Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  Oakes pulled Rhonda back behind her car. He unclipped the cell from his belt. Punched in a number.

  “I’d like to speak to Sheriff Ives,” he said. “Tell him it’s Deputy Jake Oakes from the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department.”

  * * *

  “We got ’em.”

  Bell repeated the words triumphantly into her phone—“We got ’em”—just to make sure that Mary Sue Fogelsong had heard her correctly on the other end. “Tell Nick that a search warrant for Walter Albright’s house and grounds was executed at 2:14 this morning by the Collier County Sheriff’s Department. We found evidence that he accepted bribes to compromise security procedures at the Highway Haven.” She paused. “Sure, put him on the line. I’ll tell him myself.”

  Waiting for the phone to be passed to Nick in his hospital bed, Bell looked across the table at Rhonda and Jake. Both had taken her up on her offer to buy them a truly epic breakfast here at JP’s—eggs, sausage links, grits, hotcakes, waffles, toast, and coffee—on this early Sunday morning, and were currently clawing their way through it at warp speed, like a demolition crew paid by the brick. They’d been up all night and they were ravenous; they had gone along on last night’s raid that had dismantled a major drug ring. Even though they had no official role, it was their tip that had initiated the action, and the Collier County Sheriff had taken one look at their eager faces and muttered, “What the hell. Come on, you two—you can ride with me. But keep your damned heads down, okay?”

  Nick’s voice on her cell sounded tired. “Hey, Bell,” he said. She looked forward to the moment when he didn’t sound tired all the time. Tired didn’t suit Nick Fogelsong.

  “Hey.” Bell was excited, and pleased that she had good news for a change. “We nailed the bastards. It was Albright’s son-in-law—Leroy Smathers—who ran the show. He’d been paying Walter for the last year and a half to look the other way while they set up their operation. Walter was more than happy to pocket the cash. Once Walter got fired, though, they had to find another distribution point. That’s why they went to Royce Dillard.” She stopped to take a long, satisfied breath. “Albright’s decided to cooperate with us. Turns out that after he lost his job, he wasn’t worth a damn to them. So they started treating him pretty bad. Moved into his house, ordered him around. They even trashed the inside of his motor home—and that was enough to turn Albright against his own kinfolk. I mean, drug dealing’s one thing, but pouring beer on the Berber carpet? He’s jumping at the chance to testify against the lot of them—for whatever amount of time is shaved off his sentence.”

  “Good. That’s real good news,” Nick said.

  She waited for him to ask her for more details. When he didn’t, she supplied them, anyway. “The guy in the green plaid? That’s Leroy. Guy who shot you is a scumbag named Tommy Boykins. He’s looking at an attempted murder charge. I know some of those Collier County judges. They won’t go easy on him.”

  There was a pause, and then Mary Sue was back on the line again. “He’s having a rough morning, Bell. Lots of pain. Pushed himself a little too hard in physical therapy yesterday. He didn’t want to ask for pain meds this morning—but he finally had to and he’s pissed about it. Listen, though—this is wonderful news. You’ve done a splendid job.”

  “Not me,” Bell said. “It was Rhonda Lovejoy and Jake Oakes.”

  At the sound of their names, the two people across from her grinned. Oakes toasted the table with his orange juice glass.

  “You tell them,” Mary Sue said, “that I’m sure Nick’ll want to thank them personally. Just as soon as he’s able.”

  “I will.” Bell ended the call. She placed her cell next to her napkin. The napkin was still folded; she’d ordered only coffee.

  “What did Nick say?” Rhonda asked. She’d had to finish swallowing a jumbo bite of syrup-beribboned pancake before she could speak. “Got to be a relief, knowing that the man who shot him is gonna be out of action for a good long while.”

  “Yes,” Bell said. “He’s looking forward to the day he can shake your hands.” She didn’t elaborate. She felt protective of Nick and his despondency; she didn’t want to share with too many people the fact of how changed he was, how knocked back by his wound and by his awareness of all that he couldn’t do anymore.

  “So how’d you spend your Saturday?” Rhonda said. She was saucy, sky-high, happier than Bell had seen her in weeks. The Dillard trial was taking a toll on her.

  “Let me think,” Bell said. She pictured the scary tick of the minutes trapped on the stalled man-hoist, the rich scent of the coal dust, that dark world. And she thought, Later. She’d share the story with Rhonda later. This was their morning, their victory.

  The only person in whom Bell had confided thus far was Carla. Her daughter possessed an adventurous soul. Bell knew she wouldn’t say, Oh my GOD. You were WHERE? And you were trapped for HOW LONG?—the probable reaction of almost anyone else. Indeed, when she’d called Carla last night and described the ordeal, the young woman said, That is SO incredibly cool, Mom. Sounds like a new ride at Six Flags—the Haunted Man-Hoist.

  “This and that,” Bell replied.

  A frowning Oakes was using his fork to chase the last few biscuit crumbs around his plate. “Can’t help but wonder,” he said, “why a man like Nick Fogelsong didn’t suspect Albright right from the get-go.”

  “He thought of Albright as a colleague,” Bell said. “A brother officer.”

  “Hell. Colleagues can let you down, quick as other folks can. Fogelsong’s got to know that.”

  “He does. But it’s never going to be his first thought.” Bell saw that Oakes was still frowning, so she came at the explanation another way. “The minute it’s our first thought,” she said, “that’s when we quit. That’s when it’s all over. We’ve got to believe there’s a bright line between the good guys and the bad. Somebody like Albright is an anomaly, an exception—not the rule. The second we’re not surprised by the likes of Walter Albright, the battle’s well and truly lost.”

  Oakes nodded. He seemed to accept that. “Well, folks,” he said, his voice turning jocular again, “I’m mighty glad this all worked out okay, but Sheriff Harrison’s going to kill me when she finds out how I spent my time off. Just so you know. All I ask is that you give me a decent burial. Something nice. Not too fancy.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll square things with her,” Bell said.

  He winked at her. Then he patted his belly, which never seemed to expand no matter how much food he put away. “Well, now that I’ve rejuvenated myself, I’ve got to get ready for my shift this afternoon. Tell you this much, Rhonda,” he said, offering her an admiring nod, “if I’m ever in any kind of trouble, I hope they send you to my rescue. ’Cause you just don’t quit, girl.”

  They watched him leave. Once the red door had closed behind him, Bell looked around the restaurant. It was still too early for the after-church crowd, and so most of the tables were empty. Through the wide window that ran the length of the front wall of JP’s, you could see the gray flanks of the mountains in the distance, chipped and scored like the hard-used hides of immense prehistoric animals. She thought about those mountains and what they had witnessed all these centuries: good people and greedy people, happy lives and wretched ones. And endless, endless stories. In this place, history seemed a little closer to the surface of things than it did anywhere else. It was always within reach, like your next cup of coffee. History wasn’t a set of ancient fables but a daily reality that you felt and you tasted. It lived in your skin. It lived in the dirt and the sky, just as it lived in the hardships and the sorrows that stretched back into a common past that would never be forgotten. History mattered here. It told people who they were and what their lives really meant.

  She remembered what she and David had talked about on the man-hoist. And she remembered the article in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, the one from all those years ago, the one in which Royce Dillard’s story had been told for the first tim
e. “Rhonda,” Bell said. “I need a favor. I don’t know for sure, but it might make a difference for Royce. Look, I know you’re exhausted, but—”

  “I can sleep when the trial’s over,” Rhonda said. “Tell me what you need.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Rhonda was out of breath. Bell asked her to repeat what she’d said, so that she could understand her; the words had begun to run together in a hasty mush, fed by zeal and fatigue.

  “Got back about midnight,” Rhonda said. She plopped down on the couch across from Bell’s desk. “Some hard driving on those roads after dark, I’m telling you.”

  It was not yet seven in the morning. Rhonda had left Acker’s Gap just after finishing her breakfast at JP’s the day before. Her destination was a small coal town in the southern part of the state.

  “It’s like you figured, Bell,” Rhonda said. “Ed Hackel had driven over there a few days before he was murdered. He’d been hunting her for weeks. But he didn’t have any contacts. And you don’t track down somebody in southern West Virginia—somebody who went off the grid in 1972—unless you know what you’re doing.”

  Rhonda sat back against the couch. Her hair was flat, even greasy-looking, with none of the usual evidence of its having been fussed over, and the skin around her eyes was smudged and crinkled with tiredness. She had texted Bell at 5 A.M., announcing that she’d gotten back too late last night to call but that she really needed to meet before the day’s court session began.

  2 excited 2 wait: That was how Rhonda justified her request.

  Sunrise had just touched the edges of the tall leaded windows in Bell’s office. One of the virtues of an ancient courthouse—something to set against the negatives such as lousy ventilation, appalling plumbing, and warm hospitality toward successive generations of mice and assorted vermin in every crevice and crawl space—was the presence of large and copious windows. More modern public structures, their designers mindful of energy loss through all that glass, featured windows that were little more than slits. Bell loved her windows. She wasn’t sure she could function without them. She kept the brown drapes swept back and well secured, so that the world beyond her office was always visible—the world beyond, that is, whatever stories of misery and conflict and loss were being set before her, hour by hour, day after day.

  “So,” Bell said. She wanted to give Rhonda more time, but her curiosity wouldn’t hear of it. “Vera Tolbert.”

  “To begin with, she’s not Vera Tolbert anymore. That’s one of the things that made her so hard to find. In 1975 she took up with Orville Gunderson. So now she calls herself Vera Gunderson. It’s common-law, though. No marriage records. That’s what held up Hackel when he was trying to find her. Can’t be done through records. You’ve got to go there. Chat with folks. Took Hackel a while to figure that out.”

  “And she agreed to talk to you?” Bell said.

  “Not at first. She was suspicious as all get-out. I walked up to the door and I knocked, and when she opened it, she had a rifle in her hand.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not kidding,” Rhonda declared. “It turned out to be just a BB gun, but my Lord—if somebody’d been monitoring my heart rate right then, they would’ve called the squad. Anyway, she opened the door and she held up that BB gun—I could tell by now what it was—and she said, ‘Wish you people would leave me the hell alone.’ Her face was all red. She was breathing real hard. My grandfather breathed like that—I’d know that sound anywhere. Too many cigarettes over too many years. Anyway, I just looked her dead-square in the eye and I said, ‘Ma’am, I don’t mean to make things difficult for you, but I’m an assistant prosecutor over in Raythune County, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of a murder case.’ Next thing I knew, she’d lowered that BB gun and invited me inside the house and offered me a cup of coffee.”

  “Wonder what changed her mind?”

  “The truth. The truth changed her mind. I mean, I asked her that myself, and she said, ‘You were honest about why you’re here. Straight off. The fella who was here before, he lied to me. Lied right to my face. Said he was with the guvmint and was tracking down folks who were owed some money. So naturally I let him in. Turns out that was a damned lie.’” Rhonda put her hands to her hair. What she felt there drew a frown. “Lord, I bet I look like ten miles of bad road. Just couldn’t take time for the curling iron. Had to get over here.”

  Bell didn’t say, No, you look fine. Especially not after the issue of truth had been raised so recently. She said, “You’ll have a chance to freshen up before court. Promise.”

  “Good thing. Else the judge and jurors are likely to run screaming from the courtroom. Anyway,” Rhonda said, settling back into her story, “naturally I asked her the identity of her gentleman caller. Yep—it was Ed Hackel. That was the name. I showed her a picture, to make absolutely certain. She sort of snickered when she saw it. ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s him all right. Nice suit. Big brown tweed overcoat. Wore his hair all slicked back. Heavy man. Real heavy. Put it this way—if he stepped on your toe, you’d know it. But still handsome. Kinda like that Perry Mason fella. Raymond Burr.’ Once she’d let him in her house, she said, he came clean about why he was there. He wanted her to change her story. Her story about what she’d seen on the morning of February twenty-sixth, 1972. Wanted her to say that Mike Dillard hadn’t tried to save his little boy. No, sir. He’d left his boy to die.”

  Bell nodded. She could imagine Hackel’s threat to Royce Dillard: Sell the land or I’ll make sure the world thinks your life story is a lie. A fraud.

  It was the only leverage that would matter to Dillard. It meant more than a threat of exposing the drugs in his barn. It meant more than anything.

  Sell the land or I’ll have that old lady—the one who saw your father save you—change her story. She’ll say whatever I tell her to say. No problem. She’ll say your father didn’t save anybody. Only cared about himself.

  The significance of Dillard’s suffering, and his family’s suffering: It all came down to what his father had done. The ultimate sacrifice. If that was taken away, then there was nothing. There was only pain. And pain without meaning is unendurable.

  Dillard didn’t give a damn about the things that most people did—money, possessions, power, sex, revenge, reputation. The things that could incite people into violence when they thought they were under siege. And so Hackel had to find the one thing Dillard did care about.

  And he found it.

  Hackel, Bell speculated, probably hadn’t realized what he was setting into motion when he threatened Royce Dillard’s story. Hackel didn’t know he was pushing the man toward the abyss. And sealing his own fate as well.

  “She said Hackel offered her a nice payday for changing her story, for claiming she’d lied all those years ago,” Rhonda went on. “A thousand dollars.” A quick lift of her eyebrows. “A woman like Vera probably hasn’t seen a thousand dollars all at the same time ever before in her life.”

  “So she agreed.”

  “Nope. She didn’t.” Rhonda grinned. “She may be poor and old, but she’s not stupid. She took a long look at that fancy overcoat of his, and those shiny shoes, and she smelled that expensive aftershave—and realized that he had a few bucks in his pocket and might go higher. After all, he’d taken the trouble to find her and to come all that way. He must want her to change her story pretty bad. So she said, ‘Two thousand.’ Bless her heart.”

  “And?”

  “Hackel didn’t say yes right away. Now, lots of folks in Vera’s spot would’ve backed down at that point. They’d have said, ‘Oh, come to think of it, a thousand is fine, thanks very much.’ Not her.”

  Rhonda pulled a small notebook out of her purse, in which she had made her notes. “Here’s what she told me she said to Ed Hackel. ‘I’m sixty-six years old, mister. I’ve got arthritis so bad that I can’t get out of bed in the morning without groaning so loud that it scares the cat, and things’ll be about the
same for me, with or without your damned money. So the price is now three thousand. But if you go longer than a few days afore getting back to me, price goes up to five.’” Rhonda flipped the notebook closed. “Gotta admire her moxie. And her understanding of capitalism—the more somebody wants something, the more you can charge for it.”

  Bell remembered the list of items on the nightstand of Hackel’s motel room. The scrap of paper with VG $?? scribbled on it. Hackel probably needed Carolyn Runyon’s approval to get the cash for the higher payment to Vera Gunderson.

  “All she had to do,” Rhonda said, “was recant her testimony. Just tell a few newspapers and TV and radio stations that the tale she’d spun all those years ago—about what she saw on the day of the flood, the story about and Mike Dillard and his little boy, Royce—was a lie.”

  “And how was she going to explain changing her story, after all these years?”

  Rhonda shrugged. “Guilty conscience. Wanting to set the record straight before she died.”

  “Did she know that Hackel had been murdered in the meantime?”

  “Oh, yeah. Just a small item in the paper over there—but she recognized the name right away, of course. And she wasn’t embarrassed to tell me that her first thought was, ‘Dang it. Now I gotta forget about that big-screen TV I was gonna buy.’” Rhonda closed her eyes, and used her index fingers to rub at them. “She asked me about Royce Dillard. Hasn’t seen him since he was two years old. But she’s sure he isn’t capable of murder. Asked me my opinion on the matter.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said what you always say, Bell. I said anybody’s capable of anything.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Winter was on its way out, and spring was making inroads, but the radiators in the old courtroom were still on duty. They raised their usual ruckus each morning, an amateur symphony of plinks, pops, bangs, hoots, and rattles; a steady high-pitched whistle that made people look around for a hidden teakettle; and a low ominous rumble. By midafternoon they settled down a bit, although they were never completely quiet. Occasionally a small fwizzzzt would escape from a radiator’s nether regions, causing some of the younger spectators to glare disgustedly at an older person, and the older person to mumble Sorry sheerly out of habit.