Charles thought that was a beautiful story. And if Mallory had made it up, it was even better.
The cafeteria was noisy with the rush of feet and fifty conversations, clattering dishes and silverware. The staff and visitors were all deep in their own preoccupations and taking little notice of Charles and his pale companion.
Darlene’s skin was sickly in this brighter fluorescent lighting. He seated her at the nearest table. If she did not sit down, and soon, she might fall. When had this woman slept last?
“You wait here. I’ll get the coffee.”
He meant to bring her only that cup of coffee, all that she had wanted, but while he was in line with the other patrons, he also loaded down the tray with nutritious green vegetables, and suspicious gray meat swimming in dishwater gravy. The piece de resistance was a dry-looking slice of chocolate cake encased in a cellophane bag. It was his intention to fatten her up.
When he set the tray down in front of her, she laughed.
Well, that was an improvement.
As he sat down, he handed her the letter of introduction from the Dallheim Project. She read in silence, and then the paper fell from her hands. “They want him! They want Ira!”
“Oh, yes. Now they’re very excited about him. Eat something. And it’s not just the multiple talents. I think it was Ira’s star that finally won them over.”
He had badgered the project director for days with stories gleaned from Betty, Mallory and Augusta, until Darlene’s son had become a person instead of an application number. Ira had jumped to first place on the long waiting list.
“They’ll take him as soon as he’s well enough to travel to New Orleans. You won’t be allowed to visit him for the first three months. But later, you’ll be able to bring him home on the weekends.”
“I understand. You really think he has a chance of making it on his own?”
“Thanks to you. If you hadn’t kept up his therapy, he’d be a lost cause by now. Please eat something. It might take years of work, but in time, he will be able to survive outside of a care facility.”
“So if anything should happen to me – ”
“He won’t go to a state institution.”
She was happy for a few moments, even outglowing the brilliant overhead lights. Then something else must have occurred to her, for her eyes were saddened now. Perhaps she was grieving over something that had not happened yet. He could make a shrewd guess at what that might be. “That’s good – wonderful.” She was more subdued now. “There’s something I have to do. I only needed – ”
“Try the meat, Darlene. I’m just wildly curious to find out what species it is.”
She picked up the knife and fork and went through the motions of cutting the meat. Losing the last of her energy now, the knife and fork were laid down in the thin gravy. “Not too appetizing, is it? Sorry.”
“I need to talk to the sheriff,” she said. “There’s something – ”
“Did you hear the sheriff’s theory that Fred Laurie killed Babe?”
“Fred didn’t do it.” Her hand upset the coffee cup, and a stream of brown liquid ran across the table.
“I know.” Charles pulled napkins from the metal dispenser at the center of the table and mopped up the spilled coffee. “But, you see, everyone really likes this theory. So it might be difficult to force your confession on the sheriff. Try the vegetables.”
“You knew.” She raked one hand through her hair, fingers thin as claws. “I wanted to tell Tom. I wanted to tell him every day. I don’t sleep at night. I keep hearing that rock hit Babe’s skull.”
“You don’t have to tell me any of this.”
“But I do,” she said, a bit too loud. The people at the next table turned to look at her. Darlene lowered her head. “I want to.” Her voice was a whisper now. “I have to talk to somebody.” She worked her wedding ring up and down her finger. “I saw Babe leave the car at the gas station. He was heading for the bridge over Upland Bayou. I went back after him while the doctors were working on my boy. But it’s not what you think, not because of what he did to Ira’s hands.” Her ring was so loose now, so little flesh on the bone. Charles stared at his reflection in the metal napkin dispenser. He couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. She was in so much pain as she described the violence on the road to Cass Shelley’s house.
“I didn’t know if I’d killed him or not. I screamed when I saw all the blood, and I ran for the car. I was sure someone must have heard me or seen me. I left him lying there in the road and went back to the hospital to wait for the sheriff. I was so sure that any minute Tom would walk in the door and arrest me. When the doctor came to the waiting room to talk to me, he didn’t notice that there was more blood on my suit -
“Babe’s blood splattered over Ira’s.”
She buried her face in her hands, and Charles stared at her wounded fingertips.
“Eat something.” This was what his mother had always said to him when he had been through another day of torture among normal children with average-size noses and intelligence. Food conveyed nurture and caring, and it was all he could think of to comfort her.
Darlene picked up her fork and absently stirred the peas into the cranberry sauce. “I was half crazy wondering what would happen to my boy when I went to prison.” The peas swirled round and round in the red sauce, faster and faster. “Every single day, I thought Tom would arrest me. I even tried to tell him once – when I thought I couldn’t stand it another minute.”
The fork slipped and the peas scattered, some to the floor, and one flew to the next table. “But I didn’t tell. Who would have looked after Ira?”
Two people seated nearby stared at the single pea and a dot of cranberry sauce at the center of their table.
Darlene abandoned the vegetables. Peas were too difficult. She picked up the cellophane package with the cake inside. “How did you know, Charles?”
“This is the hospital where Cass ordered Ira’s blood tests. When you brought him in with his broken hands, a red flag showed up on the computer for the previous entry – when Ira was only six. The doctor would have asked you if he’d completed the treatment for syphilis. The computer entry was sparse and he would have wanted a patient history – standard procedure.”
“It was the desk nurse, not a doctor.” Her hands worked over the cake wrapper, trying to tear it open and failing to find the weakness in the cellophane seal. “I didn’t know what that woman was talking about. I said it was a mistake. Ira had been tested for hepatitis that year, not syphilis.”
Charles wondered if it would be rude to assist Darlene with the cake wrapper, to imply that she couldn’t -
“Well, it made no damn sense at all. So the nurse took me down to the basement where they stored the old health department files for St. Jude Parish.”
The cake wrapper was impenetrable. She stabbed it with one finger, forgetting she had no nails left to tear it. “We found one file to match Ira’s computer number. There were no names, only dates and statistics for tests on a boy of six – Ira – another boy thirteen, and a nineteen-year-old. The file clerk told the nurse they were all in that same folder because the doctor – Cass Shelley – was backtracking the infection.”
“Jimmy Simms was the thirteen-year-old.”
“I guessed that. And Babe had turned nineteen that year. Everybody in town knew about his syphilis party. It was a legend. And then there was the faith-healing. Ira was never the same after that. So I thought he’d raped my boy. What was I supposed to think? And he did smash Ira’s hands. I had good reason to believe it, didn’t I?”
“You don’t seem quite so sure of it now.”
“After I killed him…” Not wanting to meet his eyes, she stared down at the insoluble problem of the cellophane bag. “I mean, later that night, I realized my husband must have known about Ira’s syphilis. They have to notify the parents, don’t they? And that would’ve explained his quarreling with Cass. Maybe she accused him of raping his own son.”
Her wedding ring fell off and lay on the table. He wondered how much weight she had lost. He longed to open the wrapper for her, to feed her.
“Had to have happened that way,” she said, twisting the package in her hand, mashing the cake. “Ira’s clean now. So, at least my husband had the grace to get the boy treated before he wrapped his car around that telephone pole.”
“So now you believe you killed the wrong man?”
“I heard Ira tell you his father threw the first rock. Well, that’s proof, isn’t it? Cass was going to tell, so my husband – ” Her hands were resting on the table, covering the cellophane package, too tired to fight with it anymore.
“Your husband didn’t hurt Ira,” said Charles, covering one of her hands with his own. “But I believe he was told that Cass had accused him. Something similar was done to Deputy Travis. Malcolm read him Cass’s letter, and Travis thought she was accusing him of raping a boy in custody – Jimmy, I suppose. When Travis was dying, he said Cass was going to ruin him with science. He was innocent of course, but just the accusation meant ruin. The rock was put into his hand – the idea was put into his mind.”
Look at the damage Darlene had done with a rock and a single maddening idea. But Travis had only stoned the dog. “Actually, there was a letter on file from the hospital lab. It was a negative report on your husband’s blood test.”
“That was the letter Malcolm read from?”
“I believe so. The date matches up with the stoning. Mallory found a copy of it in the hospital files. There was another letter on file, addressed to your husband – the same negative report on his tests. But by the time it was mailed out to him, Cass was dead.”
“That’s why he killed himself.”
Suicide never made sense. But Darlene wanted the world to be orderly for a few minutes. She was coming undone, and this was a small thing to ask.
“Yes,” he said, “Your husband and Cass probably argued when she asked him for a blood sample. He would have been outraged. He was innocent, but she needed to eliminate him as a suspect. So Cass had the results in her hand when she went after the real child molester that day, and she was angry.”
“Then it was Babe. Mal was shielding his brother with that letter.”
“There’s no way to know for sure.”
“Who else could it have been!” Her eyes were suddenly wide and startled, disbelieving that shrill scream could have come from her own mouth. The people at the nearest table left it, upsetting a chair in their haste to be gone. The abandoned chair rocked and teetered on its hind legs and then crashed to the floor.
“Babe had the disease before the others did!” Her voice was louder now and carrying across the cafeteria. Her hands splayed out in the air as if to call the words back and hush them down. All around them, conversations ceased, and the newspapers of solitary patrons went flat on the tables.
Her lips pressed together. She was in control again, but just barely. “I know Babe was the nineteen-year-old in that file. His was the oldest stage of syphilis. The nurse told me so.”
And so it must be true. A man had died because of her faith in hard science.
“That chronology, by itself, proves nothing about who gave it to whom.”
The cellophane package lay by her hand. The wrapping showed no signs of wear, but the cake was badly smashed. She renewed her struggles with it for a moment, and then gave up. “If only Ira could have told me.”
“Children are the best of conspirators,” said Charles. “They’re so easily frightened, they rarely tell. Jimmy never told, and neither did Babe when it was his turn to be abused.”
“Babe?”
“He had a very late stage of syphilis according to the autopsy. But there was no way for a pathologist to pin the date of infection with only a dead body to work with. The coroner didn’t have the history of convulsions, the weakness in the legs, fits of temper, delusions of grandeur – it was all there.”
Malcolm had supplied some of the symptoms in his impersonation of Babe on the stage. “The unsteady gait made everyone think that Babe was stoned on drugs. And I’m sure he was on some kind of painkiller. He would have been in a lot of pain near the end of his life. Those symptoms don’t usually appear until a man is nearly fifty.” And with all the wear on Babe, mind and body, that might have been his true age when he died at the calendar’s measure of thirty-six years. “So Babe must have been a child himself when he contracted the disease.”
“How could that happen? Somebody would have known.” And then she froze. For she had not known about Ira, had she? Did Jimmy Simms’s parents know what had been done to their child?
“I’m sure Malcolm knew,” said Charles. “Babe would have run the gamut of symptoms. But Malcolm was hardly going to have a small child, his own ward, treated for venereal disease. There would have been an investigation.”
“But Cass was treating Babe when he was – ”
“When he was a teenager and it could be passed off for whoring around. Tom Jessop told me Cass dragged Babe right off the street to treat him. Lesions would have been evident by then. She didn’t wait for the test results to tell her what she already knew. When Cass did get the tests back, when she realized the extent and the duration of the disease, she made the link to Jimmy Simms. His hepatitis led her to Ira. And suddenly she had a lot of questions for Malcolm.”
The cellophane had burst open; the cake was in Darlene’s hands at last, and it was mashed to bits. “So it was Mal she went to see at the meeting that day?”
“He raised Babe from the age of five. He had the opportunity.”
Her hand closed. Golden crumbs leaked through her fingers. “Then Babe just did what was done to him. Well, that makes a bit of sense.”
Charles could see she was desperate for something to make sense, but he shook his head. “Only attorneys make the case that their child-molesting clients were themselves abused. All the stats on that are tainted. Malcolm was always the more natural seducer. The time frame works. He probably went after his nephew Jimmy when Babe was no longer a child. And then he could’ve easily taken Ira at the faith healing.”
That had been the most likely window of opportunity, and it would account for the setback in Ira’s therapy. The child would have been terrified when Babe did the healing act, the laying on of hands. He would have been screaming. Malcolm would have played the role of the calming influence. He would have taken the child away to some quiet place. If Ira had screamed again, if anyone had overheard, who would have guessed the real reason for it? No one – not even his own father seated in the audience that night, perhaps only steps away from his small son during the abuse.
If Darlene had followed this much, she was willing the image away, slowly shaking her head. The dry cake crumbs, crushed to a finer dust, fell from her hand to spread over the tray, the table, and some trickled to the floor.
“It must have been hard for Babe to watch Cass Shelley die,” said Charles. “Cass was his doctor once. Probably the only one who had ever cared what happened to him. Then Mallory appeared – the image of her mother. And Ira began to play those notes over and over on the piano. Those same notes were playing on a scratched record all the while Cass was being stoned by the mob. Babe went wild. He might have yelled at Ira to stop. But you know Ira would have blocked that out and kept on playing. At this stage of Babe’s disease, he couldn’t have handled any frustration. So he slammed the piano lid on Ira’s hands to make the music stop. When the music did stop, the assault was over.”
“But Babe was lying in wait for Mallory.” Louder now, insistent, “He was going to ambush her!”
Her coffee cup crashed to the floor.
The room quieted for a moment. Then the other patrons resumed their conversations, but everywhere about the room, eyes were trained on the dark stain spreading across the floor and the woman who might be dangerously crazy.
“I rather doubt that Babe meant to harm Mallory,” said Charles. “Perhaps he dimly saw her as Cass, an
old source of comfort, an easer of pain. Or maybe he was lucid and wanted to talk to Mallory about the day her mother died. That might explain why the brothers fought in the square and again at the gas station. But we’ll never know. It’s always a tricky thing – second-guessing the dead.”
It began with quiet tears, and then she was trembling. Stutters of breath were choked up in her throat, emerging now as racking sobs. The people seated around them had finally redirected their eyes to their own affairs. Tears were the norm in this place, and Darlene’s seemed to comfort all of them, saying there was nothing dangerous here – only death and pain.
Charles patiently waited out the crying, occasionally handing her napkins. When she was composed again, he fetched another piece of cake and opened the wrapper for her.
She tried to give him a smile for the cake, and she failed. “No one gave a damn who killed Babe Laurie. Only you.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” said Charles. “They were liars, every one of them who said Babe’s death didn’t matter. They all thought someone they cared about had done it.”
Well, Mallory might have believed the sheriff had killed Babe Laurie. When pressed, she had pointed him in Jessop’s direction, hadn’t she? But Charles remained uncertain. It was always so hard to tell when Mallory was lying. She might have reasoned that Tom Jessop could easily fend off a false accusation; but if Darlene had gone to prison, who would’ve looked after Mallory’s old playmate? It would be just like her to choose the expedient -
“Charles, what do you think the court will do with me?” Darlene’s words were listless. She was calm now, and seemed only mildly curious about her future.
“Tom Jessop is a very decent man. He’ll have a strong influence on what happens to you.” Jessop would certainly support a plea of temporary insanity for the crime of mother passion. “I suppose your best outcome would be probation.”
Stone Angel Page 36