All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

by John Farris

  He smiled heartrendingly, at Jackson "Or did I imagine all that? She couldn't have talked to me, she was lying in her coffin."

  "Champ, you've been through so much. Give yourself time." Jackson withdrew the needle and swabbed the spot with alcohol.

  Nhora came in smiling expectantly, high shine to her face, hair sleekly tied at the nape of her neck. She was wearing riding pants and a gingham shirt in brown and orange.

  "Champ, you look—"

  Champ thrust Jackson aside with a strength Jackson wasn't prepared for. His other hand clamped just under Nhora's jaw with such force that her mouth was frozen open. Her eyes, glazed with panic, stared at the dangling airplanes. She staggered back, bearing his weight, until he got his other hand around her throat too and bent her savagely, thrusting her head far back as he tried to crush her windpipe. His body was against hers, groin to groin. He whined and shuddered like a dog in heat as he tried to kill her.

  As Jackson grasped Champ by the wrists and attempted to wedge himself between them, Champ's charge of extraordinary strength failed. He suddenly released Nhora and collapsed heavily on the floor. She fell against the wall by the door, rasping for air, staring at Champ, ready to run for her life if he stirred. But Champ was out cold, eyes back in his head when Jackson turned him over, muscles twitching galvanically.

  Jackson carried him to the padded deck chair and prepared a barbiturate for injection. Aunt Clary Gene stood dumbfounded at Champ's side.

  "I want someone with him every moment. Someone strong enough to handle him."

  "He was just the gentlest boy," she muttered. "Couldn't never do a hurtful thing like that. It's the truth. Champ just couldn't."

  When Jackson had sedated Champ he turned around and saw that Nhora was gone. He followed to her room. The door was locked. She sobbed inside.

  "Please let me in! Are you badly hurt?"

  Nhora's sobbing continued, but during the next few minutes as he stood there, intermittently knocking and calling to her, she sounded as if she were winding down. She wasn't hysterical, and if she could breathe well enough to cry so luxuriously, then probably Champ hadn't damaged her. Nhora knew he was by the door; clearly she didn't want to see or talk to him.

  "Nhora, you're not in any danger now. He'll sleep most of the day. It's five of nine. I have to go into town. Well decide what to do about Champ when I get back."

  What to do? Jackson failed to come up with alternatives as he pondered the problem while driving to Chisca Ridge. It was evident now that Champ hadn't survived the ghastly throat-cutting in the jungle without permanent ill-effects. All but destroyed by the loss of his wife, he had become unpredictably violent, potentially homicidal. Perhaps the best answer was to turn him back to the military; he belonged, at least temporarily, in a prison hospital ward, where he could be examined by specialists. Another tragedy for the dwindling family to absorb. Nhora would have to make the decision. But she couldn't hesitate, not after his attack on her. He might try again.

  In a thoroughly melancholy frame of mind, Jackson parked and entered Flax and Dakin's funeral parlor.

  They were ready for him in a basement room where three electric fans stirred the clammy air. Flax was a big, bluff man with Father Christmas spectacles and a messy unlit cigar that seldom moved from the center of his mouth. His shirttail hung out and his trouser cuffs covered his little feet. Dakin was a nervous dwarf in a business suit and polka-dot bow tie. The two partners, he explained, as Flax set out his tools, had not spoken to each other in six years; some sort of feud, Jackson gathered. They seemed to work well together nonetheless, revolving around each other like double stars.

  The court order for the autopsy had come through. Flax, the coroner, listened to hillbilly music on the radio while he worked. The body of Nancy Bradwin had come unembalmed to him in the early afternoon of the day before. While Dakin made notes he described the condition the body had been in. Jackson soon discovered that Flax was a competent and thorough examiner, able to distinguish those marks and blemishes that had been on Nancy's body before death from those sustained when her body fell from the train.

  "There weren't no penetrating wounds," he explained to Jackson. "Not even a pinhole. These four scratches on the left side of the throat might be from fingernails"—he positioned his hand, fingers spread, to illustrate—"if she was in some kind of catfight. But she don't have the bruises I'd expect to see if she was beat up."

  The autopsy proceeded, with the removal of the scalp and hair and, neatly, the top of the skull, high-speed saw whining and chittering as Ernest Tubb sang lachrymose songs about Texas on the radio.

  "No scalp lesions or hemorrhage, new or old," Flax intoned. "No hemorrhage of the temporal muscles. No fracture lines new or old." Flax pried into the bloodless brain, separating the thready lobes, with Jackson looking over his shoulder. The brain looked normal, no clots or hematomas, but he hadn't expected to find that Nancy Bradwin had died of an aneurysm. It was her heart that interested him.

  In due course Flax lifted the organ from the chest cavity.

  "Heart killed her?" Flax snorted. "Not this heart. I hope mine looks this good."

  Jackson examined Nancy's heart himself, and concurred. No occlusions or faulty valves, no wasted patches on the stout muscle that might have resulted in cardiac arrest.

  Likewise the liver, lungs and spleen appeared normal. "Too bad we don't have blood," Flax said. "Blood could tell us a lot." He sectioned the vital organs and packed the tissue in dry ice. At that point it would have been difficult for anyone not in the mortuary business to understand how neatly Nancy Bradwin would be restored for viewing, prior to the funeral, now that Flax had finished his autopsy.

  "Friend Dakin's on his way to Little Rock this mornin'. He'll drop the specimens at the state pathology lab and tell them we're in a hurry, should have some results by telephone tonight."

  Everett John Wilkes was waiting for Jackson in the foyer of the funeral home when he went upstairs. Red carpet, ferns, the light of the sun diffused by stained glass panels.

  "Know anything now you didn't know before?"

  "Physically she was in very good condition when she died."

  "Then she wasn't murdered." His face became congested as if in a parody of grief, but it was just a sneeze coming on. He reached into his back pocket for a handkerchief and stifled the sneeze.

  "Not in a conventional way."

  "Meanin' she wasn't stabbed or shot or hit over the head. What else is there?"

  "Paralysis of the central nervous system, perhaps. I'll know more when we have the pathologist's report on stomach contents."

  Evvy Wilkes turned his head slightly; a sunbeam trembled at the level of his brow, exciting one bloodshot eye.

  "You think she was poisoned?"

  "I don't know what else to think right now."

  "Those long sleepin' spells of hers—maybe somebody was givin' Nancy pills to make her sleep."

  Jackson shook his head. "Dr. Talmadge would have found traces of any barbiturate in her blood."

  "That is, if you trust Dr. Talmadge."

  "Do you have reason to believe he was guilty of unethical conduct?"

  "Wasn't around here long. Nobody got to know him very well. Surly little bastard. Then he hanged himself. That's proof-positive he had an unsound mind. He just might also have had plenty to feel guilty about."

  "I think he was in love with Nancy, frightened for her. And there was nothing he could do. He may have sensed that she was doomed, for reasons that are still unclear to me. I only know that bona fide Bradwins are getting scarce."

  Wilkes sneezed again, and looked around uneasily. "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust," he muttered. "But it's the kind of dust I'm allergic to. Had your breakfast?"

  "The Turkey Shoot Café ain't bad. Let's get on out of here."

  They walked a block and a half to the café. Wilkes, in shirt sleeves, labored on his crutches. His left shoe was all but worn out along one side, from dragging. The day was
heating up and he sweated buckets, but he seemed determined to ignore his physical handicap.

  Jackson briefly weighed the bad news he had to tell and decided there was no gentle way to break it to the lawyer. He took off his straw hat to mop his damp hairline, and described Champ's attack on Nhora.

  "Jesus Christ!" Wilkes shouted, and he stopped short in the street, hulking over his crutches, big drops of sweat roiling off his face. He did battle with his emotion, overpowered and shoved it deep inside and slammed a lid on it.

  He said quietly, "In your opinion, doctor, should Champ be committed to an institution?"

  "I don't know what's going on in his brain. He might well have seen, instead of Nhora, an Imperial Marine entering the room with a machine gun in his hands. In a few hours Champ could wake up all smiles and not remember a thing about it. But he's a soldier, it's wartime, and he's AWOL. As soon as he's strong enough to travel, Champ should be given over to the military."

  "Is it battle fatigue, or is he permanently brain-damaged?"

  "Let's hope a case of battle fatigue, complicated by his emotional problems."

  "You don't sound too damn hopeful," Wilkes said resignedly.

  They reached the café. Two gold stars hung in a flyspecked window and there was a sign on the door: No soft drinks for the duration—buy war stamps instead.

  "You didn't ask me how Nhora is," Jackson said, as he held the door for Wilkes to enter the café.

  "That's right. I didn't."

  "She wasn't hurt very badly."

  "I figured she wasn't."

  The Turkey Shoot Café was a long, dim room repeating all of its bleak angles in too many mirrors. There were ceiling fans, and a ghostly beer smell. At ten o'clock in the morning they had it pretty much to themselves. They took a booth near the back of the café. Wilkes ordered a beer and a plate of hash browns for himself, recommended fried eggs and country ham with red-eye gravy for Jackson. He lit a cigarette and fidgeted with his GI Zippo lighter. A nearby radio was broadcasting yesterday's closing commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. A tractor went by in the street. Two old men played dominoes in the shade beneath the tin roof of a machine shop. In the deep dark beyond them the brilliant tip of an arc welder wandered like a lost star.

  Wilkes waited until he had a couple of swallows of beer before he spoke.

  "You got any idea what Dasharoons is worth?!"

  "Millions, I presume. Who owns it all? Champ?"

  "Nhora's got a one-eighth share. I tried to argue Boss out of it. Champ's will provided for his wife and children. But Nancy's predeceased him, and there ain't no children. Dasharoons, for all practical purposes, is intestate. That's why I was so anxious to sit down and have a talk with Champ right away. I could say that preserving Dasharoons is a sacred trust to me, that's partly true. But looking after their legal business has kept me, and my daddy before me, and a couple of old survivin' partners, in grits and gravy for the last sixty years. So I figure I owe Boss my best efforts now."

  "What would happen to Dasharoons if Champ is declared incompetent?"

  "Property is placed in trust, and administered by the trustees, of which I am one. When he dies, the property gets sold, piecemeal if we see fit. The money goes to a number of institutions of higher learnin'. Plenty of eager buyers been sniffing around since Boss left us. My legal fees from the trust or the sale would keep me well fixed in my declinin' years, so I ain't worried about income. What I don't want is for the plantation to fall into the wrong hands."

  "Nhora's hands?"

  Wilkes drained his bottle too quickly, frowned, signaled the waitress for another. "No court would give her another square foot of Dasharoons. I saw to that before the marriage ever took place."

  "Beau, then."

  "Beau's dead; he must be."

  "Long-lost sons and heirs have a way of showing up unexpectedly."

  "He's not the one I'm worried about," Wilkes said stubbornly.

  "That leaves Tyrone, doesn't it?"

  Wilkes looked startled, then impressed. "By God, you keep your ear to the ground, don't you?"

  "I had occasion to treat his injured hand last night, and we became acquainted. Tyrone makes no bones about his paternity."

  "He damn sure don't. Couple of times he tried to capitalize on his bloodlines. Boss was more patient with him than I was. Tyrone had been coached before he came to me. He knew, even though Boss chose not to legally acknowledge him, that he had a case. So I explained the true facts of the matter to him."

  "Which were?"

  "I told Tyrone that even if he got a respected, dedicated jurist to take his case, which I doubted, he'd still spend years in the lower courts losing on every technical point we could come up with. I reminded him that the judges of this state, even those who sit on the highest court, are obligated for practical reasons to influential men like Boss, and conditioned by their heritage to turn a deaf ear to niggers eager to exploit an accident of birth, which is not the same thing as a birthright. I told him that Boss might be inclined to make a small gift of money, supplementing his generosity in the past—"

  "Sent Tyrone to college, didn't he?"

  "Right. Make a gift of money, oh, say, as much as two thousand dollars, if Tyrone should decide to pursue his choice of vocation a long way from the environs of Dasharoons. He had the nerve to smile at me."

  A bottle of Griesedieck Brothers beer, a pot of coffee and plates of food were set before them. Wilkes mopped his heated face with a napkin. Jackson noted that his eggs were fried hard as hickory nuts.

  "Smiled at me. So then I said, okay, son, get yourself a lawyer. Petition the court. Go right ahead and embarrass Boss Bradwin. Because that's all you'll be to Boss by then, a source of humiliation and embarrassment to him and his children. And let me tell you somethin' else about Boss: You can criticize his kids, kick his dog and kiss his good-lookin' wife, if you do those things privately. He'll bend over backwards makin' excuses for you. But if you have the bad judgment and the discourtesy to make your insults a matter of public record, then Boss will prove to be unforgiving. He banished his own firstborn son forever, the son he loved most dearly in this life. What do you think he'll do to you, you little darkie shittail? You misbegotten son of a yella whore? You clap-brain arrogant jackass."

  "That was not a very gentle threat."

  "I did manage to make my point."

  Jackson ate some of the crisped egg white, a forkful of grits, which he found palatable, and stirred sugar into his coffee.

  "So he's given up his claim to Dasharoons?"

  "Not likely. I firmly believe, now that fate has dealt a hand or two his way, Tyrone's changed his strategy. Champ is home, and in a vulnerable position, and those two sure as hell have figured out a way to take advantage of him."

  "Those two?" Jackson said, startled. "You're including Nhora?"

  "Yes, sir!" Wilkes smacked the table top with the flat of his hand for emphasis, spilling some of Jackson's coffee. "She's been without a husband for more than two years. Why's that? She's young, healthy, and plenty of men have found her beautiful. But in all this time nobody's seen her with an eligible man. That nigger's always had himself quite a reputation with the ladies, married and unmarried. It doesn't require a great deal of imagination to know what's goin' on at Dasharoons these days."

  "I doubt that Nhora and Tyrone are having an affair. They're—friends, that's all. What could he gain? You said yourself that Nhora can't inherit Dasharoons."

  "She could if Champ would just sign his name to a piece of paper handin' it all over to her. Then Tyrone, who's got her wrapped around his little finger, would have what he wants. The last legitimate Bradwin out of the way. And he wouldn't have to worry about wakin' up some night to find his nuts nailed to the top of a burnin' cross."

  Wilkes waved more cold beer his way, a brace of foam big bottles this time.

  "You see, I don't trust the woman. Never trusted her worth a damn. It was always instinct, though; nothin' I could l
ay a good solid bet on."

  "You simply resented her for marrying into the family. You felt she was all wrong for Boss."

  "He paid for his good times. She got that old pecker of his uppity again. So maybe it was worth one-eighth of that good black-bottom land. I don't like coincidence, I suppose. Who the hell is she? Where did she come from? Off a goddam boat. She marries Boss, then a year later Boss and Clipper are both dead, and Champ goes against all good advices by puttin' her in charge out there at Dasharoons, while he fights the war."

  "By all accounts she's done an excellent job."

  Wilkes sourly considered Jackson's defense of Nhora, and pulled on a beer. "Dasharoons can damn near run itself. But you're right, she's made it her business to learn the business. She just ain't been so shrewd about the company she keeps. And now she's made a mistake, and maybe I'll find out why all this time I haven't trusted her."

  "What kind of mistake?"

  Wilkes smiled good-humoredly, but his eyes were cold. "I could be makin' just as big a mistake trustin' you too much. You only got off a train night before last, yourself."

  "Nonetheless I have access to Champ, and you don't. You need my help, I may be the only one who can help you now. Provided there is some sort of conspiracy afoot."

  "That says it all."

  "What about Nhora?"

  "Stuck on her a little bit yourself, it seems."

  "She's kind and lonely and frightened by the disastrous fortunes of the Bradwins. As baffled as you or I. Shall we get on with it?"

  "Okay. Day before yesterday, about nine-thirty in the mornin', Nhora called me at home. She was cryin'. Couldn't get any sense out of her right off. Then she told me about Nancy. Asked me—no, she begged me to go up to Kezar County and claim the body. That's a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I left right away."

  "Why do you suppose Nhora didn't want to go?"

  Wilkes gulped beer and gave him a look of seething satisfaction. "No good for that kind of thing, I guess. Or maybe she was too tired to make the trip again."