River of Secrets

by Roger Johns

  Mason’s arrival had changed that. Almost from the moment they started working together, her focus had enlarged to include him.

  “Perfect timing,” Carol said as Wallace entered the kitchen.

  “Can I help you do anything?”

  “Push the Start button on the dishwasher.”

  “Lucky me.” She pushed the button and then leaned back against the counter and looked at her mother. A sad expression had taken over Carol’s face. “Mom, what’s the matter?”

  “I had a dream about your father last night.” She brushed her palm across the countertop, as if she were wiping away crumbs. Her eyes followed her moving hand.

  “Tell me about it.” Wallace reached for her mother’s hand, but Carol moved away and then sat on a stool next to the stove island.

  “We were walking along a crowded street. Suddenly, Walter stopped. ‘You go on,’ he said. He shooed me away, so I walked a bit and looked back, and he was standing right where I left him, smiling and waving me on. Every time I looked he was a smaller part of the picture, until all I could see was his face. I felt like the crowd would surge and wash him away. I felt so lonely and so sad. And he just had that stupid smile on his face. I knew if I kept going, I would lose sight of him, so I hurried back. I told him I loved him and he said he loved me too. We walked back in the direction we had come from, talking about what we did earlier that day, but before I realized it, we were back where he said he had to stop, and he was telling me to go on.”

  Wallace scrutinized her mother’s face. “You’ve had this dream before.”

  Carol’s gaze fixed on Wallace for a moment and then she slid from the stool and began rearranging spice jars clustered next to the stovetop. “How would you know that?”

  “You don’t seem very upset and you usually get weepy at a lost-puppy poster.” Wallace took her mother’s place on the stool.

  “Well, aren’t you a regular detective.”

  “Mom, I’m not sure I believe in signs from above, but at the very least your own subconscious seems to be giving you permission to move ahead with a new part of life. If your mind is couching it in terms of Dad giving you the go-ahead, then go ahead.”

  “His is not the only understanding I value.”

  “You don’t need my permission to have a man in your life.”

  Carol propped her elbows on the countertop and laced her fingers together. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “If you’re not interested in Davis, just tell him.”

  “It’s not that simple.” Carol rested her chin on top of her intertwined fingers and looked at Wallace. “Did you ever wonder what made me choose your father over Davis?”

  “Not really.” Wallace squirmed, giving her mother a nervous look. “Is this something I need to know?”

  “Davis was very certain about things. He had a sense of the way things ought to be and he’d go about engineering situations to meet those expectations.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “I wasn’t sure if that left any room for me and my ways of thinking. Everybody has their differences, you know.”

  “Has he changed, in that regard?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure. But at our age it’s less threatening. We’ve both probably figured out who we are. And don’t get me wrong. His sort of single-mindedness is probably what made him such a good lawyer.”

  “Which doesn’t necessarily make for a good husband.”

  “Your father and I were a perfect fit—naturally and effortlessly so. A rare thing.”

  “But people do change. I’m not the same woman who married Kenny, all those years ago. Mason might not have worked for me back then.”

  Carol sighed and gave Wallace a tender smile. “You’re a lot like your father was.”

  “Hardheaded, you mean?”

  Carol laughed. Her eyes brightened for just a second as she studied Wallace. “And intensely logical, even when the emotional strain makes that tough.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Remind you that logic isn’t the only way to reason through a situation. And then haul you up to the front of the house, so we can rejoin our dinner companions.” Carol looped her arm around Wallace’s waist and pulled her along into the hallway.

  “Dinner was wonderful,” Wallace said as they joined Davis and Mason on the front porch. “I didn’t know you were such a fancy cook, Davis.”

  “New hobby,” he said, pulling a chair around for Carol.

  “I think this little to-do is Davis’s way of distracting me from being content with my solitary life,” Carol said, reopening the subject of their kitchen discussion.

  “How hard do you plan to make him work at it?” Wallace asked, taking Carol’s statement as a license to pursue the topic.

  “You’ve phrased your question in a way that assumes she already knows the answer,” Davis said with a toothy smile. “I’m not yet convinced that’s the case.”

  “I’m not making anybody do anything,” Carol objected.

  Wallace looked over at Mason. His expression was a mixture of fascination and mild discomfort. His home life growing up had been one of emotional austerity and physical turbulence, and he wasn’t accustomed to the casual intimacy so normal among Wallace’s friends and family.

  “Entirely true,” Davis continued. “But she hasn’t told me to hit the bricks, either.”

  Wallace walked around behind Mason’s chair and laid her hands on his chest, then leaned over and kissed the top of his head. When he reached up and took each of her hands in his, she could feel the difference in the strength of his grip.

  “Davis, what do you want with me, anyway?” Carol asked. “I’m an old woman.”

  “You’ve been an old woman since we were kids. Why should that bother me now?”

  “If you’re trying to be charming, it’s not working.”

  “It worked for Walter.”

  “You’re not Walter.”

  “Walter’s not even Walter, anymore.”

  “Wallace, are you listening to the way he’s talking about your father? Don’t you have something to say?”

  “Mom, we’ve got to go.” She massaged Mason’s shoulders.

  “And leave me alone with this man? Even though you know full well, the minute you’re gone, he’ll probably try something?”

  “You make it sound so dramatic. Besides, he looks determined. I don’t think us staying will change his game plan.”

  “When he thinks I can’t hear him, he refers to me as ‘the widow Hartman.’ Before you two arrived, he was out here on the porch, yakking into his phone with one of those silly friends of his. ‘I’m paying a call on the widow Hartman.’ What kind of talk is that?”

  “The true kind?” Wallace frisked herself for her phone and her keys.

  “See what happens, Davis? You teach a child to always tell the truth and then just as soon as it’s the wrong thing to do it’s the first thing out of her mouth.”

  “You and Mason can’t leave before I give Carol her birthday present.” He pulled a clumsily wrapped box from the side pocket of his blazer and offered it to Carol on his outstretched palm.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to buy me anything?”

  “You did, and I didn’t.”

  “Then, where did you get this?”

  “Stolen goods.”

  Carol eyed the box with suspicion.

  “Just open it,” Davis said. “We’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  Carol snatched the box from his palm and began pulling the paper away, the tendons bow-stringing on the backs of her hands as she struggled with the ribbon.

  “Careful,” Davis said. “It’s the last of its kind.”

  Carol pulled away the remaining bits of wrapping to reveal a small framed photograph of her and Davis as teenagers. They were standing in front of the clubhouse at the city park golf course. She was looking wide-eyed into the camera, her cheeks puffed out like a blowfish. Davis, with an exag
gerated pucker, was giving the camera a sidelong glance as he planted a kiss on one of Carol’s inflated cheeks.

  “Wallace swiped this out of a box in my closet, didn’t she? That’s why you wanted her here. So she could do your thieving for you. You little devil,” she said, smiling at Wallace.

  Davis gave her his patented so-what shrug, that effortless way he had of acknowledging he had done wrong but still managed to get things right. He still had the rascally frat-boy attitude that made him such a formidable presence in the courtroom. Wallace had seen a long line of judges fall victim to that little enchantment of his. She watched as her mother studied the picture.

  Carol’s eyes glistened, then appeared to lose focus. Her gaze drifted to one side and her eyelids gently closed.

  “How did you know I still had this?” Her eyes opened and she looked at Davis.

  He gave her the shrug again, adding a smirk and a slow-motion eye roll. “Of course, I had no idea where you might have stashed it. For that I needed a little help. And if you must know, and I think you must, Wallace didn’t hesitate for so much as a second.”

  “Well, I have to say, this is a strange sort of a gift. You’re giving me back something that was mine all along?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “May I?” Mason asked, leaning forward to look.

  Carol handed him the photograph, then sat back in her chair.

  Mason studied the image. He turned his head to look up at Wallace and then he looked back at the picture. “Carol, you’ve certainly perpetuated your good looks.”

  “Oh, please,” Wallace said. “Have you been taking smooth-operator lessons from Davis?”

  “Bravo,” Carol said as Mason answered with a respectable imitation of the Davis shrug.

  Wallace looked from Mason to her mother and saw something in her face she had never seen before. Carol’s gaze traveled back and forth between her and Mason, studying their faces, and Wallace could tell that her mother was trying to imagine what a grandchild might look like. A current of alarm jolted through her.

  Sensing the tension, Mason tilted his head back and looked up at her, his expression instantly mirroring the worry he saw on her face.

  “Mom, we really have to go. Happy Birthday.”

  Everyone stood, and there was a round-robin of hugs and good-byes.

  “This is a good thing you’re doing,” Wallace whispered in Davis’s ear as she and Mason stepped off the porch into the darkness.

  * * *

  They drove in companionable silence, arriving at Mason’s apartment building—a nicely restored two-story fourplex on the edge of the Garden District—less than five minutes after leaving the birthday party.

  Wallace killed the engine and rolled down the windows. She turned toward Mason with a wistful smile on her face.

  “What’s going on in that head of yours?” Mason whispered.

  “I think my mother is falling in love with you.”

  “What about you?”

  “I might be too. Maybe, just a little.” She brightened her smile, hoping Mason wouldn’t sense the anxiety beginning to gnaw at her, in the wake of Craig’s visit. “A lot happened at that little party.”

  “I was there, remember?” He turned and reached for her just as her phone lit up.

  “Sorry,” she said, giving Mason a pained look. “It’s Burley.” She put the phone to her ear. “Somehow I knew we’d be talking before the night was through.”

  As she listened, she looked over at Mason and gave him a sad pouty face. After a few minutes, she signed off and put the phone away.

  “I can tell from your end of the conversation that my plans for a grand seduction just got back-burnered,” Mason said.

  “Somebody’s unhappy about my visitor during the party. Burley and the chief of police feels the need to chat me up.”

  “If it’s not too late when you’re done with the other men in your life, you know where to find me.”

  She smiled and leaned in for a kiss.

  EIGHT

  Wallace met Burley in his office—a glass-walled fishbowl a short hallway away from the Homicide Division cubicle farm—and laid out all the details of Craig’s visit.

  “Just for the record, I don’t like this,” Burley said.

  “Because you’re worried about the politics of it.”

  “Look, the defense has a statutory obligation to formally notify the DA if they plan to use an alibi and they have to show whatever evidence they’ve got that supports it. They have to show it to us. But this is not something that should be done informally by the brother of the prime suspect, the brother who just happens to be a lifelong friend of the principal investigator.”

  “What’s done is done. We can’t change it, so let’s use it to our advantage. I want to do some snooping around False River and I want to search Craig’s fishing camp.”

  Burley sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his softening middle. “We’ll need a warrant, because there’s no way Eddie’s lawyer is going to allow a consent search of that house.”

  “Which is why I want you to lead the charge with the powers that be in Pointe Coupee Parish and in New Roads, the little town right next to False River, and make it okay for me to get this done.”

  “Slow down. Are you sure you want to do this? Once your relationship with Craig Stephens becomes common knowledge—and it will—the perception will be that you’re looking for evidence to substantiate the alibi because of your friendship, and that maybe you’ll be less diligent or objective about looking for or preserving evidence that tends to cut the other way.”

  “I just want the facts, whichever way they cut. This was not a spur-of-the-moment crime of opportunity. There was no break-in. The victim’s cell phone and laptop are missing, but none of the other valuables were even touched. This was an execution and it clearly took planning. And now I have credible information that, at the time of the murder, the prime suspect was someplace else.”

  “And I’m not questioning your intentions.”

  “Then why all this pushback? If we have good reason to believe the suspect was at a specific place at the critical time, then we have an obligation to go over that location with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “It isn’t an issue of what needs to be done. It’s about who should be doing it.”

  Wallace’s head snapped up like she’d been slapped. “I see.”

  “And this has nothing to do with you as a person. You don’t ever need to convince me that your motives are pure.” With both hands, fingers splayed, he pushed down on the air in front of him. “It has to do with how your connection to Eddie Pitkin will be viewed from the outside.”

  “And from the inside. You’re not saying that, but I can hear it in your voice.”

  “There are some on the blue team who will think you’ve gone to work for the defense because your good buddy’s half-brother is the one with his head on the block.”

  It dawned on her what a clever move Craig had made. If she got taken off the case and Eddie ended up being found guilty, she wouldn’t have been the one to put Eddie in line for the needle. And Craig would have moved her out of the picture without the insult of directly asking her to take herself off the case. It would look like she was being replaced because he had tried to use his friendship with her to steer the investigation.

  It was also possible that Craig was worried that, of all the possible investigators the police could put on the case, she would be the likeliest to find any damning evidence. By having her off the case, he was trimming the odds of that happening.

  He was trying to help her while he was trying to save Eddie and he was willing to take the heat for sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. It was typical Craig—smarter than everyone else and not afraid to suffer for it.

  She looked up at Burley. His grimace and his slow nod told her he was thinking the same thing.

  “I don’t want to be taken off this case.”

  Burley just stared at her.
A tiny smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  “So what are you going to do?” She crossed her arms and stared back at him.

  “Send you upstairs. Chief Shannon wants to put his two cents in.”

  * * *

  Wallace couldn’t remember the last time she had been on one of the upper floors of the building on a weekend night. The hallways were dim and quiet. She pulled open the door to the chief’s office suite and stepped inside. The only light came from his open doorway, across the empty reception area.

  Jack Shannon’s office was nicely appointed but conspicuously modest. Most of the wall decorations were awards and certificates and photographs of him with local dignitaries. He didn’t believe in feathering his nest with the tax dollars of hardworking citizens. Especially when quite a few of those hardworking citizens were police officers who risked their lives for a paycheck and would resent seeing chunks of their money turned into Oriental rugs and cloisonné vases for the exclusive enjoyment of some bureaucrat who no longer risked his life for a paycheck.

  “Have a seat, Detective. I’m sure we’d all prefer to be home right now, but for reasons you’ll understand in a moment, this case is the department’s number one priority. Number one headache too. So, before we move on to the issue of Craig Stephens, I’d like to show you something that was brought to me by the pastor of one of the largest, predominantly African-American churches in town. Right over here, if you don’t mind.”

  He pointed to a seat at the little conference table in one corner of the room. A laptop rested on the table in front of where he wanted her to sit.

  “Just click the Go icon on the video. I’ve already seen it, so I’ll let you enjoy it. Then we’ll chat.”

  The video was shaky, but the event it recorded was crystal clear. The cab and the bed of a bright red dual-wheel pickup were loaded with hollering white teenagers, male and female. One of the girls standing in the bed was holding up a wind-stiffened banner tacked to a wooden pole. A game of hangman was crudely sketched in black paint on a white bedsheet. Beneath the unfinished image of the person on the gallows it read: