Our second stop was up the hill from Main Street, a lovely little house painted white with a porch that wrapped around the front like a generous ribbon. The lawn was neatly trimmed, the flowers in the beds were blooming brightly, a swing set could be seen in the side yard. It was the all-American home, it even had a picket fence. The sign said THE LIPTONS, and it seemed as if the Liptons had lived there for generations, but that was an illusion. This was Hailey Prouix’s girlhood home. I wondered how it smelled when she was young, whether the paint then was peeling, the lawn untrimmed, the beds brown and weed-ridden. I wondered what I could have seen through those windows had I been here twenty years before. But time had bleached that house clean of whatever then went on inside. Nothing to be learned here.
And, finally, nothing to be learned either at the quarry on the far edge of the town. I was directed to it by a kid at the Sunoco who eyed me suspiciously when I asked, as if it were a sacred place that I was intending to desecrate. I took a road that twisted up into the mountain and stopped at a turnoff the boy had described. There was a fence, and there were signs warning of dangers and signs prohibiting trespassing, and there was a gate wrapped with chains and fastened by a lock. But the lock was rusted, the signs defaced, the fence torn apart at certain edges. It didn’t take a thing to slip through.
It was getting dark now, but we could see the contours of what had been left after the stone had been ripped from the earth. The walls formed a shoehorn-shaped canyon browned by age, with bushes and scrub trees growing in the cracks, weakening the stone as the plants fought for purchase. There was a wide ledge below us and a path that seemed to travel down to the ledge, a path that required grabbing hold of certain bushes and the roots of certain trees as you made your way down. The ledge was uneven, rough, and littered with beer cans and cigarette packs and graffiti. JK &FS. CATS RULE.JOHN G.LOVES TINA R. I wondered if there was a GRADY LOVES HAILEY or maybe a HP &JS, but I couldn’t spot such from where we stood. And then, beneath the ledge, at the bottom part of the quarry, was a road that rolled out to the river, to take the mined stone to the trains. Between the great stone walls and the road was a reservoir of sorts that seemed to be filled deep with water. I could imagine it all, hanging on the ledge and swimming in the reservoir, a few beers, a little laughter, high dives and skinny-dipping, shrieks of abandon, a little tonguing under the cover of the night, or maybe something a little more than a little tonguing. It was almost enough to make me wish I were seventeen again. Almost. This was the lake, I supposed, that drew the local kids on hot summer nights. And this was the lake from where they dragged the body of Jesse Sterrett.
“So what’s the agenda, mate?” said Skink as we stood over the edge and looked into the dark water.
“Go in town, ask some questions, find the truth about that boy’s death.”
“Sounds simple, it does. So simple, you’d have thought someone would have done it by now.”
“You’d have thought.”
“We just stop anyone on the street, or do you have a plan?”
“I have a plan.”
“That’s encouraging.”
Pause.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” I asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Not even curious.”
“Only thing I’m curious about is why you brought me along.”
“A lawyer always brings an investigator when he questions witnesses.”
“That he does. But my guess, Vic, is you don’t want me nowhere near that courtroom.”
He was right, I didn’t. As far as I knew, only Skink could connect me to Hailey Prouix, and that I couldn’t allow. “Maybe not. Maybe I just like your company.”
“I am charming, I am. But if I was a hundred and fifty dollars a day charming, I’d be in another line of work. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting into, do you?”
“Nope.”
“And you wanted to bring some muscle.”
“Something like that.”
“All right, then.”
“Don’t you want to know my plan?”
“Nah,” he said, turning from the edge and heading back for the path up the hill. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re chasing here after your own tail. I don’t need no plan. I’ll just sit back and watch the show.”
31
“COURSE I remember,” said Chief Edmonds as he wrapped his meaty hands around a coffee cup. “How could I forget? A sight like that’s not something slips away so easy. When they pulled him out of the water, he was bloated and white like a German Wasserwurst and the back of his head was cracked open like a walnut.”
I tried to ignore the unpleasant food imagery as I finished my breakfast.
We were in Kim’s Luncheonette on Main Street, a large, barren café that, with its high ceiling and uncomfortable spaciousness, seemed to have taken over for a failed hardware store in one of the city’s squat brick buildings. The plain Formica tables were sparsely filled with grizzled patrons, who slumped over their meals and drank their coffees in silence.
“How was everything, Harvey?” said the woman behind the counter when a man stepped over to pay for his eggs.
“Just fine.”
“That’ll be a dollar eighty-six.”
“Uh-oh, I ain’t got it.”
“Then it will be four-fifty.”
They both shared a laugh as he handed over his money. Behind the counter at Kim’s was a large stainless steel milk refrigerator with one serving spigot, the red sign above the spigot holding a single word: WHOLE.
Edmonds and I finished up our breakfasts: eggs, ham, grits, and biscuits with white milk gravy. Skink pawed with his spoon at his milkless oatmeal. The dress code required blue jeans and baseball caps advertising various farm implements, and so Skink and I stood out more than a bit, Skink in his brown suit, me in my shirtsleeves. The chief sat stolidly in his flannel shirt and green John Deere baseball cap. Edmonds’s name had been in Jesse’s letters to Hailey. It hadn’t taken much to look him up in the Pierce telephone directory, and it hadn’t taken much more to get him out to Kim’s. Edmonds, now retired, seemed to welcome the company and was willing enough to talk about Hailey. Trying to get people to speak to me was pretty much the extent of the wondrous plan I had wrought: I would take my cue from the letters, talk to the principals involved, try to shake something loose.
I said I had a plan; I didn’t say it was brilliant.
In the middle of breakfast I had dropped the picture of the boy in his baseball uniform onto the center of our table. I figured that might start things shaking, and maybe it did. When Edmonds saw it, he closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled the name. “Jesse Sterrett.”
“What happened?” I asked after he had described the corpse.
“Who the hell knows?” said Edmonds. “That damn quarry. In Jesse’s time they necked and did their drugs there. In my time we necked and drank our beer there. Now they neck and do who knows what there. We’ve got a fence all around and signs warning everyone to stay away, warning that the rock faces have grown unsteady over time, but I suppose there never was a danger sign that teenagers didn’t ignore. We were forever patrolling, shining in our spotlights, but it didn’t do any good. It was only a matter of time before something happened. Best as we could tell, he fell down, cracked his head, and then tumbled into the water.”
“An accident?” said Skink.
“Yep.”
“Everyone thought so?” I pressed.
“All that mattered, me and the coroner.”
“Doc Robinson.”
“That’s right.”
“How about the boy’s father?”
“You know parents. If a kid crashes the car, it must be a dangerous turn that should have been fixed years ago. If the kid busts a knee in football, it’s the coach’s fault. Always looking for someone to blame. How else could you lawyers stay in business? Jesse’s dad didn’t want to believe that his son was out at the quarry smoking that marihuana a
nd just got careless.”
“Jesse Sterrett didn’t smoke marihuana,” I said.
Edmonds was taken up short. “How do you know that?”
“And didn’t you find it peculiar that a week after Jesse is in a brutal fight that puts a boy in the hospital, he’s found dead?”
Chief Edmonds squinted his hard blue eyes at me. “Come again with what you’re doing here?”
“We’re just trying to understand what happened to Hailey. We have the idea…” I glanced at Skink. “I have the idea that there might be some connection between what happened to Hailey and what happened to Jesse Sterrett.”
“I’m sorry as hell about Hailey. I knew her father, played cards with her uncle, and what’s happened with her sister is just plain sad. I’m sorry as hell, but I’m not surprised. She had a wild streak no one could tame.”
“What is it that happened with her sister?”
Edmonds looked at me and pursed his lips. “I’m willing to tell you what I know about Hailey, but that’s as far as I go. Though I’ll tell you this for free: There’s nothing between what happened to her and what happened to that boy.”
“Weren’t Hailey and Jesse going together when he died?”
“Not as I recall. I seem to recall that Jesse had other interests.”
“Like baseball.”
“Just other interests. And as I remember it, Hailey was seeing someone else at the time. That fight, it was just something between two boys. It’s not unusual ’round here. This one just got a little out of hand. From what I learned, they had been at each other’s throats for years.”
“Jesse and Grady,” I said.
“That’s right. Grady Pritchett. He was like a spur in Jesse’s side, never gave it a moment’s rest. Two guys hate each other like that, you don’t need a reason to fight. From what I could tell, the fight was Grady’s doing. That’s why we let Jesse go back to school and play ball after just a few days.”
“And you never thought there might be a link between the fight and the death?”
“Like I said, it looked like an accident to us. But we did our jobs. Police work’s the same out here as anywhere else. We brought in Grady for questioning. Said he knew nothing about it, said it convincingly, too. He’d been in trouble before, and he had lied to us before, and this time looked to me he wasn’t lying. But still we checked him out. Oh, we did ourselves a full investigation. Doc Robinson insisted, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. On the night of the accident Grady said he was with someone at the time. We went out and proved up his alibi. Witness we talked to was as definite as could be. So that was that.”
I leaned forward. “Who was the witness?”
Edmonds took a sip of his coffee. “Hailey,” he said. “And she didn’t have no doubt about it.”
32
“SO EXPLAIN this to me,” I said to Skink as we drove out of Pierce, following the path of the river. “Jesse is crazy in love with Hailey, he promises to protect Hailey from Grady Pritchett.”
“This all from the letters?”
“From what I could tell; Jesse wasn’t exactly a Hemingway when it came to clarity. So he puts Grady in the hospital, and it sounds like the next thing he’s going to do is put Grady in the morgue. And then, boom, Jesse is found dead and Grady’s alibi is Hailey.”
“Dames,” said Skink.
“Dames? Dames? Who uses the word ‘dames’ anymore?”
“I do.”
“What were you, a sailor?”
“My daddy was. Anyways, you never can tell with a dame. First they blow hot, then they blow cold. It’s all the same to me, just so long as they’re blowing.”
“Your level of enlightenment is dazzling.”
“Thank you.”
We took a right at the Foodmart and drove over a one-lane bridge, as per our instructions. There were three roads leading off to the right, we took the one with the steepest climb up a ravine jutting into the side of the mountain. The road switchbacked once and then again as it climbed the ravine. With a sudden jolt the asphalt gave out, and we were riding now on dirt, soaked with grease and hardened with pebbles. I checked the directions once again as the car shimmied and shook in its climb.
“It should be just up ahead,” I said, and then there it was, a ragged metal mailbox with the the address on the side, two ruts shooting off sharply to the right creating their own switchback as they rose deeper into the yaw of the ravine. A sign was posted on a tree by the drive, the words painted roughly in red:
NO TURNAROUND
I checked the address and then looked over to Skink. “Guess it’s all right to go in, since we have no intention of turning around.”
I steered the car into the drive and slowly rumbled up the pitted ruts. At a sharp turn in the climb there was another sign, this one nailed onto a post:
NO SALESMEN
“You selling anything?” I asked Skink.
“Not me, mate.”
“Me neither.”
I continued up, moving now out of the ravine toward the river, only much higher. The road was getting steeper, my ears popped, and I didn’t like that there was no barrier on the far edge of the drive, that one bad bounce could send us tumbling. On the hill above us I spied a rusted old truck, wheels missing, suspended in a mad pursuit down the side of the mountain. God knows what was stopping it from skidding off the hill and crushing us. In its windshield was another sign, this one, too, painted in red, a blood red I now noticed:
NO HUNTING
“It’s a good thing we left the shotguns and coon dogs at home,” I said.
Farther up the road there was a scraggly grove of weed trees with a sign nailed onto a thin trunk:
NO TRESPASSING
“We don’t seem to be welcome,” said Skink. “What again is the purpose of our visit?”
“To trespass.”
“I feel so much better now. Look up there.”
Another sign:
GO THE HELL AWAY
“That’s to the point, at least,” I said. “Can’t say he’s not being clear.”
I slowed down now, made two final turns up the slope, the car dipping into the ruts, its undercarriage savaged by thick weeds and loose rock. The drive rose through the trees until it ended at a turnaround. An old brown truck was parked there, facing us. Ragged wooden stairs led up to the left, and at the front of the path was one final sign:
BEWARE OF DOGS
I didn’t have time to come up with another weak witticism before something hard slammed into my side of the car and suddenly, at my window, a giant snarling face was baring its teeth and yelping like a maniac.
I turned to look at Skink. His head was thrown back, his mouth a rictus of fear. On the other side of his window a savage face grimaced, saliva falling in streams from yellow teeth.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“You don’t like dogs?”
“Not ones that are trying to bite my noggin off.”
“Oh, these little pooches don’t mean any harm,” I said as the black dog on my side continued its yelping and the brown dog on Skink’s side snarled and snapped in frustration at the glass between his teeth and Skink’s neck. “They just want us to rub them on their bellies.”
“Turn around, mate, and get us out of here,” said Skink, a real panic in his voice.
“Not yet.” I banged the horn and waited. The black dog danced at the side of the car and kept up its yelping. The brown dog smashed its muzzle against the glass and snapped its jaws. The car rocked.
“Please, please,” said Skink. “Turn around.”
“What is it with you and dogs?” I said.
“Let’s just say I had an unpleasant encounter with a bulldog in my youth.”
“I hear once they chomp their teeth around something, you have to kill them to get them off.”
“Get us the hell out of here.”
Just then a shot rang out.
Skink and I ducked down and stayed down.
“Maybe you should pull out your gun to be safe,” I said.
“I didn’t bring no gun.”
“I thought you were bringing a gun.”
“Across state lines on a fool’s errand? I don’t think so, mate.”
“What good are you without a gun?”
“Plenty damn good. I’ve got fists of iron and nerves of steel.”
“Except when it comes to dogs.”
I cautiously raised my head and peeked out my window. On the staircase leading up the hill a man now stood, cradling a shotgun, the dogs sitting calmly on the step beneath him. He was an old man, thick and unshaved, sparse clumps of hair standing out from his huge head. I sat up slowly, my hands raised to show I held nothing in them. I whispered for Skink to do the same.
I leaned over to open the window. The gun jerked in the man’s arms. I sat up straight again, gesturing my intentions. The gun settled, and the man nodded.
“Are you Mr. Sterrett?” I said, sticking my head carefully out the now open window, my hands still in sight.
“Who’s looking for him?” said the man.
“My name is Victor Carl. I’m a lawyer from Philadlephia, and I haven’t come to help him or to sue him. I simply have some questions.”
“Didn’t you see them signs?”
“Yes I did, I surely did. But I’m not a salesman or a hunter. I didn’t see a sign saying no lawyers.”
“Guess I’ll be putting one up tomorrow.”
“But until then I’d like to ask Mr. Sterrett some questions about his son.”
“Which one?”
“How many does he have?”
“Five boys, three girls.”
I whistled. “And Mrs. Sterrett?”
“Gone now going on five years.”
“I guess the eight kids wore her out.”
Fatal Flaw Page 24