by Farris, John
I saw that he was beginning to perspire, although the day was not yet humid.
"The—the matter of the virgin has troubled me. The authorities ask many questions when a local adolescente vanishes. Even in my grandfather's day—"
"There were problems in obtaining a virgin. I know. But I resolved that dilemma a long time ago."
Looking again at the gardens, I saw her now on the path leading up to the terrace, coming from our bungalow, her hair the color of a jaguarundi's coat flashing in the sun as she hurried in walk shorts and a shirt of colorful Maya weave toward the hotel. She saw me watching, waved, lengthened her stride, bounded up to the terrace past the appreciative eyes of Francisco Colon and draped her slim tanned arms around my neck. My face was tilted to receive the kiss she gave me on my forehead. I smiled and tingled at her touch, thinking of all the happiness she had brought me, the love in her heart that would live refreshed in me for a thousand years to come.
"Good morning, Daddy," Sharissa said.
BUTTERBAUGH'S NOTEBOOKS
PART THREE
August-December, 199-
"It is one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The tragedy had been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so many people that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns."
I had been a Sherlock Holmes freak for about four months when I copied those lines into one of my notebooks.
I was in the eighth grade. The story was called "Silver Blaze," from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and it was about a stolen thoroughbred and the murder of its trainer. The plot doesn't stick in my mind like the plots of some of my favorites (which I reread when I'm in the mood, and thinking that I can still pull it off, the big career move, maybe become a private investigator working for one of the top criminal lawyers). But I remember clearly the enthusiasm I felt while scribbling those lines down, the "shock of recognition" they talk about in college lit classes. What Holmes had to say to Watson on the train to—(I need to look it up sometime)—what Holmes said summarizes, today, my attitude toward detective work, what little of it I actually get to do as a member of Sky Valley's finest.
"The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so many people . . ." That pretty well says it for the way people felt about Bobby Driscoll's murder. What we, I mean the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, weren't suffering from was a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. There just wasn't anything much to go on.
I never officially interrogated Sharissa. It wasn't my case. But I spent more time talking to her about Bobby, about the tragedy, than anyone else. I'm easy to talk to. That's part of being a cop. But there was more to it than that. Friendship. I knew that was the best I could ever make of our relationship, even though we had hit it off right away and you can always dream. And I suppose she saw me as an older brother, someone who had been missing from her life. A guy she could talk seriously to when she felt like it, without having to be concerned that eventually I'd come on to her in a heavy way. Friends, I could live with that. I was thirty-two, and Sharissa was seventeen. Two years, maybe three, I'll probably quit trying to cover up my bald spot.
What she couldn't get out of her craw was the notion that, if he'd been found sooner, Bobby might have survived. I finally convinced her, as gently as I could, that he had stopped breathing only a few minutes after his skull was crushed. And we had a very accurate idea of when that happened. Forensic entomologists know that flies are attracted to faint odors, undetectable by humans, coming from newly dead bodies. They swarm from up to two miles away and immediately begin to lay their eggs inside the nostrils and ears, in the corners of the eyes of the deceased. The eggs hatch on a precise timetable. You can set your watch by them.
But I didn't want Sharissa to think about that: Bobby kneeling in the woods with his shattered head pitched to the ground, blowflies and, later, small animals swarming around.
I found out a lot about Bobby, and his family, from Sharissa. They'd known each other, from church, for years. They started dating in ninth grade. Casually at first, then it became serious. How serious? I didn't know that. I don't think I wanted to know if they'd been lovers. There was something stuck in my craw, too, even if I didn't want to think about it very often. Maybe, if there's enough time, if I can just hang around long enough . . .
With Bobby gone, Sharissa wanted to be with me. It was almost as if she were afraid some small lead to his murder would crop up and I'd forget to tell her. She was avid for every crumb of speculation. I felt as if I had to keep coming up with these crumbs, engross her, concentrate her attention on me. Before she surrendered her obsession, outgrew the tragedy, went her own way—to college, to another life, to someone else she eventually would marry.
You get crazy, I guess. In our hearts we're all nineteen, or something like that. I was buddies with girls as beautiful as Sharissa in high school. I had a knack for kidding them, keeping them entertained. Buddies. While I ate my heart out. I wasn't exactly eating my heart out over Sharissa. It was deeper, sadder, more philosophical than that. There was a kind of pleading in her eyes, when we sat and talked—at her house, in a booth at Burger King, on a bench by the public tennis courts next to the high school. I know you can do something, she seemed to be telling me. I know you'll be the one to solve his murder. And I will love you deeply, I will love you forever . . . that kind of bullshit, which I couldn't get out of my system. Because I wanted it to be exactly the way I was dreaming it. Knowing all the time I didn't have a prayer. I couldn't solve the murder because there was nothing to go on, there never would be short of some offhand confession by a well-traveled homicidal vagrant years down the road. Oh yeah, yeah, Georgia, young kid, I did that one, too.
Practically speaking, I couldn't do a thing, and I was experienced enough at police work to understand that, yet . . .
Every waking minute, almost, even when I was supposed to be working on other stuff, I memorized the reports from the GBI and sifted the details, what there were of them. I started getting serious headaches again, and my hair seemed to be falling out faster than usual. Dumb ass, I thought. I didn't like myself, leading Sharissa on—because that's all it was: as long as I could hem and haw and pretend that I might possibly be getting somewhere, she was mine. I neglected my parents. I woke up with night sweats, gloomy murder on my mind. Thinking, why, and, there is no why, and then: but what if there is? Right in plain sight, so obvious nobody can recognize it. Why was Bobby killed? Simple. Because he—
Because he had a secret enemy. Nobody kills that way for sport. Bobby was condemned and executed, on his knees, struck down from behind after being judged—guilty. By someone with a longstanding grudge we hadn't yet uncovered, or someone—oh yes. Yes.
Someone very, very angry with Bobby because Bobby had Sharissa, and he didn't.
Night sweats. Three A.M. The overhead fan in my bedroom turning, rippling blade shadows on a moonlit wall. And Collins Gosden Butterbaugh, just tossing and turning, getting nowhere. Thinking of Sharissa, and was she awake too, and were the answers there, in her subconscious mind?
"Byrd Aycock," Sharissa said. "Then I dated Mel Clark for a couple of months. Steve Cutrere used to call me. A lot. I didn't want to go out with him—"
"What's Steve Cutrere like?"
"Oh, he's okay, just sort of cynical and thinks he's cool. He likes to put everybody down."
"When's the last time you heard from him?"
"I don't know. We talked some at the junior-senior prom. He was drunk."
"Did he ever proposition you?"
She looked startle
d, then amused. "Sure, all the time. Not just me. I mean, you don't take Steve seriously, not if you have any brains."
"So what did he say to you?" I asked. I had a cold pack on the muscle in my thigh I'd strained trying to give Sharissa a decent game. We were on the shady side of the country club courts, where Sharissa had invited me to play.
She had another sip of Gatorade. "You don't really want me to tell you."
"Yes, I do."
She scuffed a toe of her sneaker in the pea-gravel border of the courts and shook her head, working up to it. "Oh, he said stuff like, when are we going to eff-you-see-kay." Sharissa made a wry face at this discreet approach to profanity. "I think he just likes talking dirty. Lonnye Sue Mitchell came on to him one time as a joke, and I'm telling you, he didn't know where to put his face."
"Could Cutrere have been jealous of Bobby?"
"Jealous? I wouldn't know. He went out for football once and lasted two days. I don't think he ever dated anybody from our school. I doubt if he and Bobby ever said two words to each other. Why, do you think—"
"Don't know, Sharissa. Have you ever had anonymous phone calls, somebody leaving you suggestive notes, that kind of thing?"
"Well, when I was ten, I had an obscene phone call. I guess that's what he thought it was. I thought it was funny. I told him he'd better get Jesus in his life, right away, and hung up." She passed me the bottle of Gatorade, orange, not my favorite. But I drank some anyway. "What are you getting at, C.G.?"
"Somebody who might have had a grudge against Bobby because he was going with the prettiest girl in school—"
"Dee Millican is the prettiest girl in school, like, she is flat-out gorgeous. Oh, I see. Somebody who might've had a crush on me and resented Bobby? But, Lord, you just don't go around killing—"
Her throat locked; she took the towel from around her neck and buried her face. "Can't believe that," she said, her voice so muffled I barely understood her.
"I have to ask these questions, Sharissa. And more questions, until something clicks. I'm not trying to punish you."
"I know." She dropped the towel in her lap, took a long discouraged breath, and changed the subject. "Your leg still paining you?"
"Not so much."
"Want to quit?"
"Am I a quitter?"
"No, you're not."
We looked at each other for a few moments.
Sharissa murmured, "That's just one of the fine things about you I don't think many people have had the chance to appreciate. Why didn't you ever get married, C.G.?"
"Well, wait a minute. Don't rush me."
"You mean to tell me you never got that serious about somebody?"
"Oh, I don't know about that."
"So you did get serious once?"
"Twice."
"Did you live with them?"
"One of them."
"Didn't work out, huh?"
"She was a philosophy major at Cal State Los Angeles. Talk about not being able to communicate with someone."
"Ever go with a girl here in town?"
"Seem to be spending most of my time with you."
"Begged that question, C.G."
"Her name's Tricia. Assistant head teller at the Wachovia downtown. We still have coffee once in a while."
"You're gonna get married some day, C.G.," Sharissa said, as if she'd detected a flaw in my confidence. There were plenty of them, God knows.
"And have short, dumpy kids with bowed legs? No, thanks."
"Marry a tall, beautiful girl, then it's fifty-fifty."
"Beautiful girls don't marry guys who look like me."
Great, now I was beginning to whine. I wished we could just play tennis.
"Shoot they don't, all the time; and looks don't have a thing to do with it. After you get to know somebody."
She wasn't teasing me, but I must have had a cynical expression.
Sharissa elbowed me for emphasis and said, "Sometimes I get the feeling you don't place enough value on yourself. And I've had the urge to say something. So I finally said it, that's all."
She stood and draped her towel over my head and observed with a melancholy amusement, "That cute little bare spot's gonna get sunburnt, C.G." Then she bent down and kissed me on the forehead, lightly, but damn it was a kiss, and went away looking more melancholy than ever, saying, "I'm gonna work on that hitch in my serve while you recuperate."
Some days are too good to ever allow them to end—in memory, or in my dreams. After a lot of tennis that long afternoon I drove Sharissa home. Caroline was in Washington, Greg was in Atlanta attending a seminar for RCA dealers in the Southeast. He wouldn't be back until late. At the door we said good-bye, and then, having opened the door on an empty house, Sharissa called me back.
"I'll fix us something to eat, if that's okay."
It was okay. I knew by the look in her eyes that it wasn't my company so much as the fact that she didn't want to be alone.
Tuna melts on English muffins, a salad, lemonade—we ate on the deck with the sun going down, and then it was full dark with a yellow three-quarter moon rising and occasional flashes of blue light from the bug zapper by the sliding doors. I did a lot of talking. I made Sharissa laugh. I felt as if I were back in high school, entertaining the prom queen until her boyfriend showed up from football practice to take her out. I felt a little ridiculous and sad, too, but the night wore on and I couldn't stop talking. Sharissa stared at me, smiling, with her gaze that was eating up my heart.
We went in, finally, and Sharissa went upstairs to her room while I scraped paper plates into the DisposAll and rinsed out the lemonade glasses. I had made up my mind to let myself out while she was still upstairs, but when I closed the dishwasher and turned around she was standing on the last step to the kitchen, looking as if she were walking in her sleep except for a tear track down one cheek, a tear about to fall from the line of her jaw. That was what I looked at—not the rest of her face, her eyes, her body, but that single tear about to fall.
"Hold me," she said.
I'm sure she said it. Maybe she didn't have to speak at all. But I don't think about it very often; there are memories you don't want to risk by examining them too closely, too often. Not even in your dreams.
A little more than twenty-four hours after we played tennis for the last time that summer, Sharissa's mother was dead.
I was filling in for Ed Hagood on the three-to-eleven when the call came in from the Georgia State Patrol in Marietta, relayed from one of the troopers at the scene of the accident. Greg and Caroline Walker had been seriously injured in a crash on I-75 north, and were being transported to Kennestone Hospital. No word on the extent of their injuries, but apparently Greg was no worse off than LOC times two—conscious and coherent. He had asked GSP to get in touch with me.
I had about thirty minutes to go on the shift; Lieutenant Neidermeyer released me and I drove immediately to the Burger King across from Gatewood Mall, where I knew she would be closing up. Rain had started about ten o'clock, and it was really coming down hard. My glasses were wet and they fogged up right away when I walked into the King.
There were no customers. Sharissa was back in the kitchen. The assistant manager brought me coffee, and Sharissa.
She didn't say anything when I told her. She just sagged in the booth and looked as if she couldn't catch her breath. Her nails bit into my right fist.
"I don't know how bad it is," I said. "I'll patch through to Kennestone as soon as we're rolling."
She didn't let go of me until we were in the car. Then she muffled a scream with her hands, slumping in the seat. I put my arms around her.
"We don't deserve this!" she moaned. "No more. No more! I can't—really can't—"
There was a lot of lightning, every few seconds, and thunder that shook us to the bone; I held on, and she screamed it out of her system, then sat there shuddering, her skin appearing pale blue by the naked light of the sky. I turned up the heat and rubbed Sharissa's cold hands.
"They're not dead," she whimpered. 'They're not. God's not so unfair."
"We need to get going."
It was a miserable night for driving, on any kind of road. I wondered what had happened to Greg and Caroline.
"Your mother just came back from Washington, didn't she?"
"Y-yes."
"I'll see what I can find out. We should be at the hospital in forty minutes."
I learned via the phone in my car that Caroline was in surgery. Greg's injuries apparently were less serious. Nobody would tell me about Caroline's condition.
Beside me in the seat Sharissa tried to pray. About all she could manage, over and over, was a heartbroken "Please, God." My own heart was breaking, too, to see her suffering like this. I would never have said anything, but I was afraid it was going to be bad news once we reached the hospital.
We were rolling south, as fast as I dared to go, through the rainstorm pushing north, and finally, a couple of miles below Cartersville, we ran out of it.
About the time the rain slackened to a light patter on the windshield, I had my first uneasy thought about Greg Walker. My thought was: He has too much luck. No more to it than that. But like I say, it made me uneasy in a way I couldn't define. On the other hand, I didn't know the extent of his injuries. So I put it out of my mind until the moment I saw him at the hospital, an arm in a sling, cuts on his chin and one cheekbone, and found out that Caroline had died just a few minutes before we got there, of massive internal injuries.
Too much luck, I thought again, almost as if I resented him. Because Sharissa was suffering, and Greg—well, to give him the benefit, he seemed to be in a daze, in that state where you can't release your feelings, can't begin to grieve.
They had to sedate Sharissa, find a bed for her in the outpatient clinic. I wandered around the hospital and finally found one of the troopers who had covered the accident having coffee in the canteen. He let me look at his report. Caroline driving, a little too much speed on a wet highway. Hit the divider, lost control. And a truck behind her.