Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

54

Maryanne Benedict held Della Wade’s shoulders as she cried. She did not cry for more than a few moments, and then she seemed to gather herself together with surprising composure. It was as if she were somehow demonstrating vulnerability, and this facet of herself she did not wish to share with those present in Nate Ross’s kitchen.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me everything you know about Nancy and Michael.”

Gaines did. He explained the sequence of events from the moment Nancy’s body was first discovered right up to the meeting they were now having in Nate Ross’s kitchen.

And when he was done, he sat back in his chair and watched as she tried to take it all in.

A couple of times she seemed to have a question on her lips, but then it vanished as she considered some other aspect of what she’d been told. Finally, minutes having passed, she asked the one thing that needed to be asked, the only question that really held any significance or meaning.

“And you have no evidence at all, do you?” she said. “Nothing that directly implicates Matthias in any of this? Not in Nancy’s death and not in Michael’s.”

“No, Miss Wade, I do not,” Gaines said.

“So what is this based on? Your intuition?”

“Perhaps,” Gaines said.

“Perhaps?”

“My intuition, yes, but also the fact that Matthias was in love with Nancy and yet could not have her, that he was with her the night she disappeared, that Matthias paid Michael’s bail, that he was the last person seen with Michael, the fact that he had someone terrorize Clifton, had them cut off his fingers, and just to stop you seeing him, even the fact that—”

“Enough,” Della said. “Enough now.”

“You’re right, Miss Wade. It’s all circumstantial or coincidental, and no, I do not have anything that I can prove or substantiate, but sometimes an intuitive feeling possesses more substance than anything else.”

“And you thought that because of what happened with Clifton, I might be willing to help you incriminate and expose my brother as a murderer?”

“Miss Wade, I do not know for sure that he is a murderer.”

“But you believe he is.”

“I consider him the most likely contender.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “This is just a nightmare, a fucking nightmare.”

“I understand.”

She looked up suddenly. “Do you? Do you even have the faintest idea what it’s like to be told that your own brother is a murderer, that he murdered someone twenty years ago, an innocent girl for God’s sake, and he’s lived with that for two decades?”

Gaines shook his head. “No, I don’t. I don’t have a clue how this must feel.”

Della sighed. “I am upset with you, Sheriff Gaines. I am upset with Maryanne. I am upset that you went to see Clifton. Clifton knows I love him. He doesn’t need to ask me. He knows I love him enough to wait for however long it takes. The moment he’s out, we are gone, seriously. And we will be gone so far and so fast that Matthias will not even know about it until it’s too late to do anything. And it’s not only Matthias that makes it difficult for us to have a future together. A white girl and a colored man cannot have a relationship here. It is not possible. That is just the way of things. We should have been smarter. We should have been more careful. I have to accept responsibility for what happened, as I was the one who gave him the money. It was a stupid and impulsive thing to do, and we learned a hard lesson. But I am patient, and I can wait, and then Clifton and I will wish this part of the world goodbye, and we won’t be coming back. I want you to know that if Matthias had seen this letter, then Clifton would be dead. You understand?”

“I do, yes,” Gaines replied.

“And he asked you to send word back from me?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Well, if you go up there again, you tell him that nothing has changed, that everything is the same. But you tell him, Sheriff Gaines. No one else. You do not pass on a message. You do not send the message with someone else. And if you cannot go there, then you do nothing. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, we are. Absolutely.”

“Okay then,” Della said. She turned to Nate Ross. “What you got that’s halfway toward moonshine in this place?”

“Got some good bourbon,” Ross replied.

“Well, I need some. I need a good slug in a cup of coffee.” She took a packet of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and lit one.

“So how was Clifton?” she said.

“He looked good,” Gaines replied. “As good as could be expected under the circumstances.”

“You know he’s a musician, right? You know I met him through Eugene?”

“Yes, he told me that.”

Della smoked her cigarette for a while. Ross brought her the laced coffee. She drank half of it, nodded at Ross, who then added more bourbon.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she said, almost to herself. “This is not what you think it is, Sheriff Gaines. This is not just a matter of walking up to the house and accusing my brother of murder and trusting that he will fall apart and confess.”

“I appreciate that, Miss Wade.”

“So what the hell do you think I’m going to be able to do?”

“Well, the mere fact that you have not leapt to his defense tells me something.”

“What, exactly? What does it tell you?”

“It tells me that you believe he might have done this, that such a thing would not have been beyond him.”

She smiled sardonically. “My brother is a man of many faces, Sheriff. Those who know him do not really know him, and those who don’t know him know more than they think. Who he is, and who he wants the world to believe he is, are two different things entirely.”

She hesitated for a moment. Gaines said nothing, his silence the best encouragement.

“He wants everyone to believe that he’s the master of his own little world. He runs my father’s businesses, or at least he pretends to. He appears every once in a while at the plants, at the refineries. He tells the people there what to do. They listen; they acknowledge him, and once he’s gone, they do what they were going to do before he showed up. He knows it, they know it, and it’s an arrangement of tacit consent. It works just fine on both sides. They get to make the companies and businesses work, and he gets to take the director’s salary.”

“And your father?”

“What about my father?”

“He doesn’t manage the businesses anymore?”

“My father is seventy-six years old, Sheriff Gaines. He has not been involved in any real capacity in his businesses for at least five years. After the illness—”

“The illness?”

“He was ill, seriously ill. At first they believed it was some kind of heart condition, but it wasn’t. Then they said it was a nerve disease, a deterioration of something in his brain, but he didn’t have the right symptoms. No one seems to know what was wrong with him, but it got worse and worse, and then it seemed to level out. He reached a state about a year or a year and a half ago, and he doesn’t seem to have gotten any worse since then.”

“And how is he? What effects has this illness had on him?”

“Everything, Sheriff. Everything about him has changed. He has moments of lucidity, but rarely. The times I have with my father, I mean, really have with him, are so few and far between these days. An hour or two a week, if I am lucky. He is elsewhere. He doesn’t remember the simplest things, and yet he can recall precise details of some event that happened fifty years ago as if it was yesterday. He rambles; he talks incessantly about nothing, and then he is completely silent for days at a stretch.”

“Is he aware of what happened with you and Clifton?”

“Sheriff, sometimes he doesn’t even know who I am, and I live with him.”

“And if he had known about you and Clifton, what would he have said?”

“You mean, would he have let me get involved with a colored man?”

“Yes.”

“No, he would not. Well, I think he would have done everything he could to discourage me, but if I had fought him—and believe me, I would have—he would have finally relented. He would not have let me stay here, but he would not have disowned me, neither in name nor financially.”

“And he would not have threatened Clifton or had him sent to Parchman.”

Della smiled ruefully. “Whatever has been said about my father, he was never a vindictive man. He was a businessman. He was tough, aggressive, but he was not cruel.”

Gaines looked at Ross, at Holland, at Maryanne. It seemed as though he might have been angling for some unspoken moral support, and Della picked this up immediately.

“What?” she asked.

“There’s a question I want to ask you, but I don’t want to cause offense—”

“Do I seem like the sort of person who is going to take offense at being asked a question, Sheriff?”

Gaines sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know what kind of person you are, Miss Wade.”

“Well, ask me the question, and if there’s gonna be a fistfight, then you’ve got three friends here to hold me down if it gets dirty.”

“Your father . . . his political persuasion, his loyalties, so to speak—”

“Ask the question, Sheriff. Politeness has its place, but directness serves us far better in the long run of things.”

“Is he Klan?” Gaines asked. “That direct enough for you?”

Della shrugged. “Well, at least I know what you’re asking me now.”

“So?”

“Politically, yes, personally, no. But then, such a balance cannot easily be maintained around here, if you know what I mean.”

“Explain.”

“I don’t need to explain, Sheriff. You know precisely what I mean. It’s all very well and good saying you’re in the club, but saying you are goes only so far. Every once in a while you have to do something that proves you’re in the club; otherwise folks start to get fidgety and unsettled. The Klan is on the decline. It might come to life again, but those who are out there with their mouths open, airing their opinions and whatnot, are becoming more and more rare as the years pass. It is not so fashionable nowadays, even down here, and if you are of that inclination, then it is expected that you keep your opinions to yourself, just to keep up appearances, you know? It’s a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to business. For some people, you have to say one thing, for others something else.”

“But your father has not been involved in business for some time, right?”

“Right, so that is a problem he has not had to deal with.”

“And Matthias?”

“I think you know where Matthias’s sympathies lie.”

“But does that extend further than his concern for his family? Is he just prejudiced when it comes to his sister getting involved with a colored man, or does it apply to everyone?”

“If you’re asking whether or not he goes out late at night with a pillowcase on his head, then no, he does not. Where he puts money, what he supports, whom he speaks with, where his allegiances lie, I do not know. You have to appreciate that my brother and I have not maintained the most amicable of relationships for quite some time.”

“So why do you stay at the house?”

“Have you seen the house?”

“Yes, I have,” Gaines said. “Not inside, but I was there very briefly, speaking to your brother a while back.”

“You could lose an entire family in that house. I can go for days without seeing him. It suits me to stay there right now.”

“For financial reasons?”

Della looked awkward for a moment, as if caught off guard. “I don’t see that—” She hesitated, turned to glance at Maryanne, standing in silence there by the back door. She sighed audibly, seemed perhaps exasperated. “For financial reasons, yes.”

“Do you think that if your father were able to maintain some coherence in his mental state, you could then explain your situation to him and he would help you?”

“It would not be a problem I would want to give him, Sheriff. I wouldn’t want to put him in the middle of any conflict I might be having with Matthias.”

“Are you not able to make financial arrangements to secure your independence from Matthias? Is that not possible?”

Della smiled. “However advanced into the twentieth century things may appear to be, Sheriff, there are some things that stay traditional. I have absolutely no influence or control over any aspect of the Wade fortune. In the event of my father’s death, everything comes under Matthias’s control. That’s the way he wants it, and that’s the way it will be. Perhaps that is unusual, but then my father has always been an unusual man. And taking into consideration the fact that my father is not able to manage his own affairs, he might as well already be dead, at least from a business point of view.”

Della lifted her coffee cup and drained it. She held it out toward Ross. “Same again, barkeep.”

“I think I’ll join you,” Ross said. “Anyone else?”

Maryanne and Gaines accepted coffee, declined the bourbon. Holland wanted both.

“So how is your life?” Gaines asked.

“Life is a waiting game right now,” Della said. “Waiting for my father to die, waiting for Clifton to be released, waiting for a revelation about how to handle this mess better than I am handling it right now.”

“You want some help?”

“You think you can help me?”

“I think we can help each other.”

“Seriously?”

“You doubt my intentions?” Gaines asked.

“I don’t know anything about your intentions, Sheriff Gaines. I appreciate the fact that you are trying to do something here, and I acknowledge that you made the effort to go on up to Parchman and see Clifton, ill-advised though it was, but I don’t know what your long-term plan is, no.”

“It’s very simple, Miss Wade. I want to find out if your brother was responsible for the deaths of Nancy Denton and Michael Webster, and if so, then I want to see him charged, arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced appropriately.”

“Do we hang folks for murder now, or do we fry them?”

“Not anymore, no. Death penalty has been suspended by the Supreme Court.”

“I didn’t know. So, it’d be a life sentence then?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Up at Parchman. That would be ironic, eh?”

Della was silent. She sipped her coffee. By the time she finished it, she would have gotten through a good three or four shots of bourbon. Maybe that was standard for Della Wade. Maybe that was the way she rounded off the edges of her awkward existence.

Gaines watched her. There was sadness there, no doubt about it, but deep-rooted, buried beneath the brave face she wore for the world. He did not envy the life she was living, and he knew that there was no amount of Wade money, present or promised, that would change the fact that she was desperately alone without Clifton Regis.

“Do you not hate Matthias for what he’s done?” Gaines asked.

“Hate him? No, Sheriff, I don’t hate him. There is no point hating him. What good would it serve? What problem would be solved by allowing him to upset me that much? No, I don’t hate him. I don’t trust him, and I don’t deal with him on anything but the most superficial terms. I know who he is and how he can be, and there have been times that he has demonstrated tremendous generosity and kindness, but it’s as if he’s at war with himself. He thinks he needs to be a certain way to survive, and that makes him arrogant and self-absorbed, but I don’t believe that’s who he truly is. The difficulty is that he’s been this way for so long that who he really is has been lost forever.”

Gaines nodded. He needed to ask Della Wade about something else, but he did not want to inspire any inherent impulse she might possess to defend her brother. He knew that she sensed this—if not in his expression, his body language, then in the seeming increase of tension in the room. It seemed that everyone was aware of this, for Della Wade pinned Gaines with a hard look and asked him outright.

“This is not all, is it?” she said. “There is something else.”

Gaines did not speak immediately. He started to explain, to walk around the edges of what he wanted to ask her, but she cut him short.

“Ask me the question, Sheriff. I cannot promise that I will know the answer, or even that I will answer it, but I am big enough to be asked.”

“January, 1968,” Gaines said. “Morgan City, Louisiana. Two girls were found murdered—”

“I remember it,” Della said.

“At the time—”

“At the time, there were a lot of questions. Some of those questions were asked of Matthias, but nothing was proven. There was no evidence to link Matthias to what happened to those children.”

“Just as there is no evidence to link Matthias to either Nancy or Michael.”

“You honestly think Matthias could have murdered little girls?”

“I don’t know, Miss Wade. I know Matthias even less well than I know you.”

Della sat without speaking for a good minute, perhaps two. It seemed so much longer, and the atmosphere in the kitchen was such that no one dared move or breathe. Even more than that, no one dared think.

Finally, she looked away toward Maryanne, not at her, just toward her, and then she turned back toward Gaines and shook her head. “I have nothing to say,” she said. “I do not want to think that my brother would be capable of such a thing. I know him, and I do not think he has it in him to do something like that. But, then, I did not believe he’d be capable of doing what he did to Clifton. I think what he did to Clifton was done out of jealousy, not prejudice or hatred, but jealousy.”

“Jealousy?”

“Jealous of love, Sheriff. Jealous that he does not have it, cannot find it, probably never will. He was jealous of Michael and Nancy, for sure, and he may well have been sufficiently jealous to take Nancy away from Michael. I do not know, and I am not saying that I do not want to know, but I am saying that I do not want to believe he did that. It’s natural, isn’t it? To think the best of people? To believe them good and kind and honest? But they’re not, and I’m not naive about these things. I can accept what he did to Clifton. I can accept what he has done to me. I can understand why he believes he should be this way in order to make it through this life, but I am struggling, desperately, when I consider him capable of such horrors. I am supposed to love him. He’s my brother. And I do love him, but I don’t know why. Maybe I don’t actually love him, but I have convinced myself that I do because that is what’s meant to happen. You’re not meant to hate your own family. Blood is thicker than water and all that. But this? This is someone else’s blood, isn’t it? Several people’s blood. What do you do then? What are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to feel?” She looked up at Gaines. “You don’t know, and I know you can’t answer that question, so don’t bother trying.”

She turned to Ross. “Nate, get me another drink, and skip the coffee this time.”

Ross brought her more bourbon, poured some into a glass while she lit another cigarette.

Gaines leaned forward. He smiled as best he could, trying perhaps to reassure her that he was here without bias or prejudice, without preconceptions or some unspoken ulterior motive.

“My mother died,” he said. “Just a week ago—”

Della opened her mouth, perhaps to express her condolences.

Gaines raised his hand, and she fell silent.

“She had been ill for a long time. I knew she was going to die. I’d known for a long time. But I wasn’t prepared for it, and I don’t think you can ever be prepared for it. My father died back in the war in Europe, and I never knew him, and so it’s easy to feel very little about that at all. If you never had something, then you can’t miss it, right? What I’m trying to say, Miss Wade, is that I cannot imagine how you must feel. I am not going to even try to imagine how you feel. All I can say is that every once in a while we drive right into something terrible, something so devastating and overwhelming, something we have no context for, no frame of reference, and we deal with it the way that we deal with it. They say that the things that don’t kill you make you stronger, but that’s not true. Maybe those things don’t kill you physically or emotionally, but they can kill you mentally, even spiritually. I don’t know what really happened to Nancy Denton and Michael Webster, just like I don’t know what happened to Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew back in 1968. What I do know is that someone killed those people, and I don’t think they deserved it any more than Clifton deserved to get his fingers cut off for loving you—”

“Don’t try and blackmail me, Sheriff Gaines. Don’t try and make it any more personal than it already is—”

“Della, I don’t think it could be any more personal. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. This is not some movie script where everything is going to fall into place at the end and everything’s going to get tied up nice and neat. This is a horror story, a real-life honest-to-God horror story, and I am right in the middle of it, and so are you. Maybe you’ll get through this, maybe Clifton will, maybe me and Nate and Eddie and Maryanne will all come through this and out the other end, but maybe we won’t. Nancy didn’t, and even though that was twenty years ago and we don’t have to think about it, Michael was killed just a week ago, and that is awful close, as far as I’m concerned. That is just too damned close. And even though I didn’t know the man, and despite whatever he might have done however many years ago, I don’t think it was right what happened to him. Even if he was complicit in the death of Nancy Denton, then his penalty should still have been legal and equitable. What was done to him was no better than dragging some poor colored man out there and lynching him. Guilt by association, guilt by assumption, guilt because of your color or your religion or your political persuasion . . . These things don’t determine guilt. You know that, and I know that. What determines guilt is evidence and confession and proof, and I mean real proof, proof that can be substantiated and validated by reasonable men, men who have no ax to grind, no vested interest.” Gaines paused. He felt the passion of what he was saying in his chest, in the way his hands were shaking, in the way his voice wavered. “Now, I don’t know about you, Della, but I am of a mind to find out what really happened here and what happened back in Morgan City six years ago. I want to know who killed Nancy Denton, and I want to know who cut Michael Webster’s head off and buried it in a field behind my house. My desire to find the truth will not diminish in time, Della, and I won’t go away. I am here, and I am here for as long as it takes, and I will keep on digging and looking and asking questions until I find out what I want, or until someone kills me and buries my head someplace. That’s the simple truth of it, and you can either help me or not. You are not obligated, and I am not going to blackmail you. You can say yes or no. You can stay, or you can walk away. You have no loyalty to me, but you do have loyalty to your family. I know that I am asking a great deal of you, and I know that to be involved in this investigation is a huge risk, but right now I have no place else to go. If you say no, well, I will find another way—”

“Stop talking, Sheriff Gaines. Just for a second, stop talking, okay?”

Gaines nodded, leaned back in his chair, continued to look right at her.

“Okay,” she eventually said. “If I said I was willing to help you, what would you need me to do?”