Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  The pictures were less gruesome than those of Michael Wright—less bloody, at least. Unlike Michael’s, Missy’s face appeared as it had in life: round with an acne-scarred chin, but a pretty girl, all in all, or what passed for beauty in small-town Texas. Blond alone would get you far in these parts, and Missy had thick golden strands of it, without any roots showing. There wasn’t a mark on her above the neck. Her eyes were closed, as if she were sleeping, on the edge of a dream that had just turned bad. It was what lay below her jawline that told the real story. There were fingernail scratches up and down both sides of her neck, where she’d tried to fight off her attacker. Darren could see the imprint of the fingers that had strangled her. The bruises were wine red and deep midnight blue, and the skin around them was freckled with a constellation of broken capillaries. According to the medical examiner, Missy had spent less time in the acidic water of the Attoyac Bayou than Michael Wright had. There was no trace of the Attoyac in her lungs—no bayou water or silt—which meant she was dead when she went in. The cause of death was listed as asphyxiation by manual strangulation. Her hyoid bone had been fractured in two places. The manner of death was listed as homicide.

  The bayou had been a set piece, Darren saw now, a staging that was meant to suggest a link between Missy’s murder and that of Michael Wright, to assert causality where perhaps there was none. It was a clever ruse. Hadn’t Van Horn been working under that very assumption—that one murder had been in retaliation for the other? But what any of this had to do with Geneva Darren didn’t know—until he got to the second-to-last page. Buried down at the bottom, beneath a notation of her blood alcohol level, zero percent, the contents of Missy’s stomach told a secret about how she’d spent the last hours of her life.

  * * *

  “Van Horn got some nerve,” Geneva said when Darren finally got in to see her. They’d already processed her at the jail in the county courthouse, had removed her apron and wedding ring. She kept a thin gold-plated wristwatch in her pocket to prevent flour and grease from gumming up the gold band, and they’d taken that, too. Her lawyer was a portly white fellow with a shock of white hair that was both receding and reaching for the ceiling at the same time. He had the look of defense attorneys everywhere, with a sartorial nod to an antiauthority streak. Around Austin, Darren’s uncle Clayton was known for his collection of unruly socks—plaids and polka dots and stripes that he mixed and matched proudly. Frederick Hodge, counsel for Mrs. Sweet, wore a pearl-button western-style shirt beneath his suit jacket and a pair of square-toe boots that had no place in professional society. He had done his best to keep his client from speaking with additional law enforcement personnel, but Van Horn liked the idea of giving Darren free rein with Geneva, especially since the visiting room for any man or woman without a bar card was closely monitored.

  “Talk away,” he’d said.

  The room was small, and the air was close, thick with the faintly sweet scent of mildew. There were water spots on the ceiling, brown stains that looked like sick clouds. “He’s got some nerve,” Geneva repeated, wringing her hands.

  “Nerve? Or probable cause?”

  Geneva’s eyes narrowed as she glanced over Darren’s shoulder. There were two deputies watching them, monitoring the exchange from behind the smudged glass of a window cut into the plaster wall. Darren was being careful about what he said, but he also felt himself toeing close to the edge of his loyalty to a woman he didn’t know—not really. She’d felt like home, like the women he’d grown up around in Camilla, women who were the embodiment of the mother figure who was missing in his life, and he worried he’d let it cloud his judgment, had potentially mistaken a maternal countenance for a peaceful heart.

  “This is bad, Geneva.”

  “That lawyer say they can’t hold me much longer. It’s all just circumstantial. They just panicked ’cause it’s been three days, and they still don’t know who done it or what happened. He says they can’t—”

  “Your lawyer hasn’t seen the autopsy yet.” He took the other seat at the table, setting himself directly across from her so he could watch her face when he listed the partially digested food removed from Missy Dale’s stomach and small intestine: beef and beef fat, the latter in a quantity significant enough to suggest what is colloquially referred to as oxtails; purple-hull peas; raw green tomato and vinegar; fried dough and powdered sugar; canned peaches and cane syrup. Save for the pastry, it was the exact meal he’d had at Geneva’s—the same day Missy’s body had been discovered not even a hundred yards from the cafe.

  “Still circumstantial,” she said hotly.

  She’d lived through two homicides and believed she knew a thing or two about criminal liability. He could see she’d grown calmer and ever more steady since being put in the back of a squad car. Something new had settled into the feathered lines around her eyes, the tight set of her dry, cracked lips. It was pure indignation. It made Darren furious, the degree to which she misunderstood her position here. “You lied to me,” he said.

  “No. I simply ain’t told you things wasn’t your business to know.”

  “But you saw Missy the night she died.”

  “And what if I did?”

  “You didn’t think to tell anybody that?”

  “You keeping secrets your damn self.” She crossed her arms, sharp elbows pressing against the table. “Didn’t say you was a Ranger when you came steady strutting around and ain’t said a word about being suspended.”

  So Wally and Geneva had talked. For the life of him, Darren couldn’t understand their relationship. It was nakedly adversarial but also strangely familial in the way they tolerated each other, accepted each other, even. Whether either of them liked it or not, there was no getting around it: they were family.

  “I’m trying to help you,” Darren said.

  “Not wearing that badge you not.”

  “I’m not Van Horn, Geneva.”

  She considered this but wasn’t in the least bit impressed.

  “I know about your grandson,” he said finally.

  “Then you ought to know that’s what got her killed.”

  “Keith?”

  “Who else?”

  “They’re going to say you were the last one to see her.”

  “I had every right,” she said, slamming her fist on the tabletop. Darren was wrong. It wasn’t indignation radiating off her slim body. It was rage. She pushed herself back from the table, which had patches of bald wood where the shellac was peeling off. She nearly knocked over her chair. “I had every right to see my grandson. I will always respect that about Missy. She did what she could to let me see him, in a way that wouldn’t rub it in Keith’s face. She came by my trailer now and then, usually when she thought Keith would be late coming from the mill in Timpson. He picked up overtime a few times a month.”

  “What did you talk about?” he asked. “You and Missy?”

  In his mind, he heard his uncle Clayton’s voice: Find a crack in the timeline, son. Darren had worked at a free legal clinic in Cook County the summer after his first year in law school and used to keep Clayton on the phone late at night while they dissected some of the difficult cases Darren had come across. It was the closest they’d ever been—when Darren was in law school—and right now he needed Clayton’s influence more than William’s. The autopsy reported the digestion of the contents of Missy’s stomach as “advanced”; some of the food had made its way into her small intestine. It was estimated she’d eaten as long as four hours prior to death. So unless she and Geneva had sat and talked for hours in her trailer before Geneva just up and strangled her, it was possible and probable that Missy had gone somewhere after she left Geneva’s.

  Geneva sighed and said, “She knew she was running out of time.”

  Still standing, she seemed to sink a little in her knees as she talked about Missy and the baby. “Blond as that boy is, his true color was coming through. Missy had been panicky about that for a while. This summer she had him in long sle
eves so much, hot as it is, that he got a little heat stroke, had to be run up to the pediatrician in Timpson several times. I told her to quit all that. She was going to suffocate the child. I even bought him a bunch of little-tyke clothes with the legs and arms out. I told her to blame his color on the sun, like folks been doing for a hundred years. Wasn’t nobody going to make a fuss about it ’cept for Keith. And he already gave the boy his name, so she ain’t have nothing to worry about. I told her that every time she brought him by. We argued sometimes, I’ll admit. But mostly Missy let us be. She watched my TV while me and the little one caught up on things.” Here Geneva’s face lit up. “I bounce him on my knee, same as I used to do with Lil’ Joe. He likes that. Likes my sugar cookies, too.” She sighed and dropped back into the chair. “With Missy gone, I don’t know if they’re going to let me see him again.”

  “He’s been staying at Wally’s.”

  “I know.”

  This seemed to bother her almost as much as the idea of not seeing her grandson at all; that Wally had unlimited access to the boy rankled her. “He’s probably happy to see me ’bout to rot away in here.”

  “Give me something so I can challenge them.” Darren nodded at the deputies over his shoulder, Van Horn’s men watching from the adjacent room. “What time did she leave your trailer? Did she say anything that might have given you an idea of where she was heading when she left?”

  “I know where she went,” Geneva said, so plainly that Darren wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly or that she knew what she was saying. “I drove her home.”

  “Home?”

  “Home.”

  “And Keith was there?” he asked, remembering how neatly his initial suspicions lined up with Geneva’s theory of why Missy was murdered.

  “His truck was.”

  “So he was the last one to see her?”

  “I don’t have no proof of that. It ain’t exactly like I walked her to the door and rang the bell, got asked in for a glass of tea. I’ve never been inside. I just like to make sure she and the little one get home safe. I started keeping a car seat in my trunk so I could ferry them home. It’s sitting in my backseat right now.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  “Keith didn’t see me. Wouldn’t be nothing but my word against his.”

  “But if Van Horn knew, he would have questioned Keith first thing.”

  “You been here long enough to know that’s not necessarily true.”

  She looked down at her hands, which were resting in her lap. She picked at a pill of wool at the bottom of her oversize sweater. “Besides,” she said, “Missy truly believed no one knew the boy wasn’t Keith’s. It was a secret that mattered to her. And fresh after she died, I didn’t want to put her business in the street.”

  There were rules of decorum in place that she hadn’t wanted to upend in the wake of the young girl’s death; she didn’t think it was her place to out Missy when the girl could no longer speak for herself. She’d promised to keep her secret when she was alive and had tried to honor the kindness Missy had shown Geneva—letting her see her grandson—by not saying a word to anyone. That this had ultimately protected Keith was a price Geneva was now paying. But Darren wasn’t raised in Lark, didn’t know these people. Screw decorum, he thought. Van Horn had arrested the wrong person, and Darren wasn’t going to let it stand.

  18.

  THE LUMBER mill where Keith Dale worked was on the north side of the town of Timpson, on the way toward Carthage and Marshall. It sat on ten acres that ran alongside Highway 59. According to the foreman on duty when Darren called, Keith Dale was in fact at the job site today. He was in the middle of his shift at the finishing plant, near the back of the mill, where his team oversaw the pallets of stacked wood as they came off the conveyor belt from processing and were then wrapped in a white plastic sleeve that had “Timpson Timber Holdings” printed on it. The foreman offered to escort Ranger Mathews to Keith’s exact location—“Did they find the one who killed his wife?”—but Darren said that wouldn’t be necessary. Oh, I found him, he thought as he parked his silver Chevy in the lot behind the twenty-foot front gate, the letters TTH casting a shadow across his windshield. There was a row of semis idling near the warehouse where Darren was heading, oversize trucks waiting for forklifts to load pallets of finished wood onto their flatbed trailers. As far as Darren could see in either direction, there was no open land on the entire property that wasn’t filled with stacks of raw pine being stored out under the sun, scenting air still damp from the rain with the milky sweetness of freshly cut wood. He had walked out of the sheriff’s office without so much as a word to Van Horn about where he was going. He told himself that he and Keith were just going to talk, that he was just making sure he got the interview he feared wouldn’t materialize in the wake of Geneva’s arrest.

  The warehouse was about a third the size of a football field and was open on two sides. Darren stepped past an idle forklift, the driver waiting on a signal from another worker. The man stared at Darren—at his pressed shirt and slacks, not to mention the star on his chest—walking among a dozen men in fluorescent yellow safety vests and hard hats, their work boots caked in dirt and mud. Darren found Keith clear on the other side of the warehouse laying a plastic sheet of Timpson Timber Holdings packaging across a four-foot-wide pallet of planks of raw pine, each two by four inches. Blunt-force trauma. Skull fractures. Wood fibers embedded in the skin. The hair on Darren’s arms shot clear up out of his skin as he stood in front of the man who, he was now sure, had killed Michael Wright—the man who had beaten him within an inch of his life then tossed him into a shallow, watery grave. He had never been more certain, and he knew that the moment required him to free himself of Wilson’s rules.

  “Keith Dale,” he called out.

  Several men turned to stare before he did. In fact Keith was one of the last men to take notice of the black Ranger in their midst. When he did, a slow grin spread across his face. Under the yellow hard hat, his skin was sallow and even more sinister looking, the smile playing as pure menace. Unlike his coworkers, who regarded Darren’s arrival in the warehouse with a kind of bemused awe because of the many things that didn’t line up at first glance—A black Ranger? Here?—Keith Dale seemed almost tickled by what he took as absurd.

  “I already know they got that old lady for killing Missy.”

  Two of the men near him glanced at each other, one attempting a mournful pat on Keith’s back, a gesture of male solicitude that Keith shrugged off.

  “Know you tried to put it on me, too.”

  “I’d like you to step outside with me,” Darren said. Keith would get more difficult the larger and whiter his audience became. There was one black guy in the corner who chose to keep working despite the drama playing before him.

  “I don’t think so,” Keith said. He stepped away from the pallet he’d been wrapping and lifted off his right glove, then his left. He tucked them into the back pocket of his faded, grease-streaked jeans. There was a threat in the gesture, as if he were prepping for something for which he’d need physical dexterity. Darren took a step forward, making clear he was standing his ground.

  “I want to ask you a few questions, Keith.”

  “I don’t have to answer nothing you say.”

  “Afraid that’s not true.”

  Keith looked at a few of his buddies, and his smile widened. Darren saw teeth, sharp and white, with tobacco stains at the gums. Keith was enjoying himself, said the next bit loud so that the black guy in the corner could hear, too.

  “Turn your nigger ass around and get out of my place of business.”

  Darren swallowed it, because one nigger wasn’t worth it.

  He could take one nigger if it meant keeping the upper hand.

  Firmly, he said, “That’s not going to happen. I need you to come with me to the sheriff’s office in Center. Time we sat for a proper interview.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere with you.”
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br />   “I’d rather you come nice and easy, not make a scene in front of your people here,” Darren said. “Otherwise I got to do this the hard way.”

  “The hell you will.”

  The hard way meant cuffs, a pair of which he’d made sure to clip to his belt. But there was another hard way, too: if Keith wanted to show out in front of his buddies, Darren would give them a show. “I know about your son,” he said.

  Keith’s whole body went rigid. His eyes darted left, then right, trying to gauge if any of the men around him knew what Darren was talking about, if anything on their faces gave away their knowledge of the gossip, if it had made it all the way up here.

  “Keith Junior is not your junior, is he?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Let’s go, Keith. We can talk when we get down to the station.”

  He was giving him an out, but Keith refused to move. He stepped even closer to Darren, and when one of his buddies whispered his name and grabbed him by the arm to keep him from doing something stupid, Keith told him to fuck off. The guy, a man in his early thirties with a reddish beard and a rather girlish tattoo of a thorny rose on his forearm, called Keith an asshole and walked off.

  “What happened?” Darren said. “Were you afraid Missy was going to tell on you, that she was going to tell everyone what you did to Michael Wright?”

  “I never saw that man before in my life.”

  “Sure you did, Keith. You saw him and your wife on the farm road. You caught your wife out there with a black man, and you didn’t care which black man it was, but somebody was going to pay for making a fool out of you.”

  “Now, wait a minute. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”