by Chuck Logan
“So what happened? You tell him about Billie?” Rane asked.
Beeman ignored Rane’s question and muttered, “The sheriff of Hardin County, Tennessee, happened, that’s what.”
Investigations was located past Narcotics at the end of the cluttered hall. Going in, Rane perused an office that looked like an equipment dump.
“We need a new jail; space is cramped,” Beeman grumbled. “Got the jail and the sheriff’s office lumped together.” He plopped into his chair and stated in a mincing, “in quotes” tone: “‘We can’t let the five-year-olds run the day care can we?’ Shit.”
Then Beeman handed one of the papers in his hand to Rane. A color-printer picture of a handsome man with dark, curly hair and a salesman’s smile. “That’s him.”
“So this is Mitchell Lee,” Rane said, holding up the picture. “Nice smile.” He covered one side of the face with his hand, then the other.
“What’s that for?”
“Sometimes lets you see something. Eyes don’t lie like a smile. Like, the left half-face is normal. But…” he covered the left side again, “the right kind of snarls, see? How the eye glitters?”
“Parlor games, John? I told you. He’s not crazy,” Beeman said.
“You sure about that after what Marcy and Billie said?”
“No, I ain’t,” Beeman said.
Rane put the picture aside and perused four diplomas on the wall; three from law enforcement courses and a bachelor of arts from the University of Mississippi. Rane pointed at it. “What’d you major in?”
“History and English; two guaranteed nonstarters. Four years on scholarship right out of high school,” Beeman said in a dismissive tone.
“Athletic?”
“Academic.” Beeman sat down at his computer, clicked the mouse, and, after a moment, read from the screen. “Latest e-mail: ‘Beeman you skunc now your goin to get yers.’ Dummy spelled skunk ‘s-k-u-n-c.’”
“What about the Tennessee sheriff?” Rane asked.
“Shiloh’s in Hardin County and their sheriff is running security at the event, providing extra deputies and a SWAT team on site. Oh, he takes the threats seriously—up to a point. So he still wants me to play staked goat and all. But now he’s decided that I won’t carry any weapons on the battlefield. He doesn’t want to do anything to encourage the popular excitement that Mitchell Lee and I are going to fight some damn duel.”
“So?” Rane asked.
“So I been disarmed,” Beeman glowered. “All I carry is a radio and a play Enfield. Saturday I hang out at the Confederate camp at Hurlbut Field. Sunday morning I’m with the Union guys over by the History Center at the river landing.” Beeman sagged back in his chair.
“What about me? Can I bring my reenactor gear and camera?” Rane asked.
“Don’t see why not. We gotta dress the part.” Beeman abruptly stood up and looked out his office window. “Well shit. Gonna rain all night and most of tomorrow so we might as well kick back tonight and take it easy.”
Beeman’s cell phone rang.
He answered and said, “Hey, Danny. Yeah…” drawing it out as he looked up at Rane and raised an eyebrow. “Got him standing right here in my office.”
Rane looked up, his face instantly questioning. Beeman warned him off with an upraised hand, intent on listening to his conversation. Rane twisted in limbo for almost two minutes.
“Thank you Danny very much, I owe you one,” Beeman said, ending the call. He got up and perused Rane. “Gets curiouser and curiouser. That was Danny Landry, investigator at the State Crime Bureau in Jackson…”
“And?” Rane asked.
“Tell you a little later,” Beeman said. “Right now we got some shopping to do. Don’t know about you but I sure could use a drink. Whattaya say?”
51
“EVERCLEAR GRAIN ALCOHOL?” RANE WONDERED. “That shit’s illegal in Minnesota.”
They’d stopped at a grocery, a hardware, and a pizza place, and then proceeded to Beeman’s house. The Mustang tailing them peeled off at the driveway. Outside it was raining like hell. Inside, Beeman was munching on a wedge of sausage-and-cheese pizza and opening cans of lemonade and pouring them into a widemouthed Igloo water jug on his kitchen counter. So far he’d dumped in a generous slug of the Everclear, a bottle of vodka, and three oranges—carefully hand-torn and squeezed, peels and all.
“Avert your eyes,” Beeman admonished with mock severity. “This is a closely guarded secret recipe that evolved in my uncle Hutch’s hunting camp up the Tenn Tom Waterway.” He dumped in some ice cubes, tipped the container under the tap, and ran in some water.
“But Everclear?” Rane repeated, staring at the bottle on the counter. “My uncle used that stuff to soak his pipes to remove tobacco tar?”
“Negative,” Beeman said, picking up the bottle and sloshing in another slug. “Tonight it’s gonna serve as hundred-ninety proof broomstick remover. It’s time we extracted that uptight Minnesota broomstick out from your ass, don’t you think, John?”
Beeman placed the bottle back on the counter and pointed to the jug’s open neck. “Now put your hand in there and stir it around, redneck-style.”
Rane tucked in his thumb, reached in his hand, and swished the cold concoction around. Then he withdrew his hand and licked his fingertips. “Smooth,” he said.
Beeman winked. “Deceptively smooth. Ain’t what it seems. Kinda like you, huh?” Then he screwed on the top and carried the bucket and two glasses out to the screened, covered porch at the end of the deck. They pulled up two lounge chairs, Beeman situated the jug on a low table between them, and depressed the spigot, then filled two glasses and handed one to Rane.
Rain misted in through the screens. A crooked trident of lightning illuminated Beeman’s back acreage enough to reveal that several more dead catfish had floated belly-up in his poisoned fish pond. Rane took a strong pull on his glass and found it fruity and ominously easy on the throat. He pictured it going down like a depth charge, saw himself strapped to it, plummeting deeper into Beeman’s world.
“Truth,” Beeman said, raising his glass. “How the hell are you and me going to find the truth in all this, John?”
Rane shrugged. “You mean about Mitchell Lee? That’s not my department. I leave the truth to my Nikon. Whatever else goes down, bottom line, the camera doesn’t lie.”
“Bullshit, that’s a cop-out. Camera’s just a machine feeds back what you point it at,” Beeman said. “And I ain’t talking about Mitchell Lee. I suspect that’s going to work out in a way I’ll never fully understand ’cause I ain’t privy to the counsels of the people who run this town.” Beeman pointed his corncob pipe. “What I’m getting at is you.”
Rane blinked as a flush of sweat swelled his eyes. One-ninety proof on top of vodka. Jesus. He took another drink.
Beeman stuffed his pipe. Rane lit a Spirit. They refilled their glasses.
“Thing about you, Beeman,” Rane said with a rambunctious edge as the Everclear stripped off the veneer of his control, “is you don’t come right out and say a thing. Everything curves around indirect. Reminds me of Go, the Japanese…”
“…Board game.” Beeman nodded. “Ran into it in college. A game of encirclement, all these black and white stones wrapped tight all mixed up in a stranglehold around each other.” He chuckled. “Bears a certain resemblance to the South…”
“I mean, you got something to say to me, goddamn it, say it,” Rane challenged.
Beeman stroked his chin, sipped from his glass, and leaned back in his chair. “Thing that struck me weird about the game of Go is—something I read, in Mailer I think it was The Naked and the Dead. How the Japs invent this subtle strategy game at the same time they come up with the banzai charge…”
“Jesus, there you go,” Rane muttered.
Beeman sat down his glass and scrubbed his knuckles into his frazzled hair. “See, my job, when they let me do it—which ain’t often—is to solve what happened. So Paul gets killed an
d you show up…
“Then turns out when I called the new widow I wound up talking to you. Next I find out Edin raised your daughter. And you show up with his clothes and gear. So I got a press guy with a personal agenda. I ask Jenny Edin and she says you’re all fucked up and are trying to be a father. Okay. Seeing’s how you got hiding behind a camera somehow confused with real life, I think…this guy’s turning this tragedy into a personal coming-out party…”
Beeman had turned out the kitchen lights, and the pockets of twilight rain shadow slowly spread out from his eyes.
“Get to it, Beeman,” Rane said, leaning over and refilling his glass.
“When the Tennessee coppers ran you on NCIC you came up clean. But now we got your license and social security in the system. So I gave them to Landry in Jackson, asked him to call up North and ask around about you with his sister agency, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” Beeman pitched forward in his chair and wagged his finger. “He hears back that the FBI visited you in 2002, during the DC sniper shootings. They were combing through military records checking on sniper-qualified personnel who had anything unusual flagged in their records…”
“Oh give me a break…” Rane mumbled, his voice weary.
Beeman inclined his head. “When you were listing all those schools you went to you left one out. Appears the army sent you to the Marine Scout Sniper School and you completed the course.”
“C’mon, Beeman, it was just another school I covered. Doing background. I went back and shot a photo spread. I explained to the Feds that a couple of instructors at the school resented me taking up valuable training time on a photo lark and entered their opinions in my records. Check that with your guy in Jackson. It ended there.”
“I doubt it,” Beeman said.
Rane thought of the pierced quarter, his graduation key fob from the police sniper school at Camp Ripley, sitting in his wallet between the credit cards. Probably only a matter of time before Beeman ferreted out the reason he’d quit the St. Paul cops.
But then Beeman lurched in his chair when a monkish shadow in a rain poncho crossed the patio. He’d pulled out the SIG as the figure stamped up the deck steps. “Who’s that?” Beeman called out.
“Jesus, Bee, sounds like you’re half in the bag,” said the hooded man, opening the screen door and throwing back his rain hood. Rane recognized the bearded, sidewalled cop from the sheriff’s office. “We got Marcy Leets out front, and she ain’t driving that white Caddy. Got this old rattle-trap Honda. She wants to talk to you.”
Beeman rolled his eyes and laughed. “What the hell, long as she ain’t armed.” He didn’t try to hide the slur in his drawl.
The cop grunted and batted his eyes. “I’ll strip-search her if you like. Expect all I’ll find is fifty caliber tits, slightly banged up, and a depleted-uranium jelly roll.”
“Send her in,” Beeman said as he returned his pistol to his holster with difficulty, missing the first time.
Rane tipped his glass and took another drink; rolling with it, loose as dice, on a rainy night in Mississippi.
MARCY LEETS DROVE UP THE DRIVEWAY AND GOT OUT OF A BATTERED Honda Civic, wearing a well-cut raincoat. She trudged stiffly up the steps, came onto the porch, and tipped her head carefully to shake raindrops from her hair. A square of taped gauze covered her puffy cheek.
“I hate this fuckin’ thing,” she said by way of hello.
Beeman held up his glass. “We’re drinking tonight. You want some?”
“I took a Percocet,” Marcy said. “I shouldn’t even be driving.”
“Where’s the Escalade?” Beeman asked.
“It attracts the eye, so I got one of Darl’s junkers,” she said, craning her neck toward the kitchen sliding door, trying to look into the darkened house. “So this is where you live, huh?” Then she turned and felt her pockets. “I’ll take a smoke if you have one. Left mine in the car.”
Rane shook out a Spirit, which Marcy accepted, along with a light.
“He’s still here?” she said, waving the cigarette at Rane.
“Can’t be helped. Don’t trust him out of my sight,” Beeman said.
“Well, he makes me nervous. Gotta be the quietest man I ever seen…”
Beeman shrugged. “We’re joined at the hip for the duration.”
“I can dig it.” She raised a hand and tentatively touched her bandaged cheek. “Me? I got a crazy fucker calling me up.”
“Really,” Beeman said, “all I get is text messages.”
“He apologized,” Marcy said.
“That was sweet,” Beeman said.
“Pretty-boy asshole never could handle his liquor,” Marcy said with an edge of fatal boredom. Rane watched rain shadows mate with the dark bruises on her throat as she puffed nervously on the cigarette. “He’s sorry and wants me to run off with him. Then he’s enraged and he swears he’s going to kill you if you show your face at Shiloh, like he’s getting off on all the talk…out in the woods playing Rambo or some damn thing. He’s not stable, Bee.”
“Call you on your cell phone?” Beeman asked. She nodded. “Let me see,” he said.
She dug the phone out of her pocket and handed it over. Beeman took out his cell and thumbed them side by side, the panel lights playing on his face. He glanced at Rane. “Numbers match.” Then he turned to Marcy. “Don’t suppose you got him on voice mail?”
She shook her head.
Beeman handed the phone back and said, “I talked to Billie Watts.”
“We all heard,” she said, eyes darting at the rain. “You ain’t wearing a recording device, are you?”
Her comment struck Beeman as hilarious and he laughed out loud.
“It’s not funny. Dwayne especially is not happy. He came right in the hospital this morning when they let me out and asked me how to arrange a meet with Mitchell Lee, afraid he’s going to run his mouth in the fucked-up state he’s in. Wants to talk him down out of his tree and tuck him away. Maybe permanently.” She shuddered convincingly. “I’m caught in the middle and this shit’s getting too crazy. I want a deal, Bee.”
She was good. The scared was real. Rane couldn’t tell if she was lying or not.
“Why don’t you sit down, Marcy,” Beeman said softly, pointing his glass at the third chair on the porch. Marcy sighed and nodded, then lowered herself to the chair.
Beeman opened his hands in a “whattaya got?” gesture.
“Let’s say I heard some things,” she said cautiously. “Pillow-talk things…” Her eyes tipped up with a plea. “Hearing a thing and wanting a thing ain’t the same. The law understands that, right, Bee?”
“You cooperate, and it pans out, you’ll be a protected confidential informant. You got my word,” Beeman said.
“Darl got dragged into the margins of this thing and I want him clear if I cooperate. Agreed?” She shot Beeman a hard, bargaining look.
Beeman nodded.
“Okay,” Marcy said. “You heard how Dwayne is putting together a construction outfit? And you know that big developer bunch in Nashville who paid for the monument? Well, that statue Mitchell Lee built for Hiram Kirby is a Trojan Horse full of condominiums…”
“Hmmm,” Beeman mulled, sitting up straighter now, setting his glass aside.
“He’s got this plan to develop Kirby Creek, after old Hiram dies. They got it on paper. They done studies. Civil War–themed condos on the lake, named after generals. Put in tennis courts and little jogging paths through the battlefield and such.” She paused, stared at the smoke curling up from her cigarette.
Beeman flopped back in his chair and exhaled, “The battlefield…”
“Billie told you about the will business I suppose?” Marcy asked.
Beeman blinked and leaned forward. “Get down to it, Marcy.”
“Tried to talk them out of it,” Marcy said frankly. “They wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Less wallpaper, Marcy, more cooperation. I can run you downtown as a material witness a
nd you’ll be wearing striped pajamas in county,” Beeman prompted.
“Well, his scrawny wife wouldn’t hear of it, anything to do with coming in and disturbing that ground, what with the unmarked graves and all…so Dwayne and Mitchell Lee were going to get rid of her when Hiram dies; run her down on the road when she’s out training for her marathon.”
“Another accident. Like me getting shot at Kirby Creek,” Beeman said. Rane could almost hear his eyes clicking in the dark.
“Too many players. Too many moving parts. I told them it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t,” Marcy said in a cool, practical voice.
“Goddamn it, stop beating around,” Beeman demanded.
Marcy raised her wide, blue eyes and they glistened through the bruises and bandages. “I can give you Mitchell Lee,” she said.
“How?”
“Tell you where and when he’s going to hook up with Dwayne. They’re using me as the go-between.”
“How about telling me where he is now?” Beeman asked.
“I won’t know that until it happens. And don’t go putting a tail on me. Just be extra work to lose them.”
“Shit,” Beeman said.
“Look, I got a feeling he’s camping out at Shiloh. But I ain’t sure. And I can’t promise he won’t still be gunning for you. So, you going to be out there tomorrow?”
Beeman nodded. “I’ll be at the Confederate camp at Hurlbut Field tomorrow afternoon and spend the night. On Sunday morning you can find me with the blue-suiters, over by the History Center.”
“We got a deal, Bee?”
“We got a deal,” Beeman said.
“Okay. Keep your cell phone charged,” Marcy said, standing up. “I’ll be in touch.”
“YOU BELIEVE HER?” RANE ASKED AFTER MARCY LEFT.
“Nope,” Beeman said, head inclined, studying the bottom of his glass. “Don’t believe you either with your camera you never use.”