Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  After driving slowly around the little clearing for some time, she found what she thought was the track up which they had come in the night. It was more like a tunnel than a road, but the sight of broken branches and deep tire tracks convinced her that she was going the right way. She had, of course, completely forgotten the directions of Darl, but this did not seem to be an insurmountable problem.

  “It stands to reason,” she explained to the dog, “if I pick the road that tends downward every time we meet another trail, then eventually we’ll hit the river valley and the main roads, or if not, we’ll still get off the mountain and reach the land of baths, whiskey, and Lanacane. And dog food. See, that’s the advantage of partnering with a species that has higher mental functions. You could never have figured that out on your own, could you?”

  After an hour or so of driving, during which the fog burned off considerably, she found herself on a steep, rocky road, little more than two ruts, with rank growth and even small trees growing up between them.

  “This is what they call a divided highway in West Virginia,” she said. “The ruts are divided by lovely ornamental sumacs. But lucky us, it’s dropping real steep and I have a good feeling that just around this curve we will be able to see . . .”

  She hit the brakes a little too late, just after she had become aware that the road had disappeared. What lay ahead was a great tangle of sunken, disturbed earth and fallen trees, as if a giant had pressed his foot down hard upon the earth. The truck tilted; Marlene screamed; the dog whined. Metal screeched upon rock, a heavy branch smashed against the windshield, as the truck skidded at a terrifying angle, down, off the road and into the churned-up area.

  And stopped with a bone-jarring thump, nosed into the upended root ball of a toppled hickory. After she had stopped shaking, she got out to inspect the damage. The rear differential housing was wedged upon a boulder, leaving the rear wheels clear of the ground. The front wheels were buried to their upper rims in mud.

  “Well, this truck needs a nice rest. It’s not going anywhere without a wrecker. What we need, Gog, is a colorful Neapolitan dogcart, to which I would hitch you, and you would pull me in a leisurely fashion back to civilization. But you forgot your colorful Neapolitan dogcart, didn’t you? You always forget your goddamn dogcart. What kind of best friend are you? A piss poor one. This is absolutely the last time I am taking you on a fun trip like this.”

  And so on as she labored up the slope. At the top she continued downward on what had been the shoulder of the putative road. Gradually, however, the ruts became fainter, the growth between them became more mature, until she found herself facing a twenty-foot-high mountain ash growing between the vague traces of wheel marks.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the tree, “could you tell me where I could catch the downtown D train?” Turning to the dog, she said, “This is entirely your fault. I will never listen to your stupid ideas again!”

  * * *

  Hendricks came into the office. “I’m going to go talk to someone who might know something about this. You want to come along?”

  Karp did. They got in a Bronco with three of the black-clad officers. Hendricks drove.

  “Where are we going?” asked Karp.

  “See a fella I know.” That was all Karp got during the forty-minute drive. They passed the green bridge and then headed west up increasingly primitive roads. Karp tried to recall his airborne geography lesson.

  “We’re on Burnt Peak, yes?”

  Hendricks looked at him. “You got it.” He turned into an overgrown driveway.

  In a clearing stood a double-wide mobile home, painted pale green. A mud-covered white Mazda pickup sat in the yard, beside a scatter of toys, an inflatable pool, some bikes, a yellow mutt dog, and a towheaded boy of about seven, wearing swim shorts.

  The dog barked. Hendricks got out of the Bronco and allowed the dog to sniff at him. To the boy he said, “Your papaw in there?”

  A nod.

  “Well, whyn’t you go on in there and tell him Wade Hendricks wants to talk to him.”

  The boy ran into the trailer. A few minutes later a large-gutted man in an undershirt and stained green workpants stepped barefoot out onto the mobile home’s concrete apron.

  Hendricks advanced and shook the man’s hand. “Russell. How you keepin’?”

  “Pretty fair,” said the man, not smiling. His chin indicated the Bronco. “I guess you ain’t visiting.”

  “No, I’m not. This’s police business. We’re looking for a woman gone missing. Her name’s Marlene Ciampi. She was Mose Welch’s lawyer. The one from away.”

  “I heard about her. She’s gone missing, you say?”

  “Went out last night to the green bridge and didn’t come back.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, how about that. She’s got that Dodge four-by, ain’t she? Red?”

  “That’s right. You seen it?” “No, I ain’t. I worked the late at Majestic last night. I’m just now getting up. You’re here because of her runnin’ the Cade boys off.”

  “That’s right. You heard anything about maybe they was plannin’ some get-even?”

  “Tell you the truth, them boys is always running their mouths. I don’t pay them much mind. They was red up, though. Earl, mostly. That lady needs to watch her step, I guess. But I didn’t hear of no actual what you might call a plan.”

  Some polite talk about people Karp didn’t know followed this exchange, and then Hendricks returned to the car and they rode off.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Oh, Russell is a good fella to talk to if the Cades have got up to any mischief.”

  “He’s a Cade?”

  “Related to them. It’s good news, though. We’re probably not dealing with foul play. On the other hand, if she decided to go cruising around these hills at night . . . well.”

  “An accident?”

  “Maybe. More like she got stuck. Some of those roads peter out to nothing, or they’re busted up by landslides or fall-ins.”

  “Fall-ins?”

  “Yes, sir. All these hills are riddled with mine shafts. The pit props rot out and the shafts collapse and the land kind of sags. And there are fires. We got underground fires burning for years up here. They hollow out a whole rise and then the land just collapses like a rotten pumpkin. Then you got your sloughs. A slide blocks a creek and the water pools up and makes a little swamp. You go into one of those, and you might have a worry getting out. And there’s rock slides—”

  A squawk from the radio interrupted this dire catalog. Hendricks picked up the mouthpiece and talked and listened to what to Karp was incomprehensible garble.

  Hendricks hung up the instrument. “They spotted the truck. It was stuck in a fall-in, but there was no sign of her. Up on Belo, the north side.”

  Three hours later, Karp, now in sodden shirtsleeves, tieless, his city shoes covered with mud, was leaning against the side of a Bronco, drinking from a plastic water bottle, when he saw his wife, or what seemed like his wife, striding down the dirt road, trailed by her dog and a couple of uncomfortable-looking troopers. Her face was mottled red and she was covered in stinking black mud from shoe (she had but one) to crown.

  She spotted him. “One laugh and you’re dead,” she snapped, “and you probably forgot to bring bagels.”

  12

  “THEN I TRIPPED ON SOMETHING,” Marlene said, and took another sip of gin and tonic, “a root, or a goddamn alligator, and went headfirst into the swamp. When I got out of it, I leaned against a tree and screamed for, I don’t know, three hours? Then the dog barked and I heard your guys thrashing around in the bushes. They must have heard me.” Another pull on her drink. “At which point I was discovered by this major countywide search you organized, adding the last possible increment of embarrassment.”

  “People get lost up here all the time, Mrs. Karp,” said Hendricks.

  “Marlene, please. And you’re Wade, right?”

  “Right. Couple of times a year we got to
go up some mountain and find a hunter. Sometimes it’s people who lived here all their lives. They fall in holes, they get tangled in some laurel and get exhausted, heatstroke, hypothermia, depending on the season, or they get wrecked like you did. It’s no big thing, really.”

  They were in the living room of the Heeney house, Marlene, Karp, and Hendricks. Marlene was freshly bathed, with her hair in a towel and wearing a black T-shirt with a calligraphic design on it and her only pair of clean shorts. She wanted a nap, and more than that, she wanted the previous twenty-four hours not to have happened.

  Hendricks looked at his notepad and thumbed back through some pages.

  “You said the boy said his name was Darryl?”

  “Sounded like Darl. You think there’s any chance of finding him?”

  “Maybe. Lots of Darryls in these parts. This man behind the sheet—how come you asked if he was a Jonson?”

  “Just a guess. The Jonsons are feuding with the Cades, right? If someone wanted to rat out the Cades for the murders, I figured it might be the other clan. Also . . . the way the boy talked, calling the man he in a funny way, like he was a leader or something, more than just an older relative.”

  Hendricks tightened his chin, causing his upper lip to protrude, and knotted his brow. Another of his portfolio of Gary Cooper grimaces, Karp thought. “Well. It might could be. It could be you talked with old Amos Jonson. That would be something.”

  “Why?” Karp asked. “Who is he?”

  “No one’s seen him for a while. He’s the only survivor of the Jonsons of his generation. I guess he must be in his late sixties if it’s him. He had four brothers and a sister, all dead.” Hendricks looked directly at Marlene. “Killed.”

  “By the Cades?”

  “That’s what people say. Two of them were passed off as mining accidents. No one was prosecuted. The last brother, name of Jonathan, was shot by Ben Cade, right on his own front porch. His sister, Dora, said she saw the whole thing. Well, they had to bring old Ben in on that. A couple of days before the trial, someone tossed a couple of sticks of dynamite through her bedroom window. Killed her and a couple of her kids, as I recall. So they had to let him go. That was when Amos sort of disappeared. Of course, there are still lots of Jonsons around, even if they keep sort of a low profile. He could’ve been staying with his kin all this time.”

  “Can we find him?” Karp asked. “According to Marlene, he’s got lots of answers. Would he testify, do you think?”

  “I would doubt it,” said Hendricks after a silence.

  “Right,” said Karp. “And I expect that this guy Floyd and the three Cades would have alibis provided by all the merry Cades and various henchmen and would not be forthcoming out of, say, remorse.”

  Karp received the expected laconic agreement and clapped his hands briskly. “Well! Assuming that Marlene’s guy is not just some kind of grudge horseshit, we now know who done it. Not a small thing, but on the other hand, we have bubkes on anyone from a purely legal standpoint.”

  “Pardon, bup what?” said Hendricks.

  “Bubkes,” said Karp, “a term widely used in the New York bar to signify an insufficiency of probative material. The point is, an anonymous message from a probable clan enemy is almost worse than nothing at all. That leaves the possibility of forensic evidence linking one or more of these guys to the crime. We have prints at the scene. I assume these scumbags have prints on file?”

  Hendricks made an assenting noise. “The Cades do. I don’t know about Floyd.”

  “We’ll find out and see if there’re any matches. Next, we have the famous sneaker. We’ll check that for biological traces of the last wearer and do a DNA workup. Also, we have the famous boots, expensive and new. We’ll check around town and see who bought a pair like that recently. The murder gun, if it’s still available, would be nice. Juries always like to see a murder weapon. Wade, I’d like your guys to go over all the evidence collected the first go-around. My assumption is they didn’t bust their humps over it when Mose Welch stepped into the frame.”

  “As we speak,” said Hendricks, “they’re reviewing the material at the Charleston lab, and I got people going over the grounds outside right now.”

  Marlene added, “I’ve got beer cans and bottles from that overlook, too. It’d be interesting, at least, if any prints on them matched the prints found in the house.”

  “Good idea,” said Karp. “What I’d like to do now is . . .”

  A young man came into the room. He was wearing plain clothes and rubber gloves, which identified him as one of the crime-scene people in Hendricks’s outfit. He stopped short and looked at Hendricks inquiringly.

  “What’s up, Frank?” asked Hendricks.

  “We found something, Captain. I thought you’d want to take a look.”

  They all followed Frank out through the kitchen to the back stairs. Marlene saw that the storm door that had lain by the side of the stairs since the murders had been moved aside, and that in the damp, grassless earth near the stairs were two near-perfect impressions of boot soles. Marlene recognized the wavy tread pattern as being from the size-nine-and-a-half Rocky-brand boots found with Heeney blood all over them, and said so.

  Hendricks looked down at the impressions. “Damn it all, Frank, how in the hell did this get missed the first time?”

  “No excuse, sir. Just pure sloppy work. Nobody thought to move the storm door to see what was underneath it.”

  Hendricks looked to have a few other things to say to old Frank. Marlene could see muscles working in his jaw, and a dark flush was spreading up from the jawline. She said, “Say, Frank, could you generate a body weight from that print? By how deep the boot sank into the soil?”

  The technician looked up at her with relief, and perhaps gratitude on his face. “Yes, ma’am, we could. A range, anyway. Within five or so pounds.”

  “Well, if it’s all right with Captain Hendricks, if you could do that test right away and it turns out that the fellow who made them was much less than two hundred pounds, I can probably get my man out of jail.”

  The technician looked at Hendricks, who nodded abruptly. “Go do it,” he ordered.

  To the Karps, he said, “I got to run into town now and see how they’re doing on our temporary headquarters.”

  “We have headquarters?” asked Karp.

  “Yeah, in the old Burroughs Building. An insurance company used to have it. They went bust and the state grabbed it up for the taxes. They still got all their furniture and equipment in there and the building’s still in good shape. I got people cleaning it out now, putting phones in and all. I assumed that was okay. It’s right near the courthouse. Trooper Blake’s got an unmarked standing by and he’ll drive you anywhere you need to go.”

  Karp found himself nodding in agreement, keeping the surprise off his face and suppressing any expression of what he knew to be petty annoyance.

  “Good. That’s real good, Wade.”

  “Also, we’ve arranged quarters for you. I was thinking it wouldn’t look that good for you all to both be staying here, I mean it being the murder scene. There’s a kind of lodge west of town, Four Oaks. They rent it out for groups, industry and church groups having retreats, what passes for the tourist industry here. I arranged a cabin. I’ll be staying there, and some of my guys and Cheryl, too. If that’s all right?”

  “I’m overwhelmed. Thanks,” said Karp. Hendricks took his leave, and Karp and Marlene went back into the house, where Marlene refreshed her drink.

  “Well,” she said.

  “No flies on Captain Hendricks.” “No. I feel like a nature film where the queen ant is being shoved into position by the worker ants, my swollen abdomen being wiggled into position so I can lay the eggs. I guess I’m staying.”

  “You hadn’t planned to?”

  “I haven’t planned anything since Lucy called. I’ve been responding to the crisis, which turned out to be a noncrisis.”

  “And you feel dumb because I’m just r
addled with bug bites instead of smashed to pieces or kidnapped by desperadoes.”

  In answer he sat next to her on the couch, threw an arm around her shoulder, kissed her cheek.

  “Ugh, how can you stand it? I look like an illustration from a medical textbook. I should have one of those black rectangles across my eyes.”

  “My bug-bitten beauty,” Karp said tenderly. “I’ve missed you. Call me old-fashioned, but I used to like coming home to the happy family every night.”

  “Or the unhappy family, on occasion, if you recall.”

  “Even that. Anyway, it seems that since I’m here now instead of next week, I might as well put my game face on and play. Have you thought about what you’ll do?”

  “Well, I’ll see my client out of jail and the charges dismissed, which should be a matter of days. Beyond that, I don’t know. Leap on my horse and vanish with a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver.’ ”

  “Why not stay?”

  “And do what?”

  “Nothing. It’s summer. Take a break. You went from busting your hump as a corporate mogul to busting your hump as a struggling dog farmer. Why not kick back?”

  He cupped his hand to his ear. “Listen . . .”

  “What? I don’t hear anything.”

  “My point. No howling animals. No gormless employees requiring direction. No darling children yammering for attention. We haven’t been alone together since Christ was a corporal.”

  “Yes, and if I stay, I’ll be alone together, and you’ll be consumed with your case.”

  “Oh, consumed, conshmumed! Look, darling: it’s one case—count it, one—instead of the fifty I usually have to follow. Two, the people who did it are morons operating under the assumption of impunity. They’ve made a million mistakes, and they’ll make more. Their hillbilly asses are mine. Three, as you just saw, I apparently have the entire Wehrmacht at my disposal. Four, no political horseshit to cope with. Compared to what I usually do, this is flower arrangement.”