Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

71

It was easier than Gaines had expected to find Eugene Wade. Gaines had not known what obstacles he would encounter. New Orleans was a big city, and if a man wished to be lost, then he could be lost so very easily. But it seemed that Eugene did not want to be lost; he did not want to be invisible, and within an hour they had an address from the phone directory, an old address granted, an address where Eugene no longer lived, but the current tenant was a friend of Eugene’s and gave them the address to which he’d moved only weeks before.

Gaines, Hagen, and Maryanne Benedict drove over there. Gaines asked Maryanne if she would be willing to stay in the car while they went up and checked out the place.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Really? After fetching me all the way from home, you want me to stay in the car? Not a hope, Sheriff. If what you think is true, if Eugene Wade killed Nancy Denton and that family hid this thing for all these years, then I want to see the son of a bitch’s face when you confront him.”

They crossed the street and knocked on the door. An elderly woman answered, asked after their business. Gaines produced ID, said they were hoping to see Eugene Wade.

“More than likely he ain’t here,” she said. “Music playing so loud all the time when he is, but you go on up and check. You go see for yourself. All the way to the top in the attic. His room’s up there.”

Gaines went first, Maryanne behind him, Hagen last.

They had spoken little on the drive over, and though they had been in the car for more than an hour, it seemed as though that hour had vanished within a moment.

“It makes sense,” Maryanne said at one point. “I don’t want it to make sense, but it does. That night, the night he left with Catherine and Della. He must have gone back to the house and then left again to find us. Maybe he came down through the woods and saw her with Michael. She wouldn’t have been alarmed, not to see Eugene. Maybe she went to speak to him, left Michael behind for a moment, and . . . and he must have just . . .” Her voice trailed into silence.

Gaines did not speak. She was putting these things together just as he had and seeing a truth that she did not want to see.

“Eugene was sixteen when Nancy went missing,” Maryanne said. “He strangled her. Michael found the body, did what he did, and then Matthias found out. I think Matthias has known all this time. Earl, too. Maybe even Della. And they hid this from everyone.”

“What else were they going to do?” Gaines asked. “This is the Wade family. This is the Wade name. This is a dynasty that’s supposed to go on, generation after generation. They can’t possibly tell the world that they have a killer in their midst.”

“And they just let him get away with it?”

“They let him get away with a great deal more than the death of Nancy Denton. There was Morgan City as well. I think Eugene killed those two little girls, and that’s when Matthias knew he had to get Eugene away somewhere. I think we’ll find that Eugene’s rent, his bills, everything is paid for. And it’s paid for by Matthias. He’s the one directing this, dictating how it goes. He has his own situations to deal with, his own secrets, believe me. I think he has done everything he can to keep the Wade name free of scandal. I think he used Leon Devereaux to do a great many things that we will never know about, least of which was separating Della and Clifton.”

“And Matthias killed Devereaux?”

“Again, I am not sure. Maybe he did, or maybe Della killed him. We are going to find out.” Gaines shook his head resignedly. “Or maybe we’ll never know.”

Maryanne fell silent again, looking from the window as they crossed the bridge, trying perhaps to come to terms with what was now unfolding around her, trying perhaps not to think of it at all.

They went quietly, Gaines at the head of the trio, stepping lightly on the edges of the risers so as to make as little sound as possible. Why he felt it necessary to do this, he could not have explained. He was delivering an unwanted message, a statement of the truth to someone who wished for such a truth to never be known. He felt as if he were invading someone’s life, someone’s reality, and though it was necessary, though it was vital that such an invasion occur, it nevertheless felt strangely cruel. It was not something that Gaines considered greatly, for there had been so many strange and disparate emotions throughout these past days that something further was of no great concern.

Gaines stopped on the uppermost landing and waited for Maryanne Benedict and Richard Hagen to reach him. They stood together, they looked at one another, and for a moment Gaines held his breath.

His heart did not race, nor his pulse, nor the blood in his temples. He felt no rush of adrenaline, no agitation of nerves in his gut. He felt calm, unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world.

He raised his hand and knocked on the door.

“Mr. Wade?” he asked. “Eugene Wade?”

There was no immediate answer.

“Mr. Wade . . . this is the Breed County Sheriff’s Department.”

Not a sound came from inside the room.

Gaines unclipped his holster.

“You going in?” Hagen asked.

Gaines nodded.

“Warrant?”

“Not gonna get one, and right now I don’t care,” Gaines replied.

He reached out and turned the handle. The door was locked.

“Back up,” he said. Maryanne and Hagen did so, and Gaines, stepping away two or three feet, then raised his right foot and kicked the door just at the side of the lock. The frame was not substantial, and the door opened suddenly, slamming back against the inside wall.

The smell was immediate and unquestioningly familiar.

Gaines told Hagen to stay with Maryanne for a moment, and he went on inside.

He held his hand to his face. This was two days’, three days’ dead, and he knew that at least some small part of this mystery was now resolved.

Later, the autopsy complete, the coroner would estimate time of death somewhere between six a.m. and noon on Saturday the 3rd.

Eugene Wade had not known how to hang himself. He did not understand the basic mechanics of weight versus speed of descent, factoring in such things as the length of the drop and how this determined the force brought to bear upon the cervical vertebrae.

Hanging people was a science. A simple science perhaps, but a science all the same.

Eugene had been dead for three days, and it seemed at first that no one had known.

But later—once the facts of his injury was made known to Gaines—it became obvious that Eugene had been visited by someone. It did not take a great leap of imagination to determine who that might have been.

Eugene Wade’s left hand was bandaged tightly, and once those bandages were removed, it was evident that one of his fingers was missing. The wound had become infected, and had he not received treatment, the blood poisoning alone might have killed him. It was also noted, confirming Gaines’s suspicion regarding the identity of his assailant, that Eugene Wade’s blood type was AB.

Later, Gaines tried to imagine the conversation that had taken place between Eugene and Leon Devereaux. What had Matthias sent Devereaux to tell him? That he should disappear out of the state? That he should disappear for good? Had Eugene responded by saying that he would tell everything, that he would confess to the killing of Nancy Denton, that he would ruin the Wade name for all time?

Leon’s visit must have changed everything. Leon sang a different song. Perhaps he told Eugene that he was now on his own, that the game was over. The girl’s body had been found, and the soldier who loved her was dead. Eugene had no way out. If he confessed, well, Matthias had a judge in his pocket. Eugene’s accusations—unfounded, a lone voice of protest—would be ruled inadmissible by Marvin Wallace. Eugene would be charged also with the murder of Michael Webster, and he would go up to Parchman Farm for life. And perhaps that life wouldn’t be so long: there would be a disagreement, an exercise yard altercation, and Eugene Wade would be found bleeding out from a stomach wound in the dirt. Maybe Matthias Wade would get Clifton Regis to do it, the perfect irony, and Clifton would be promised exoneration and release, a reunion with Della. Of course, Della and Clifton would never be able to stay at the house; they would have to move away, to disappear and make their own life with whatever Wade money they could get, but a sister married to a colored was far and away a better burden to bear than a serial killer for a brother.

Had Matthias told Leon to hurt Eugene, to physically harm him, or had Leon taken the law into his own hands and exceeded his brief?

So Eugene had no more money, and time was at his heels. He was caught between Leon Devereaux and an altogether unknown future.

Perhaps Eugene had long since decided that he would never run, that he would make his escape more final, more complete, an escape that could never be undone.

The guilt he carried for the deaths of Nancy Denton, Anna-Louise Mayhew, and Dorothy McCormick had finally brought sufficient pressure to bear on him that he knew he could hide no further.

Or maybe he had considered some thought like Judith Denton. Maybe if I go now, I will find that my mother is still waiting for me.

So it came back to the other option, the easiest one of all.

And it was that option he decided to take in the early hours of Saturday, the 3rd of August, 1974.

He hung himself right there in his own attic apartment from a rafter in the ceiling. The rope he had selected was too fine for such a job, and—in the few hours after he had choked out his last breath—the weight of his body had brought such constriction to bear upon his throat that his face was almost black. His tongue protruded, distended and swollen, and his eyes were a deep red.

He had hung there for three days. No one knew, save perhaps Leon Devereaux and Matthias Wade. No one else had cared enough to find out where he was.

Gaines looked at that black and distended face for a long time, and then he walked back out to the hallway.

“Go down and call it in,” he told Hagen.

Maryanne accompanied Hagen. Hagen asked the landlady for the use of her phone.

Gaines returned to Eugene’s room and made a cursory search. He did not expect to find anything that would directly implicate Eugene Wade in the murder of Nancy Denton, nor the murders of Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew. But just as had been the case so many times in the preceding weeks, what he expected and what he got were not the same thing.

Gaines found the small leather suitcase open at the foot of the bed, left there—it seemed—to be found.

Within it were newspaper clippings, photographs, odd and unrelated articles—a faded yellow ribbon, a small gold locket, a dried flower—now little more than dust—pressed inside a folded sheet of paper, a silver bangle with a turquoise stone. Other such tokens and mementos.

It was the newspaper clippings that told a story that John Gaines could barely believe.

He sat there on the edge of Eugene Wade’s bed, and it seemed that where he was—that stinking attic apartment with a corpse hanging from the rafter—seemed to vanish from his awareness. He leafed through the clippings, scanned the headlines, grasped the import of what he was reading, and he began to understand what Matthias Wade had unleashed when he had chosen to hide the truth of his brother from the world.

He realized he was holding his breath. He inhaled forcibly and perceived the edges of his vision blurring. He felt as if he would lose his balance, and he held on to the edge of the bedframe.

Eventually, he rose, gathered up the small case, and walked back to where Eugene Wade hung from the rafter.

Gaines looked at the man’s face, almost unrecognizable though it was, and he knew he was looking at the face of the devil.

72

Gaines left Hagen behind to deal with the local authorities. He did not speak of the leather case. He did not speak of the newspaper clippings he had found. Hagen was instructed to explain to the attending officers that the dead man was responsible for a twenty-year-old murder. Details were of no great concern now. There were no living relatives to inform of the ultimate justice that had befallen the perpetrator of Nancy Denton’s murder. There would be no charges to file, no arraignment to schedule, no jury to select. Gaines would go back and bring closure to the families who had lost their children, of course, but right now that was not his foremost concern.

Maryanne accompanied Gaines to the car.

“We’re going back to Whytesburg,” he said, “and I’ll have one of my deputies drive you home.”

She was there on the passenger seat beside him for some minutes before she spoke.

She had seen him set the small case on the rear seat. She had watched as he closed his eyes for a moment before starting the car, the way he had clenched and unclenched his fists, the way his hand shook ever so slightly as he tried to get the key into the ignition.

And then she reached out, and she placed her hand over his, and he looked at her.

“Tell me,” she said.

Gaines shook his head. He looked away through the window, and she could see his knuckles whitening as he gripped the steering wheel.

“John?”

And then he nodded, as if reconciling something within himself. He reached behind himself, retrieved the case, and handed it to her.

She held it in her hands and then placed it on her lap.

She placed her fingers on the latches, but she did not open it.

“Look,” Gaines said. “You want to know . . . then look.”

Maryanne hesitated, and then she flipped the latches. The sound was sharp and loud in the confines of the car.

The smell of musty paper filed her nostrils, and she started to look through the newspaper clippings within.

On the morning of March 19, 1957, a bright and cool Tuesday morning, Jeanette Ferguson, a fourteen year-old girl from Lyman went missing on the way home from school. She was reported missing that same evening. She was found four days later in a derelict house.

On Saturday, November 10, 1960, just a day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man ever to win the presidency, Mary Elizabeth Duggan was found strangled in the back of a Greyhound bus. Mary Elizabeth had boarded the bus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, bound for Monroe, Louisiana. She was eighteen years old. The bus had made stops in Collins, Magee, Mendenhall, Jackson, Vicksburg, Tallulah, and Rayville. Mary Elizabeth’s cousins—Stan and Willa Blakely—had waited in the depot for Mary Elizabeth to disembark. She did not. Puzzled, they asked if they could perhaps search the bus to see if she had somehow remained asleep. The driver said there was no one back there, but he gave them permission to look anyway. At the very back of the vehicle, there beneath the seat, they found Mary Elizabeth on the floor, wrapped from head to toe in a blanket. She was not sleeping. She was dead.

A lengthy and extensive investigation was undertaken. Police departments from both Mississippi and Louisiana were involved. An attempt was made to locate every single passenger who had used that service between Hattiesburg and Monroe, but anyone could buy tickets and no identification was required; nor was any record maintained beyond the number of tickets sold and their respective costs. The investigation, it appeared, had come to nothing.

On Saturday, October 7, 1961, Frances Zimmerman, a nineteen-year-old from Monticello, ironically the girl chosen to present Vice President Richard Nixon with flowers upon his arrival at the Mississippi State Fair in 1958, was found strangled in the men’s restroom at Brookhaven train station. She had been left in an open doorway.

August 19, 1962, just two weeks after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Kathleen Snow, a fifteen-year-old, was reported missing from her afternoon classes at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School for Girls in Jackson. Her friends said she had left the school at lunchtime to meet someone. The identity of the person was unknown to her friends, and Kathleen had assured them she would be gone for no more than half an hour. They had promised they would cover for her. Kathleen did not return. Her body was found the following day by a volunteer crossing guard. Kathleen had been strangled, but strangled with such force that the hand prints of her killer were visible on her throat as dark welts.

And so it went on—through ’63, ’64, a year or two skipped here and there, but those reports seemed endless. And then Maryanne found them. Morgan City, January of 1968, the faces of Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew.

She held up the clipping. Gaines looked at those faces, and they looked back at him, just as they had from the files he had read in Dennis Young’s office.

Fourteen victims spanning seventeen years.

“I can’t believe—”

She shook her head, and there were tears in her eyes, and they welled over the lids and rolled down her cheeks.

Gaines started the car.

“You’re going to see him . . . Matthias?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to see him, John.”

“You won’t, Maryanne. Go home, or even stay in my office, but don’t see him.”

There was silence between them for the rest of the journey, and once they arrived, Gaines had Forrest Dalton fetch a squad car to take Maryanne home.

It was then, as she left Gaines’s office, that she hesitated. She touched his arm, looked at him directly, unerringly, and said, “Enough people have come to grief. Enough people have died. And this man—”

“This man is not going to kill anyone,” Gaines replied. “I do not think he has ever killed anyone. I think he got Devereaux to kill Webster, and he hid his brother from the law. I don’t even know that he was aware of what Eugene had really done. His crime was his silence, the same as Della, the same as Earl.”

“And Devereaux? Didn’t he kill Devereaux?”

Gaines shook his head. “I don’t believe he did, no. I think Devereaux was killed in revenge for something else entirely.”

Her expression was questioning, but it was obvious Gaines was not going to explain further.

“Be careful,” she said, and there was something in that entreaty that touched Gaines, as if she really meant it, as if she really wanted to ensure that he came back safely.

“I will,” Gaines replied, and then she left.

Half an hour later, Gaines was again at the Wade house. He pounded on the door with the side of his fist, and the door was hurriedly opened. He did not wait to be invited across the threshold. He walked in, the leather suitcase in his hand, said that he needed to see both Matthias and Della, and then he crossed the hallway and entered the same library where he had spoken with Earl Wade only that morning.

Della appeared within a minute.

“What is it?” she said. “What is going on?”

“Where is Matthias?” Gaines asked.

“He’s upstairs with Father. Why? Why have you come back here?”

“Eugene is dead,” Gaines said matter-of-factly.

Once again, real or perfectly portrayed, Della Wade expressed utter disbelief and shock in her expression, in her absence of words, in the way in which the color drained from her face and her eyes widened.

“Dead?”

“He hung himself, Della. He committed suicide. He has been dead for a few days, and I think it would interest you to know that Leon Devereaux might very well have been the last person to see him. That is an assumption on my part, but I think it will prove to be fact.”

Della walked to the window, back to the door, looking sideways at Gaines as if reminding herself that he was in the room, that this wasn’t some hideous nightmare from which she could force herself to wake.

“I have a question for you, Della.”

She paused, looked directly at him.

“Did you kill Leon Devereaux?”

“Say nothing, Della.”

She turned, her mouth open as if to speak, silenced by the sudden appearance of Matthias, entering the room and interrupting proceedings just as she herself had done with her father.

“Do not say a word to this man,” Matthias went on. “He has no right to be here. He has no warrant. He has no evidence, no nothing.”

Gaines did not speak. He set the leather case down on the table, opened it, and withdrew the sheaf of clippings. He took three or four steps toward Della and held out his hand.

She took them from him.

“What is this?” Matthias asked, and he reached out to take them from Della.

Della snatched her hand back, walked away toward the window and Gaines felt the tension in the room increase in proportion to the slow-dawning realization that was taking place. Perhaps, once again, it was his imagination; perhaps no one but he could sense it, but it was there. He felt sure of it.

When she turned, tears in her eyes, there were many things written in her expression.

For the first time since he’d met her, Gaines believed that now she was going to tell the truth.

“This?” she asked. “This is what?”

“This is what you have done by saying nothing,” Gaines said.

“Saying nothing about what? About—”

“About nothing,” Matthias interjected. “About some wild flight of imagination that Sheriff Gaines has convinced himself is the truth.”

“About the fact that your brother Eugene was the one who killed Nancy Denton. Matthias knew, your father as well, and Judge Wallace, and maybe even Leon Devereaux. I don’t know how many more people knew what really happened back then, twenty years ago, but I think Matthias was the only one who knew what happened afterward, right, Matthias?”

Matthias Wade didn’t respond. He looked back at Gaines implacably, as if Gaines had commented on nothing more consequential than the weather.

“And this?” Della said, holding out the clippings. “This is Eugene’s doing? These are people Eugene has murdered?”

“Seems that when you release a monster from the cage, he doesn’t stop being a monster,” Gaines said.

“Matthias?” Della said. “Matthias, is this true? Is Eugene responsible for all of this? Did Eugene kill Nancy? Is that what happened?”

She looked back at Gaines. “All this time, I wanted to believe it had nothing to do with us.”

“Della,” Matthias Wade said, his tone authoritative, almost threatening.

“She just ran away from home. That was all. She was scared, something happened, something we knew nothing about, and she ran away from home. I wanted to believe she would come back, just like Michael did, and I never even imagined that she had been murdered by someone in my own family—”

“Della, seriously, enough is enough.” Matthias took a step forward.

Della turned and looked at him, her expression one of dismay and horror. “And then I talked to Sheriff Gaines, and he told me some things, Matthias. He told me some painful things, and it got me to thinking that it might have been you. You could have done this terrible thing. You sent that terrible man to frighten Clifton, and that man cut off his fingers. Did you tell him to do that, or did he just get inventive?”

Matthias advanced again and was now within arm’s length of his sister.

“Yes, I started to think that you could have killed Nancy. And then I thought no, you could never have done that. You weren’t capable of murder, surely. And then I started thinking that if it wasn’t you, then who could it be? Who would you be so eager to protect? There was only one person. There could only have been one possible person, right? Our father. That’s who you were protecting. All this while doing nothing but hiding the truth from everyone, trying to protect our father, trying to protect the family name, trying to protect your inheritance and not see it wasted on defending—”

Matthias lashed out and caught her across the side of the face. She fell awkwardly, the newspaper clippings spilling from her hand.

Matthias Wade stood silently, staring at Gaines, ignoring his sister as she struggled to her feet.

“My brother is dead,” Matthias Wade said, “and so are Nancy Denton and Michael Webster and Leon Devereaux. They are all dead. No one’s coming back, Sheriff. No one’s going to substantiate what you are saying. No one is going to make any statements or testify in court, and even if there were someone to help you, I think you would find that the courts were not going to give you whatever justice you were hoping for.”

Della was on her feet. “This is true,” she said. “What he is saying is true, Matthias? Eugene killed Nancy, and he’s been doing this . . . these things, and all this time you knew about it? Is this true?”

Matthias looked back at his sister. “Don’t even talk to me, Della. Don’t you act judgmental with me. How fucking dare you? Drugs, abortions, sleeping with colored men. You are a fucking whore just like Father says you are. You are a worthless fucking whore, a worthless human being, and if you weren’t my sister, maybe Leon would have come and visited with you as well.”

Della snatched a handful of clippings from the floor and thrust them at Matthias.

“You did this,” she said. “You are as guilty as Eugene. You knew what he did to Nancy. You knew what he’s been doing since, and you did nothing? You did absolutely nothing?”

“What would you have had me do, Della? Kill him? Is that what you would have had me do? Kill my own brother? He was sick. He was mentally ill. Like our mother, alcoholic that she was. Drowning her depression in whiskey. You have no idea how much time and effort and energy it takes to control what happens around this family. You have not the faintest clue how much trouble you have caused for me. Eugene was your brother, too, Della, and just because he lost his mind when our mother died, you think that gave me license to neglect him, to abandon him, to pretend he was no longer part of us. You can’t explain what he did. He believed he was doing the right thing. He believed that maybe he could bring her back. He honestly believed that. And our father? Lost his mind, too, eh? What would you have me do? Kill all of them, anyone that doesn’t meet your standards of sanity? Oh, and what a standard that would be, Della. What a fucking standard that would be!”

Della slapped her brother. The sound was ferocious. He looked at her as if she had barely touched him.

He smiled strangely, and then he lowered his head as if dismissing her from the room.

Della, her eyes ablaze, tears rolling down her cheeks, caught somewhere in the midst of a whirlwind of emotions, stormed out.

Gaines heard her as she ran across the hall and started up the stairs.

Matthias Wade turned back to Gaines. “It’s over,” Wade said. “The game is finished. The people who really did these things are dead. Perhaps it is time for you to just accept the fact that sometimes things happen, and there is nothing you can do to influence or change any of it.”

“I don’t believe that, Mr. Wade.”

Wade nodded slowly. He looked down at the clippings on the floor, and then back up at Gaines. “Who’s to say that one life is worth more than another? Not for us to say, right? I don’t know about you, Sheriff, but I tend to be fatalistic about these things. If I were a religious man, if I held to the view that God created all men in His own image, then He created Eugene just the same as He created me or you or Della or these children. Maybe there is a balance in all things. Maybe He gives and at the same time He takes away, and there is nothing we can do to change that. Perhaps these people were all meant to die, and if it had not been Eugene to take care of that, then it would have been someone else—”

“Is that how you have justified your decision all these years?”

“My decision, Sheriff?”

“Your decision to say nothing when you found out that Eugene killed Nancy Denton.”

Wade smiled. “Are we still playing that game, Sheriff? What I say here has no bearing on anything. Whatever you think I might be admitting to will be so strenuously denied. It is your word against mine, Sheriff Gaines, and I believe I know enough people of enough significance to make anything you say sound like the ramblings of a war veteran with some inexplicable personal grudge.”

Gaines looked at the man, and he saw it in his eyes. There never was a decision. Nancy Denton did not matter, not compared to the shame and discredit that could have been directed toward the family.

“You are no different,” Gaines said. “You may as well have killed her yourself. You may as well have killed all of them. You knew what had happened, and you let it go. You just stepped away and did nothing.”

“I think you are delusional, Sheriff. I think that maybe you are shell-shocked, a little mentally unbalanced. After all, war can have such a destructive and deteriorative effect on a man’s mental stability, can it not?”

“You killed your own brother, Matthias. You sent Leon Devereaux up there to tell him that Nancy Denton’s body had been found, that the truth was going to come out. You knew what he would do, didn’t you? You knew he would kill himself. There was no other way out for him, was there? Did you think he would just be forgotten? Another lonely suicide somewhere, hushed up by the Wade family, everything forgotten? Is that what you anticipated?”

Matthias Wade waved the questions aside as if they were irrelevant.

“Life might be a matter of doing the things you want to do, Sheriff, but surviving is a matter of doing the things that need to be done. Sometimes people agree with those things, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes others feel that the things you choose to do are not acceptable, and that is their right. People should have a right to disagree, Sheriff, but that doesn’t necessarily give them the right to try to prevent you from doing those things. For me, it is very simple.”

“And for me, too.”

Matthias Wade turned as Della came into the room. She had a gun in her hand, a small revolver, and she aimed it unerringly at her brother.

“What is this?” Wade asked. “What the fuck is this, Della?”

“Justice, Matthias. Plain and simple.”

“Put the fucking gun down, Della. You are not going to use it.”

“You don’t think I’m capable?”

“Capable? Capable? What I think you’re capable of is getting drunk and fucking some colored man, you ignorant bitch. That’s what I think you’re capable of.”