by Rob Riggan
The doctors had tested her father in late June and found he had cancer like they suspected, only he wouldn’t listen, and she and Danny and the girls started going back up into Tennessee on the weekends more regularly, just like they’d done that night in April. Except back then, it was spring and there had been a big thunderstorm like you have only up in the mountains, when all the noise rolls here and there. Though it had passed, they could still see lightning over the mountain ridges, scorching the bellies of great clouds. And oh, the smells! All the flowers and leaves and earth opening in the darkness, soaked by the rain. The smells just rushed in the windows that night.
“It’s like we’re headed toward a war,” Danny had said, not upset but with wonder, and she’d said “Yes,” from somewhere in her thoughts. She was happy as she watched their headlights roam through what looked like smoky ruins. The girls were curled up asleep in the back. They had the radio on, but just so they could scarcely hear it. It was tuned to Damascus Country Radio, and a voice was talking about things way down in the valley like it was somewhere in outer space, about how tickets were still available for the Rotary drawing on a new Chevy pickup from Fremont’s Downtown Motors. They were in the Monte Carlo. They’d bought it new a little over a year before from Fremont’s, and it was almost paid for. They already owned the pickup Danny drove to work. They had both come to hate buying on time because they were caught in debt that one time, when it almost took their marriage along with their home and everything else, and Danny had become quiet then, too, like something caged. But they had scrimped and somehow paid their bills. They even kept their credit. Aside from the car, they owed only on the house, and just three years on that. Life seemed simpler that way to both of them, more free and good.
That night was so full of spring, damp and lush, that they had the windows all the way down and finally stopped talking just to feel the mountains and each other, like time didn’t exist anymore. A few years before, they would have pulled off somewhere to make love. He told her once she was the only woman he’d ever known who seemed to really enjoy taking off her clothes, getting bare-naked in front of him. Well, she sure did. She guessed she still did, though it didn’t feel quite the same since the shooting. It felt less free—old, like a movie you never should see more than once or twice. She knew it wasn’t about Danny, though, and she felt sorry when she felt it.
There was always something delicious, a danger, when they used to play like that, taking off their clothes under the heavens like Adam and Eve. It was the mountains and the night, the whisper of trees and splashing creeks. But beautiful sounds hid other sounds; no matter where they were, they always felt watched. She knew Danny wanted to stop that night and just spread her out on the wet, lush ground, and her mouth even went dry. But the girls …
Before they could even cool down, it all changed. Lights suddenly swooped up behind them, and the beeping of a horn began like some kind of yelling from hell, and there was no one else anywhere in all that darkness, just she and Danny and the girls and that car darting from side to side behind them like something wild. It ran up in front of them, then fell alongside and swung at them, and everything went crazy.
They waited all day in district court, Danny taking a day off from his job at the V.A., where he worked in maintenance and grounds, and she from her job at Eckerd’s. It cost them all that money, which was all right, she thought more than once. They sat through all kinds of cases, and it was hot, the courtroom not air-conditioned but like a big amphitheater or church. The seats rose up so high she could look right down on Judge Samuel Ellsworth Walker and at the lawyers down below the judge in what Danny called “the pit,” like for some cockfight or something. The big windows were all open, and though the courthouse was right in the middle of the square in the middle of Damascus, with all those oak trees and grass it had a hush about it, even in the middle of the day. The hard thing was trying to stay awake, it was so hot inside. She’d look out the window and watch the squirrels way down on the ground. She tried not to keep looking at the solicitor. She didn’t want to bother him just because she didn’t know the way things worked, but it would have been nice if he looked at them now and then, and maybe even told them something, she thought. She was worried something was going to happen, something get said, and the case would be thrown out with them right there and not knowing anything had happened. Danny caught her looking at Mr. Lamb and said, “Them lawyers put him up for election. No one runs against him.” He sounded disgusted. “If he was any good, he’d be making real money like the rest of them, not living off the public tit.”
Reggie Tetrault was there, the bailiff, big-bellied and full of himself. She remembered Reggie from high school, still reading in a third-grade reader. She tried not to think about him investigating their case. Lord! And then an attorney came in from a side door—the only steps to the courtroom, which was on the second floor, were on the outside of the building—and talked to Mr. Lamb, the solicitor, and the two went and talked to the judge, and then the judge leaned over and talked to Marianne, the clerk. Then the judge said the preliminary hearing for Dr. Martin Pemberton was to be continued to Wednesday morning three weeks hence, and they could barely believe it. No one even talked to them or asked about their schedules.
She went right down to the jail to see the sheriff and give him hell, only he was gone for the day, and by then she was so angry she could spit.
She shouted at Danny that night. She was angry at him, too, his acting like a know-it-all. He tried to hold her and quiet her down. “Don’t you touch me!” she told him. “What are you being high and mighty about?”
He nodded up the hallway. “The girls,” he whispered.
“They’ll have no life left either if we don’t talk, Daniel Earl Carver! You tell me!”
Then he gave her a look she’d never seen before, like right through her. She saw then he was beyond angry. He was so quiet, his look so cold, it scared her so bad she wished she hadn’t asked what she asked. It made her anger seem like happiness. “We can’t win,” he said. “The man’s rich.”
“Danny, we got the law on our side!” She was almost in tears. He was tearing at something deep inside her. “We have Sheriff Dugan.”
“Don’t count on Dugan or the law. It’s politics. If you’re not on top of the heap, any justice you get is like a scrap you toss a dog. And because it’s either us or that doctor, there won’t be any scraps, honey, believe me. Maybe if he killed someone, someone might say he’d gone too far and do something about it. But no one died, Loretta. That’s the bottom line. We’re here, and the car’s sold only because we couldn’t stand to be in it anymore.”
“Oh, Danny!”
“All we had to do was buy a used car and a little more debt and forget about it.”
He went outside then, just turned and went because he couldn’t stand to be saying it all. But when he came back awhile later, still real quiet but calmer for a moment, she told him she wasn’t going to believe what he said. They were going to see Sheriff Dugan the very next day, and Danny would see that Dugan was a good man, she could feel it. She made up her mind then, and told him so, told him she wasn’t going to despair, wasn’t going to believe their girls had to grow up in a world like that.
XI
Dugan
Dugan leaned back in his chair, rested his chin in the palm of a hand and eyed the woman across the desk. From the open window beside him came the sounds of late-afternoon traffic, of people going home from their jobs. It was hot out, and he’d dropped the blinds, through which the sun pressed in a soft, muted haze. The desk lamp was on, a patch of fluorescent harshness. He was irritable now.
It hadn’t been twenty minutes before when Fillmore, his radio operator, first flung the door open and ushered Loretta Carver and her husband in. At first, Dugan had sat upright at his desk, hands folded, and listened attentively, making routine eye contact with her and also the husband when necessary, though the husband had stayed in the background. From the fi
rst, it was her show, but that was no surprise.
Though he’d talked to her on the phone often, the last time he’d seen her was a couple of days after that night up on the mountain. She’d still looked worn and frightened then, her eyes ringed and skin mottled. She was entirely different now. Dark haired, even striking, she would be quite handsome, Dugan thought, except for a stern and determined set of the mouth, a lean look he’d seen many times before on women, a look set there by years so hard the once-startling and heart-stopping softening of features a man might have lost his heart to was scarcely a memory. She was wearing a denim skirt that rose above her knees, disclosing nice legs, and tennis sneakers with no socks. Her white blouse was unbuttoned not immodestly, two buttons over full and prominent breasts. Her husband was only slightly taller than she, he realized now that he saw the two of them side by side. His blond hair thinning on the forehead gave him a slightly harried, older look. Or maybe it wasn’t the blond hair.
At first, she disappointed Dugan somehow. He didn’t know if it was her voice or simply the beginning of an often-played scene. She was just another woman with maybe a high-school education, if that, judging by the slight twang in her voice and the peculiar inflections around her anger. She was certainly angry, but that, too, was no surprise. He’d heard how the preliminary hearing was continued, and that also was no surprise. They’d be damn lucky ever to get Pemberton inside a courtroom. And then for what?
But she was quite pretty when animated, an intelligence enhancing her attractiveness, though he hadn’t noticed any of that at first. He’d hurried around the desk to greet them, towering over both of them because neither was much over five-foot-six.
“Sheriff Dugan, they continued that preliminary hearing!” she declared, storming by him to a chair. “First they just continued it without even calling us to court, and now they’ve continued it with us right in the courtroom and not even asking!”
He was sensitive to the twang immediately, giving away as it did her birth, her education and, with a little less certainty, her current position in the world. Her words themselves were not so much an announcement of fact but a challenge.
“That often happens, Mrs. Carver,” Dugan said politely. “Particularly on the first court day of a case like this. As I told you, ideally, this wasn’t our best course to take, but probably the only one. I don’t believe we could have gotten a true bill if we’d gone directly to the grand jury and superior court—we just don’t have the case. At least this way, we gained some time for more investigation.” As he closed the door, he saw that Fillmore was back in his cubicle with the radio, that big right ear of his just visible over the bottom half of the Dutch door that enclosed his space, his round-rimmed glasses glinting in the fluorescent light.
“No,” she countered, her eyes boring right into him. They were dark, he noticed, like her hair, which was chopped straight and hung around her like it had been done with a bowl. No games. Like his niece, Rachel, he thought, suddenly looking at her with new appreciation, realizing that even if she weren’t as pretty, or even pretty in the same way, the reminder was in the unvarnished announcement of self: take it or leave it. Maybe he’d judged her too quickly. “Not only did they make us sit there all day, the solicitor telling us we had to be there or there wouldn’t be no case—‘The doctor will be here any minute,’ he said. He never did show, and the way people acted, it was the most normal thing on earth.” The he came out as if she were speaking of God Himself. Or Satan.
But Dugan went ahead and asked “Who?” his voice gentle and without challenge, though he already knew very well who he was and prayed she wouldn’t go biblical on him.
“Dr. Pemberton,” she snapped. “His attorney said his client had been called out on emergency surgery at eight forty-five yesterday morning. ‘Someone is in danger of dying, Your Honor, and my client has to save a human life. This is something he is honor-bound as well as professionally required to do, but will only take a few minutes.’ And he said the same damn thing at three-thirty or four, or whenever it was. ‘So we will just have to continue the case.’ ” She mimicked so well, Dugan knew exactly who the defense attorney had been, as well as the judge, even though she hadn’t named either. “Before, in June, they said his lawyer quit, so we didn’t even get called, then the next time the lawyer had to go to Raleigh on some big case, and we didn’t get called. Now this. It’s all damned lies. Just because this man is rich, and connected, and a doctor …”
“Now, we don’t know that,” Dugan said, glancing at the husband sitting beside her, who was watching her, but with patience, it seemed, not the clench-jawed acquiescence he usually saw when couples charged into his office like this. It suggested one thing the two of them might do together real well was be mad at someone else. No, not even that, Dugan suddenly thought. He’s even looking at her deferentially. He not only loves her, he likes her.
The man caught Dugan’s glance and returned a look that was steady, the anger visibly there but focused, and none of it on her or even really on Dugan. Surprised and impressed, Dugan looked back at the woman.
“No,” she said, insisting once again that Dugan didn’t get it. “The judge didn’t even blink, or press the attorney to explain why we had to wait all day to find out, but continued the case before the attorney even finished telling what he wanted the judge to do.”
“Loretta,” her husband said.
Dugan began mechanically, “Well, you know, judges see a lot—”
“No,” she said, the outrage suddenly rising several degrees as she cast a new look at Dugan. “He’d been on that emergency since the morning, and here it was three-thirty or four, and they were just getting to our case. We’d been sitting there since court began at nine because we were told we had to be there or they might drop the case, and your own deputy himself, Mr. Trainor, didn’t even show up till after ten.”
“I’ll talk to my deputy,” Dugan said. “But that’s the way court usually runs, Mrs. Carver. Pretty slow. Things will sort themselves out, but it might take some time.” Dugan was not really having trouble being patient. He’d been waiting for it to become shrill, as it usually did, only now he was beginning to wonder if it would. Despite her voice and that twang, he wondered. And no religion yet.
“No. Our own lawyer, the county solicitor, Mr. Lamb, just shuffled some papers and said ‘Fine,’ almost before the judge did. And he never did talk to us about it. We’d both taken a day off from work to be there and had been sitting around in the heat and no air conditioning for hours because we are not going to drop this case, Sheriff Dugan, just because the man Danny saw is a doctor and county commissioner and rich and—”
“Thinks he saw,” Dugan corrected, but gently, because court and justice were not like TV, and most people didn’t know that. Though they were both theater, of course. And certainly justice was not swift, which TV was because at least it had an on-off switch. Court was not like much of anything else in the world except people and bureaucracies and government and politics and circuses and …
She stopped then and looked at Dugan as though if it weren’t his fault exactly, maybe it ought to be. He knew that look, too, and the warning bells started clanging. She certainly expected more from him. Maybe he would have to talk to her a time or two more, to calm her down, but then she would finally get it.
“Mrs. Carver,” he said as earnestly as he could, still leaning over the desk. He was dressed in his gray suit pants and white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and the matching gray vest with the silk back. The gray suit coat was hanging on the clothes tree in the corner, along with his white Stetson and the derby. The small holster with the snub-nosed S&W .38 was riding just out from under the vest on his right side because he was left-handed, though the pistol on his bulk looked less intimidating than a child’s cap gun. He’d gone from slim, about 195, to over 250 pounds since he’d gotten elected, although the gain had really begun when he married Dru and started eating well. His sheer size was usually sufficient to discou
rage most men from challenging him. But he wasn’t in the least trying to intimidate her, even if he could have, or wanted to. The women were always the toughest, the ones who refused to see or even consider nuance but went straight to what they thought the issue was—which it generally was, nuance be damned.
“So are they going to continue the hearing again?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I have no control over such things.” But of course they will, he thought, particularly this one. Maybe forever, if they can swing it. He wanted to say that. He’d sent a man to the town of Cary and to the other towns Mort Riddell, the trooper, had turned up with that partial number, assuming the plate was from North Carolina, and also a man to Tennessee, to check out plates and cars and alibis, like it was a murder that had been committed, but he couldn’t tell them that. He couldn’t tell anyone why he was being so thorough, unless it was to shut the case down with an easy conscience. Pemberton had no alibi—he disdained even offering one. Dugan had Carver’s impression of a car and a bit of a tag, and a man driving, and now, since he filed the charges, he’d uncovered a tentative ID of the same car in Pinetown about an hour and a half before the incident, but it was hearsay evidence from a man in trouble so often he’d be laughed out of court if Dugan were fool enough to bring him in, which he wasn’t. He needed something solid.
He still felt there was more to learn in Pinetown, but prying it out was another matter. And anyhow, everyone was alive and fine, just outraged, that’s all, as Eddie had said—and was still saying, or not saying, just looking at him a certain way. All cases seemed like murder when you were the victim.
“It might take awhile,” he said instead. “You’re going to have to be patient.”
“What do you mean patient?” she demanded. “That’s all you’ve told us! This is costing us money. We’re working people.”