by Jeff Crook
I said, “I don’t know anything about fire investigations.”
“All you need to know is who wanted Deacon dead.” She got up and walked down the hall, stopped at her bedroom door and turned on the light. “That’s why you’re here, Jackie. That’s why you have to go on. You owe it to Deacon.”
Let the dead bury the dead, I thought, but I mustered enough genuine sincerity to say, “Good night.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.” She entered her bedroom and closed the door. I heard the click of the light switch as the light under her door winked out.
* * *
Sleep had left me again, maybe never to return. I stood at Reece’s door, paused in the act of opening it because just as I touched the knob I heard a thump on the other side. I stood at the door with my hand on the knob, afraid to open it, afraid for the first time in my life of what I might find looking back at me from the other side. Not Reece. I was afraid I’d open the door and find Deacon waiting there. He’d want to know what I was waiting for. I owed it to him, Jenny said.
I walked back downstairs and sat on the couch until dawn slid up the sky, my mind crawling through every fact I knew, every guess, every theory, trying to find something that tied it all together. Two men were dead—Sam and Deacon. How were their murders connected?
Sam’s murder seemed obvious enough. He had found out something he wasn’t supposed to know. Maybe he was killed by the guy who molested his daughter and drove her to suicide. But if that were true, why kill Deacon? If Sam had told Deacon before he died, Deacon would have settled that bill long before I arrived on the scene.
Maybe it had something to do with the finances for the homeowners’ association. I remembered the question Deacon had asked that night at the meeting. How did they spend all those HOA fees? A little landscaping? The senator’s Coon Supper? What if Sam found out the money was going somewhere else?
Then there were Sam’s finances. Spending cash that had no source. Was Sam the one skimming HOA fees? Or was he part of a team of grifters? Did he grow a conscience and threaten to expose his accomplices?
What did Deacon know? Far more than he ever told me. I’d never know what Sam told Deacon before he died, whether he confessed to stealing or exposed those who were. What I did know was this—with Deacon dead, there was no one to contest Ruth’s will. All her money and all her land would go to Luther Vardry.
Luther Vardry was the president of the HOA.
Luther Vardry grew up here and knew the area, including the woods, as well as anybody.
Luther Vardry, seventy-odd years old, couldn’t have killed Sam Loftin. He couldn’t have hurled Molotov cocktails through the second-floor windows of Ruth’s plantation house. He was physically incapable of the murders of either man.
It had to be somebody else. Someone with the same motive and the same opportunity, plus the means to accomplish the deeds. Someone with a good throwing arm and huge chip on his shoulder, someone who already hated Deacon enough to kill him, even if Luther didn’t personally order his murder. The kind of man who could interpret the cries of the king and take a baseball bat to the head of a meddlesome priest.
Too easy, but it was the only thing that fit the facts.
But as the sun crept in through the windows, one fact threw a shadow over the whole thing. The fact was, I had no facts. Just a bunch of theories linking together a trail of coincidences. Theorizing on coincidences had nearly led me to accuse Sam Loftin of abusing his daughter. Luther Vardry had the money and the local power to take Ruth’s property, no matter what her will said. He didn’t need to kill Deacon to destroy him. All he needed were his lawyers and his connections.
* * *
I lowered the shades and clicked on the television, flipped through the early-morning news programs looking for something to dull my mind and maybe send me back to sleep. Instead, I found a movie, a movie I hadn’t seen in years—Taxi Driver. The scene was where twelve-year-old Jodie Foster and her pimp are dancing alone in her apartment. The pimp’s talking to her, whispering vomit-inducing sweet nothings into her hair as he holds her close, rocking side to side. I’m the luckiest man in the world. I had to turn up the volume to hear the rest of it. No man alive ever had a woman who loved him the way you love me. These were Nastyboy’s words, word for word, written to Reece.
I watched the whole movie, looking for anything that might help me find him. All I found was a fresh desire to hunt down the bastard who raped that little girl and go all Travis Bickle on him. I’d have given anything for that kind of catharsis, that kind of purity of purpose.
But life isn’t like the movies. Not even the ones that are more lifelike than anybody wants to know.
47
I VEGETATED IN FRONT OF THE television half the day, ignoring every good-morning, every offer of diversion and conversation, every call to breakfast and then to lunch. Holly wandered through at midmorning and I rebuffed her attempts to become soul sisters of the vestal fire. Nathan sat beside me for a while and tried to interest me in buying his camera and taking off my clothes. I watched the clock count down on the floor-mop deal of a lifetime.
The noon news came on. There was a report about the fire in which a local preacher was believed to have died. “Fire investigators have stated,” the reporter repeated, “the blaze began in an upstairs bedroom and that smoking was involved.”
They cut to Fred the Fire Marshal in his dress uniform. I didn’t know volunteer firefighters had dress uniforms. “We believe the fire is the result of someone, perhaps the victim, smoking in bed.” The body of the victim, whose name had not yet been released, had not been found at the time of the report.
My phone, like everything else, had burned up in that blaze, so I used Jenny’s to call Lorio. He apologized for not stopping by. He’d been very busy. His superiors had him directing traffic at road-construction sites. I bet him I knew why, but he didn’t bite. “I haven’t heard from Wiley, but they only exhumed Sam yesterday.”
“Give him a call, just the same,” I said.
He promised he would.
They had covered up Sam’s cause of death. Now they were covering up Deacon’s. The two were connected somehow. I hoped, once Wiley did his job, I’d have more than theories and coincidences. Until then, there was nothing to do but wait.
I was prepared to wait. I had nothing else in the world but time.
I found an egg salad sandwich on a plate in the fridge and heard water rushing in the pipes from Jenny filling the bathtub upstairs. I stood at the sink eating the sandwich, looking out the window at the pool. Cassie stood in the pool near the steps, Holly sunned herself on a towel behind her. Nathan floated on his back with his package breaking the water like a half-submerged bicycle tire. I went upstairs and put on a swimsuit.
Nathan was swimming laps by the time I stepped outside. Holly had rolled over on her belly. “Hey, Aunt Jackie,” Cassie said. I dove into the deep end and let my momentum carry me to the shallow, where I glided up beside her. Her brown legs looked pale because of the greenness of the water. Her pink bikini bottom was little more than two triangles held together by shoestrings, her feet flat and dainty and wrinkled, with their wrinkled white soles turned out slightly.
Nathan turned and pushed off the wall. I saw him coming up from the deeper green haze of the deep end, like some hairy leviathan, shafts of light playing over his back. He rose to the surface as he reached the shallows and found the bottom with his feet. Cassie climbed the stair and got out of the water. Water dripped from her body and from the ends of her hair. Her bare feet slapped across the hot concrete. She snatched a towel from the brick wall and began to dry herself, her legs, her hair, tilting her head to shake the water from her ear.
Nathan followed her out of the pool. He toweled off, then got his camera from the bag under the window. Holly moved to a deck chair and Cassie sat down between her long legs. Nathan sat in the chair beside them and dried his hair.
I sank to the bottom for a while, holding m
y breath, waiting for something, I didn’t know what. Then I knew. I turned around and the girl in the red bikini was lying on the bottom in the deep end. Cassie must have already seen her.
When I came up again, Nathan was telling them how pretty they were and shooting close-ups of Holly. She turned her head this way and that, flipped her hair over her shoulder, shifted her sunglasses down her nose, pouted. “Don’t you think Holly is pretty?” he asked.
Cassie said she was. He asked if he could take their picture together.
She glanced at me. He took a step back and shot a couple of pictures, then lowered his camera. “What about that smile?”
She pulled her feet up and wrapped her arms around her knees. I was shocked by how much she looked like her sister. Cassie was about the same age as Reece had been in the youngest photos. “I don’t feel like smiling,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because Aunt Jackie is leaving.”
He turned to me. “Are you leaving?”
How had she known? Maybe her friend from the fireplace told her. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m having too much fun.”
He moved around to Cassie’s side of the deck chair. “Come on, smile for me sweetheart. Smile like Holly. Don’t you want to be pretty like Holly?”
I climbed out of the pool, picked up my towel and sat in Nathan’s chair. Cassie switched chairs and sat beside me holding my hand. Hers was trembling. “I wish you wouldn’t go,” she said.
“Now I’ve got three beautiful girls.” Nathan moved over to photograph us. Cassie turned her head away from him. As he knelt at the end of the deck chair to photograph her, I could see his tight black Speedo tightening across the hardening swell between his tanned, muscular legs. And just above that, the hair on his belly rising like a curl of gray smoke from the waistband, a curl in the shape of a question mark. He blew a kiss at Cassie and said, “You’re so much prettier when you smile, little pig.”
It was like a curtain parted, not just revealing the screen behind the curtain, but also the fact that I was sitting alone in a dark, empty theater. I held on to the arms of the chair to keep from falling out. Nathan had destroyed Reece, and now he was hunting Cassie. I thought of how many times over the last three months we had left him alone with her in the pool. How many times he had taken her for joy rides on his boat, or tucked her into bed at night.
“Smile, Aunt Jackie,” Nathan said.
I pulled back my lips. I’m sure I looked like the mother of death, but Nathan liked it enough to reach down and give himself a little squeeze so I could see him do it.
“How about I stand up?” I said.
“OK.”
I stood and turned slightly, rising up on my toes, showing him my back and the curve of my ass. He groaned happily and brushed himself against my leg while moving to get a better angle to shoot. When his face was behind the camera snapping away, I grabbed him by the elbows and shoved him into the pool, camera and all.
Holly jumped out of her chair. “What the hell!”
I grabbed an empty beer bottle and got ready to bean him the next time he came up for air, but he didn’t come up. He was sinking toward the bottom, slowly flailing his arms. His camera floated free of his hand and drifted away.
I dove in and found Nathan pinned to the bottom of the pool by the girl in the red one-piece. Her arms and legs were wrapped lovingly around him, her chin on his shoulder as she stuck the black worm of her rotting tongue in his ear.
As I swam down to them, she frowned at me and released Nathan, but his eyes were starting to glaze over. I grabbed him by the back of the Speedos, kicked off the bottom and dragged him to the shallow end. He was a big guy, but I managed it.
I flipped him over. Thankfully I didn’t have to give him mouth-to-mouth, because as soon as the air touched his face, he vomited out a lung full of water and struggled to his feet, coughing, spluttering and livid.
“Cassie, go inside right now,” I shouted. Holly grabbed her hand and they both hurried into the house.
Still coughing, Nathan said, “What the fuck! You were trying to kill me!”
“I think I was saving your worthless life. Prick.”
“After you shoved me in the pool!” He looked back at the dark spot resting on the bottom at the deep end. “My camera!”
“Sorry about that.” I truly was. Any incriminating pictures that might have been on the camera were lost.
“It cost over seven thousand dollars!” Mad as he was, he didn’t go diving for it. He stood looking at it, shivering slightly even though it was hot enough outside to melt the lead from your fillings. “I thought for a second somebody was holding me down.”
“You shouldn’t go swimming by yourself.” I climbed out of the pool. He followed me to the ladder. I stopped with my hands on the rails, blocking him. “You took those pictures of Reece, you sick fuck.”
He paused, halfway up, and brushed the wet hair out of his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen them, Nathan.” He got quiet, staring up at me with enough ice in his eyes to freeze the pool solid. “Reece printed them out, left them for somebody to find. You seduced that little girl and broke her heart so bad she killed herself.”
He grinned and pulled himself up the ladder. “Fucking cunt. You don’t know jack shit about anything.”
“I’ve also read your messages. You never should have sent her that picture of your willy. It’s all I need to get a search warrant … Nastyboy.”
“Crazy fucking bitch,” he laughed as he wrapped a towel around his waist.
“Why don’t you show it to me now, Nastyboy, and save us both the trouble?”
“You’d like that, whore. But you’ll pay for that camera, one way or another.”
“Why don’t you call the cops on me. Go ahead. Assault. Felony criminal mischief. If you hang around a bit, I’m sure I can think of something else to do to you.”
After exchanging several more empty promises, he headed for the boat dock. Tossing the towel into a seat, he started the engine and gunned it, lurching the boat away from the dock, then turned far out on the lake and came roaring back, spraying a rooster tail forty feet long and flipping me the bird, his last great act of defiance.
I was completely crushed.
* * *
I went inside to dry off and put on some clothes. Jenny met me outside Cassie’s door. “What happened?” I could hear Cassie inside, bawling her eyes out. I wondered if she was already in love with Nathan, if it was already too late for her. “Holly was furious. She couldn’t even talk. She left.”
I couldn’t tell Jenny yet, not until I got my head wrapped around this and sorted it out. Things were starting to fall into place like a good game of solitaire, but I still had a jack or two that needed revealing. “I got a little mad at Nathan and shoved him in the pool.”
“Oh,” she said, grinning. She didn’t bother asking and for the moment I let her fill in the details herself. She knew Nathan well enough to know he probably deserved it.
But she didn’t really know him at all, and I was only beginning to find out.
48
AN HONEST-TO-GOD BUTLER LET ME in Luther’s front door, not some personal assistant, not a housekeeper—a real Jeeves type, black tie, white gloves, long nose for looking down at people, only he was about twenty-three years old and looked like he’d just stepped down from an Elgin Marble. I hadn’t seen him at the Coon Supper, but maybe he had the day off. I wiped my shoes on the rug and stepped inside, wishing I had found a dog turd to step in before I got there. I would have to remember next time.
I handed young Jeevesy a plain brown envelope. “What’s this?” he asked.
“My card. Tell Luther I wish to see him.”
“The reverend is a very busy man.”
“Tell His Reverence to pull his little pastor out of Eugene’s pulpit and come down here. It’s about his son, Nathan.”
He took the envelope and glided away, the star
ch in his slacks whispering like a confessional. I wandered into Luther’s library, cracked open a few cabinets until I found his secret bottle and poured myself four fingers of giant killer into the jelly jar he kept with his stash. Luther seemed to be in no hurry. I lit a cigarette, took a couple of puffs and breathed smoke into the four corners of the room. His window had a fine view of the sun setting over the lake, and the woods dark as a storm cloud over the horizon. From here Luther might have witnessed Sam’s murder. From here, he could have watched the fire that burned down his mother’s home and freed him from a lengthy and expensive court battle with a meddlesome priest.
I glanced at a passage Luther had marked in the Bible that lay open on his desk. This must have been his private Bible, because he had underlined all the naughty parts in Genesis, Judges, Song of Solomon.
Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.
“I wonder if you noticed that there are no ashtrays in my house?” Luther said as he entered the library. He batted faintly at my smoke. Dear old Jeevesy closed the doors behind him. “Ezekiel, chapter twenty-three. I was planning to read it at Mother’s funeral, until Deacon hogged the show.”
She would have liked that. She would have liked Luther’s whiskey, too. “Nice hooch. Expensive stuff. Who buys it for you?”
Frowning primly, he dusted off his good book and closed it, tucked it away in the same drawer where I found his whiskey. When he turned back around, he had my calling card in his pudgy hand. I could tell by the torn flap of the envelope that he had opened it.