Stone Angel

by Carol O’Connell

  He was lying of course. The truth was less flattering. The blinding of Charles Butler was the damage just for getting in Mallory’s way. She had succeeded where Riker had failed in his own attempt to maim this man.

  “The only criminal thing about Jessop is that he never got over Cass Shelley’s death. He just couldn’t get past it.” Riker watched his cigarette smoke curl up to the ceiling. “Poor bastard. And you thought he could’ve been part of a murder? Maybe a cover-up? You suspect Augusta of something, too, don’t you? Who’s next? Henry?”

  Charles’s lips parted, but nothing came out. Mallory had rendered him sightless, and Riker had struck the man dumb. But he was not done yet.

  “Here’s the real kicker, Charles. Even Mallory – who trusts nobody – Mallory would tell you this idea of yours is bullshit. How do I know that?” He leaned forward for the last shot. “It might take her more time than most, but even that amoral brat can recognize an honest man, and God knows she’s no Diogenes.”

  Charles sank down in the chair, deflated and defeated.

  And now Riker believed there might be a future in the miracle business, for lo and behold, the blind man could see once more.

  Praise the Lord.

  Ah, but wait – there was a downside to this healing trade. The sad giant was seeing too clearly now.

  “It worked out for the best, Charles. You stood by her, and now the kid finally gets a little justice for her mother. That must be some consolation.”

  But the big man was unconsoled.

  “What do you want, Charles? You want absolution? Well, you got it.” Riker waved his cigarette to make the sign of the cross in the air.

  Jane was standing at the cafe window when the silver Mercedes pulled up in front of the sheriff’s office. The two men from New York City were helping somebody out of the backseat. Was it a man or a boy? He had a jacket pulled up over his head – just like the celebrity murderers on the evening news.

  The cashier, Charmaine, joined her at the window in a cloud of cheap knockoff perfume. “Well, who is that?”

  Jane shook her head, wishing Charmaine would go away. She turned to the empty porch of the bed and breakfast. Betty would probably be in the cemetery with her little troop of tourists by now. So this event belonged to Jane alone.

  The man in the middle of the trio was slender and small – that narrowed it down some. And now that he had cleared the body of the car, she could see the red shirt below the hem of his pulled-up jacket. Oh, and now she had a clear view of the trademark red socks. Now, don’t that beat all. Who would’ve thought – “Well, that’s the idiot,” said Charmaine, stretching her neck and seconding her employer’s unvoiced opinion. “Is he under arrest?”

  “Looks that way, don’t it?” said Jane. “The man with the bad suit is a New York City detective.”

  “I wonder what that idiot’s done. That mother of his – letting him roam around town at will, bringing him in here for lunch every day like he was normal. Didn’t I tell you he was dangerous, didn’t I, Jane?”

  “Yes, Charmaine, I believe you did mention that.” Twenty times or more, you slovenly, bleach-blond bitch. “What do you suppose he’s done?”

  “It wouldn’t be Christian to speculate. Poor Ira. And my heart just goes out to his mother.” Jane’s smile conveyed no such charitable sentiment as she walked over to the buffet line and began to load up a tray. “I think the new prisoner will be needing his lunch.”

  “But it’s not even eleven o’clock.” Charmaine was looking at her watch, which she swore was gold, but it wasn’t. “Kind of early for lunch, isn’t it?”

  Well, Charmaine always had been a bit slow.

  The sheriff followed his deputy into the reception area to greet Charles Butler and Detective Riker. Another man was sitting on the bench behind them. A denim jacket covered his head. Well, aren’t you the shy one.

  Tom Jessop decided to let the man sit for a while, let the fear ripen a bit. And he did not mind dragging this out a little longer. For the past seventeen years, anticipation had been everything to him.

  “Me and my deputy was wondering when you were gonna bring in the witness.”

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” said Riker. “You’re takin‘ all the fun outta this.”

  “You can blame Lilith for that. She was in the cemetery last night – saw the whole show. Is Kathy coming in?”

  “Well, technically,” said Riker, “she’s still a fugitive from justice.”

  “I guess she’s better off at Augusta’s.”

  Charles Butler smiled. “Sheriff, is there anything you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know how you made that statue fly.” He lightened up on the sarcasm for his deputy’s benefit.

  Lilith Beaudare turned on him. “I know you don’t believe me, but I’m telling you, I saw it.”

  It was a hard story to swallow, even given his past history with her father. Guy Beaudare had never conjured anything so imaginative as an avenging angel rising off the ground, stone wings flapping to beat the devil, and attacking a man with the wrath of God. But it was a good story, and Guy would be proud of his daughter.

  But Charles Butler seemed stunned, and now Jessop had to wonder if there might be something to the story.

  Lilith gave Charles a pleading look. “The sheriff says the trick can’t be done, not even with wires. Please tell him how you did it. He thinks I’m crazy.”

  Charles and Riker exchanged glances, as if debating this question of Lilith’s sanity. The detective shrugged, deferring to the larger man in all things magical.

  “I do it with mirrors,” said Charles, as if bringing stone to life were an everyday thing with him, and not worth a bit of Lilith’s wonder.

  “Right,” said the sheriff, turning to his new prisoner. “Well, let’s see what we got here.” In the spirit of opening a long-awaited present, he pulled the jacket away from the man’s head and stepped back. It took a moment to see past the disguise of different clothes, the barbered hair and beardless face. Jimmy Simms was all dressed up like a normal person on the verge of rejoining the world.

  Tom Jessop felt suddenly very tired. This was the last thing he had expected. “You were right, Lilith, he’s got the Laurie family resemblance all right. This is Babe’s nephew.”

  Jimmy bowed his head to hide his face.

  The sheriff put one hand on the younger man’s shoulder and shook him lightly. “You saw that killing, and you never said a word to me?”

  “He was part of it,” said Riker, holding out a bulging manila envelope. “It’s all here. A signed confession and all the names.”

  The sheriff waved the envelope away and backed off from the prisoner. “I want to hear it from him. Lilith, take the boy into the conference room.” The man was thirty years old, but Tom Jessop would always see him as a runaway boy, and he didn’t trust himself to touch Jimmy Simms, not yet.

  They all filed down the hallway and through the last door. The sheriff remained standing while the others sat down in metal folding chairs pulled up to the long table. This back room lacked the antique warmth of the reception area. The walls were cold white and held contemporary maps and bulletin boards with papers dangling by pushpins. Riker was seated at the head of the table, flanked by Lilith and Charles. Jimmy Simms sat alone on the other side.

  And now the sheriff hovered behind the prisoner. “Let’s hear it, Jimmy.”

  The younger man only looked down to the end of the table, where Riker was coating half of it with official-looking papers. The sheriff put one hand on the prisoner’s shoulder to prompt him. “You told it to Riker, now you tell it to me.”

  Jimmy stared at Riker, who didn’t look up, but continued to cover the table with evidence, pieces of a murder. Now Riker did look up as he pulled a blue sheet of paper from the envelope, and held it up to the prisoner.

  Jimmy spoke as if he were reading the words. “Cass took me to the meeting at the New Church. She dragged me right into that room. She wa
s so angry, waving her letter around and yelling at people.”

  The sheriff bent low, his head close to Jimmy’s. “What was Cass angry about?”

  “I don’t remember what she was saying. I just wanted to crawl away and die.” Jimmy looked at Riker, who smiled gently and nodded, making a rolling motion with his hand. Jimmy continued. “She was gonna tell the whole town. She was gonna tell you. The last thing she said was, ‘The sheriff will be back in the morning, you bastard.”

  “Who did she say that to?”

  “My uncle.” He sank down in his chair and covered his face with his hands.

  Riker waved a hand to caution the sheriff. “Don’t get him off on that. He’ll cry, and it’ll take an hour to settle him down again.” To the prisoner, he said. “Go on, kid.”

  “My father must’ve put it all together, ‘cause he was looking at me real strange, just staring at me like I’d crawled out from under some rock. After Cass left, Dad told me to wait outside while the grownups talked.”

  “Talked about what?” the sheriff prompted.

  Riker handed him two blue sheets of paper, hospital lab reports on blood tests for a twelve-year-old boy. “The ID number matches Dr. Shelley’s case file number for Jimmy.”

  The sheriff scanned the first line. “Hepatitis?” He looked at Riker. “I knew he had that. Cass treated him for it when I brought the boy back from New York.” But apparently, she’d treated him for a more serious ailment as well. On the next blue sheet was the positive test for venereal disease. “Jesus.” That might explain the downslide of the boy’s life from the day he had brought him home to his parents.

  “There’s more,” said Riker.

  Jimmy was staring at the blue sheets and crying softly.

  “All right, boy.” The sheriff put one hand on his shoulder. “Never mind that now. Get on with the rest of it.”

  Again, Jimmy looked to Riker for his instructions, and the detective nodded.

  “We all gathered at the Shelley house. At the time, I didn’t know what for. I remember accidentally kicking a stone loose from the flower bed around the big tree in the front yard. So I stooped down and put it back. Dr. Cass was particular about her flowers.”

  She loved her flowers. They bloomed all around the house in every season.

  “Then I saw the blue letter again and people were talking in whispers. They were going to fix everything so no one would know.”

  By killing Cass, who never did you any harm and never would.

  “Somebody threw a rock and hit her on the side of the head. She never cried, never said a thing. It didn’t seem real – like TV with no sound. Another rock hit her in the shoulder. Then somebody put a rock in my hand. It was just there in my hand, and this voice whispering in my ear, ‘Do it, do it.’ And I threw the rock and hit her in the knee. That one brought her down. She fell so quiet.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  Jimmy looked up at the sheriff, with faint surprise. “Well, I went back to the flower bed to get another rock.” As if that were the most obvious answer, the most natural thing to do, for he had thrown his rock and needed another one, didn’t he? Jimmy turned to Riker. “And that second rock was the one that broke her front teeth.”

  Riker smiled and nodded in approval.

  Behind Jimmy’s head, the sheriff’s hand was rising like a club. Hate was everything now. Charles Butler was getting up from the table. Riker only touched the sleeve of the large man’s shirt to restrain him. “Stay out of it, Charles.”

  Jimmy looked up to see the sheriff’s large fist hanging over him. He stared down at his own hands neatly folded in his lap as though he were on best behavior in church. His shoulders stiffened, bracing for the beating. His voice was calm and reasonable when he said, “I’m sorry for it now, but I didn’t want them to know what he did to me.”

  The sheriff’s hand was suspended in space.

  In the same reasonable voice, Jimmy said, “The dog forgave me.”

  Riker held up more blue sheets. “The kid was raped. He says his uncle did it – a lot.” He passed the papers down the table. “It didn’t stop till he was thirteen. There were other kids, too.”

  So that was what Jimmy had run from, and what he had delivered the boy back to. Now the sheriff read a blue sheet with an account of the blood workup for a six-year-old boy, identified only by a number.

  “Another case of hepatitis.” And now he looked at the other sheet for the same child, bearing a later date. It was a positive test for syphilis “Why would Cass test a six-year-old boy for VD? How did she make the jump from hepatitis? We’ve had hepatitis in the schools before. It’s pretty common.”

  Charles said, “Not the blood-borne variety. Small children get a highly infectious form transmitted with clumsy toilet habits. Even that one would be rare in the upper grades, Jimmy’s class. You’d have to be sexually active or shooting drugs to fall into a high-risk group for hepatitis B. It was a glaring marker for abuse in a six-year-old.”

  The sheriff turned to the last sheet, a positive VD test for a nineteen-year-old man. He looked up at Charles and held out the sheet. “There’s no name. You’re sure this one is Babe?”

  Charles nodded. “It matches Cass’s patient file number for previous treatment.”

  Now he looked from one sheet to the other. The six-year-old was the most recent infection of syphilis. Jimmy’s was older – second-stage and apparently not contracted during his brief flight from home.

  “Babe’s infection was the oldest,” said Riker, “even at the time of his famous VD party at the Dayborn Bar and Grill.”

  “I gather he never completed the treatment,” said Charles. “That would explain the advanced case at the time of his death.”

  Riker was talking, explaining the remaining evidence to support the motive for murder, the illegal activities which would not stand up to any investigation, and the pedophile with a preference for small boys.

  The sheriff was not listening. His rancor was curiously absent as he picked up another set of papers from the table. This was the handwritten statement of Jimmy Simms. At the bottom of the final page, all of Cass Shelley’s murderers appeared in a neatly printed column. His eyes moved listlessly from one name to the next, and then the sheets dropped from his hand and landed on the table.

  This was not the outcome he had been anticipating, feeding on for all this time.

  What a cheat.

  He had expected something larger, more on the grand scale of Lilith’s stone avenger in flight. The long-awaited moment had finally come, and it was not enough.

  Lilith remained to guard the weeping prisoner. Tom Jessop left the room with the hollow feeling that he had missed a meal. No – a great many meals – years of them.

  He led Riker and Charles back down the short hallway to the reception area, speaking mechanically, all business now. “Me and my deputy are gonna take Jimmy out the back way. I think he’ll be safer in a New Orleans lockup. We might be a while. I’ve got to scare up warrants for twenty-three people, and I don’t know a single judge that owes me a favor. Riker, could you mind the store and stay close to the phone? I might need the backup if a judge is gonna buy this story.”

  “No problem,” said Riker.

  As the small group entered the reception area, they encountered Jane’s smiling face. She was seated on the bench by the door and holding a covered tray on her lap. “Hello, Tom. I saw your new prisoner come in. I thought you might want to feed him.”

  “No need, Jane. I turned him loose ten minutes ago. But you just send me the bill for that tray, all right?”

  Jane’s smile was undiminished, and that told him she wasn’t going away with nothing for her trouble but the price of the tray.

  When the door closed behind her, he turned to Riker. “Whatever she heard, it’s gonna be all over town before lunchtime.”

  “How fast can you get the warrants?”

  “Not fast enough. Babe’s funeral is tonight in Owltown – jus
t family, but that’s at least a hundred drunks. It’s a better idea to move in real early tomorrow morning with state troopers. We’ll pick up the suspects when they’re all hungover and sick.”

  At one o’clock, Charles returned to the sheriff’s office, carrying their lunch and coffee in paper bags from Jane’s Cafe. “I didn’t hear any gossip going around. Maybe Jane didn’t hear anything either.”

  “Fat chance.” Riker’s eyes never left the window on the square as he groped in the brown paper bag and pulled out a sandwich. He was staring at one of Jane’s customers. The man had just walked out of the cafe and now he slowly turned to face the sheriff’s office.

  Charles was in good spirits as he sipped his coffee. “So Mallory did it by the book.”

  “I count three felonies in the paperwork gathering. Whose book are we talking about?”

  “Well, she didn’t hurt anybody.”

  Didn’t she?

  Riker said nothing. The sandwich lay on the desk, untouched. He was intent on the man in the square, who had been joined by a friend. There was no conversation between them, nor any curiosity. They were only keeping watch on the sheriff’s door – sentries.

  “Riker, you don’t still think she – ”

  “Mallory came back here to get those bastards, and now she has a complete list.” He slumped back in the sheriff’s chair and put his feet up on the cluttered desk. “I wish you’d go back to Augusta’s and keep her occupied for a while.”

  Another man had joined the watchers in the square. They moved back to the fountain and perched on the rim of the basin like a row of Augusta’s birds on the paddock fence.

  Riker turned away from the window to face Charles, his next problem, and such a large one. How to get rid of him?

  “Why can’t you trust her?” Charles was pacing now, unaware of the watchers, but adding to the tension. “You know she won’t do anything to compromise this case.”

  “Charles, what does it take to get through to you? For Christ’s sake, she’s telegraphing everything.” It was a fight to keep his eyes from straying back to the window, to the watchers. “You’ve seen the gunslinger outfit. You think Mallory’s playing dress-up? She’s the real thing, Charles – the genuine article.”