Faye checked her watch. She figured she had twenty minutes to kill before she and Joe were irredeemably late for work, so she busied herself perusing a selection of cut-rate pantyhose on the aisle furthest from the pharmacy counter. Within ten minutes of watching Preston Silver do business, she’d detected a pattern that she didn’t like. Eight people had approached the counter, which was staffed by Silver and a silver-haired African-American woman who looked as if her feet already hurt. Five of the customers were white, two were black, and one was Native American, probably Choctaw.
This was a reasonable approximation of the population of Neshoba County which, because of the reservation, had its own unique racial balance. During their project orientation, Dr. Mailer had been careful to call their attention to that balance—roughly 65% white, 20% black, and 15% Native American—which was an inescapable part of the local landscape.
It wasn’t the diversity of Preston Silver’s clientele that put a cold lump in the center of her chest. It was the way he treated them. As each person reached the front of the line, Silver either took the prescription from an outstretched hand, or he gave a curt nod at his assistant, who reached out a hand to take the slip of paper. It was impossible for Faye, who had been born biracial in the 1960s South, not to notice that Silver waited on all five white customers, handing the people of color over to his assistant.
Faye sat on her anger for five more minutes, watching Silver wait on three more white people, while his assistant deftly intervened to capture the two non-white customers before they had a chance to notice that the boss didn’t want to talk to them. She decided to use her last five minutes well.
Approaching the counter, she sidestepped the efforts of Silver’s assistant pharmacist to intercept her, presenting herself to the great man himself.
“My associate can take your prescription—” Silver began.
Faye wished she could do this without subjecting herself to the clammy aura that surrounded Silver, but she couldn’t, so she spoke up. “I don’t have a prescription. I just want to ask a question.” She held up a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “I heard it wasn’t safe to take aspirin with this stuff. I took some last night. How long should I wait before I can have an aspirin?”
“My associate is well-versed in drug interactions,” he began again. “If you’ll just step—”
Joe, whose powers of observation exceeded even Faye’s, had seen what was happening and done precisely the right thing. When Silver tried again to shunt Faye aside, he found that Joe was already standing beside her, engaging the assistant in a spirited discussion of the relative merits of several cold remedies.
Faye looked expectantly at the cornered Klansman, brandishing the bottle of pink stuff, but he untied his apron, dumped it on the counter, and stalked away. She wondered if no one had ever challenged him and his ugly approach to business. Or maybe, like Neely Rutland had done just the day before, people simply bustled into the store, conducted their business, and left without noticing who waited on them.
She set the bottle of Pepto-Bismol on the counter, turned to leave, then thought twice. Retrieving the bottle, she handed it to Silver’s long-suffering assistant, along with a ten dollar bill. She’d faced down a dragon and won. Something inside her wanted to keep the Pepto as a trophy.
“Did we prove something, Faye?” Joe asked, eying the set of her jaw and the pink bottle in her hand. “I mean, did we prove something besides that he’s prejudiced and that we’re smarter than he is?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Faye liked the contrast between the pink stomach remedy and the light brown skin of her hand. She hoped her impertinence made Preston Silver so sick that he needed a few doses of his own stomach medicine.
“We went in there because we wondered whether Silver poisoned Mr. Judd. Did we learn anything?”
Faye set the bottle aside and cranked the car. “Not exactly. We already had ample evidence that he’s a racist. Now we’ve seen it with our own eyes. But that doesn’t mean he’s a killer.” She pursed her lips while her thoughts raced ahead of her ability to sort through them. “Wait. We did learn something slightly useful. I’d bet fifty dollars that Preston Silver waited on Neely yesterday. She is white, after all. Then, when he had to help her track down Mr. Judd’s prescription, he would have known he was counting pills for a black man. A rich famous black man with political views he vehemently opposed. A rich famous black man who just gave a public speech calculated to stir up the past. Would it be tempting for a man like that to slip in a pill that could kill the patient?”
“Poison?”
“It wouldn’t have to be something we’d think of as poison, like arsenic or strychnine. There’s lots of perfectly ordinary things that can kill you if you take it wrong, or if you take too much. Simple aspirin would do it. Even water. To kill with one of those ordinary things, you just have to convince the victim to poison himself willingly. I suspect it wouldn’t be that hard.”
She wondered whether Preston Silver had stood behind his pharmacist’s counter all these years, refining his plan for the perfect murder, waiting for his chance. Had Neely given it to him?
“I need to call the sheriff,” Faye said, thumbing open the address book on her cell phone.
“So Preston tried some of his stupid bigot’s tricks on you? I’ll bet you made him eat his pharmacist’s apron.”
“You know about it?” Faye wished she’d asked Joe to drive while she talked on the phone. This country road appeared to have been laid out along an old cow path. Navigating around another abrupt twist, she wondered whether the cows had been drunk. “Neely, his behavior’s illegal. You know that. It’s a throwback to the days when only whites could eat at lunch counters.”
“Why do you think Preston closed his lunch counter?”
“Because he didn’t want to be forced to serve the likes of me.”
Neely cleared her throat. “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes. The law has pushed Preston and people like him into a corner. They push back in little ways, just to prove they can. He behaves when I’m in the store. He knows everyone on my payroll by name, so he’s not likely to screw up in front of them. I don’t doubt that he pushes his luck when none of us are in the store.”
“You’ve got my testimony…” Faye paused. “Wait. No, you don’t. Joe and I both got waited on. We were made a little uncomfortable in the process, but I’m not sure any laws were broken.”
Neely’s voice was warm, even after it had been bounced off a few cell towers and filtered through the electronic guts of Faye’s phone. “I guess I could get somebody he doesn’t know to go in there wearing a recorder, and get some hard evidence but, Faye, I’m a little busy. I’m in the middle of a murder investigation. I wish people would vote with their feet and with their dollars. If people would shop somewhere else, then Preston could be prejudiced all by his lonesome self. Well, I guess he’ll always have me, as long as I’m buying Daddy’s medicine.”
“Do you really think he’s harmless enough to ignore? You said yourself that he was a known Klansman. Doesn’t it worry you that Lawrence Judd collapsed shortly after taking pills from Silver’s Pharmacy?”
The silence on Neely’s end of the line was so complete that Faye checked her phone’s display to see whether their connection had been broken. After a few long seconds, the sheriff spoke. “I heard Mr. Judd had been sick. I spoke with the doctor about his condition, but not as the sheriff and not because I thought there was a crime involved. I just felt…”
“Sympathetic?”
“Yeah, sympathetic. Because of Daddy. I know how hard it is to be sick. I was going to call his wife this evening, because I have an even better idea of what she’s going through. Anyway, the doctor didn’t give me even a breath of suspicion that there might be anything criminal about Mr. Judd’s collapse.”
Feeling sheepish, Faye said, “I guess I’m just the suspicious type.”
“Well…” The phone was silent again for awhile, presumably b
ecause Neely was thinking. Faye congratulated herself for getting this far. Most law enforcement types would have dismissed her tenuous suspicions out of hand. She was grateful to Neely for taking her seriously.
“Well,” Neely said again. “I’m supposed to talk to Preston Silver this afternoon. Nothing dramatic, just a conversation about his friendship with Carroll Calhoun, concluding with a discussion of why Preston thinks the man turned up dead. I had hoped to press him for information on Mr. Judd’s attack, since I feel like there’s is a decent chance that his attacker was in the Klan. Maybe he bragged to the Klavern about what he’d done. While I’m at it, I’ll try to find out what he knows about why Judd collapsed yesterday, but I need something besides, ‘I think you slipped him a bad pill because everybody knows you’re a racist.’ I’ll do my best, Faye, but don’t get your hopes up. Preston Silver has had more than forty years of practice in keeping his mouth shut.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Faye and Joe had slinked in late to work. Granted, they were hardly ten minutes late, but there were bosses in the world who would have chewed them up and spit them out for much less serious transgressions. Dr. Mailer was not one of those bosses.
Twenty minutes later, Toneisha and Bodie had arrived. Dr. Mailer had missed their arrival, having been in his office at the time, but Faye knew that he was aware of their tardiness. He said nothing.
Faye caught Joe’s eye, then cast a knowing glance in the direction of the two tardy archaeologists. Joe just grinned. Faye hadn’t mentioned to him that Toneisha had been out all night, figuring that her roommate’s business was her own. Joe had apparently taken the same position regarding Bodie’s whereabouts.
Privacy was tough to achieve under their close working conditions, but Bodie and Toneisha might as well have broadcast their budding relationship on the Internet. If they’d just managed to be on time for work (and if they’d been discreet enough to arrive in separate cars), the rest of the crew would still be wondering. Faye harbored naughty thoughts of buying Toneisha a travel alarm.
The morning passed uneventfully. At eleven o’clock, Dr. Mailer looked at his watch and said, “Would you look at that? We’ve been out here three hours and nobody’s threatened anybody with a bulldozer. No law enforcement officers have driven out here to check our alibis for anything. No aging politicians have had any medical crises today. Nobody’s been killed with a weapon that looks a lot like the stuff we’ve got stored in the trailer. And every last one of you has a dirty trowel in your hand. Even Faye.”
Faye looked up from her excavation unit. “Hey. It’s not my fault that the sheriff came all the way out here to talk to me. Or that Mr. Judd needed a ride.”
“Sounds like slacker talk to me,” said Toneisha, secure in the knowledge that, though she’d arrived late, she’d made up for it by moving more dirt than anybody on that particular morning.
“Folks that are talking are folks that aren’t working,” observed Bodie.
Faye tossed a rock in his general direction.
Mailer lifted his head from the potsherd he was measuring, and raised his reading glasses up onto his forehead so that he could focus on the car turning into the Nails’ driveway. A spiffy-looking logo on the door proclaimed that it was owned by SGM&T. Their client had arrived.
Mailer muttered, “Well, I’ll be John Brown,” which was as close to cursing as he ever got. “Looks like my big mouth has conjured up a client visit. I won’t be getting much more accomplished today, but if you people keep your heads down, maybe he’ll ignore you and let you work.” He rose and brushed the dirt from his knees. “Tell you what. If he tries to bother any of you, I’ll tally up how much his project is paying, per minute, for this team’s time.”
“It’s not all that much,” Oka Hofobi said.
“Yeah,” Mailer said as he walked toward the car, “but he’s cheap. If you’re on the clock, then he’ll want you working. I’ll deal with him on my own.”
Mailer, as good as his word, had kept the contractor as far from his team as possible, but sound travels far and fast, so the team had heard every word of their client’s diatribe. He was unquestionably unhappy. His client, the state department of transportation, was unhappy, too, and he was happy to pass that dissatisfaction down to his lowly archaeological subcontractors. To hear him talk, anybody who had ever driven a car on Mississippi highways, not to mention everyone who ever hoped to drive a car on those highways, was extremely unhappy with Dr. Mailer and his management of this project.
His opening salvo went right to the heart of the problem. “Do you know how quickly you people could stop this project if you tell the whole world that there might be Indian artifacts here?”
“Sir,” Dr. Mailer began, taking the obsequiously respectful approach, “you hired us to look for cultural artifacts, and that’s what we’re doing. Not just Native American artifacts, but anything of cultural value that could be destroyed by road construction. That’s not a secret.”
It’s also the law, Faye was tempted to interject, but there was no point in antagonizing the man. Also, he was standing quite some distance away, so she would have had to express her opinion at a significant decibel level. This was not the way to win friends and influence people.
“Of course it’s not a secret. It’s the law, and I run all my projects according to the law,” the man said, redeeming himself a trifle in Faye’s eyes, by echoing her thoughts. “But was there any need to go on television and shout it out to the countryside?”
And here was the crux of the problem. Their client was worried about bad PR. It was entirely possible that a road project could be completed within the law, by excavating any cultural materials and removing them, yet still be politically impossible. If the public rose up and protested the destruction of an archaeological site, then a road project through that spot could be dead in the water.
Here, in the Choctaws’ literal back yard, winning approval for construction was even more perilous. The Choctaws absolutely possessed the financial and political clout to make themselves heard. Considering past history, Faye found it refreshing on those rare occasions when the government had to tiptoe around the sensibilities of Native Americans.
From their client’s point of view, the archaeologists they hired should do their work, turn in their report quietly, then let the engineers decide where the new road should go. Heaven forbid that the public should get any more information than the law required.
“You’ve got a Ph.D., so I guess you’re not stupid,” ranted the client, who clearly enjoyed having his subcontractors by the financial scruff of the neck, “but I’ll tell you SGM&T’s position one more time. You are here because our client, the highway department, needs a permit to build this road. You are not here to make trouble. You are not here to find any reason not to build this road. And you are certainly not here to be on television talking about murdered farmers. Not when we’ll be coming back next year to work on a much bigger project right across the road.”
Dr. Mailer listened, nervously rubbing his palms together with his hands clasped in front of him. Faye wondered whether the client thought Dr. Mailer had killed Carroll Calhoun himself, just to antagonize SGM&T. She also wondered whether the red-faced agent was going to be the second person in two days to have a cardiac event right here in the Nails’ driveway.
It seemed to her that Dr. Mailer needed a little moral support. And he needed someone to help him gather his wits so that he could jump on the insider information his client had just handed him. Somebody was going to do the archaeology work next year for that big project across the street. Why not Dr. Mailer and his job-hungry students? More to the point, why not Oka Hofobi? Here was a chance for him to get paid, again, for pursuing the questions he’d asked all his life. What were his ancestors’ lives like when they lived here, all those years ago?
She wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans and reached into the cooler that Dr. Mailer kept stocked with bottled water for his team. His team might have preferr
ed beer, but they appreciated the gesture. He was a good boss and he deserved for Faye to go to bat for him.
Wiping the bottle dry, she handed it to the client. “It’s pretty hot out here. Would you like a drink?”
He thanked her, cracked the bottle’s seal, and took a healthy swig. He even smiled. Offering food to placate an angry enemy was a human custom that went back…how far? Faye would have bet that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons did the self-same thing.
“Do you know when the contract for next year’s project will go out for bid?” she asked. “The one that you just mentioned?”
“Oh, the contracts people at the highway department will keep fiddling with it until the end of this fiscal year, but then they’ll be in a big rush to hire somebody. If we get the job, we’ll be looking to hire some archaeologists again. You folks interested?” His fury seemed to have spent itself when he realized that Dr. Mailer wasn’t going to respond in kind, and that he wasn’t going to cower, either. A soft answer does indeed turn away wrath.
Faye looked at Dr. Mailer, inviting him to take this opportunity and run with it.
“Yes,” he said, shoving a white shock of hair off his high forehead, “we definitely are interested, and we’d be the obvious choice. We’re gaining more site-specific knowledge every day, which we could use to help you write the proposal. And, of course, we have young Dr. Nail, who lives right here. He’s a huge asset to getting the work done cost-effectively.”
Good job, Faye thought. Get him in the pocketbook. Out loud, she only said, “Can you tell us anything about the proposed location of the road?”
“Right over there,” the man said, gesturing across the street to the left of the Calhoun house. He didn’t seem to be pointing at Calhoun’s mound, which was a relief to Faye. She’d hate to see it standing in the median of a four-lane highway.
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