Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

Gaines did not tell his mother he had been shot. It would have served no purpose but to diminish the hardship of her own situation, and—more important—it would have invalidated the belief she possessed in her will for him to survive unharmed. She knew her faith had figured prominently in his return. He had survived, but he was not unharmed. None of those who returned were unharmed. As Narosky had said, In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

It was during the first weeks of his return that he befriended Bob Thurston. Thurston was a good deal older than Gaines, and he would spend time with Gaines when he visited Alice. Thurston would give her morphine, and while she slept, he would sit with Gaines and listen to the war stories. Thurston became John Gaines’s confidant, his confessor, most of all, his friend.

It was Thurston who advised he apply for the sheriff’s department.

“You have to have structure. You have to have a schedule. You cannot spend the rest of your life smoking weed and listening to Canned Heat.”

“I don’t want to make any decisions until later …”

“Later? You mean after Alice has died? That could be years, John, seriously. She is a tough woman, and the cancer she has is not so aggressive. It will be a long battle before she gives up. She still believes she has to look after you.”

So, in May of 1969, Gaines did as Thurston had advised. He was accepted immediately. He was young, single, a Vietnam veteran with a service medal and a Purple Heart. He attended the police academy in Vicksburg, graduated in November of 1969, and was assigned to the Breed County Sheriff’s Department in January of 1970. In February of 1971, he was promoted to deputy sheriff, and then on October 21, 1973, the day following Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Whytesburg sheriff, Don Bicklow, fell down dead from a heart attack in the front hallway of his mistress’s house. His mistress was a fifty-two-year-old widow who lived out near Wiggins. Taking into consideration the fact that there was an election scheduled for January of 1974, an election that Bicklow would have won without contest, Breed County Council asked Gaines to hold Bicklow’s position for the intervening two months. After six weeks, no one having come forward to apply for the job, Breed Council petitioned for Gaines’s permanent assignment without election. Gaines did not contest the application, nor did the assigned representatives of the County Seat. So, at thirty-three years of age, John Gaines became Mississippi’s youngest sheriff. He proved himself competent, not only in the day-to-day management of the department, but also in the small-minded politics of the thing. Seemed he had been born for the job. This was what people said. He did not speak of it, and perhaps was not fully aware of it himself, but Gaines did the job because the job was all he had. No wife, no girlfriend, no children, no father, his mother taking the long road to her grave, the routine and regularity of his existence punctuated solely by her sporadic but intense outbursts, her mutterings, her diatribes and polemics against Nixon and his cabinet, the morphine-induced hallucinations that she so vigorously believed were true. This was Gaines’s life. Had been his life until now, until July 24, 1974, when the rain had uncovered a twenty-year-old murder.

One morning, no more than a week before he’d been wounded, Gaines shot a Vietnamese teenager in the face. He hadn’t meant to get a head shot. He’d intended to scare him, to warn him, to cause him to flee, but the guy dropped suddenly as he fired, perhaps thinking to turn the other way. However, whyever, it didn’t matter. Gaines triggered, the guy dropped, and he took a face shot right through the bridge of his nose and out the other side. He lay there surprised. Dead, but surprised. His eyes wide, his mouth agape, he looked like he’d been about to say something important and then had simply forgotten the necessary words.

Gaines had walked over there, looked down at the plain black shirt, the black pants, the rubber sandals, the body inside them. The dead boy was no more than eighteen or nineteen. He had been carrying a French 9mm MAT machine gun, captured by the North Vietnamese in an earlier war. He had on a belt, tucked into it a cracked leather scabbard, within the scabbard a hunting knife. He had a single grenade.

His eyes were like tight nuggets of jet. Black, depthless. And yet they burned with some profoundly bitter malice.

Gaines looked at those eyes, and all he could think of was the child he never had, of how he used to sit on the porch with Linda Newman eating ice-cream sandwiches and watching the sky get closer until it was finally dark, and the fireflies in the fields had been like agitated, earthbound stars.

Then he kicked the boy once, firmly, sharply, in the upper arm.

“Fucker,” he’d said, almost under his breath, not because he resented the boy, not because the boy might have been responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, not because he disagreed with the boy’s political sympathies, his loyalty to the communists, his allegiance to things that Gaines did not comprehend, but because he’d been in the way of the bullet when Gaines had pulled the trigger.

That was all he could find to hate. That the boy had been in the way.

Gaines had stood there for a moment more and then walked away, his poncho pulled tightly around him, and with the rain battering ceaselessly on his helmet, he’d eaten his breakfast out of a green Mermite tin

He’d looked out in the fog, the moist, unbreathable fog that hung over the land and through which the vagaries of the landscape took on an awful and terrifying prospect. The fog itself did not move; it was the shapes within it.

Later, when the fog cleared, the boy had gone.

That strange sense of distortion, a sense of mystery, of profound disorientation, now assaulted Gaines once more.

In closing his eyes, in trying to remember Nancy Denton’s face from only a handful of hours before, he could not. He saw only the dead teenager with depthless eyes and the fog that came to retrieve him.

9

Gaines made his way back over to see Powell. Powell was not there, though he would be back before too long. Gaines just stood in the corridor and waited. After remembering Linda Newman, Charles “Too High” Binney, the VC teenager with the hole in his face, his thoughts had been quiet. He remembered a neatly stenciled legend on the side of a Jeep: Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. Why he remembered such a thing, he did not know. He smiled. He closed his eyes, and then he took a deep breath. Sometimes—even now, and for no reason—he experienced the bitter taste of salt tabs. Like sweat, like tears. No, like nothing else.

Sometimes he felt as if he’d spent his life missing the punch line, catching the last part of things, laughing not because he understood, but because everyone else was. Get up to speed, he kept thinking to himself. Get with it—another admonition.

He had never been one of the chosen few. A different world awaited the beautiful.

Sometimes resentment bled from every pore like a dark sweat. Resentment of himself, his dead father, his sick mother, of the people he had known and lost, of Linda and the child. He had believed in her—in them. He had found her, somehow. As if the clumsy poetry of his words had given her hope, hope that he—a spent and broken man, by all accounts—had yet somehow secured a path through the tortuous rapids and shallows of the human heart, that he had navigated a way, that he knew some means of escape, that alongside him, she would never experience the lovesick travails that appeared to befall all people. He had believed her his true north. But life happened. Life got in the way. The minuses added up, and no matter how many minuses were added, it never became a plus. Now he looked at the world as if everything before him was a little more than he could absorb, a fraction more than he could understand. And he resented it. Such an emotion infected all he touched, a virus of shadows, and some other sour-tasting bitterness. This is not the life I envisioned or wanted . . . This is not my life, but someone else’s. There has been a grave mistake. Who do I speak to about this? No one, the world replied. You make your bed, my friend, and you lie in it.

“John?”

Gaines looked up. How long had he been standing there?

Powell smiled. “You okay?”

“Yes,” Gaines replied. “I came back for the autopsy results.”

They stood in silence for some time. The girl was laid out before them, her chest and stomach now stitched more neatly, her skin and hair washed, her hands enclosed in plastic bags, as were her feet. To preserve any detritus or blood beneath the nails, Powell had said. Unlikely, and even if there is, well, the possibility of matching it to anything is unlikely to impossible. But we do what we can.

It was the snake that held Gaines’s attention.

The remnants of the small basket had been washed clean of blood and mud, the snake—now clearly identifiable as a garter—there on the table beside it. It held its own tail in its mouth. Unraveled, the snake could not have been more than a foot long, but here it was in a circle, its tail in its mouth as if ready to swallow itself.

Gaines had heard of this. Ouroboros. A symbol of the unity of all things, the cyclic nature of birth and death, of something constantly re-creating itself, of something existing with such force it cannot be extinguished.

“I have no idea,” Powell said. “I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know what it was intended to signify. This is all lost on me.”

“Was it strangulation, as you thought?” Gaines had asked him.

“Yes,” Powell said. “The muscular damage around her throat and the fracture of the hyoid bone—”

“Hyoid bone,” Gaines echoed. He was elsewhere. He was still thinking of Ouroboros, the snake that devours its own tail and disappears.

“The damage to her throat and clavicle was preserved, almost as if this happened a week ago. Truth is, had she not been buried in mud, well, she would be nothing but a skeleton now.”

Gaines closed his eyes. He tried his best not to picture it. What she must have gone through. Perhaps the only saving grace was that she had not been raped or sexually abused. He’d seen rape victims before, girls as young as ten or twelve assaulted by the VC as revenge for Army of the Republic of Vietnam collaboration. That faraway stare, the light in the eyes extinguished, the physical inertia, the apathy. The platoons left them behind. What could they do? The field hospitals couldn’t take them, and there was no way the US military could provide a transportation service to the few religious missions and outposts that were scattered back behind the rear lines. This was war. This was collateral damage.

Where do I begin? This was the question in Gaines’s mind. He did not voice it.

“Do you know anything of the story?” Gaines asked.

Powell shook his head. “I was transferred here just a couple of years before you. However, I did speak to Jim Hughes, and he told me that it was never reported as a murder. The girl just disappeared. That was it. People figured her for a runaway. Don Bicklow, your predecessor, was sheriff back then, or so Hughes tells me, and his deputy was a guy called George Austin. Both of them are dead now, so whatever they found out has probably gone with them.”

Gaines listened to the words, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was trying to find some context within which to place his thoughts.

Whytesburg had seen three murders in Gaines’s four and a half years. Two had been domestics: discovered love affairs, one a cheating husband, the second a cheating wife. Leonore Franks had put a kitchen knife through her husband’s chest in November of 1970. She had caught him fucking a girl called Deidra Collins, a short-order cook from Picayune. Tommy Franks was a big man, but Leonore was bigger. She waited until he was sleeping, and then she brought that blade down into his heart with all the force she could muster. Powell told Gaines that Franks wouldn’t have had time to even open his eyes. It seemed no great loss to Gaines. Franks had always seemed to be too much of everything that was worthless. Infidelity was not the only way he proved himself an asshole. The man had been as crude and brash as a circus poster.

Second case was March of 1971, a man called Cyrus Capaldi, all of five foot four. He was a barber, one with a better view of himself than was warranted. He talked ceaselessly, opinions worth little more than a cent or a nickel. He wore a perpetually furtive expression, as if his purpose were to relay some sordid sexual escapade, such escapade punishable by law in thirty-nine of fifty states. Hey, Capaldi, Gaines wanted to say. Why don’t you shut the hell up? But he didn’t. Figured the barber would do as he was asked, but would cut the back of Gaines’s hair all ragged and ornery just to get a small revenge. Anyway, Capaldi discovered his wife was screwing an itinerant carpenter called Hank Graysmith. Graysmith was not his real name, but was the name he chose to use for work and other various extracurricular activities. Cyrus poisoned his wife, Bernice, with a combination of sleeping tablets and fungicide. The fungicide had been purchased from the hardware store to treat a mysterious mold that showed around the corner posts of the veranda. Evidently, Cyrus considered that his wife was now a mold, for he used the preparation to rid himself of her once and for all. According to Cyrus, this was not the first time she had gone out on him.

In both of these cases, there had been no investigation. Leonore Franks had sat in her house, her hands covered in blood, until Sheriff Don Bicklow had shown up to arrest her. Cyrus Capaldi had called the sheriff himself, simply said, It’s over, Don. I done killed Bernice. She’s sat here at the kitchen table with her head slumped down, and there’s a white foam coming from her nose. Better come and get the both of us. Both Cyrus Capaldi and Leonore Franks were doing life, Cyrus up at Parchman Farm, Leonore at the women’s facility at Tupelo.

The third murder had been a real murder. A dismembered body in a machine at the Whytesburg Laundromat. June of 1973, two days after Gaines’s thirty-third birthday, just four months before Bicklow gave himself a coronary seizure doing precisely what Tommy Franks should not have been.

There was a head, two arms, two legs, but the torso was gone. The arms and legs had been severed at the elbows and knees respectively, and thus there were five parts, each carefully wrapped in a heavy-duty polyethylene. It wasn’t long before an ID was made. The victim was one Bradley Gardner, a salesman, a purveyor of sometime-necessaries, fripperies, extravagances, and wares. He was of the view that anything could be sold. Everything had a tradable value. It was simply a matter of clientele and confidence. Haircutting devices, ever-sharp razor blades, unbreakable coffee cups, socks guaranteed to last as long as your feet. Seemed to Gaines that such people as Bradley Gardner had only two functions in this world: getting drunk and sleeping it off. He was a petty criminal—nothing more, nothing less—but it seemed he had ideas above his station. Later, it transpired, Bradley Gardner was more than capable of blackmail.

Searching the burned wreckage of his trailer home, parked there on the outskirts of Whytesburg, Bicklow and Gaines had discovered the remnants of photographs. The star of these photographs, discernible only by those who might have known him, was William Hammond, the son of a wealthy local sawmill owner. Bicklow visited the elder Hammond, they shared words, the discovered photograph remnants were produced, and though Bicklow knew he would never tie the death of Bradley Gardner to the Hammond family, he nevertheless wanted them to know that he knew. Whatever the younger Hammond might have been doing in those pictures would remain unknown, but Hammond the elder was smart enough to realize that staying in Whytesburg would only exacerbate Bicklow’s desire to see justice arrive in some fashion. By the end of August 1973, the Hammonds were gone—lock, stock, and barrel. Bicklow didn’t ask after them, and Hammond didn’t send flowers to Bicklow’s funeral two months later. Whether money exchanged hands in that June meeting at the Hammond place—the kind of money that put Don Bicklow’s mistress in a neat little apartment in Lyman—Gaines would never know, and he had long since reconciled himself to letting it lie. Gaines knew that if you asked questions that folks didn’t want to be asked, you more than likely got answers you didn’t want to hear. No need to sully Bicklow’s reputation now that the man was dead. The heart attack, in flagrante delicious, seemed punishment enough.

So John Gaines, as a soldier, had seen more than enough death for any lifetime. As a police officer, he had seen all too little to be on firm ground with the Nancy Denton case. People would look to him—for order, for answers, for investigation, for results. This was local. There would be no external assistance. No one outside of Whytesburg would be interested in a twenty-year-old murder. The resources he possessed were the resources he could use. Richard Hagen, his deputy, and two other uniforms—Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton, twenty-six and twenty-four respectively. It would be the four of them, and they would have to deal with every aspect of it.

It was this simple truth that John Gaines confronted as he considered the injuries that had been inflicted upon the person of Nancy Denton. What would the law say about this? That someone did murder the person of Nancy Grace Denton against the peace and dignity of the state of Mississippi. What about the peace and dignity of a teenage girl? Where did that get lost in the law books?

“John?”

Gaines looked up at Powell as he drew the white sheet back over the girl.

“Any more questions?”

“You know who did this thing, Victor?” Gaines asked.

“No, John, I don’t,” Powell replied.

“Then I have no more questions.”

10

It was seven o’clock. Gaines drove home to see his mother, to make a sandwich, to take a moment’s respite from the insanity of the day.

When he arrived, he found his neighbor’s daughter, Caroline, bringing soup to the downstairs back bedroom where Gaines’s mother now spent her days.

“I’ll take it,” Gaines said. “You go on home.”

“Thanks, John,” Caroline said. “I got a date tonight. Jimmy’s coming in half an hour or so. We’re going to the movie theater in Bay St. Louis.”

“What you gonna see?”

“Well, I wanna see The Sugarland Express, but Jimmy wants to see some macho thing with Clint Eastwood, Thunder and Lightning or something—”

Gaines smiled. “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your own way,” Gaines said. “Anyway, you should’ve called me,” Gaines said. “I’d have come down sooner.”

“Picture doesn’t start till eight thirty. It’s fine, John.”

“How’s she been today?”

“Asking after you, you know? Usual stuff.”

“Crazy talk?”

“No more than yesterday. She’s on about Nixon again, how he’s the devil, an’ all that other stuff she was sayin’ a while back.”

Gaines nodded. His mother had it in for the president. Sure he was a liar, sure he was as crooked as a country river, but Alice Gaines seemed to believe there was a special hot place in hell being saved for Tricky Dicky.

Ever since the Watergate break-in, she’d been rambling about him. Two years now. Nixon was still in the White House, and Alice Gaines was still dying of cancer. Maybe she was hanging on just to see for herself that he got his ass kicked good.

Gaines wished Caroline a good night out, told her to make sure Jimmy didn’t drink before he drove her home, that if he did drink, she was to call Gaines and he would go fetch them both.

“He won’t drink,” Caroline said.

“But if he does—”

“If he does, I’ll call you.” Caroline Rousseau smiled one more time, and then she left the house.

Gaines stood there for a moment, the tray in his hand, the soup getting cold, and he wondered what kind of world this was.

He took the soup through to his mother.

“John,” she said, and she smiled. She looked well. There was some color in her cheeks. She had on The Bob Newhart Show, told Gaines to turn it down some.

Gaines set the tray on the dresser, rearranged the pillows behind his mother’s head so she could sit and eat more comfortably, and then he put the tray in front of her. He sat on the edge of the bed. He watched her eat, as he did most evenings. This was her routine. Spend most of the day with Caroline, evening meal with her son, her waking hours filled with The Young and the Restless, Columbo, and Barnaby Jones. After her evening meal, Gaines would give her a sleeping tablet, and—aside from sometimes waking at three or four for help with the bathroom—she would be gone until he came in with her breakfast at six thirty. She was fifty-nine, looked seventy, but her mind—when she was lucid, when the morphine wasn’t assaulting her reality with hallucinations—was as sharp and facile as it had ever been. She had been dying for six years, would go on dying for another six or ten or twelve, it seemed. She refused all treatment but the painkillers, said that things were the way they were and that was that. Bob Thurston said that she should have died within two or three years, five at most, but something kept her going.

“I think she wants to see you married,” he told Gaines on one occasion. “Maybe she wants to see if you can muster up the energy to get her some grandkids.”

“Not the marrying kind.”

“Never done it, have you?”

“Nope.”

“So how do you know it won’t suit you?”

Gaines had shrugged. “I know me, and I would be a nightmare to live with. Besides, I have Ma—”

“Well, if my theory is right, once you got yourself hitched, she wouldn’t hang around much longer.”

“Well, Bob, you stick to your theories, and I’ll stick to mine.”

Thurston hadn’t mentioned it again, but Caroline was in his ear on a routine basis about finding someone as well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it was the very least of his concerns.

“They’re gonna get him, you know?” Alice said.

Gaines snapped to. “Get who, Ma?”

“Tricky Dicky.”

“Why? What’s he done now?”

“Same things he’s always been doin’. You know. ’Cept that now they’re making him hand over the tape recordings he made. The Supreme Court, that is. House Judiciary Committee will impeach the son of a bitch—”

“Ma—”

“Don’t be so naive, John. He’s a liar through and through. Everyone’s all up in arms saying he’s a good man, that he brought the war to an end, but the war isn’t at an end, is it, John? There’s still American soldiers out there, plenty of them, and plenty of them are going to die yet.”

Gaines couldn’t argue, didn’t want to. He had enough on his mind without starting some political debate with his mother. Besides, she was right. The January 1973 cease-fire had held, for sure, but it was only a matter of time before the Vit Minh would come in from Laos and Cambodia, and then Saigon would fall. However, America’s attention was on Nixon. He’d talked his way out of the frying pan and into the fire. Reports of the last US troops coming out of Southeast Asia at the end of March had been overshadowed by the resignation of Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, and a whole handful of others. It was a mess. Nixon himself had as much as admitted that there had been a cover-up. The country was in limbo, everyone waiting to see whether Nixon would be impeached. Nixon was a crook—no doubt about it—and more than likely Chief Justice Warren Burger would get those tapes and the curtains would come down.

Alice Gaines drank her soup. John Gaines sat and watched The Bob Newhart Show with her, and then he fetched her sleeping tablets from the bathroom.

As she drifted away, she held his hand. “How was your day, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Same old, same old,” he said.

She reached up and touched his face. “You look tired.”

“I’m okay, Ma.”

“You worry too much about me. You don’t need to have Caroline over here day in and day out. She’s a young woman now. She has things she needs to be doing. She has her own life.”

“She’s happy to come over, Ma, and besides, I give her some money, and if she weren’t here, she’d have to go get a job, and she doesn’t want to do that right now.”

“She should have stayed in school.”

“She can do whatever she pleases, Ma; you know that. Don’t get on her about it, now. Just leave her be.”

“She tells me . . .” Alice Gaines smiled wryly. She knew she was starting something that would never finish.

“Ma—”

“I’ll be gone soon enough,” Alice interjected, “and you’re not getting any younger, and if you want children—”

“Ma—”

She squeezed her son’s hand. “Enough,” she said. “I’ll leave you be. You want to be a bitter and lonely old man, then that’s your business.”

Her eyes started to droop. She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and Gaines knew she was almost asleep.

“Love you, Ma,” he whispered.

“Love you, Edward,” she whispered back, and Gaines knew that in whatever world she inhabited when she slept, his father was there. Edward Gaines, the father that never was.

Maybe Edward was waiting for her. Maybe it would be best to just let her go. Gaines glanced at the morphine tablets in a bottle on the bedside table. He closed his eyes for a moment and then shook his head.

He rose slowly, removed the tray, drew one of the pillows out from behind his mother’s head, and eased her down. She did not stir or murmur.

Gaines left the room, headed back to the kitchen to wash up and make himself a sandwich. He sat in the front room, ate slowly, drank a glass of root beer.

He thought of his father, of his mother, of what she would have to say about Nancy Denton.

One dead body was more disturbing than a hundred. One dead body was you, your friend, someone you loved, someone you just knew. A hundred dead was a featureless mass, an event, a happening, something distant and disconnected.

Gaines thought of the ones who never came home. The ones who never would. Just like Nancy Denton. Families kept looking, kept hoping, kept praying, all of them believing that if they wished hard enough, well, the wish had to come true. Not so. They did not understand that if a wish was destined to be realized, then it needed to be wished only once. Real magic was never hard work. And even if they did return, they would see that the world they’d left behind would never accept them again, would never contain them, would never be big enough or forgiving enough to absorb what they had become.

Here he was—a veteran, a casualty of war—starting a new war here in Whytesburg. A war against hidden truths. If there was one thing he knew, it was the degree of creativity and imagination that could be employed to bring a life to some unnatural end. But this? This was without precedent.

The strength of the heart had been measured—not in emotional terms, not in terms of love or passion or betrayal, for this was not possible. It had been measured in physical terms, in pounds of pressure per square inch, the force with which it could move so many gallons of blood for so many meters at such and such a speed. But the heart, irrespective of its power, was silent until fear crept in. Until panic or trauma or terror assaulted our senses, the heart went quietly about its powerful, secret business. Now Gaines believed his heart was more alive than it had been since leaving Vietnam.

Mayhem and a dark kind of magic had seemed inseparably blended as he’d looked down into the cavity of Nancy Denton’s chest, as he had seen the basket, the snake that had been within it.

When you saw a blond, nineteen-year-old high school football star decapitate a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese kid and then stand there for snapshots, the head dangling from his hand by the hair, its eyes upturned, the rictus grin, the pallid hue of bloodless flesh, you knew something was wrong with the world. You never looked at people the same way again.

This was the same. The same sense of surreal and morbid fascination. The same sense of dark and terrible wonder.

Gaines closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

Seemed that we all made a deal with God. Believe, trust, have faith in His goodness, and it will all be fine. Well, hell, it wasn’t fine. Never had been, never would be. It was all horror and bullshit.

Gaines truly believed—when it came to deals with God—that it sure looked like someone wasn’t holding up their end of the deal.