Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

by Tom Franklin

  Larry opened his lips.

  “You want to say something?”

  “Can I talk…” He swallowed. “To Silas?”

  “Who?” The sheriff looked back.

  French said, “He means 32.” The chief came forward. “He’s not part of this investigation, Larry. This is what we call out of his jurisdiction. Why you want to talk to him?”

  “Cause we used to be friends.”

  French nodded. “He mentioned something about that, but didn’t sound like yall was friends. More like you just went to the same school.”

  “We were friends,” Larry said.

  “Okay. We all remember things different, I guess.” He stepped past the sheriff, who eased back and lowered himself into the chair by the window. French glanced at his tape recorder. “Now I’ve rode you pretty hard over the years, Larry, I know. But we ain’t never found nothing to let us convict you for that Walker girl or any other girls. Till now.” He was shaking his head. “I reckon it ain’t but a handful of people in the world knew about that cabin out in your woods-”

  “I’d clear forgot it,” said the sheriff.

  “Cabin out in the last part of them woods you ain’t been willing to sell. And then one of our men stumbles onto her, out there where, odds are, she ought to never been found. It gets me to thinking, Larry.” French scratching his head as he talked. “I’m thinking, fellow with your history might’ve just got fed up with the world. World’s a awful small place, specially here in southeast Mississippi. Maybe you just got tired of ever body thinking what they been thinking about you. Hell, maybe we all partly to blame, whole county ostracizing you. Maybe you just wanted some company, she may of even seemed like she come on to you, way these young girls dress, belly button rings, all that. Tattoos. You with your own kind of, well, local celebrity, I guess. Maybe she was messing with you, all I know. Your biggest fan. There she is, you see her at one place or another, the dairy bar, post office, Wal-Mart, young girl, pretty, long hair, and maybe you resist awhile, maybe a long while.

  “But then a man can only resist so long, right, once his rut gets up, and maybe you drank a passel of them Pabst Blue Ribbons we seen in your fridge, or smoked a little dope, got out of your head, and next thing you know you’ve taken her. Just to talk, for all I know. Little companionship. Man gets lonely. But then, you know, way girls can get, all hysterical, maybe you got scared. Maybe she hit you. Threatened you. Tries to run and you didn’t mean for things to happen like they did. Maybe it was all a accident, her winding up dead. You might not even remember exactly what happened or how it happened. It’s one fellow I knew, started drinking with his air force buddy and when he woke up in the morning it was a butcher knife sticking out of his buddy’s chest.

  “Maybe that’s why you shot yourself, Larry. All that guilt, adding up. Nothing you meant to do but suddenly it’d done got out of your hands. And you can bury the past but it always seems to come back, one way or another. There’s her face, on the news. In the paper. Whole damn world out looking for her and you alone know the truth.”

  French talking on in his calm voice, making rape, murder, logical, Larry listening with his veins full of airy drugs and his head afloat, how reasonable if he had done it, strangled the girl and buried her, how these men understood his life so thoroughly and knew how people were in the world, in their hearts, brains, what they were capable of doing when they drank a passel of Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and smoked a heap of dope, how you could stick your best buddy with a knife, how sometimes women wanted to be raped, they were asking for it, you put on the mask so it wasn’t you doing it, it was somebody else doing what the women wanted anyway, French was saying that, maybe she was asking for it and he was trying as French talked to see into that space where his mother looked, where the truth of memory hid. He could feel the truth waiting for him, floating like a ghost in the room, but his brain the doctor said had been deprived of blood so there might be lapses or delirium and he remembered the mask and remembered the gun, he seemed himself the man in the mask waiting by his door for the other him to come home, watching as Larry got out of his truck and crossed the yard and came up the steps and over the porch and let himself in with his keys and then coming in the house and turning, Mask Larry marching up to Face Larry, pushing the gun against his heart and the two Larrys merging to one with one heart and it’s him holding the gun to his own chest, thinking how good it would feel to confess, to please these reasonable men doing their reasonable, necessary work.

  “Larry?”

  He blinked French into focus. “Do you think I did it?”

  French glanced back at the sheriff. “Yeah. I do, Larry. I think you done away with both girls. Tina Rutherford and Cindy Walker. The sheriff here, he does, too. We don’t know why you did it, but if you want to tell me, it’d sure help us.”

  “I don’t know why,” he said. “Why I would’ve done that. I didn’t even know that Rutherford girl. I don’t know anybody except my momma and she don’t know me. I used to go a week sometimes without talking to anybody except the girls in Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  “Well,” French said, “sometimes we do bad things without knowing the reasons, that’s surely possible. Like I said, things can get outta hand so quick it’s like the world’s in fast-forward. But the way you feeling now, Larry? And how you felt when you put that gun to your chest and pulled the trigger? That ain’t going away. It’s only gone get worse. I been in law enforcement a long stretch now, and the one thing I can tell you for sure is that the only way you’ll ever feel better about this is to own up and pay the price.”

  “Okay,” Larry said.

  twelve

  SILAS FULL OF dread, switching his hat one hand to the other, waiting for the hospital elevator, its third-floor light lit so long he imagined somebody must be holding the door. He knew what was going on up there now, Lolly and French coercing Larry, wheedling him, crafting a confession, French so damn smooth at what he called interviewing that people said he could make a stump confess to saying “timber.”

  Finally the elevator doors slid open and Silas stepped in, pressed “3” and the doors closed. On the third floor he excused himself between a pair of nurses holding cigarettes and lighters and hurried down the hall, Skip rising with his newspaper to meet him. A doctor talking on his cell phone, finger in his other ear.

  “Hey, 32,” Skip said.

  “Skip.” Nodding at the door. “They in there?”

  “Yep. Bout twenty minutes, this time.”

  The doctor snapped his phone shut. “Can I help you? I’m Dan Milton, Mr. Ott’s physician.”

  Silas offered his hand. “32 Jones.”

  They shook.

  “The officer who found the Rutherford girl?”

  Nodding, looking from Skip to Milton. “Can I go in?”

  Before either could answer, he’d entered the room, Skip and the doctor saying “Wait,” together, following him in.

  French turned and Lolly rose from his chair, his hand on his pistol.

  “Speak of the devil,” French said. He pointed to the door and Skip nodded and left, but the doctor stayed.

  Larry raised his head and, when he saw Silas, smiled, his eyes misted with drugs, but he still moved his hand up to his lips, covering his mouth, like he did when he was a kid, his wrist red from the restraints.

  “Hey, Silas. There you are.”

  “Hey, Larry. Here I am.” He wondered should he offer to shake his hand. “How you feeling?”

  “Not too good. They say I shot myself and killed that girl, but I can’t remember doing either. And now they want me to say I killed Cindy Walker, too.”

  “You had enough, Mr. Ott?” Dr. Milton said. “You want me to ask these gentlemen to come back tomorrow?”

  Larry said, “No, sir. I’m glad Silas is here.”

  “Press your buzzer,” Milton said, “if you need me.” He glanced at French, then the sheriff, and left the room.

  “Chief,” Silas said. “Can we
have a moment or two? Me and Larry?”

  “Not right yet,” French said. “But you can stay and witness our interview.”

  Interview.

  “Did you come in my room at night?” Larry asked Silas.

  “Yeah.” Silas willing him to shut up, not say more, wait till they could be alone. He focused on the bed rail, long, stainless steel, one of the restraints looped on it halfway up. He felt like a kid caught in a lie. “Sometimes.”

  “You was feeding Momma’s chickens, too?”

  “Yeah. I never did move the pen, way you do.”

  “Did you bring me Night Shift?” The men followed his eyes to the book on the table between the beds. The gauze-wrapped hand on the cover, the eyes in its palm gazing out, seeing all.

  “Yeah,” Silas said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You welcome.”

  “Did you ever read it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like it?”

  “No,” he said. “Horror, it ain’t my thing. Too much of that in real life.” He wanted to say how Larry’s versions, way back when, were better, but French cleared his throat.

  “If we can end our Oprah book club, we was just telling Larry here that his guilt won’t go away till he owns up to what he’s done. Ain’t you found that to be the case, 32?”

  “Only if he’s done something.” Silas sensed French stiffen, heard Lolly squeak in his chair.

  “Tell em, Silas,” Larry said, “that we used to be friends.”

  “Yeah,” French said. “Tell us, Silas.”

  “We was,” he told Larry.

  “Friends, huh?” French kept his eyes on Silas. “Yall meet at school?”

  “No.” Larry seemed stronger now, buoyed, a splotch of color coming into his cheeks. He shifted in his sheets, flexing his hands. “We couldn’t be friends there cause Silas was black. We used to play out in the woods. Remember, Silas?”

  “This might,” French said, “be a good time to get back on track. You want to tell us what really happened to Cindy Walker, Larry?”

  “Wait,” Silas said.

  The sheriff coughed behind them and French fixed him with a hard gaze, one that said, Don’t fuck up.

  “I took her where she asked me to,” Larry said, oblivious, it seemed, to the tension mounting in the room. “And I let her out. Then I drove off.”

  “That’s what you’ve been saying all these years,” French said. “Tell us the rest. It’s time, Larry. Like I said, it ain’t going away, this guilt.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Silas said.

  “Constable Jones,” the sheriff now, “you want to wait in the hall?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The room quiet except for the tick and beeping of Larry’s machines. Silas aware of the chief’s hot eyes on his face and the sheriff’s on his back like the red dots of laser sights.

  “Is there something you want to say, then?” French asked.

  Here it all came. A quarter of a century bunching up on him, bearing down, a truck slamming on its brakes and its logs sliding forward, over the cab, through the window, the back of his head, shooting past him in the road.

  “It was me,” he said, turning away from French.

  “You.”

  “I’m the one picked her up after Larry dropped her off. In the woods. I’m the one let her off at her road.”

  Larry said, “What?”

  French clamped his fingers on Silas’s shoulder and turned him so he could see his face. “Wait,” he said. “It was you that Larry took her to see in 1982?”

  Yes, it was him.

  “You mean,” French said, “he’s been telling the truth all this time? And that you, in fact, were the last person to see her alive?”

  Silas nodding.

  “It was you?” Larry asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “She was pregnant,” Larry asked, “with your little baby?”

  Silas had taken hold of the bed rail.

  “Is that why you left?” Larry staring at him. “Went to Oxford?”

  “Part of why.”

  “To meet her?”

  Silas said, “Larry-”

  “Was it a boy or girl?”

  “What?”

  “The baby. Your baby.”

  “There wasn’t,” Silas said, “a baby.”

  French pulled his hand away in disgust. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Roy-” Lolly said.

  Larry looking puzzled.

  “Larry.” Silas made himself face him. “I’m the one owes you an apology. More than that. See, Cindy, she wasn’t ever pregnant. She just…said that cause she knew you’d bring her to see me. I didn’t know that’s what she was doing, then. We were in love, or thought we were.”

  Larry saying nothing, his open face.

  “That night,” Silas went on, “after you dropped her off? We drove out to a field we used to go to, and we argued. She wanted to run away together, but I-” How to say it. “I had my baseball career ahead of me, and my momma was after me not to see her. It wouldn’t have worked, for half a dozen reasons. So I just took her home.”

  Larry said, “Took her home.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got there early.”

  “Yeah. She didn’t wait on you cause she was mad at me. She just run off down the road, in the dark.”

  “Where Cecil was.”

  “Yeah.”

  They stared at one another, Silas aware of what Larry must be thinking, how Cecil would have stood up as she came in the door, her face red, tears streaking her cheeks, him holding his beer, stumbling forward, toward her, yelling. Outside, Silas driving away in his mother’s car, faster and faster, Larry heading there at the same moment, the two boys missing each other by a few minutes, maybe their cars even met on the dark highway, lights on high beam, both too distracted to think of dimming, both flinching against the oncoming bright.

  “He killed her,” Larry said.

  The doctor was back in the room, tapping his watch.

  “This interview”-Lolly stepping between Silas and French, putting an avuncular arm over both their shoulders-”might need to be concluded, fellows. For now.”

  “Wait,” Larry said as French began to fasten his restraints. “We were friends. Weren’t we, Silas?”

  Tell the fucking truth, 32. Silas.

  “You were, Larry,” he said. “I don’t know what I was.”

  SILAS FOLLOWED FRENCH and Lolly to the Sheriff’s Department and parked next to French’s Bronco. The chief got out and dropped a cigarette on the asphalt and ground it with his boot toe, looking up to where a reef of dark, swollen clouds, like a tidal wave, seemed ready to tumble over the building, wind on Silas’s cheeks, the Mississippi flag snapping on its pole and the asphalt freckled with rain. Lolly hurried back to his reserved spot by the handicap space to roll up his windows and then French held the door and the three of them walked inside, Silas like so many others summoned down to this redbrick building, to be questioned. Interviewed. They stopped at the receptionist’s desk, French and Lolly getting their messages, as Silas stood numbly behind.

  He followed them to French’s box of an office lined with filing cabinets. The CI tossed his recorder on his desk with cardboard evidence boxes stacked beneath and, overhead, a bookshelf lined with videotapes and manuals and three-ring binders. To the left a dry erase board on which his current cases were listed, Tina Rutherford first, M &M second, a string of burglaries, a car theft, a rape, and, at the bottom, Larry Ott’s shooting. Silas sat in a folding chair while Lolly closed the door and French clicked on his coffeemaker. The sheriff stood with his arms on the top of a filing cabinet and took a can of Skoal from his pocket and fingered himself out a dip.

  French rolled his chair from under his desk and sat, the coffee starting to drip.

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

  “THAT’S A HELL of a story,” French said when he’d finished, telling everything but being Larry’s half br
other.

  He’d poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Silas, then made another and given it to Lolly. “But you want a little advice? If I was you? I wouldn’t go too public with it. You know what I mean? Back in 1982? Might a been a good time. Then they could’ve made Cecil Walker the suspect. Questioned him at least. But since he’s been dead awhile-”

  “Cancer,” the sheriff said. “If it’s any consolation, he had a tough go at the end.”

  “And now,” French went on, “here you been carrying this information around with you for a quarter-century. I understand your reasons. But considering they never found the Walker girl’s body, and Ott never did no time-”

  “Shit,” Silas said. “Larry’s done time his whole life.”

  “Well, you reaching into ethics here, I’d say. Or civil law one. And both of them’s a tad outside our jurisdiction. But considering he never went to prison, it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie. We’ll focus on the current case. If he’s innocent, it’ll come out.”

  “So none of what I’ve told yall changes anything,” Silas asked, “about Tina Rutherford?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like whoever killed her’s probably cashing in on Larry’s reputation. If I’d killed her,” Silas said, “guess where I’d bury her?”

  “We know where you would,” French said, “but it wasn’t a lot of folks aware of that little tomb, was it? And Ott, before you busted in and started fucking everything up, he’d give what I’d consider to be a preliminary confession. What about you, Sheriff?”

  “Sounded like one to me. Enough to keep him clipped to his bed. Keep Skip by the door.”

  “But not you,” French said to Silas. “I think you’ll understand why, as of now, I’m taking you off guard duty.”

  “Yeah,” Silas said.

  AT THE HOSPITAL, his shoulders and hat wet from rain, he stopped and talked a moment with Skip, who got up from his chair by the door.

  “You early,” he said. “You hear he confessed?”

  “Yeah.” It was the day for it. “I ain’t staying.”