A Killing at Cotton Hill

by Terry Shames

  “I don’t know whether I ought to. Ida Ruth and I are going out to Elgin tomorrow morning to look at headstones for Dora’s grave. Her grandson said he’d be glad for us to do that. We thought we’d get an early start.” Her voice is so full of regret that I know she wants to be persuaded.

  “Come on, Loretta. We’ll go over there early and get on back so you can get to bed at a reasonable time. You could order you some of those oysters you like.”

  “Samuel, August is not oyster season,” she says. “But I could get some crawfish etouffe.”

  She can’t see me make a face. I can’t imagine how anybody can eat a critter like a crawfish with all those little prickly tentacles. “All right, then. I’ll come by about six o’clock.”

  I’ve got a little time, so I head on over to the jail to talk to whoever is on duty. Even though Rodell would resist my asking questions, I can pretty much count on him not being there so late in the day.

  Over at the jail, James Harley is startled when I walk in. He shoves something into the desk drawer real quick, but not before I see that he’s been entertaining himself with a titty magazine.

  “What is it you want?” he says. He’s surly and I don’t know if it’s because I interrupted his session with the magazine or if he got into trouble with Rodell for not putting up more of a fight when I got Greg out of jail.

  I set down the sack I’ve got with me and pull out two of the beers I brought, figuring I might need a bribe. “I need you to help me out with something,” I say. I pull up a chair and sit down with a foot crossed over my knee.

  The beer lightens his attitude considerably. He takes a long pull. “Nice and cold.” He sets it down and belches softly. “All right, shoot.”

  “Before Dora Lee was killed, she told me she saw somebody in a fancy car sitting out on the road in front of her house. I’m wondering if there were any rumors of somebody seeing an unusual car out there in the last couple of weeks.”

  James Harley takes another long swig. He props his boots up on the desk and folds his hands over his stomach, and says he has to think about it. I can almost hear the wheels creaking as they turn in his brain. Finally he swings his feet to the floor and goes over to the file cabinet. “I’m going to say it was Earl told me something about that.” He ruffles through what I take to be incident reports. “Here it is. And it was Earl. Says here it was weekend before last there was some boys drag racing over at the dam.”

  I wait for him to tell me the connection between drag racing at the dam and seeing a car out at Dora Lee’s five miles away, but finally I have to ask.

  “Earl said he got to talking with the boys and they told him they saw some foreign sports car when they passed by Dora Lee’s on their way out to the dam.”

  “Did Earl tell you who the boys were?”

  He gestures toward the file cabinet. “It’s all right there. We keep good records. It was the Armstrong twins and Jack Kunkel.”

  The Armstrong twins. I’d as soon try to get information out of an alligator than out of an Armstrong. That family has been raising up hellions as long as I can remember. I went to school with Robert Armstrong, and there wasn’t any boy in school that didn’t feel his fist or his boots. And when I was the law around here, they were always up to no good. The thing is, the Armstrongs waste all their energy on striking out at the world around them, leaving nothing left over for honest hard work. No telling how those boys have come by a car they can race up on the dam.

  I thank James Harley for his information, and before the door is closed behind me, I hear him opening the desk drawer.

  The Armstrongs live on the hard-luck side of town. I’m not surprised when I pull up in front of their tin-sided shack to be rushed by a couple of nasty dogs. I tell them to get back, and they’re so surprised that somebody would speak sharply to them that they settle right down and follow me through the maze of torn-apart cars squatting in the yard.

  Cathy Armstrong comes to the door. She’s a big, tough country woman. Her gray hair is pulled back in a fierce bun at her neck. I’d hate to see her with her hair flowing free. “Samuel Craddock, what brings you over here?” Her voice is not unwelcoming, the way it would have been if I were still a lawman.

  “Cathy, it’s good to see you again. You doing okay?”

  She says she’s poorly with her back, but other than that she’s fine.

  “I’d like a chance to have a word with your boys. They might have some information that could help me out.”

  “Information about what?”

  “You know Dora Lee Parjeter, the woman who got killed at Cotton Hill?”

  “I’ve seen her a time or two.” The welcome is gone from her voice. “My boys didn’t have nothing to do with that. They’re good boys.”

  I wave my hands vigorously. “No, no, don’t get me wrong. It’s nothing to do with them. I just hear that they saw a car out at Dora Lee’s that they took notice of, and I’d like to see if they can tell me something about that.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” She’s looking for the hitch in my story. “Come on in. Let me see if they can talk to you.”

  “Why don’t I just wait out here? I don’t want to keep you from your business.”

  “Suit yourself.” She disappears back into the house.

  After a few minutes identical teenaged hulks come tumbling out the front door, hitching up their pants and grinning to each other. They’ve got big flat faces, eyes set close together, and hair that I imagine their mamma cuts.

  I stick out my hand, and they shake with me, both turning red in the same degree. I gesture to the cars scattered out front. “I notice you all take an interest in cars.”

  “Yessir, we sure do,” one of them says.

  “Which Armstrong are you?” I say. “I swear I never saw two people look so much alike.”

  They snicker as if they’ve never heard it before. “I’m Cecil and this is Felix.”

  “Cecil, I understand you noticed a fine car parked out at Dora Lee Parjeter’s place sometime in the last couple of weeks.”

  Cecil grins. “We sure did. I’d like to get my hands on a car like that.”

  “What can you tell me about the car and if you can remember when it was you saw it out there.”

  “It was a ragtop,” the one called Felix says. “A foreign make. Smallish, like a little sports car.”

  “Yessir, that would be one hell of car to drive,” Cecil says.

  “Did you see it once? Twice?”

  “Two times. Both times it was parked down near the road, not up at the house.”

  “Did you see who was in it?”

  The two boys squint at each other in an effort to recall. “It was a man,” Cecil says, “but we didn’t pay any attention. Being that we didn’t know the car, we didn’t figure we’d know who was driving it.”

  “Big man? Small?”

  “I guess we would have noticed if he had been outsize, one way or another. He wasn’t shrunk down behind the wheel, but I didn’t notice him being real big.”

  “Any idea what nights he was out there?”

  They look at each other and shrug. I’m liking these two boys. They’re not shy about talking to me, but they’re not smartasses or surly either. Being twins, maybe they feel a little more secure in their ability to take care of themselves than some of the other men in their family.

  Technically they were breaking the law by drag racing at the dam, but they’re just boys, glad to be out of school for the summer, roaming the roads at night like boys have been doing since I was a youngster, stirring up whatever they can to use up time and energy.

  “Did you see the car out there last Thursday night?” The night Dora Lee was killed.

  They exchange looks again. “We wouldn’t have seen it that night even if it had been there, because we were over visiting somebody in Bobtail.” Cecil punches his brother on the arm, which tells me they were in Bobtail to see some girl.

  “In case you were to see that car again, co
uld you do me the favor of getting a license plate number?” They say they’ll be glad to. I thank them for their time, and then I have an idea. “You two boys need any work?” I say. “I could use some help at my place.”

  They have twin looks of regret. “We appreciate it, but we’ve got a job over in Bobtail, working for a garage. We work over there every day, from morning until two thirty.”

  “You must be pretty good at this stuff,” I say.

  Hands on his hips, Cecil surveys the yard. “We’ve been at it since we was twelve,” he says. He points to the one car that looks intact. “That’s how we got our car there. We put it together from some junkyard cars that daddy hauled out here. It can get up to some fair speed.”

  “You all be careful,” I say. They look at me and grin the way boys do when they think nothing will ever happen to them. But I know it can, remembering a couple of incidents that I’d prefer not to have been a party to, pulling mangled bodies out of fast cars, when I was chief of police.

  When I get back to my house, Caroline’s car is still not back and I begin to wonder if she has gone on back to Houston without telling me. I take a look in the spare bedroom, and sure enough her things are gone. She’s left a note propped up on the bedside table. Samuel, I’ve moved out to the farm for tonight. Thank you for your hospitality. —C. I’m thinking she must have some sense of shame about last night to move out to the farm, as much as she hates it.

  I go out and sit on the porch and run through my mind the things I’ve learned today and how they fit with Dora Lee’s murder. Why would she have thought somebody was after her? Surely Dora Lee would have told me if someone threatened her. But maybe she wouldn’t have if it was her daughter. I try to imagine Caroline threatening Dora Lee, but even though Caroline has an edge to her, it’s hard for me to be serious about her making a threat. One thing is certain, something sent Caroline out of that house thirty years ago and she’s never really gotten over it. I’m thinking maybe I’ll have to make another pass at talking to Maddie Hicks.

  My thoughts turn to the car the boys described today. I let my imagination loose. Could the Underwoods have hired someone to spook Dora Lee into selling her place and it got out of hand? Could the fancy car belong to Caroline and she borrowed a friend’s heap to drive here? Maybe Wayne Jackson has a second car to complement his big SUV. Or maybe the car belongs to somebody who hasn’t even come into the picture yet.

  So Loretta will approve of the way I’m decked out to go to Frenchy’s, I put on some black pants and a light blue shirt with a black string tie, and I’m pretty pleased with myself when I walk out the door.

  Loretta takes her time. That’s why I told her I’d pick her up at six o’clock. I figured by the time we got over to Frenchy’s it would be close to seven. When Loretta finally makes her appearance, all tight-curled and wearing a crisp yellow and white dress, I’ve become acquainted with all the articles in her new Good Housekeeping magazine and don’t feel better informed for it. I ask Loretta if she’d rather I drive her car than my truck, so we can arrive in style, and she likes the idea. She has a nice little Chevrolet, and its air-conditioning works, which on a hot August night is a blessing.

  At Frenchy’s I stick to ordering what I know; steak and a baked potato. Loretta orders the special, which she always does, since she likes to be adventuresome in her eating. I start to order a beer, but then remember how nice that wine went down at Jenny’s, so I ask if I can get a glass of red wine.

  “I never knew you to order any red wine,” Loretta says.

  I almost tell her I had some at Jenny Sandstone’s last night, but think better of it. “I was just thinking that at a French restaurant, wine might be the thing. You want some?”

  She shudders and makes a prissy face. “Ice tea is just fine for me.” I suspect Loretta would like a glass of wine if she’d ever tried it, but her husband was a rigid teetotaler, and she went along with him.

  Talk starts out well between us, with us going over details of the funeral and the reception. Loretta has all kinds of news to impart that I was not privy to. Things like who is in the family way; whose son has decided not to go off to college after all, making his mamma cry with happiness and his daddy mad at the lost opportunity; who is sick; who has gotten better. All the things that run through a small town and make you appreciate the ebb and flow of life, even if you don’t know much about the people involved. Loretta keeps peering at me when she thinks I’m not looking, and I know she’s thinking about what happened at the Two Dog last night.

  I figure the best defense is a good offense. “I had me a problem last night.”

  “What problem?” she says.

  “Dora Lee’s daughter went off to the Two Dog and had herself a little too much to drink and I thought I better go get her out of there.”

  The dam breaks. “Well, I don’t know why it had to fall to you to take care of somebody like that. She’s a grown woman. I hear she was making up to Rodell, and he’s a married man. I hear they were practically going at it on the dance floor. How come you had to get involved? It’s not like you and Dora Lee . . .” She stops abruptly, having gone one step too far.

  “Dora Lee was a good friend, and Caroline was staying at my house, so I felt some obligation.”

  Loretta’s cheeks are bright pink. “I don’t understand that to begin with. She could just as well have stayed out at Dora Lee’s farm.”

  I’m wondering how I’m going to ease her off the subject, but I remember what Jenny said about the kind of woman Caroline is, and I figure that deep down Loretta has the same instinct for Caroline that Jenny does, and I won’t get past it. So I just say, “With all those Parjeters out there at the farm, I thought she might need some privacy. And it worked out all right in the end. She was just a little stirred up by the funeral.”

  I couldn’t have asked for a better time for our food to be served. It puts us back on a good footing, and after a few bites, Loretta says, “How long do you figure Caroline is going to linger here?”

  “She said something about having to get back to work. Loretta, I know she’s a strange kind of woman, but I believe life hasn’t been all that kind to her, and it won’t hurt for people to let her alone.”

  “If she’ll leave us alone, we’ll leave her alone.” Loretta dabs her lips with her napkin.

  “I don’t think she wants to be here, but she’s got to do something about the property.”

  Loretta suddenly gets a smirk on her face, and she reaches up and pats her hair.

  “What are you so smug about?” I say.

  “I just know something you might not know,” she says. “I stopped by Frances Underwood’s place this morning to get some eggs, and she told me something interesting.”

  It makes me embarrassed for Loretta that Frances Underwood is going to use her to spread the rumor that Dora Lee’s property might amount to something. If I had Frances Underwood here right now, I’d have plenty to say to her.

  “Well, tell me what she said.”

  “She made me swear not to tell.”

  “All right, then. I wouldn’t want you to go back on your word.”

  She takes a couple of bites of her dinner, and I say something about how nice the wine is and how nice it is to sometimes come to a place that has white tablecloths. I’m about to say how nice it is that everybody dresses up a little to come here, when she says, “Well, I don’t suppose it would hurt if I told you. She just meant don’t spread it to all and sundry.”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  She peers at me to see if I’m being sarcastic, but decides I’m not. “Some big outfit from Houston is thinking about putting a race track out there.”

  “A horse racetrack?” I ask, all innocence.

  “No, a car racetrack. They think people who come to the lake will come to the car races, too.”

  “I thought Underwood wanted to farm that land.”

  “I asked her about that,” Loretta says. “She’s a kind of woman I
think knows more than she lets on. She says that’s exactly what they were going to do, but then they heard about this racetrack some time back and decided it might be best to see what came of it, before they put in the time and effort to bring the land up to where it could grow crops.”

  After that, we discuss what a big change it would be to have racing out there. She says there’d be people for it and people against it, and I agree. We wind up the evening on friendly terms.

  In Jarrett Creek we’re headed toward our part of town when I see flashing lights up ahead, like an ambulance. I wonder if it’s for old Mrs. Summerville next door.

  “What in the world?” Loretta says. “Look at the sky, there’s smoke.” Anxiety clouds her voice.

  I have a sudden feeling of dread. It’s as hot a night as we’ve had, and I wonder if something has caught fire. We turn on to our street, and I yell out, “Oh, my God!” The fire trucks are sitting outside my house.

  I hit the accelerator, and come to a screeching halt at Jenny Sandstone’s house, because I can’t get any closer. Jenny is out front with Elvin Crown, head of the volunteer fire department.

  I leap out of the car and rush toward my house, as fast as I can go with my knee hitching up.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Elvin says and he almost tackles me from behind. “You can’t go up there just yet.”

  “My paintings,” I gasp. My heart is pounding so hard, I feel faint. Jenny is at my side and takes hold of my arm. “It’s okay. Your paintings got out of there.”

  “Are you sure? How?”

  “The volunteer boys and I got them out.”

  I bend over for a minute with my hands on my knees to get my bearings and feel Jenny holding onto my arm. “I’ll be all right,” I say.

  “You had a bad scare,” Jenny says.

  I straighten back up and now that my head is cleared I can see that the house looks intact, although the smell of smoke is strong in the air. Loretta has gone over to talk to neighbors who are in a huddle across the street, taking in the action. I’m surprised to find that Rodell is here, too, looking somber. I ask Elvin for the details.