The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020)

by Connolly, John

  Griffin restored the gun to its holster and laid it to one side.

  ‘Huh,’ he said.

  He got down on his knees between the two beds and felt beneath their frames. Within seconds, his fingers touched another gun, taped to the underside of the bed on the right. Carefully he eased it free. This time he was looking at a .38 Colt Detective Special, so old that the prancing pony badge on the left side of the butt was worn almost smooth, and the frame was pitted and scarred. Yet, as with the S&W, it was in prime working condition; unlike the S&W, it was fully loaded.

  Griffin returned it to its hiding place and resumed his examination of the case. Without disturbing the contents more than was necessary, he established that it contained a couple of changes of clothing, a pair of black Timberland boots – freshly waterproofed, judging by the smell – and a thick sheaf of papers and photographs held in a blue pocket file secured with a pair of elastic bands. Griffin removed the bands and opened the file. He took one look at the contents, closed it again, and restored the bands. He put the S&W back in the case and managed to get one of the catches to lock again, but not the other. With the file under one arm, he left the room, closed the door behind him, and drove home.

  He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t even disturbed.

  In fact, he was almost relieved.

  Kel Knight continued smoking his pipe until a pair of headlights appeared from the south, approaching slowly up Main Street. The street lighting wasn’t great at that end of town, and a couple of the bulbs were also busted, which meant the vehicle didn’t become completely visible to him until it neared the lot – not that Knight needed the illumination to make an identification, not after the warning from Colson.

  The colors of the Burdon County Sheriff’s Office were yellow and brown, an unfortunate combination that had led the less respectable elements of county society to dub it ‘Shit-N-Shitter,’ which made it sound like another business misfire from the mind of Ferdy Bowers. Not that anyone would have uttered that description within earshot of Jurel Cade, a man who smiled a lot but never laughed.

  Cade unfolded himself slowly from the interior of the car, like some predatory insect emerging from its lair. He topped out at six five in his stockinged feet, but favored heavy work boots with deep soles and heels that added another inch, at least, to his height. There was no fat to him, none at all, and in proximity he radiated heat, so that the windows of his patrol car were permanently fogged, winter and summer, because the vents didn’t work worth a damn, the sheriff’s office being no more flush with funds than any other branch of local law enforcement. The Cades were generally tall and rangy, males and females both, so that family gatherings resembled a collection of blades or farm implements arrayed side by side. They all had the same eyes too: deep blue and hungry, like cruel seas. They weren’t bad, the Cades, not exactly – no family could be entirely ignoble – but they were greedy, and protective of their own. They had been the dominant force in the social, political, and economic life of Burdon County for as long as anyone could remember, and longer still, and seemed destined to remain so into the future given the absence of any significant rivals, the ambitions of Ferdy Bowers and a handful of other holdouts notwithstanding.

  ‘Evening, Kel,’ said Cade, although it was now well into the night.

  ‘Evening, Jurel,’ said Knight. ‘Social visit?’

  No love was lost between these two men, and each knew it, but Knight had been prepared to accommodate a level of grudging respect for the younger man until Patricia Hartley’s death. In the aftermath, he saw no cause for any but the most superficial of niceties.

  ‘I heard Evan was up to Boyd’s earlier,’ said Cade. ‘Made an arrest.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Anything I should know about?’

  ‘Northern boy. Had a little too much to drink, and proved disrespectful of the chief’s authority. We thought we’d accommodate him in a cell, and give him the opportunity to contemplate the error of his ways before we put him back on the road.’

  Jurel Cade absorbed this information without any change in expression. Knight might as easily have been addressing himself to a statue. Cade’s hair was thick and black, with a natural curl that he tried to hide by keeping it cut short most of the time. In winter he let it grow a shade longer, with the result that the kink was currently at its most obvious. Some in the county liked to speculate – although again not in the immediate vicinity of Jurel, or any other member of the Cade clan – that he could have a little Jew in him from up the line, but Knight didn’t think that likely. The Jews might have helped open up parts of the state in the nineteenth century through their trading ventures, as was the wont of the Semitic race, but they had long been in general decline in Arkansas, a couple of pockets of Judaism excepted, and Cargill wasn’t Bentonville or Little Rock. Any Jews who ventured as far as Burdon hadn’t lingered, and Knight couldn’t recall ever meeting a Jew native to the county in all his born days, nor did he believe that his father or mother could have boasted the acquaintance of any. He had nothing against them as a people; they simply did not figure in his life or memory, and the same could likely have been said for that of the Cades.

  There was another possibility for the kink, of course, one that even the most daring or foolhardy of commentators chose to leave unspoken. The Cades, like a fifth of all families in antebellum Arkansas, had owned slaves. In a period when the ownership of even a dozen slaves would have been regarded as significant, the Cades had a hundred in their possession, many of whom they hired out to plantation owners and farmers. Who was to say that, back in the day, a little darkness hadn’t crept into the Cade bloodline?

  ‘Way I heard it,’ said Cade, ‘your guest was drinking soda at Boyd’s. Hard to rate that as much of an intoxicant, not unless the bubbles went to his head.’

  Knight wondered who at the bar had made the call to the sheriff’s office. It wouldn’t have been Joan Kirby, because she and the chief got along like gangbusters. Knight decided that he’d talk to Kevin Naylor the next day, and Joan also, with a view to establishing the identities of those in attendance when Parker was arrested. He might have to pay someone a visit, and remind them that Jurel Cade didn’t live in Cargill, while Kel Knight most assuredly did, and a certain level of loyalty toward the local police department was not only appreciated but also expected.

  ‘He was trying to sober up,’ said Knight.

  He didn’t know why he was lying to Cade. Actually, he did know, and it wasn’t to protect the man in the cell. Even had he been upfront with Cade about Parker’s interest in Patricia Hartley, he didn’t think it likely that the county’s chief deputy would get more out of the prisoner than Griffin. But Knight and Cade had conflicting agendas when it came to the Hartley girl – just as, on a different level, Knight had issues with the chief’s handling of the matter – and he wasn’t about to feed Parker to the Burdon County Sheriff’s Office until more had been learned about him.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Cade. ‘You mind if I look in on him?’

  ‘I believe he’s sleeping.’

  ‘Won’t take long.’

  Knight could hardly refuse. He stepped aside and directed Cade with his pipe.

  ‘Take as long as you want.’

  7

  Evan Griffin got home to discover that his wife hadn’t made meatloaf but chicken casserole, and had neither thrown it out nor fed it to Carter, the dog. It was late for him to be pulling up to the table, but he was so hungry that he knew he wouldn’t sleep unless he ate. He carefully divided the portion of casserole in two, fed a little to Carter by hand and heated the rest in the microwave. He took an O’Doul’s from the refrigerator and popped the cap. He’d long ago fallen into the habit of having a beer when he came home, regardless of the hour, and one sometimes became two, although rarely more. It started to rankle with him – Griffin was distrustful of dependencies – so he’d switched to O’Doul’s because it was more a matter of having a bottle in his hand, and something
approximating the taste of beer in his mouth, than the alcohol itself. When the microwave pinged he set the plate on the table, his beer and a glass of water beside it, and the file from the motel room above the plate, being careful not to get any food on the pages. So engrossed did he become in the contents that he didn’t hear Ava come down the stairs, and wasn’t aware of her presence until her shadow fell across the table and she said:

  ‘Is that Patricia Hartley?’

  Griffin saw no point in denying it, now that she’d seen the photograph. It was a picture from Patricia’s high school yearbook, the same one that had been placed on her coffin. Behind it were graphic images of her body, visible as fragments behind the main photo: a leg here, an arm there. Had he been forewarned, he would have closed the file before Ava arrived: not out of any great sensitivity to her feelings – they’d been married too long for that, and she’d seen and heard too much – but because Ava, like Kel Knight, had also made known her feelings about the death of Patricia Hartley, and he didn’t want to give her an excuse to rake over the ashes of that particular subject, because they never seemed to cool.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You find out something new?’

  ‘No. There is nothing new for me to find out because it’s not my case.’

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me.’

  She cuffed him gently across the back of the head as though he were a child, even though he had a dozen years on her. The blow barely ruffled his hair, and was more loving and possessive than an actual rebuke, but he had to make an effort to hold his temper nonetheless.

  ‘And this isn’t my file,’ he continued.

  ‘Then whose is it? Sheriff’s office?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Which begged the question of how Parker had come by these images. They looked like Tucker McKenzie’s handiwork, being perfectly framed and in focus, even though they were copies of pictures that had been taken with an instant camera. McKenzie was the forensic analyst most frequently dispatched by the state crime lab to this part of Arkansas, but as far as Griffin was aware, Hartley’s death hadn’t been referred to the lab. McKenzie had been briefly present at the scene, but not in any official capacity. Griffin hadn’t seen these particular prints before, so how had they come to be in Parker’s possession? It was another subject to be explored with him in the morning.

  ‘You know I don’t like it when you try to be enigmatic,’ said Ava. ‘I didn’t marry you so I could spend my time guessing what you were thinking, or no more than should be obligatory with a man.’

  ‘I arrested someone this evening,’ said Griffin. ‘That’s how come I was late home. He had this file in his possession.’

  ‘All those papers just for Patricia Hartley? That’s more than the law has accumulated.’

  The little jab again.

  ‘He has details of other killings in here too.’

  ‘Others like her?’

  ‘No, but a similar level of badness, or worse.’

  ‘Worse than what was done to that girl?’

  ‘There’s lots worse than what was done to that girl. I’ve seen some of it with my own eyes.’

  ‘Not in this county.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  Griffin wasn’t about to contradict her. For every case he shared with his wife, he kept another to himself. Had he not done so, he would have been forced to choose between his job and his marriage, because the latter would not have survived its infection by the former. Once, when he was still an innocent, Griffin had believed that evil in its purest form was a property of the universe that pre-dated mankind, and upon which the worst specimens of humanity might draw in only the most extreme cases of malignance. He no longer viewed his species in such terms, and had since concluded that some men and women came into this world with a profound and terminal rancor embedded in their DNA. They nurtured it inside themselves, and evinced only pleasure in its parturition.

  ‘And who is this man?’ said Ava.

  ‘His name is Parker. He’s from New York.’

  ‘Is he a reporter?’

  ‘That’s what Kel suggested, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘You didn’t ask him?’

  ‘I asked. He just didn’t answer.’

  ‘Which is why you locked him up?’

  ‘I regarded his reluctance to cooperate as a deliberate provocation.’

  ‘You planning on asking him again tomorrow?’

  ‘I am, although by then we should know more about him, on account of our inquiries.’

  ‘You think he could have killed some of the girls in that file of his?’

  ‘I didn’t get that sense from him.’

  ‘What sense did you get?’

  The question was sincerely meant. Ava trusted her husband’s instincts. She wouldn’t have married him if she didn’t, given that one of those instincts was, presumably, that she might make a good wife, and perhaps also a good mother, although that hadn’t happened, not yet. They were trying, which was fun, but desperation was starting to creep in, which wasn’t. The doctors said it wasn’t him, but her, so it might be that her husband’s instincts, while trustworthy, had not been flawless.

  And yet, and yet …

  No, she thought. Best to wait. Best to be sure.

  ‘That he knows his way around the law,’ said Griffin. ‘And he’s angry, which means he might be dangerous.’

  He pictured Parker sitting in Boyd’s. He had a picture of a woman and a little girl in his wallet, but he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, so he could be divorced or was never married to the woman to begin with. Either way, he was carrying grief for them – of that much Griffin was certain – so they might be dead. He owned one gun associated with federal agents, and another old and worn enough to have been inherited from a previous generation, a weapon favored – although not exclusively – by detectives back in the day. He was looking into killings of women, deaths notable for their brutality, their strangeness, and – Griffin searched for the right word – the theatricality of the crime scenes. He had access to police reports, photographs, and autopsy findings.

  ‘I think he might be police,’ said Griffin. ‘If not now, then not so long ago.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he say so?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Ava reached out a hand, and her fingers hovered for a moment over the photograph of Patricia Hartley as though to comfort the ghost of the girl.

  ‘And what will Jurel Cade have to say about this?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Best he doesn’t find out.’

  ‘I hope he does. I hope this man has come to cause him all the trouble in the world.’

  ‘What’s trouble for Jurel may also be trouble for me.’

  She kissed the crown of his head, just where his hair was beginning to thin.

  ‘No, that’s not true,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re nothing like Jurel. You always try to do what’s right.’

  ‘I didn’t do right by Patricia Hartley.’

  ‘You will, down the line, when the opportunity presents itself. Perhaps this man represents an opportunity.’

  ‘You have a lot of faith in me.’

  ‘And patience. I was just waiting for you to come around.’

  ‘To your way of thinking?’

  ‘To our way of thinking. We’re the same, you and I. That’s why we’re together. But sometimes it takes a while for one of us to catch up with the other.’

  She rubbed her right hand through his hair. Her left hand rested on his shoulder, and he took it in one of his paws. He had massive hands. It was a Griffin family trait. When he and Ava began courting, he had been reluctant to hold her fingers too tightly for fear he might break them.

  ‘You really think the coming of this man is a sign?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t hold with portents, but you’ve met him and I haven’t.’

  That’s right, thought Griffin, and on one level I wish he’d never
stopped in Cargill, because life would have been simpler had he kept moving. But now that he’s here, I’m not sure I want him to leave, not if my feeling about him is true.

  ‘It seems like the whole county wants the memory of Patricia Hartley to be obliterated,’ he said.

  ‘Not the whole county, just the wrong part of it. She had family and friends, people that cared about her.’

  ‘The future of thousands is hanging in the balance right now. Everyone’s boat will rise with the tide.’

  ‘Not Patricia Hartley’s.’

  ‘No, not hers.’

  She kissed him again.

  ‘How long more do you plan to keep reading?’

  ‘I’m done. I’ve discovered all I’m likely to for now.’

  ‘Good. Don’t bother clearing up. I’ll take care of it in the morning.’

  She waited for him to get to his feet, just in case he was tempted to reconsider, patted Carter, and turned off the kitchen light. Griffin walked with her through the house, and released her hand only as she entered the bedroom, while he continued to the bathroom. He took care of his business and brushed his teeth. When he spat the toothpaste into the sink, it came away bloodied. He washed the redness away until the porcelain was spotless again.

  Evan Griffin sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought, as he did each day, about Patricia Hartley – and Estella Jackson too, because her picture had been in Parker’s file alongside Hartley’s. These were the dead girls. The majority wished them to be forgotten, but the dead, in his experience, preferred to be remembered.

  And sometimes, they refused to allow the living to forget.

  8

  Jurel Cade looked at the man hunched over the stainless steel toilet in the cell, retching dryly. Kel Knight stood behind Cade, impassive.

  ‘Doesn’t look like he’s sleeping now,’ said Cade. ‘Was he like this when you brought him in?’

  ‘I told you,’ said Knight. ‘He’d been drinking to excess.’

  Parker had been brought to the cell soberer than Knight himself, and that was saying something, since Kel Knight had been an abstainer since his twenties, which came from being the son of an alcoholic. Knight wondered how much Parker had heard of the conversation with Cade, which had continued as they walked to the cell. Enough, Knight decided, to put on a show in order to corroborate the tale spun about him. The more he saw of this Parker, the more puzzled Knight became.