The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020)

by Connolly, John

  This section of Cargill was officially known as Eastville, but it wasn’t uncommon to hear it referred to as Blackville. It was home to more than a thousand people, of whom ninety-five percent were black, the remainder being whites and a handful of Hispanics living on the periphery.

  The arrival of a pair of police cruisers inevitably attracted attention, and one of the neighbors confirmed to the officers that Sallie Kernigan had not been seen at the house over the weekend, or at least her car hadn’t been parked there, which meant she probably hadn’t returned to town after work on Friday. When Colson asked if this was common practice for Kernigan, the neighbor just shrugged. His name was Thomas Wesley Grant. That was how he identified himself: not as Thomas Grant, or Wesley Grant, or any diminution of either, but Thomas Wesley Grant. Colson vaguely recalled his face from around town, but couldn’t have put a name to it. After all, Thomas Wesley Grant had never been in trouble with the police, or come to them for aid, plus Colson had been with the department for only a year and was still getting to know the people she needed to know, which was mainly the criminals, the malcontents, and the lunatics. The rest, she had decided, could wait for more opportune circumstances.

  ‘What about her daughter?’ asked Naylor. ‘Have you seen her around?’

  Thomas Wesley Grant scratched at the stubble on his chin. ‘She the one you found?’

  Colson had resigned herself to the fact that no amount of discretion was going to prevent the dissemination of the news of another killing. The whole town would know about Donna Lee, by and by. She checked her watch and wondered what was keeping Pettle. He should have been with them by now, because they’d all left the scene at more or less the same time.

  ‘Can you just answer the question, sir?’ said Naylor. ‘It’s important.’

  Thomas Wesley Grant thought for a while, his eyes fixed on the Kernigan house across the street.

  ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘Do you recall when you last saw either of them?’

  ‘I saw Miss Sallie go to work shortly after seven on Friday morning, and I saw Donna Lee leave for school not long after. I eat my breakfast at the same time every day, and my table overlooks the street, which is how I know.’

  ‘Did you see Donna Lee return that afternoon?’

  ‘No, but I was out for most of the afternoon. I only know about the morning for sure.’

  ‘And did you notice anyone else come by the house?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Do you have a key to the Kernigan residence?’

  ‘No, sir, but I believe the Howards might. They live on the right. Mrs Howard and Miss Imogene, Donna Lee’s grandmother, are cousins.’

  They thanked Thomas Wesley Grant for his time. Colson used her cell phone to get a number for the La Salle Paper Company in Malvern, and called to check if Sallie Kernigan had reported for work that morning. After some back-and-forth, a woman who sounded like she smoked sixty a day before gargling the ashes confirmed that Sallie hadn’t shown up yet, and was now nearly two hours late.

  ‘Is she often late?’ Colson asked.

  ‘People who are often late get fired,’ said the woman.

  Colson thanked her, left a number for the Cargill PD, and requested that the secretary call should Sallie Kernigan appear.

  While Colson was on the phone, Naylor was checking with Hindman High School to find out if Donna Lee had made it in on Friday, and if so, when had she left. Hindman was the only high school in Cargill. Its student body was black by a small majority, even though the school was named after Thomas Carmichael Hindman, an Arkansas congressman who commanded the Trans-Mississippi Department during the War of Northern Aggression – incurring the dislike of the state’s citizenry in the process due to his methods – but was guilty of a tactical error at the Battle of Prairie Grove that effectively resulted in Arkansas falling to Union forces. Hindman fled to Mexico, and was murdered upon his return to the state, probably by a former Confederate. All things considered, Naylor thought, the institution’s founders could have come up with a better eponym. But Hindman was a good school, and generally untroubled by racial tensions. It was only when its students traveled farther afield, usually on sporting occasions, that color became an issue and its players were subjected to taunts.

  Naylor got through to the school principal, Mr Quarles, and informed him of Donna Lee’s death, although he stressed that they were still waiting for a family member to make a formal identification. Quarles passed Naylor to the school secretary, Mrs Huson, who confirmed Donna Lee Kernigan’s attendance the previous Friday, and also noted that the girl had band practice after class – she played the flute – and so had stayed until after 6 p.m. The secretary didn’t know how Donna Lee got home, but she checked with the music teacher, who informed her that he’d seen Donna Lee waiting at the corner and being picked up by someone in a truck, although as the evening was dark he didn’t notice the make or color, nor could he have identified the driver.

  Once the officers had concluded their calls, Colson called Griffin to update him. The chief was on his way back to the station house, and told them to get the key to the Kernigan residence from the Howards and check it out, but to wear gloves and try not to disturb anything. Tucker McKenzie was grabbing some breakfast, but he’d be over there within the hour to conduct the forensic examination.

  Mrs Irene Howard was an elderly, stooped woman, with a similarly stooped husband. Colson thought they looked like characters from a fairy story. Like Thomas Wesley Grant, they hadn’t seen any sign of Donna Lee or her mother since Friday, but Mrs Howard was more vocal in her disapproval of Sallie Kernigan’s lifestyle.

  ‘She drinks too much,’ she said. ‘She makes Miss Imogene worry for her.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ agreed her husband.

  ‘Does she have a boyfriend?’ Colson asked.

  ‘She has lots of boyfriends,’ said Mrs Howard.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said her husband.

  ‘Anyone you might know?’

  ‘According to Miss Imogene, they’s mostly over in Malvern, or that’s where she sees them,’ said Mrs Howard. ‘And they ain’t those kind of boyfriends.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said her husband, shaking his head.

  Naylor appeared confused.

  ‘Then what kind of boyfriends are they?’ he asked.

  ‘The temporary kind,’ said Mrs Howard.

  ‘Temporary,’ said her husband.

  ‘How temporary?’

  ‘They pays by the hour.’

  ‘By the hour,’ agreed her husband. ‘They’s whoremongers.’

  Colson and Naylor made a cursory search of the Kernigan home, but saw nothing to indicate signs of a struggle or abduction, and certainly no indication that Donna Lee might have been killed there. The cottage was tidy, with the exception of the smaller of the two bedrooms, which had clearly been Donna Lee’s. This was messy in the way that only a teenager’s room could be, so much so that Naylor, who had been a scrupulous child, thought it might have been burgled, until Colson – who had three sisters, two brothers, and a comfort with disarray – assured him it was normal for a teenage girl. They decided to wait for McKenzie to arrive before embarking on a more thorough search.

  The refrigerator was stocked with the kind of foodstuffs that offered satiation for minimum outlay, albeit by sacrificing a certain amount of nutritional value. In a closet by the sink they found four bottles of Everclear grain alcohol, along with a couple of bottles of cheap wine and some malt liquor. One of the bottles of Everclear was half-empty, and the refrigerator contained two unmarked bottles of liquid, one clear and one that smelled like Hawaiian Punch. Colson guessed that Sallie Kernigan was mixing the Everclear with water to make a form of cheap vodka, and adding the Everclear to the Hawaiian Punch for special occasions.

  Sallie Kernigan’s nightstand contained headache and indigestion tablets, birth control pills, an open pack of Trojans, a six-inch knife, and an Astra Terminator pistol: a
.44 Magnum with the barrel chopped down from six inches to just under three, the rear sight melted and the frame recontoured. Colson picked it up in her gloved hand, feeling the weight of the gun. It wasn’t a typical woman’s weapon, and she wondered how Kernigan might have come by it. She unloaded the Astra and bagged the ammunition. Finally, at the back of the nightstand, and hidden in a copy of the Bible that appeared to have been partially hollowed out for this particular purpose, she found four small plastic baggies: two containing white powder, one containing pills, and the fourth containing clear, chunky crystals. She waved them at Naylor. They both knew meth when they saw it. One couldn’t serve in law enforcement in Burdon County and not be able to identify the drug, whatever its form.

  ‘Nothing like variety,’ said Naylor. ‘She can smoke it, snort it, inject it, or add it to the hooch in the refrigerator. Happy times.’

  Colson ran her fingers over the bag of rocks. This was pure crystal meth, created without contaminants. Its manufacturer knew his trade.

  They went back outside and tossed a coin to determine who would stay and wait for McKenzie. Naylor lost, so Colson headed back to the station. Along the way, she passed Reverend Pettle and signaled for him to stop, pulling up alongside his car.

  ‘What kept you?’ she asked.

  ‘I needed a moment to compose my thoughts. It’s not every day you have to tell a mother that her child has been butchered and violated.’

  Colson replied only to let Pettle know that Sallie Kernigan wasn’t at home, or at work, so he could save himself a trip. Later in the day someone would have to visit Donna Lee Kernigan’s grandmother, Miss Imogene, and inform her of the girl’s death, but it didn’t seem wise to do that before Sallie Kernigan had been told. Nevertheless, if Sallie didn’t show up before too long, they’d have to speak with Miss Imogene in the hope of locating her daughter through her. Pettle confirmed his willingness to help at any time, and Colson thanked him before driving off. Pettle didn’t immediately follow, but instead remained in his car by the side of the road, contemplating the morning’s events.

  Reverend Nathan Pettle knew that a lot of people in Cargill regarded him as substandard material, even certain members of his own congregation. He wasn’t the best preacher, nor the most sagacious or patient of pastors, and he found his faith was tested regularly by the realities of human existence. It was also the case that a black man learned to show one face toward whites and another to his own people. If he did that often and long enough, even he might become confused about his own identity, and risk becoming that which he pretended to be.

  But Pettle cared about his faithful and tried his best to do right by them. There were those among his flock who said that he should have gone to the newspapers when the investigation into Patricia Hartley’s death came to an end before her body was even consigned to the flames. Pettle knew Jurel Cade wouldn’t have stood for that; and besides, if any reporters had cared enough about Patricia Hartley, they’d have come calling without his prodding. Nobody wanted to rock the boat in Burdon County, not with so much money riding on its future. But now there were two dead black girls – three, if you counted Estella Jackson from way back – and even Jurel wouldn’t be able to put a pattern like that down to a series of accidents. If he tried, Pettle would have to defy him – for the sake of the victim, and his own position in the community. If Pettle rolled over again, any authority remaining to him would vanish.

  Yet he, like many others, had been promised so much. If he made an excess of noise he would lose it all, and everyone – including his own churchgoers – would suffer for it.

  So Reverend Nathan Pettle closed his eyes and asked God to give him the wisdom to determine the value of a single life – and, most particularly, this life, because he had known the girl, and knew her mother.

  Oh yes he did.

  20

  Colson returned to the station house, where she arrived just as Griffin was pulling into the lot. The priority now was to trace Sallie Kernigan – not only to inform her of her daughter’s death, but also to establish her movements over the course of the weekend. While no one at the Cargill PD wanted to believe she might have killed her own daughter, it was possible that Sallie had crossed paths with whoever was responsible. Kel Knight came to join them, so Colson went through the details once again for his benefit, describing the discovery of the pistol and meth in Kernigan’s nightstand, and sharing the music teacher’s account of a truck picking up Donna Lee Kernigan after band practice on Friday.

  ‘If she was using meth, she might have been getting it from Tilon Ward, or one of his people,’ said Knight.

  ‘Ward’s people don’t have a monopoly on meth,’ said Griffin.

  ‘They do around here.’

  ‘Maybe, but my understanding is that while Tilon may be involved in its manufacture, he leaves the problem of supply to others, especially when it comes down to teener bags.’

  ‘But Ward also drives a truck,’ said Knight, ‘and Donna Lee was last seen getting into one.’

  ‘Half the county drives a truck,’ said Griffin, ‘and Tilon was the one who called us to say he’d found Donna Lee’s body. He looked to me to be in shock, and that’s hard to fake, especially when your skin turns gray.’

  ‘I’m not saying he killed her,’ said Knight, ‘only that he may know more than he’s sharing.’

  ‘Then we’ll talk to him again,’ said Griffin. ‘In the meantime, I want people down at Hindman High interviewing the kids from the band, the music teacher, the custodian, and anyone else who might have been around when Donna Lee got into that truck. For now, that’s the last sighting we have of her.’

  Colson said that she’d take care of the school business once she’d had a chance to use the restroom and freshen up. Griffin told her to get something to eat, and she assured him she’d grab a breakfast bagel from the Dunk-N-Go, and wolf it down in the car on the way to Hindman. Griffin gave her a nod of approval. Colson was the first female officer in the history of the Cargill PD, an appointment that had not been greeted with universal approval in the town. She was also a rarity by the standards of many police departments in the state, unusual enough to have featured in newspaper and TV coverage. Griffin had worried about her in the beginning, but stopped worrying after she ruptured Donnie Stark’s right testicle and busted two of his ribs when he made a grab for her outside Boyd’s one Friday night.

  Once Colson was out of earshot, Knight asked Griffin if he could have a word.

  ‘It’s about Parker.’

  Tilon Ward lived next to his widowed mother on a property to the east of Cargill. He’d moved back in with her after his divorce, initially recolonizing his former childhood bedroom while he worked on converting an old stable building into suitable accommodation for himself. He now had his own kitchen and living area, and a large, comfortable bedroom in which he could enjoy female company without inconveniencing his mother. She was a tolerant woman by any standards, but Ward saw no reason to parade his conquests before her, especially when they were younger than was appropriate for a man in his thirties – or when they were black, his mother’s sufferance of her son’s vices not extending to miscegenation.

  Seated at his kitchen table, Tilon flipped his cell phone open and closed, open and closed. The instrument had revolutionized his business, but he now had fewer excuses for being out of contact with his partners. Dead zones apart, he was on call 24/7.

  Tilon’s employer would want to know about his relationship with Donna Lee Kernigan, but Tilon’s view was that it wasn’t yet an issue, and would only become so were it to be discovered by the law. First up, he needed to get in touch with Sallie, offer his sympathies on the loss of her daughter, and make sure she wasn’t about to land him in a cell through whatever she might have to say to the police. Even amid her grief, he was confident she could be made to understand the necessity of discretion, particularly if she wanted to keep the supply chain open, for both herself and others. Unfortunately, Sallie didn’t possess
a cell phone, and when Ward tried to call her at work, he was told she hadn’t yet arrived. He declined to leave a message, because his mother hadn’t bred a simpleton.

  He mused for a while on who might have wanted to kill Donna Lee. If the rumors were true about what was done to Patricia Hartley, then the same person or persons responsible for her death had also murdered Donna Lee. Unless the two girls were connected in some way – and Ward couldn’t see how, given that they weren’t even friends – it looked like the police were dealing with a random sex killer, maybe even the serial kind about which his mother liked to read in her true crime books, and possibly the same one who had done in Estella Jackson, back when Tilon was still married and looked to have escaped Cargill forever.

  In which case, thought Ward, at least Donna Lee’s death wasn’t personal.

  21

  Griffin sat at his desk, Kel Knight opposite him. The office was small, barely spacious enough to accommodate the desk, two chairs, and a selection of mismatched file cabinets. The walls were decorated only with official notices, Griffin being reluctant to advertise his personal or professional history in the form of commendations and photographs. Those that needed to know about his past already did, and the opinion of the others did not concern him.

  Griffin had just finished talking on the phone with the mayor, Joe Haines. Cargill, in common with the rest of Burdon County, utilized a weak-mayor system, in which the mayor had no formal authority outside the council, and lacked the power to hire and fire, or veto council votes. This suited the Cade family, which was why the system had been instituted to begin with. Haines, who owned the town’s sole auto dealership, was a conscientious man, and honest to boot, which made him a lousy car salesman, and not much better as an Arkansas politician. Griffin had listened as Haines engaged in ten types of handwringing over the discovery of another body before finally hanging up on him.