make sure that rumor doesn’t find its way where it shouldn’t.”

Once again, Holland looked at Ross, and Ross looked back at Holland.

“Now, I know you weren’t deputy when this Denton girl went missing, Ed, and you, Nate . . . well, you were up at your practice in Hattiesburg, far as I know. You are probably not aware of the original circumstances of her disappearance, and Don Bicklow and George Austin are both long gone. So that leaves me to ask questions of those who were here and those who were involved. So, unless you were here, or unless you were involved, then I don’t know that I can ask anything of you but the exercising of your sense of duty in setting a good example around and about. I will be speaking to you both, because I believe that you may know some things of value to this case, but we’re not doing that tonight. So, as far as the here and now is concerned, I have matters to attend to with some urgency. I know that you both appreciate the situation I am dealing with far better than anyone else here, maybe even better than me. I am the sheriff, and I gotta deal with this thing, but I want to know that I can count on you for assistance and advice if I should so need it.”

“Of course, Sheriff,” Holland blurted, taken aback perhaps by the level of confidence that was being expressed in his abilities and position.

“Without question,” Ross added. “Without any question at all.”

“Well, that makes me feel a great deal better,” Gaines said, and he shook their hands. “Now, I really do need to impress upon you the need to maintain some sense of order on this thing, gentlemen. I know all too well how many folks around here value your opinion, and I want you to use that opinion as wisely as you can. Let’s keep this thing localized, shall we? Let’s keep this problem a Whytesburg problem, and with both of you on my side, I’m sure we can deal with it quite capably ourselves. We wouldn’t want the whole county coming on down here to have a lynching party, now, would we?”

Gaines didn’t wait for a response. He gripped Ross’s shoulder, squeezed it assuredly, and then left the building.

When he looked back, they were still standing there—looked like they didn’t know Tuesday from Sunday, nor any of the days in between—and Gaines smiled to himself.

Sometimes the only way to deal with Ross and Holland was to grant them the importance they so earnestly believed they deserved. Truth was, he was perhaps granting them no more importance than they did deserve. They were good people, people used to working hard and getting things done, and retirement didn’t suit such folks.

Hagen joined Gaines. He had loaded the trunk with everything Gaines had asked for.

“Where we going?” Hagen asked.

“Back to where we found her body and then a little way off.”

“What’re we looking for?”

“Her heart, Richard. We’re looking for her heart.”

Hagen just looked at Gaines.

“Seems I’m gonna spend this week looking at the faces of folks who don’t believe what I’m saying to them.”

Hagen—wide-eyed—just nodded. He opened the driver’s-side door and climbed in.

Gaines got in the passenger side, the car pulled away, and neither of them spoke for a good ten minutes.

“You get him to sign that release document?” Hagen asked.

“Oh hell, I forgot,” Gaines said. He reached into his pocket and found the paper that Hagen had given him.

“He needs to sign it, John.”

“Soon as I get back,” Gaines replied.

Silence filled the car again.

Gaines did not know if finding Nancy Denton’s heart—whatever might remain of it—would be worse than discovering nothing at all. Finding that poor girl’s heart precisely four yards east and twelve yards north of the point where they had wrestled her frail and broken body from the black filth of the riverbank would merely confirm that they were dealing with something far darker than Gaines had feared.

The things you witnessed in war tied your nerves in knots, tied and twisted them so damned tight they would never unravel, not with a hundred, not with a thousand years of living. And if the living brought you such things as this—things that were equal to the horrors Gaines had seen, things that were carried from the very heart of war itself into an unsuspecting, fragile small-town America—then what hope did he have of becoming fully human again? Scant hope at best, and perhaps it was this of which Gaines was most afraid.