Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Next he called French, in his office in Fulsom. The chief was chewing.

  “You shitting me,” he said.

  “Naw I ain’t. Shot in the chest.”

  “Rains it pours, don’t it.” French sounded annoyed. “How’d they know to go out yonder?”

  Silas slowed for a log truck in front of him on the road, its longest tree with limbs that still bore a few shivering needles. “I sent em.”

  A long beat. “You sent em.”

  “Yeah.”

  French waited. “Well?”

  He hesitated, aware of the word he was about to use. “On a hunch.”

  “A hunch? What are you, Shaft?”

  Silas fed him the chain of events.

  “Shit, 32,” French said. “Track a cloud of buzzards to a floater in the morning and follow a ‘hunch’ to attempted murder in the afternoon. You after my job?”

  Silas signaled and passed the log truck, waving an absent hand out the window. “Just a pay raise. But Ott might be more than attempted murder.”

  “Right.” Chewing. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he won’t make it.”

  “That a oyster po’boy, Chief?”

  “Shrimp, smart-ass.” He belched.

  “Damn, I can smell that shit through the phone.”

  “I’ll go to the hospital,” French said, “get a look at the victim. You boogie on over to your friend’s and I’ll get there when I can. And don’t touch nothing.”

  He rogered and hung up, relieved not to have to go see Larry.

  By now it was darker and he turned on his lights, passed a run-down house with an old black man under his porch light in a rocking chair smoking a cigarette. Silas beeped his horn and the man waved back.

  Though Larry’s shop was on the outskirts of Fulsom, he lived near the community of Amos, just within Silas’s jurisdiction. People from larger towns always thought Chabot was small, but it was a metropolis compared to Amos, Mississippi, which used to have a store but even that was closed now. A few paved roads and a lot of dirt ones, a land of sewer ditches and gullies stripped of their timber and houses and single-wides speckled back in the clear-cut like moles revealed by a haircut. The train from Meridian used to stop there, but now it just rattled and clanged on past. Amos’s population had fallen in the last dozen years, and most people remaining were black folks who lived along Dump Road. Silas’s mother had lived there, too, for a while, in the trailer the bank had repossessed. These days the population had declined to eighty-six.

  He thought of M&M. Eighty-five.

  He slowed at a little bridge, saw the sign. WELCOME TO AMOS. A little farther he turned left onto Larry Ott Road—since 9/11, for response to possible terrorism, every road, even dirt ones, had to be named or numbered. In this case, the sign was always gone because teenagers kept stealing them.

  Silas braked, signaled, and turned, his lights sweeping Larry’s beat-up mailbox into sight and back out as he tunneled through the darkness with his high beams, a road he hadn’t seen for over two decades. A quarter mile farther he passed the old Walker place, where Cindy Walker, the girl who’d disappeared, had lived, the house nothing but a slanting shanty in weeds, roof sinking, windows boarded up, porch fallen in. Somebody had stolen the concrete block steps.

  His tires slid on the dirt and he slowed, fishtailing, righting, looking for other tire tracks and seeing the ambulance’s and a truck’s, probably Larry’s, intersecting and coming apart like something untwining. Dirt roads were a blessing when it came to investigating a crime scene. Silas had worked a few cases with French, couple burglaries and assaults and one murder about a year ago, watched French use his black magnetic powder to lift prints, his distilled water and cotton balls to collect blood samples. It was nothing like movies or television where they dug moths out of the victim’s mouth with tweezers. Mostly it was just being careful and looking, a hair in the sink, a fingernail snagged in a rug.

  He stopped at Larry’s house under a clearing sky. No stars yet but half a bright yellow moon lodged in the trees across the field. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and got out and aimed his flashlight. A lot of mud, lot of footprints.

  Larry’s truck was parked by the driveway, its door closed. He wished it was light so he could see better. It was too easy to muck up a crime scene in the dark, never knew what you’d step on. Not a bad case for waiting till morning. Of course the fresher the evidence was the better, especially fingerprints. But he didn’t have a kit for that kind of detective work, and it wasn’t his job anyway. That’s why they paid French the big bucks, fourteen an hour.

  He checked out the truck first. Driver window down. He laid the back of his hand on the hood. Cold. Rain had gotten in the cab but he didn’t close the window, knew it was better to leave things the way they were.

  He turned, glad the rain had stopped, but before he went to the house he clicked off his light and stood breathing the night air, listening to the far cry of a whip-poor-will and the pulse of crickets all around.

  The house, small, wood, painted white, had a raised foundation and railed front porch, screened windows across the facade. He scraped mud from his boots on the bottom step of the sidewalk that led to the porch and walked up the steps. He paused a moment. There was a rocking chair with a cushion and he imagined Larry here each evening, the other half of the porch empty.

  He pulled the screen door open and held it with his hip, turned the front doorknob with two fingers, this among the best places for prints. It was unlocked and he creaked it into the room with the heel of his hand and ran his light over the floor and saw it reflected in the puddle of blood. Pistol off to the side, bloodied grip.

  He stepped in, located the switch and turned on the light and the room resumed itself, clean in its corners and dusted. An ancient television, a recliner with a TV tray folded against the wall. Kitchen to the left. He knelt by the pistol, not touching it. Twenty-two, looked like.

  Breathing deeply, he stood. Smelled disinfectant and mildew. Only here once and he still remembered it. He closed the door, careful not to step in the blood, and crossed the room to where the dark hall stretched out of sight. He switched on the light. There were three bedrooms and one bathroom, door at the end. A shotgun house. He remembered the first room as Larry’s as he walked along the wall, the gun cabinet halfway down the hall empty of rifles and shotguns, piled instead with mail and books.

  In Larry’s room he turned on the light, neat bed, tucked corners, paneled walls. Shelves full of the books Larry had read as a kid. Stephen King hardbacks. Tarzan paperbacks, Conan the Barbarians. Harlan Ellison. Louis L’Amour and others, lots of them he’d never heard of. In one corner there was another pile of yellowing mail. Hundreds of catalogs and sales circulars. A whole stack of Book-of-the-Month Club catalogs. Another of the Double-day Book Club. The Quality Paperback Book Club. Several stacks of old TV Guides. Silas creaked the closet open and frowned at a row of suits and shirts, clothes of a boy on one end and growing longer down the rod, a man on the other. A stack of uniforms on the floor, LARRY on the shirt.

  In the bathroom he flipped past his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. No prescription drugs. Just a tin of Bayer aspirin rusting on the metal. Tube of toothpaste. No dental floss.

  Toilet bowl was clean of the ring Silas’s had, which meant you needed to use some Comet or something. Even had one of those blue disinfectant things. Behind its curtain, the shower was clean, drain a little rusty, few hairs. Head & Shoulders, nub of soap.

  Moving through the rest of the house, he opened drawers and looked under beds but found nothing surprising. He left all the lights on and went out the back door and down the steps. He stood in the dark, listening to the birds and bugs. Out here wasn’t what you’d call a backyard: it was more of a back field. His cone of light showed more footprints and he found an unmarred section of ground and walked to the gate and stopped.

  There it was.

  The barn.

  He stood leaning on the gate and sa
w himself years ago, the day he’d come here. No grown-ups, no teachers, no other girls or boys, black or white, just him and Larry. He remembered following Larry through the house, past the gun cabinet, rifles and shotguns standing in their racks. Remembered going out the back door and over the huge yard, rolling open the doors and going inside the barn. They’d climbed on the tractor and caught lizards—anoles, Larry had called them. Then quickly added, “But some people call em ‘lizards,’ too.” They “incarcerated” (Larry’s word) the anoles in an aquarium Larry found in a dark cluttered room Silas didn’t enter. They found what Silas proclaimed a cottonmouth-moccasin but Larry called a chicken snake woven around the rafters under the eaves, and Larry took its tail and unwrapped the snake as it snapped at him and shot out its tongue. He grabbed it behind its neck and held it, enormous and gray, patterned with darker green ovals, longer than either boy. Did Silas want to hold it? Hell naw. It had a bulge like a softball in its stomach and Larry said it must’ve eaten a rat or something. He said there were big rats in the barn. Silas said why didn’t they keep the snake incarcerated, too, and they did, in a gallon jar, alongside their aquarium. Silas had said, “Like a reptile house,” and Larry had said, “A herpetarium.”

  Now, Silas took a deep breath and remembered the watermelon aroma of cut grass. He played his light over the yard, mown close, then turned back to the barn and followed the beam of light to the bay door and rolled it open. He slipped inside the dark, recalling the snake in the mailbox and trying to remember if snakes hung around after dark. His flashlight threw the tractor’s shadow on the far wall and then probed the ground, no boards, just soft dirt. Rat waddling away. The lawn mower handle sticking out, wrapped in black electrical tape. A chain saw hanging on a nail. He saw a door on the left side and heard movement within it. A stirring.

  His heart beat faster. For a latch the door had a slab of a two-by-four nailed in the wall. He moved his light to his right hand and slid his .45 from its holster with his left, easing up on the door. That smell. What was it? For a moment he imagined it was a body. Aiming the pistol with a stiff arm, he used the flashlight to turn the latch down, and when he did, the door swung open and the noise stopped.

  He poked his head in and a hen fluttered in his light and he yelped and his pistol discharged and set all the other birds aflight.

  “Shit,” he said, laughing.

  The chickens agreed.

  HE WAS WAITING on Larry’s porch listening to the wind chime when Angie called, said she and Tab were headed to the Bus, if he wanted to join them. If he could he would, he said.

  A while later French’s Bronco came bouncing up, blinding him with its lights, and pulled to a stop beside his Jeep. The CI got out adjusting his sidearm, holding a plastic bag with something in it. He went to the back of his Bronco, careful where he stepped, and raised the shell and lifted his heavy black investigator’s kit out and joined Silas on the porch. He had a cigarette hanging from his lower lip and set the bag down.

  “How is he?”

  “Not dead,” French said. He held up a bag with keys, a wallet, and cell phone in it and exhaled smoke from his nose and shook his head at, perhaps, the general nature of things. “Lost a shitload of blood.”

  “So I seen.”

  French pointed to the concrete walkway heading over the yard, a series of small sneaker prints, in blood, going away from the house, each dimmer than the one before.

  “There’s Angie.”

  Silas put his hat on and crossed the porch with his own light, fanning it out into the yard. People often covered their fingerprints, he knew, and destroyed bloody clothing and hid weapons. But they rarely thought of the simplest and oldest evidence in the world, footprints. Or tire prints.

  French knelt at the end of the sidewalk with his light, reading the runes and ruts, a cigarette smoking in his fingers. Silas came to the top of the steps.

  French turned his light. “Hold up your boot sole toward me.”

  Silas did.

  “Yeah, this would be you.”

  French reached in his shirt pocket and withdrew a clump of thick rubber bands. “Put these on your feet,” he said and watched as Silas stretched the bands over the thickest part of his foot. French also had them over his own shoes. Any foot without a band wouldn’t be law enforcement and would require investigation.

  “Sorry, Chief,” Silas said.

  He ashed his cigarette in his palm and blew it into the wind. “You will be when I make you mold these motherfuckers.”

  Not bothering to put out his smoke, French hefted his investigator’s kit and Silas followed him inside. The CI pulled out a chair from under the kitchen table and set the plastic bag and kit there and stood, pushing his hands in the small of his back until it clicked.

  In the living room they stared at the floor. The blood had dried to the color of molasses and the room had an unpleasant tang. French picked up the pistol by its barrel—it left a smear of blood—and examined it, ejected the cylinder. “Twenty-two,” he said. “Fired once.” He turned it. “Serial number’s bout rubbed off.” He replaced it and stood. “Sheriff Lolly took Ott’s gun privileges away. After his daddy got killed. He ain’t even supposed to have any firearms at all.”

  “Took em away how?”

  “Just did it.”

  They went to the gun cabinet in the hall, gazed down at its stacks of old magazines on the green lining. French opened the drawer at the bottom, more mail. “Maybe Ott moonlit as a postman.”

  “Where’d they go?” Silas asked. “All the guns?”

  “County auctioned em off, I expect.”

  “So where’d he get that pistol?”

  “If it was his? Pawnshop. Gun show. It’s a old model, could’ve had a dozen owners. I’ll run a trace, but it’ll be a dead end.”

  He fished his camera from his pocket.

  “Bullet entry was straight in,” he said, clicking through the pictures, Silas moving to see. Shots of Larry’s pale face, obscured by the oxygen mask. The chief did a miniature slide show, shots of Larry on a table in his mechanic’s uniform, bloodied at the chest. Larry’s shirt being scissored off, an IV going into his arm, close-ups of the wound, tear marks and blackened skin.

  “My guess?” French said. “Self-inflicted.”

  More shots, his pants being cut off, his egg-white legs, people in scrubs and masks, the keys and wallet, cell phone, money fanned out, close-up of Larry’s driver’s license.

  “Could’ve surprised a crackhead,” Silas said.

  “Maybe.” French still studying the pictures. “But he still had his wallet on him. And see the burns here? On his shirt, skin. That indicates a close-range shot, inches, probably.”

  He left Silas at the table and walked over to the television, an ancient mahogany cabinet model with an actual knob you turned. He looked behind the console.

  “I believe our victim here’s the last resident in Mississippi without a remote control. Or cable.” He walked to the window and fingered the flat wire that ran from the back of the TV out the window, up to the antenna. “No answering machine. Ain’t got a computer, either.”

  “So?”

  “Unusual fellow. A frozen in the 1960s kind of character. For instance,” he said, “you ever go in his shop? It’s old-timey shit. Turns his rotors by hand. No power tools. Uses a hand jack. Go in Koen’s up the road yonder and he’s got air ratchets, uses compressors and computers and shit. Engine light comes on, power window stops working, fuel injectors clogged, replace the fucking computer. That’s all they do now. Just take one computer chip out and put another one in. It’s all computers now.”

  “Larry Ott don’t need to upgrade if he ain’t got any business.”

  They stood looking.

  Silas said, “Maybe he can’t get cable out here.”

  “He could get a fucking dish.”

  “Guess he reads books instead.”

  “Reads books.”

  They stood looking over the room.

&
nbsp; “Chief,” Silas said. “Maybe you right.” He crossed to a shelf and picked up something he hadn’t seen yet, a DIRECTV brochure that listed the advantages and channels.

  French came over beside him and touched the spine of one of the books with his gloved knuckle. “Into horror and shit. It’s a lot more of these in that first bedroom. More in all the bedrooms but the parents’. More books I bet you than in the rest of the county combined. Including the library.”

  French went down the hall but Silas remained for a moment. He remembered this book, could see it in Larry’s hands as Larry described the plot. For a moment the two boys were out in the woods, walking, carrying their rifles.

  Silas found French in Larry’s parents’ bedroom, the CI opening drawers. He stopped at the one piled with a woman’s clothes. “Cept for that front room this place don’t look no different than it did when I was last here last week. My guess is he ain’t touched this particular room since his momma went to the home.”

  “Ain’t nothing weird about that.”

  “I didn’t say it was weird. My stepsister’s mother died and she won’t let nobody go in her room except for her. Sometimes she stays in there singing Boz Scaggs songs, so don’t get me started on weird.”

  Back in the kitchen French opened the refrigerator.

  “Here’s something,” he said.

  Silas looked past him, a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer among the eggs and containers of fast food. One can missing.

  “Larry’s been a nondrinker his whole life. His daddy died in a drunkdriving accident.”

  “Maybe he started.”

  “Maybe.”

  French went to the table and examined the surface, then took a towel from the top of the kit and spread it out and began to poke around in the black leather satchel. It reminded Silas of an old-time country doctor’s bag, but bigger; he’d envied this kit, but when he requisitioned the town council for a less expensive set, they’d denied the request.

  French was rewinding a tape on his recorder/video camera, his head in a cowl of smoke. “You remember how to mold?”