Zion

by Dayne Sherman

  He could see the lights on when he arrived earlier, see the Mercedes parked outside. He’d driven past the house again. He didn’t want to kill anyone unless the course of events forced it, but he wanted to deal with Charity. His plan was to teach her a lesson just like he taught Sara Hardin years ago. And he wasn’t driving back to Natchez without coming to a personal understanding with the nutty woman. She needed to shut the hell up or recant what she had said to the marshal and to everyone else. At the back steps, he hesitated, and then grabbed the doorknob. This could go south quickly, he thought. He turned the knob, and he could tell in an instant the door was locked. The unbuttoned dress coat covered his big pistol. He stood with his hand on the knob. He pushed against the door hard and it rattled in the frame but felt solid.

  “Hell,” James Luke whispered, “I’ll go to the front door just like regular white people.” He left the backdoor and picked up the Good Book. He didn’t want to make noise breaking down the door.

  “Did you hear something?” Charity asked. She fidgeted in her nakedness.

  “No.” Wesley held the pencil in his fingers. He looked thoughtful, wise, a curious enough guise on his face. He resembled a street artist in the French Quarter making portraits of tourists.

  “Can I have a quick break? I need a cigarette.”

  “Sure,” he said, looking up from the sketch in progress.

  She stood. There was a slight line of goose bumps on her arms.

  The doorbell rang. James Luke stood at the front door with the Bible under one arm like a preacher or perhaps a summertime book salesman, dressed in all black except for the white shirt. In many ways, he resembled the Apostle Thad Hussert at the Flaming Sword Church.

  “Damn it,” Charity said, “probably a neighbor lady wanting something, trying to invite me to another bridge tournament. They’re relentless and all twice my age.” Her pubic hair was visible when she stood. She put on the robe that she had placed across the arm of the couch, and she reached for her pack of Kools and lighter on the end table. “Wesley, answer the door, and tell the old woman I’ll be right down. But don’t dare let her in. We’ll never get rid of the old bat.” She climbed the stairs in a rush.

  “Okay,” he said, standing up, a little rattled. He put his pencil on the easel ledge and walked over to the door.

  The bell rang again before he could reach it. Wesley opened the heavy front door and stared at the man dressed in the suit with the Bible. James Luke held the book in one hand and the other hand was at his waist, not far from the pistol. They eyed one another for a couple of seconds.

  Wesley was perplexed at first, then sure. “Uncle Jimmy,” he said. He was shocked, as if he’d just seen an angel or something from another world.

  “Yeah. I’m James Luke Cate, but who the hell are you?” He glanced away to the street and then back to the young man’s face.

  “I’m Wesley Hardin. Tom and Sara’s boy.”

  James Luke shook his head. He turned a dark shade of reddish purple and ground his teeth. “I guess you are. I need to talk to Charity. I know she’s in there.”

  At first, Wesley wanted to hug the man just like when he was a boy, but he could sense a strange distance that was alarming. James Luke Cate was not his real uncle, but he’d been like a brother to his father ten years before he left the region. Wesley had never seen him again until now.

  “Come in. She’ll be down in a minute.” He walked James Luke through the living room into the den. The odd visitation made no sense to Wesley. Why would he come here? He still wanted to shake the man’s hand or hug his neck, but James Luke seemed to be agitated and tense by the way he gripped the Bible tight, his face hard. There was some kind of a sneer wired across his mouth that never eased.

  “You just leave church?” Wesley stared at the book. He rubbed his pants legs aimlessly with the palms, fidgeting.

  “I guess you could say that,” James Luke said, looking down at the Bible in his hand as if he hadn’t realized it was there.

  Wesley offered him a seat on the couch. They both sat down. Then Wesley realized he needed to go tell Charity about the visitor. He stood to go upstairs.

  “By God, you’ve grown a lot, way bigger than Tom and every bit as tall as me. How is Tom doing?” James Luke’s voice and manner softened slightly.

  “He’s all right. He works as a carpenter at the junior college.”

  “You live here?”

  “I stay at the pool house out back.”

  James Luke gazed at the painting, the rough sketch of Charity nude. He looked back at Wesley and grinned. “Yeah, I’m sure you stay up in that pool house. I bet stolen water is real sweet.”

  Wesley knew he was being mocked. He quickly covered the easel with a cloth. “In two weeks, I’m going to go to Southwestern in Lafayette, the School of Architecture, and I’ve been staying out back at the pool house this summer while I’m working on a carpentry project here. It’s some shelving and cabinetry to go into the study. I need to go tell Mrs. Charity you’re here.”

  “You do that.”

  Wesley walked up the stairs and down the hall into the master bedroom where Charity stood at the bathroom doorway in her robe. He could see that her face was contorted. He moved toward her. She had the telephone receiver in her hand, her fingers tight around it. She put the phone to her ear and gave the address, saying she needed the police to come immediately to her home on Thomas Jefferson Avenue. A man was breaking into the house.

  She threw the phone down on the bed and snatched open the nightstand drawer, pulling out a little black pistol that Wesley hadn’t seen before. A burning cigarette smoldered on the edge of the nightstand and fell to the floor. She was standing by the bed where they’d made love last night and many times before. She cocked the black pistol with a click.

  “Charity, what are you doing with the pistol? James Luke Cate is here. I know him from when I was a boy in Zion. This seems strange,” Wesley said.

  “Oh my God, Wesley,” she said, “you get in that bathroom and lock the door. Get in the bathroom right now, dammit.” She had the little Beretta pistol in her hand, her finger on the trigger.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  She grabbed his arm with her left hand and tried to push him into the bathroom. The phone was lying on the bed, the receiver making noise.

  “He’s a dangerous man. I’ve called the police. You go hide. Open the window and jump out and run away.” She pushed him into the bathroom. Her face was ashen, and the look was nothing less than terror.

  Before Charity could shut the door and hide Wesley in the bathroom, he saw James Luke raise the big Colt pistol from the hallway just past the bedroom door. He’d seen the pistol when he was a child, and James Luke had let him fire it once. It was pointed toward them. Wesley hollered, “No!”

  James Luke trained the pistol on Wesley, and he was hit with a round to the skull. Blood and brain sailed across the vanity mirror six feet away and splattered the wall like John F. Kennedy’s cranial matter across the trunk of the Lincoln Continental in Dallas.

  “I’ll kill you, you loudmouth bitch,” James Luke sneered as he pointed the Colt at Charity.

  She got off a quick shot with the .25 automatic, and plaster split from the wall beside James Luke’s head. He moved beside the doorframe, but she fired at him again, missing a second time. He stepped out from the hallway long enough to squeeze off a round at her, and simultaneously she at him. Her bare chest became a massive butterfly as the heavy bullet entered above her left nipple. She, too, scored a hit unwittingly, a round piercing high on his shoulder, lacerating his right trapezoid. It stung him like fire, and he began to curse the pain.

  Charity fell to the floor. James Luke stepped over to her body and shot her again in the face for good measure, her blood spattering on the side of the bed sheet.

  She lay dead. He began to kick her with his black cowboy boots. He smelled gunpowder in the air and the burnt flesh of death that reminded him of Heartbreak
Ridge in Korea.

  After James Luke quit kicking her, he saw that Wesley looked dead, too. He stopped cold and sized things up. He gazed at Wesley’s mangled forehead. He spoke to the young man on the floor in the bathroom. “What a damned waste.” He stared at his head and scowled, feeling sad for a brief moment until the pain wiped his conscience clear, and he focused his attention back on himself. He dropped his Bible on the bed and surveyed the damage.

  He put Charity’s little pistol in his back pants pocket, took a towel from the rack in the bathroom, and pressed it against his right shoulder. He could tell the wound was more of a glancing blow than a direct hit, the meat cut with a deep indention on his shoulder through the dress coat, and it hurt with pulsing pains in his neck. His shoulder burned, bleeding down his arm on the towel.

  “What a batshit whore!” he said. The pain was intense, almost breathtaking. He turned to go downstairs, and said, “Woman, everything you touch turns to shit.”

  James Luke stuck the big Colt pistol in his waistband and fled the room. Blood filled the white towel he had pressed to his shoulder which he held tight. The crimson dripped onto his boots, and his stomach immediately started to feel swollen with pain.

  This was the law of unintended consequences, bad luck, or perhaps bad karma, he thought. He almost tried to feel guilty over it all, but he could not. He was suffering a considerable amount of pain, and he felt fortunate to be alive when he left into the night as fast as he could, out the back door and down the steps and through the yard and into the alley. He was not going to expend any of his strength dwelling on the lost boy and the lost world he’d just made.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A police officer arrived in less than ten minutes. The officer on duty had been working a wreck over at Dead Man’s Curve in the middle of town. James Luke had passed the fender bender and the officer on his way to Old 51, where he made the turn north toward Mississippi. The officer left the accident and headed back downtown, now going in the direction where James Luke had just left, the patrol car lights flashing.

  Less than a half an hour later, all of the old bridge ladies were out on their front lawns, and plenty of the town and gown learned of the gruesome murder at the Claiborne House. A reporter from the Star-Register who lived in a garage apartment up the street was onsite writing notes for a story in his little steno pad, gathering the facts for the Monday, July 29, 1974, afternoon paper. He was almost jolly because he knew it would make front page news above the fold. “If it bleeds, it leads,” and this story was drenched in blood.

  Later in the night, Marshal Brownlow drove over with his bloodhounds. He had been called because he was the brother-law to the Pickleyville chief of police, Bruce Nesom, and because he had tracking dogs. It took less than ten seconds standing in the bedroom for him to recognize both Wesley and Charity, and to see that they were as dead as stones.

  Coroner L.B. Wallace, a veterinarian in Ruthberry, said they’d died within minutes of the phone call to the police station. There was enormous blood loss, and the two beautiful people were pretty no longer. He said this was the worst murder scene he’d witnessed since the stabbing of a Negro boy in 1957 for whistling at a white woman in Liberty City.

  The marshal had never seen anything quite like it either. And it was not just the gore in the bedroom and the bathroom. It was the unmitigated waste of it all, the loss of human life, the potential for good lives lost. Or at least one good life, Wesley’s, whereas Charity’s ship had long sailed, gone to sea ever since she was a girl and into a dark water forever.

  Chief Nesom and the marshal spoke to the Presbyterian minister in the front yard of the big house. He was the Claiborne family’s long-time pastor. An erudite man who had graduated from Princeton, he said he would call Dr. Claiborne in Washington, D.C., just as soon as he got the number from the man’s sister who lived in town and was also a member of the church.

  “You know,” the Reverend Hannibal Knox said, “there was a gentleman sitting in a panel truck parked on the street. It was a blue Chevrolet, I believe. I saw him when I was preparing to leave for the manse after the service. He got out of his truck, and he was dressed for worship, well dressed. I think he carried a book, a copy of the Holy Scriptures, but I did not recognize him at all. He was headed west toward the little lane behind the houses. This was peculiar, because as I said, he was not present at our evening worship service, and the automobile is now gone. We had perhaps thirty people in attendance tonight, and I would have noticed any visitors. I almost went over to speak to him before I walked to the manse.”

  “Can you tell me what he looked like?” asked the marshal.

  “Average-looking, a Caucasian gentleman with black hair. The darkness was hardly overcome by the street light,” said the minister. “This probably will not help you. I wish I could offer more details.”

  “It helps a little,” Nesom said.

  The marshal and the chief were standing outside on the front steps of the Claiborne place. The chief smoked a Tampa Nugget cigar, and the marshal chewed a piece of gum.

  “This Bible was on the bed,” a detective said. “It had a little blood on it and looked out of place. It seemed odd, the woman being naked under her robe and all, and the kid not far away from her, all of that with the Bible laying on the bed. Plus she was drawn on a big poster board on the first floor like the kid was drawing her naked or something.”

  The detective held the book carefully with a handkerchief. Brownlow and Nesom inspected it. The detective avoided the blood stains on the cover with his bare fingers. They could read a note written in black ink on the front flap. “From Tom to James Luke. Seek and ye shall find. God bless. December 24, 1961, Thomas E. Hardin.”

  “Our man is James Luke Cate,” the marshal said. “And this is a disaster right out of hell,” Brownlow told the chief.

  “Somebody might ought to go see that old boy,” the chief said.

  “If he ain’t blood loss dead already. He left here with a blood trail, drips and drops,” Brownlow said.

  “We couldn’t be lucky enough to find him dead,” the chief replied.

  The marshal took his dogs from the kennel on the back of his truck. He aided the Pickleyville police with tracking a blood trail that left the house heading out of the back door. He’d brought both of his hounds, Dixie and Duke, and they picked up the trail and were soon making a beeline through backyard and the alleyway toward the Federated Presbyterian Church. Once at North Spruce, they stopped. The marshal and the city detective watched the dogs go cold on the trail. The hounds had lost the scent and sniffed the air above the street.

  “Drove off, huh?” Chief Nesom said, stating the obvious.

  “I’d say so,” the marshal answered. “Did y’all find any weapons?” he asked.

  “No, but there was an open box of .25 autos on the nightstand and there were three spent .25 casings and three .45s on the floor,” the chief said.

  Two hours passed. Tom and Sara Hardin were met at the front door of their house in Zion by Marshal Brownlow and Reverend Poole. The marshal said, “We are sorry, but we’ve come here to tell you that Wesley has been killed at the home of Howell Claiborne. Both Wesley and Mrs. Charity Claiborne were shot to death in the house, and the best I can tell it was murder. The shooter has not been positively identified yet. I am deeply sorry to carry the news to you.” He was withholding information until he could locate James Luke or get a little closer to doing so.

  Tom said, “When I find out who did this, I’m going to kill him.”

  Marshal Brownlow nodded. He didn’t want to say anything to the contrary. He was angry enough to kill someone himself. Still, he didn’t want to chase two men instead of one.

  In the living room of the house on Lower Louth Road, the old Hardin home place, Tom held Sara for the first time in many weeks as they both wept the uncontrolled tears that accompany the death of an only child, a grief so inconsolable that not holding one another up, each would have fallen down to the woo
d floor.

  Marshal Brownlow stayed at the house for a while with Poole. They stood on the front porch in the night air and talked. Corrine Travis, Tom’s faithful cousin, arrived. Brownlow said he wanted to escort Tom to the city morgue to claim the body as soon as he was able to go. Wesley’s driver’s license was in his wallet, and the marshal knew exactly who the boy was despite the disfigured head.

  Corrine and Reverend Poole said they would stay as long as necessary. The marshal left this house of mourning and went to put the dogs in the pen. He asked Reverend Poole not to let Tom or Sara leave. He would return shortly or try to figure out the best way to persuade Tom to go to the morgue.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The marshal called the police station in Natchez and alerted the officer on duty about the murders in Pickleyville, Louisiana. He said he had a warrant issued by the police in Pickleyville. Then he asked for permission to interview James Luke and his wife, depending on who could be located. The officer said he’d call the chief at home and get back to him.

  Brownlow needed to meet again with Tom and take him to claim the body. So he called the house and spoke to Reverend Poole, who said Sara was in bed and two female co-workers from Doolittle Library were there holding a vigil, as was Corrine. One of the women had given her enough valium to sleep a standing horse.

  The marshal asked the minister to drive Tom over to City Hall to claim the body. He said he’d do it.

  Soon, the marshal met Reverend Poole and Tom at the Pickleyville City Hall, where the police station, jail, and makeshift coroner’s office were housed. The minister had driven Tom in his Oldsmobile. Inside City Hall, they sat on a recycled church pew in the hallway when the marshal arrived. The place smelled like Pine-Sol, ammonia, and death.