by Shane Lusher
One which stuck out, because it was directly behind the bar, and because there were numerous copies of the same certificate letter from years dating back to the early eighties, was from the Quiverfull, the adoption agency Rassi had mentioned.
At a prominent place centered within these letters was an eight by ten photo of Trueblood and Colby, he in a black tuxedo, she in a ball dress, dancing. Colby looked to be about fourteen years old in the photograph.
A gilded font at the bottom of the print said: Purity Ball, 2010. I wondered what that was all about.
Trueblood turned around to see what I was looking at.
“I hate those things,” he said. He gestured toward the photograph.
“What exactly is a purity ball?” I asked.
He sighed. “Daughters and fathers go to a dance. The daughters pledge to remain pure until they get married.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Ach,” he said, waving with one hand. “It was one of those things where everybody was doing it. I didn’t want-”
He blinked and wiped off the glass with a towel before handing it over.
“I didn’t want Colby to be limited, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure,” I said as I took the beer. It was then that I noticed Trueblood wasn’t drinking.
“How can I explain it?” he said and leaned on the bar. “I didn’t want her to get into trouble, but at the same time, I know how kids are. That’s why I support Planned Parenthood and all of that. I believe in good moral values, but I also know that kids are going to do what they want to do. That,” he jerked his thumb toward the portrait of the ball, “wasn’t my idea.”
I nodded. “And drugs?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Trueblood had come around from behind the bar.
I paused, considering. He was remarkably composed, and I didn’t want to break the peace. “Wayne,” I said finally, “I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Do you have any idea where Colby might have gotten the cocaine?”
He ignored my question, his eyes searching around the room. They finally settled on a fraternity paddle. He pointed to it, and then walked over and took it off the wall. It was pocked and scratched, the brown paint peeling, the Greek letters fading.
“When I was in college, in the early seventies,” he said, hefting the wooden paddle in his hands, “people were trying everything. Back then, everything meant that, in addition to booze and sex, some people occasionally smoked pot.
“Oh, I suppose some people got into LSD, but nobody I knew did it. We were just happy we weren’t going to get drafted, for the time being at least.”
“Wayne,” I said again, “I have to ask.”
He hung the paddle back on the wall.
“I know you do,” he said. “But I haven’t got the faintest idea. Nobody I know ever did anything like that.”
“Is there anybody that comes to mind who might have wanted to hurt your daughter?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.” He looked up at me, his eyes at once tired and alert. “I could point you toward Trevor Jones. I could point you toward that Pinnel girl. I could point you toward Randy Dubois, for that matter.”
“Dubois?” I asked. “Why would he have anything to do with it?”
“The man can’t stand me,” he said. He’d started to sweat, and he reached up and mopped his forehead with the towel he’d used to clean off my beer glass.
“That didn’t seem to be the case back at the sheriff’s department,” I said.
“What, did you think he was just angry with you?” Trueblood said. He shot me a sad smile.
Just then the door opened and Hannah stuck her head in.
“Wayne, Red says the steaks are almost done,” she said.
There was some kind of silent exchange between the two of them, and then he turned back to me.
“Have him take them off the grill and cover them,” he said. “We’ll be along in a minute.”
She nodded. He waited until she’d closed the door before turning back to me.
“Is Randy giving you all of the information you need?”
I wasn’t sure that he was, but I nodded just the same. “Yes, but why did you mention him?”
Trueblood was smiling. “Because I figured the next question you had was going to be whether Colby or I had any enemies. As far as Colby goes, I’d say no, but how well do you really know your children?”
He scratched at the paint on the paddle with a fingernail and then hung it back on the wall.
“You’re always going to have people who are against you, in a place like this. Tazewell County. Some people get jealous, I suppose, though some of it I think is just pure meanness.”
“Over the years, there have been a few people, but nobody I’d say who was really out to get me. Certainly nobody who would want to harm Colby.”
“And Dubois?”
“He’s a shady character. Used to be friends, back when I was still married to my first wife. Things sort of went south after that.”
He opened the door and lowered his voice slightly as we walked out into the hall, where he caught my arm and held me back.
“I didn’t mention him because I think he did anything to my daughter, Dana,” he said. “That’s just it. I could name a list of friends and associates, but not a single one of them could have killed her.”
“Even though I can’t believe that someone just randomly…accosted her. I only mention Dubois because he’s the only person recently who might have anything against me.”
“And what would that be?”
We turned and walked back out into the great room, and Trueblood stopped, rubbing at a smudge on the glass slider.
“The man lost his job because of me,” he said. He opened the door. “I never thought he’d be back.”
When we returned, the male pharmacist was manning the grill. Big Red was lying on one of the lounges opposite the group of women, who had already finished their icy green pitcher.
“Thank you, Grant,” Trueblood said as he scowled over at Big Red and picked up the covered platter with the steaks. “I appreciate it.”
We ate in the formal dining room, though at this point I was already into my third pint and not very hungry. I ate as much as I could, wondering in what condition I would be by the end of the evening, whether I would make it to Rassi, and whether I would wind up sleeping in my car in the Crossroads parking lot.
The conversation at the table centered on small town life; high school sports, the upcoming sales tax hike, and whether or not the city was going to vote for a loan to the Scotty Mart Corporation.
The pharmacy couple was conspicuously silent, attentive, and obviously waiting for dessert so that they could leave without being impolite.
I, of course, was the extra wheel.
“What in the hell do they need money for?” Big Red was saying.
Trueblood put down his glass of ice water. “The thing is, you don’t give them a loan, they pull out. That’s the way they work.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” the woman attorney said. “I prefer shopping at the Towne Market anyway.”
“Does that place still exist?” I asked.
She considered me and then said to Trueblood, “You have to keep your business local. Right, Wayne?”
Again Trueblood shook his head. “There’s a lot to be said about local, and I’ve had a good life as a result of that.” He continued, “But we’re talking about jobs here. The distillery shut down. That pork processing plant pulled out at the last minute. If they don’t give them that loan, then all there is going to be is the prison, and more of it. And that’s something people are going to eventually want to happen, because otherwise this place will dry up. You get a reputation for not catering to new business, and new business will look elsewhere.”
“The city has grown, though,” I said. “People have to be working somewhere. I remember when I was a kid, Pekin had what, 24,000 people? Now there ar
e 45.” If the population sign at the city limits could be believed.
“Yes,” Trueblood said. “And all of that is because of the prison and Scotty Mart and the distillery. I think you’ll find at the next census that the city is shrinking, not growing. This area has always had a strong manufacturing base, and now that’s on the way out. The unions have seen to that.”
“Which isn’t all that bad,” Vic Daniels spoke up. “Morton doesn’t want to grow anymore.”
“We have enough problems, as it is,” Stacy Daniels said. “Do you know we’ve got kids getting caught with cocaine? When we went to school nobody had even heard of cocaine. Where are they getting the money from?”
She looked to me for support, and I looked over at Trueblood, gauging his reaction to her mention of coke. “Meth has driven the price down,” I said softly.
“So.” Big Red was looking over at me, his meaty arms on the table. He was working something out of his teeth with his tongue. “What is it that brought you back here? You used to live in Chicago, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I heard you punched a doctor,” he said.
The table got quiet then. Everyone looked at me, everyone wearing a polite kind of smile.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
“What happened? He say something you didn’t like?”
“Something like that,” I said and looked away.
Big Red was smiling, but he frowned just as quickly and took another drink of beer. The man had to be drunk already, but given his size, maybe that wasn’t the case.
“That why you had to sell off all the ground?” he asked.
“Cost me a lot, let’s just say that,” I said.
I looked around at the table. The attorneys were staring at me. Everyone else was looking down, moving their food around or just grasping their drinks.
Trueblood cleared his throat. “Red,” he said under his breath.
Big Red took another drink of his beer. He set it down on the table, working the glass around in the ring of condensation. “Hell of an investigator you’ve got here,” he said under his breath.
Trueblood stiffened and looked at him, and then glanced around the table.
“What are you talking about?” Hannah asked.
She was sitting at the other end of the table from Trueblood, and she had barely spoken the entire evening.
Her eyes were bloodshot, and although everyone else had put on clothing, she still wore just the shirt she had been wearing earlier, over her bikini. My impression was that she was plastered.
“We’ll discuss it later,” Trueblood said.
Hannah looked around the table.
“But these are our friends, Wayne,” she said. “Why can’t we talk about it now?”
I looked over at Trueblood and then back to Hannah.
“The Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department has hired me to look into Colby’s death,” I said, shunning the word murder because she had begun to weep.
Trueblood got up and walked around the table to place his arm across her shoulder.
“Shh,” he murmured. “He came highly recommended. He caught a serial killer in Chicago.”
At this he looked directly at Big Red, who managed to maintain a neutral expression. He was looking at me with what seemed like a new level of appreciation, though whether that was true, or whether he was just being polite in deference to his boss, I couldn’t tell.
“I thought it might be good to have some new blood come in on this case,” Trueblood said.
I winced at the expression. “I’m just going to go through everything and see if I find anything anybody might have missed.”
“Are you a police officer?” the woman attorney asked.
“Not exactly.”
Her husband raised his eyebrows.
“I’m a software developer,” I said. “My experience has brought me into contact with the police once or twice.”
“Huh,” Stacy Daniels said. She didn’t seem to be following the conversation. In fact, she appeared to be as sloshed as Big Red.
“I work with big data,” I said to the attorneys. “Corporations. Companies these days have so much information that they can’t evaluate it in the time they would need to make strategic decisions. People like me extract that data and aggregate it so that analysts can get out of it what they need to do short and long term positioning.”
They were all staring at me as if I had monkeys crawling out of my ears. I sounded like a social media blurb.
“I spent some time helping the Chicago PD with the Shopping Cart murders.”
“So wait,” Big Red’s wife said. Big Red’s eyes were drooping, his eyelids half-closed. I watched as he raised his beer glass yet again to his swollen, red lips, and then looked back at his wife.
“What does this have to do with Colby?” She directed the question to Trueblood, but immediately looked over at Hannah.
Hannah was trembling. She got up from the table, shrugging off her husband’s arm.
“I told you I didn’t want to do this anymore!” she said to him through clenched teeth. “What the hell is—this?”
Her gesture encompassed my entire person, the rest of the world behind me, and life itself.
“What are you going to do next week? Bring in a goddamn psychic?”
Trueblood’s composure came unglued for a moment, his face aging twenty years, and then the mask of benevolence was back.
“Hannah, please,” he said. “Colby.”
Hannah walked out of the room, and after a moment, Big Red’s wife got up and followed her out.
The attorneys were shrinking back into themselves. Big Red was staring up at the ceiling, squinting, as if he were reading something in fine print only he was capable of seeing.
The pharmacy couple got to their feet.
“We, uh, we need to be going,” the man said.
“Of course,” Trueblood said, forcing a smile. “Actually, it might be better if-”
He trailed off, but everyone else got the hint.
“Can we help you clear the table?” the male attorney asked, and I thought I saw his wife elbow him.
“No,” Trueblood said. “No. Thank you. I’ll just see everybody out.”
As we left the room, again I noticed Vic Daniels looking at me. I realized then that he hadn’t said a word during the entire dinner. When we got out onto the porch and down into the driveway, he tapped me on the arm.
He was holding out a business card.
“You got time tomorrow during the day?” he asked.
I looked at him. His face was grim in the twilight. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
I knew better than to ask him if he was going to try to sell me insurance.
“Sure,” I said.
“Around noon?” he said. “Lunch?”
I watched as he got into his car next to his wife, who was leaning back in her seat, a hand draped over her face. He rolled down the window and gave me a little wave as he pulled out onto Broadway and headed toward Morton.
I looked back through the door and into the house. Big Red’s wife—vaguely I thought her name might be Alma—was hugging Hannah, and Wayne Trueblood was standing off to the side, a helpless look on his face.
After a moment there was a loud crash and a curse. Big Red emerged from the dining room with a pile of plates.
I waited until Trueblood looked at me. He pressed his lips together and gave me a tiny salute, and I walked down to my car and got in.
As I turned right onto Springfield Road, I thought about just what Trueblood’s purpose had been in inviting me over.
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” was what he’d said about Vic Daniels, who suddenly had something he wanted to see me about. I wondered which side of the fence Trueblood thought I was on: friend or enemy?
It was nine-thirty. I picked up the phone and got Rassi on the horn.
“Where you at?” Rassi called into the phone. H
is voice sounded strained. There was the jingly hiss of country music in the background.
“Just left Trueblood’s,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Big doin’s?”
“Hannah broke down,” I said. “We had to leave early.”
“It’s pretty understandable,” Rassi said. He coughed. “She’s on something, by the way.”
“What?”
“Not sure,” he said. “Xanax?”
“Well, can you blame her?” I asked. I turned on my signal and went left on Route 9.
“Are you coming over here?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I’m already three sheets to the wind.”
“Great,” I said. “What’s the occasion?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
The music continued for a moment, and then the phone went dead.
Eleven
She walked through Horton's field in her men’s work boots, one hand carrying the bow case, the other pushing back the long corn leaves that clutched at her neck and her arms, leaving red, fertile tracks across her brown skin.
Corn sperm. Seed. Cum. Jizz. Her father’s word for it. She hated the smell of its potency, the antediluvian stench of its life.
"Go take a shower. You need to clean off that jizz before your momma sees it.”
Always concerned about what her mother would find. She of the three bottles of Chardonnay a day, locked in her room with her Valium and her cigarettes and wads of money that came inexplicably from nowhere.
“Here, here’s a towel. Wipe off your face.”
When he was done, he would ruffle her hair, and smile, as if she were a boy, a kid who had just struck out in the ninth inning.
“Get dressed. Can’t just sit there naked.”
She’d been twelve when he’d first raped her, and she’d been fourteen when she’d killed him. Death by Viagra. Poison. The woman’s weapon. The son of a bitch had been too stupid to know that you can't take six or seven at a time.
He’d also been too stupid to ever see her as any kind of threat. Just like the police. Officially, it had been a heart attack.