‘He was asking about you last night,’ said Cleon.
‘What kind of asking?’
‘He wanted to know how long you’d been in town, and whether you’d received any visitors.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him the truth. Did I do wrong?’
‘No.’
‘What if he continues to ask about you?’
‘Continue telling.’
Cresil looked away at last, closed the trunk, and walked off.
‘He said that if I kept my eyes open, he’d make sure I was taken care of,’ said Cleon. ‘He left ten dollars on the counter, and told me he’d permit me to service him with my mouth before his departure, if I felt so disposed. Why does Mr Shire need to keep the company of a man like that?’
‘No one needs to keep the company of a man like that.’
‘But there he is, by Mr Shire’s side.’
‘Yes, there he is,’ said Parker. ‘What’s your opinion of Mr Shire?’
‘He always insists on the same room, which we keep for his use alone, and brings with him his own toilet seat.’
‘Well, a man like that must be clean, right?’
‘Or prefers to maintain the impression of cleanliness.’
‘Which would be more likely.’
‘Mr Cresil, by contrast, is definitely unclean.’
‘In every way,’ said Parker. ‘But then he and Mr Shire are engaged in a dirty business. They’re buying your county, so at least one of them has to be willing to get dirty too.’
‘If I was doing the selling, they could have the county for whatever small change they found down under the couch cushions.’
‘Then it’s lucky you’re not on the negotiating team.’
‘I can’t even negotiate a proper salary from my own family,’ said Cleon.
They watched Cresil disappear into his room.
‘Is it still bowhunting season down here?’ said Parker.
‘I don’t know. I don’t hunt.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Mr Cresil doesn’t strike me as a man hidebound by regulations.’
He thanked Cleon for the coffee, and asked if it would be okay to return the cup later.
‘Just leave it in your room. Housekeeping will take care of it.’
Parker headed for the door. Griffin had left a message requesting that he attend a meeting at the station house by eight-thirty, and Parker saw no reason to be late on his first morning. He experienced a sense of dissociation from all that was occurring, but also a degree of clarity. This inquiry was not personal to him, and so he could view it with some dispassion. Any anger he was experiencing on behalf of the dead girls was regulated, and could be directed. But he also felt like a man keeping himself afloat halfway between the banks of a river, drawing breath and kicking water while knowing that he must soon recommence swimming or risk drowning.
And on the land, a presence moved through the undergrowth, waiting for him to come.
‘Mr Parker?’ said Cleon. ‘I want to ask your pardon if you felt I was prying into your affairs, or if I’ve added in any way to your grief. That was not my intention.’
‘It never crossed my mind,’ said Parker.
The Leonard Cresils of this world, he thought, were aberrations, evolutionary anomalies that would eventually bring about their own dissolution, just like the man who had taken his wife and child from him. Men such as Cleon could mitigate the influence on human affairs of such malign entities through the goodness of their own natures, even if they could not make up for it entirely.
‘The phone call was a smart idea,’ said Parker.
‘I thought so too.’
‘I’ll see you around, Cleon.’
‘I look forward to it, Mr Parker. Very much.’
55
Tilon Ward woke early, in an unfamiliar bed. The apartment in Hot Springs to which Randall Butcher had consigned him was on the first floor of a building divided into eight units, which was two more than it could comfortably accommodate. The remaining rentals were occupied by the kind of poor white families that provided Butcher with a small but steady proportion of his income, aided by the interest on unofficial payday loans. The interest was high, but not extortionate, as Butcher was reluctant to sow excessive resentment among the masses. His people also supplied some of these tenants with narcotics when required, and Butcher owned most of the local stores that catered to their grocery needs, along with their cigarettes and alcohol. Thus, almost unnoticed, Randall Butcher had enmeshed himself in the fabric of their lives. Without him, their existences would unravel.
Tilon walked to the window and looked out on the cheerless day. Most of the east and southeast was now colored blue on the weather maps, while the temperature had dropped to the low thirties, having been close to seventy only days earlier. Still, Tilon wouldn’t have exchanged Arkansas for anywhere else in the country, or not the parts he’d seen of it. He’d spent some time in Boston when he was in his early twenties, having chased the wrong woman to the wrong place, and was convinced his health had never recovered from that single winter in the Northeast. Sometimes, at the memory of it, the tips of his toes stung, like pain in a phantom limb. No, this was the place for him, and he hoped to end his days here, but not in the service of Randall Butcher, and not with the shadow of Donna Lee Kernigan’s death hanging over him. He found himself missing her voice and touch. It could never have amounted to anything between them, or nothing more than they already had, but he’d liked Donna Lee a lot more than he had his ex-wife – and he’d married the latter.
Tilon showered under a head from which the water barely trickled, the pressure being kept deliberately to a minimum. He dressed, and ate stale bread from the kitchen cabinet. Pruitt Dix, upon dropping him at the apartment the previous night, had instructed him to sit tight, and Tilon was already growing claustrophobic. He smoked a cigarette in the weed-strewn yard, and exchanged a nod with one of his neighbors but no further greeting. His unit had the unmistakable ambience of a safe house, a place of temporary refuge, and Tilon guessed that the other tenants had learned to mind their own business where its occupants were concerned. He watched TV, and read some of the articles and stories in a pair of ancient editions of Playboy magazine, using the blade of a knife to turn the stained pages.
Shortly before nine he heard a car pull up outside. Dix had returned. He had in his possession a black sports bag, which he handed to Tilon. Inside was a selection of Tilon’s own clothing, along with some toiletries and a razor.
‘I had your momma put it together,’ said Dix. ‘I told her not to worry about you, that you’d be back with her soon enough. If anyone came asking, she was to inform them only that you’d gone out of town on business, and she had no way of contacting you. Come on, we’re leaving.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Randall had a change of heart about the cook. He’d prefer you to get started right away, using whatever supplies are already at hand.’
There was no point in arguing. Tilon got into the car and waited for Dix to join him. The interior was clean and smelled of lemon air freshener.
‘You stink of cigarettes,’ said Dix, as he took the wheel. ‘You ought to reexamine your lifestyle choices.’
Tilon was in no mood for Dix’s shit. His ear still ached, and he was sure the lobe needed stitches, because he’d bled on his pillow the night before. For now, the dried blood was holding the wound together. Butcher kept emergency kits at the cookhouses – mostly burn medication and eye baths, but also adhesive bandages and paper sutures. Tilon would tend to the injury once they reached their destination.
‘Did they find Sallie Kernigan yet?’ he said.
‘If they did, they’re keeping it quiet.’
Tilon had a suspicion that Dix might be looking for Sallie Kernigan too, and for the same reason as Tilon: to make sure she understood the importance of keeping her mouth shut about her connection to Tilon and meth. Tilon didn’t believe Sallie was in any
immediate danger from Dix, assuming she was still alive. Ironically, her daughter’s murder had guaranteed her safety, if only for the time being. Dix couldn’t risk killing Sallie to keep her quiet. If he made even the slightest error, the police would fall on him like wolves, seeking to tie him to Donna Lee’s killing, which would then link him to Patricia Hartley, and possibly Estella Jackson, back and back until every unsolved femicide in the state of Arkansas was being hung around Pruitt Dix’s neck.
Dix pulled out of the lot and drove west. ‘You really screwed up, Tilon, fucking the Kernigan girl like that.’
‘I know it.’ Tilon thought it was just one more bad decision to add to a lifetime of them. ‘But you screwed things up more by forcing me to leave Cargill.’
‘You telling me you had a mind to confess your indiscretion to the police?’
‘No, but skipping town means questions will be asked. It’ll look bad.’
‘Well, you can explain the reason for your absence upon your return. You possess a trustworthy face, Tilon, and you’ll have time enough to come up with a plausible explanation while you’re supervising the cook. You still have Evan Griffin in your pocket?’
‘I never had him in my pocket.’
‘If you say so.’
‘What about my truck?’
‘It’s garaged. We’ll have someone drive it out to you when your work is done.’
But Tilon was barely listening. Whatever was going on here couldn’t only be because of his connection to the Kernigans, could it? Randall Butcher didn’t ordinarily give a rat’s ass who was sleeping with whom, although he made a point of discouraging his dancers from getting involved with customers in his clubs, if only because it rarely ended well – strippers, in Butcher’s experience, being prone to lead disorderly lives, which in turn attracted disorderly men.
Then again, it was one thing sleeping with a girl who was barely of age, and another coming across that same girl naked and dead, and then neglecting to mention your earlier intimacy with her to the police. And sure, perhaps a degree of reticence made sense when you didn’t have an alibi beyond your own mother, who’d have lied to protect you even if the remains of a dozen dead girls were found stacked in your closet, but those kinds of secrets left a man vulnerable to pressure in the event of arrest, pressure that might usefully be applied to induce him to turn on his sometime employer Randall Butcher, the biggest supplier of meth in the region.
So there was all of that, Tilon concluded, which wasn’t helpful to his cause or conducive to his long-term health. Oh, and the skimming. He’d been careful about it, or thought he had. His larceny barely amounted to more than the sweepings from the floor after cooks, but it had added up over time: more than $30,000 squirreled away around the county – closer to $40,000, if you were counting every nickel and dime, which Tilon was.
And maybe Tilon wasn’t the only one counting.
He glanced at Dix, whose eyes were fixed on the road while his fingers tapped out the rhythm of some piano concerto from the compilation cassette currently playing on the car stereo. Each piece was only a couple of minutes long, as far as Tilon could tell, which said a lot about the shallowness of Dix’s musical knowledge and the duration of his attention span. Dix was a thug with a veneer of sophistication, just like Randall Butcher. Tilon was different. He’d completed most of a chemistry major at Arkansas State. He’d have graduated, too, if the money for his education hadn’t run out, and he hadn’t subsequently become distracted by the practical application of his skills to the manufacture of illegal narcotics. He was better than Randall Butcher in every way, better than Pruitt Dix. They knew it, too, even as they had become increasingly reliant on his proficiency, which probably explained a lot of their animosity toward him.
He and Dix left Hot Springs behind, the wipers fighting against the rain, the hickories along the roadside standing skeletal in the morning light. The two men did not speak, for there was nothing more to be said, and in time the ground began to rise, and the clouds hung like dark smoke over the Ouachita.
Trees, and the ghosts of trees; a forest of memories.
They entered, and were swallowed by shadows.
III
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
56
The Arkansas State Medical Examiner’s Office employed a number of forensic pathologists to carry out autopsy work. Of these, the best by far was Dr Ruth Temple, who was the only one of the state’s pathologists to be certified by the American Board of Pathology, the others having decided against taking the one-day exam. This was not to say that her colleagues were unqualified – board certification was not compulsory, and many senior practitioners in the field, including some with decades of experience, declined to bother with it – but Temple’s extra year of training gave her an edge. She could have made more money in another medical field, since forensic pathologists traditionally earned less than their medical peers, but she preferred working with the dead. They didn’t complain, didn’t sue, and occasionally one of them would present Temple with a mystery to which she was able to provide a solution.
Temple had risen early that morning to perform the autopsy on Donna Lee Kernigan. She had specifically requested that the task be assigned to her. Temple had been incensed by the rumors that had emerged from Burdon County following the death of Patricia Hartley, and the possibility that a young woman’s murder might have been covered up out of political and financial expediency. Temple knew all about Kovas Industries and the lifeline the company potentially represented to a largely impoverished county in a state that regularly figured among the poorest in the Union. She regarded the Burdon County coroner as an imbecile, the sheriff as a political timeserver, and the chief investigator, Jurel Cade, as a dangerous throwback to a time when cynicism and brute force trumped any concepts of legality. But Patricia Hartley deserved better than to have her death consigned to the oubliette, and Temple was damned if Donna Lee Kernigan was going to suffer the same fate. This was a view shared by most of those in the ME’s office, who felt a duty to the dead that was as much moral as scientific and judicial, and regarded the handling of the Hartley case as an abrogation of all they held meaningful.
Temple’s conversations with Chief Evander Griffin of the Cargill Police Department – including two in the previous twenty-four hours, as well as two more confirmatory discussions with Tucker McKenzie, one official, one unofficial – had convinced her that Griffin felt the same way, and she had agreed, against established procedure, to provide him with a heads-up on the autopsy results before informing the county coroner or chief investigator. Griffin had also suggested to Temple that she might like to refer any additional inquiries from the county sheriff’s office about Donna Lee Kernigan directly to him, whereupon he would do his utmost to facilitate the provision of the relevant information. Temple had readily assented, even though it would sour the ME’s relations with Jurel Cade still further.
Temple’s preferred assistant, Lara Kiesel, was already waiting for her when she arrived to begin the examination. Kiesel, like Temple, had familiarized herself with the older case of Estella Jackson, who was murdered in a similar fashion to Donna Lee. Both Temple and Kiesel had also spoken with Tucker McKenzie about his recollections of Patricia Hartley’s remains, and scrutinized the pictures he had managed to take at the scene before being banished from it.
Together, Temple and Kiesel photographed Donna Lee Kernigan while she lay in the body bag, and also X-rayed her in order to record the position of the branches used to violate her. Once these tasks were concluded, they worked together to collect the dirt and foreign bodies from her skin and hair, and opened the smaller carriers in which her hands had been sealed to preserve any residue under her fingernails. Finally, she was removed from the body bag, and her wounds surveyed and recorded, before Kiesel was given the okay to clean her in preparation for the autopsy.
Kiesel thought that Donna Lee Kernigan had been a beautiful young woman – even in death, and with her features brutally disfigured. Her bone structure was very fine, and her skin reminded Kiesel of that Curtis Mayfield song, the one about a people darker than blue. The stump of the branch protruding from her mouth – the upper part having been carefully cut off and sealed as evidence by Tucker McKenzie before she was moved from the scene – struck Kiesel as even more obscene than the branch between her legs. Both represented an effort at degradation, but to Kiesel the defilement of the girl’s face evinced an additional element of spite, like the cruelty of a child. Yet somehow the act had failed to erase Donna Lee’s essential grace. It was her small triumph over the one who had taken her life.
Kiesel moistened a sponge and began wiping down the body. She had friends who didn’t understand how she could bring herself to do this, and more than one man had chosen to absent himself from her life because of where her hands might have been. She didn’t care. To her there was something ancient and honorable about this task, and in performing it she was part of a continuum of those who had, for millennia, offered this final tenderness to the dead. Kiesel was not religious, and any doubts she might have entertained about her atheism had been excised by repeated contact with the physical realities of mortality. Her actions came down to dignity and kindness, even to those who had been stripped of the first and could no longer benefit from the second.
She spotted the fingerprint just a second before the sponge would have wiped it away. It was on the inside of Donna Lee’s right thigh, just below her groin. It had been concealed from view by a length of ivy attached to the branch lodged in her vagina, or else McKenzie might well have spotted it during his initial examination. As it was, the print could easily have been mistaken for another smear of dirt by a more careless eye than her own.
The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020) Page 23