by McNay, Dan
Rob scratched his head and walked away.
* * *
They found their way to the chief’s office. She had met him before. The chief, a small guy, with muscles and a goatee, came out to greet them and brought them back to his tiny office. He was probably about thirty-five, probably with a wife and kids and a little boy who he was teaching to play football. Daydee hadn’t really looked at him closely before. There was no decoration or any pictures in the office. No papers on his desk.
His name was Ted.
“What can I do for you?” he asked after they sat down.
Her father was shivering a little.
“Well. We’ve come to get your help,” Daydee said. Boy, did that sound strange to her. “This is my father, Donald McIntyre. I know because I knew him up to the age of ten before he was committed. He knows me. There’s someone out in the cemetery that was buried next to my mother that was identified and buried as him. We think it might be Edward Stills’ father. I don’t have any proof of any of this, but I think my father is in danger.”
Ted grimaced. Opening a desk drawer, he took a few sheets of paper that were stapled together, like it might be someone’s book report for school. He looked at it and then handed it to her.
“It may be against procedures to show you this, but you seem to be willing to cooperate with us. I received it in the mail. The sheriff and the editor of the Beacon got copies in the mail as well. For all I know you and Mr. Stills may receive it too. The sheriff has already been in contact with me. I understand you know Mr. Stills and the sheriff socially.”
She looked at the papers. At the top was typed in capital letters: THE CONFESSION.
“Read it,” he instructed.
It was all neatly typed up.
It started with the night we won the state championship. Those two boys I had bet on, encouraged, cheered for. I knew we could win that year. They both could have played pro ball. I thought after they made it into college football that they would make that next step, and I could have the bragging rights. Who would’ve thought one would become a lawyer, the other a minister. I had nursed them through school. Neither of them were too good at their studies then. I had to cajole passing grades from several of their teachers in their senior year. Maybe that’s where it started. To get to that last game of the season in Springfield. And to carry home the title. They would be graduating in June, they already had offers for college. They all drank anyway. It wasn’t like I was encouraging that. We had started out having a fancy dinner and bragged and were applauded. We all drank too much. I went back to school to double check on the gear lock up and noticed their car on the hill above the school. I went up to shoo them home. There were other kids out there. My headlights caught them. Edward on top of Deidre inside a car. You couldn’t help but watch. She was the cutest, sexiest girl in the high school and in the whole town. There wasn’t a man in town that could have resisted watching. Deidre looked really drunk or really in the throes of passion. Her clothes were halfway off and Edward just went ahead on her. She didn’t protest or fight or do much. Then Edward and Jack came after me. They told me I had to. They both were beside me, dragging me back to the car. They pushed me in and somebody kicked my shoe to get me to draw my leg in and the door was slammed. Deidre was unconscious. She was a mess and smelled of Rum and sex and that sweet stuff they were all smoking then too. And how was I supposed to refuse this. Her body was as open as a door. I did it quick. I was gentle, but I knew she wouldn’t remember a thing the next day, so it didn’t really matter, did it? I was the fucking coach of the State Champions! After that, it gets a little fuzzy. I do remember getting out of the car and getting patted on the back by Edward and Jack. Jack tried to take a turn, but she bit the bejesus out of his ear. I was the one that bundled her up and took her home. The boys and the rest of them had disappeared. I thought what had happened might be some kind of powerful dream you know, like in one of those Shakespeare plays, where you wake up not knowing if it was real or not.
The affair with Mary McIntyre started shortly after that. She was alone and Deidre had disappeared and she seemed to need me around. It was easy to cheat on my wife. I was a coach. I had to be at training sessions with the boys in the evenings. And we were traveling to neighbor towns for games and didn’t make it back at night if it was too far away and the game ran late. Mary would drive and meet me. My wife never cared for football. I’m not sure what she saw in me other than I was gone a lot. We went on for about six months and then Mary asked me to deliver a package for her on one of our game trips. I knew what it was. Then there was a few more deliveries asked for. I joked about getting gas money for all this running around and she started giving me a split. There were one or two good sized packages a month to make it somewhere around the southern part of the state. Where it came from and where it went after I delivered it, I didn’t know then and didn’t want to know. It was pretty simple to open and snort a line and then wrap it back up no worse for wear – nobody could tell. The guys I gave it to were mean looking sons-of-bitches. They were distributors, I guessed. It wasn’t until later that I found out about the coyotes and the wetbacks that were coming up. The coyotes were the mules bringing the cocaine across the border and they would drop it with Mary when they delivered the farm workers. The farmers would drive in to pick what they could from her safe house. The one Deidre lives in now. The sheriff knew all along about the whole set-up. Mary cut him in. There was no way you could bring twenty bodies into a little town in the middle of the night without everyone knowing it. The good citizens just looked the other way. God knows the farms needed cheap labor. The bodies that were buried out behind the cemetery were the ones that tried to run away. Nobody heard a thing. Nobody saw a thing. And nobody cared. Mary called me one night to help hunt one of them down. She thought since I knew where all the teenage football players hung out when they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing, I might know where to find a desperate wetback. I found him. He was no more than a boy himself. I coaxed him back to the house with a revolver. I didn’t realize the coyote needed an example. I took the kid to his death. The guy shot him in front of all of them. And it was my job to carry the body back down behind the cemetery so it could be bulldozed over. Jack was home for the summer and needed money. His father had taught him the backhoe.
Then Edward graduated from law school and came back to set up shop. He immediately started a turf war with Mary over who had rights to what in town. He was always into the kinky stuff, so he had a little syndicate over in Terre Haute for the prostitutes and he had a lot of money deals which made some rich and others not. There’s a lot more. But that’s probably enough for one session.
Things kind of went on for a few years. I got addicted to heroin and the affair ended when Mary got married again. I did love her, but she no longer needed to keep me in with the sex. I needed my fix. It wasn’t free. The football team pretty much went down the tubes. My heart wasn’t in it any more. I was just treading water. The boys knew it. The school and the town knew it. Mary needed sole proprietorship of the properties and the cemetery and no one could find her crazy ex-husband. Mary wanted her husband dead, so she came to me and Edward to find her a body. Edward wanted his father gone. So we coaxed him out to the farm and the old barn and we ran him over. Mary identified him as Donald and the sheriff ruled it an accidental death and we buried him in Donald’s grave and everybody was happy. Edward told everybody his father had moved to Florida for his health and he just took over everything his father had.
My wife saved me. She drove me to a clinic and checked me in and left me. In six months, I finally got free of it. But it left its mark. All the things I had done dragged me down like so many lead weights. I tried hanging myself, but the rope broke. Don’t laugh. It wasn’t funny.
Winston had signed it and dated it.
“Jesus,” she said. She looked at Ted incredulously. “Should I give it to him?” she said, meaning her father.
“You can tell him what was in it, l
ater,” Ted said. Daydee handed it back to him. “Do you know where Winston is?”
“No, I’ve not talked to him since his wife’s funeral.”
“We need to question him about this. If he contacts you, tell him he needs to come see me immediately. For his own protection.”
“What about us?” she asked.
“Well, as far as I know you and your father haven’t broken any laws and you are cooperating. We will need to get a search warrant for your house and the cemetery, or you can give us permission to search without it.”
“You can come home with us right now if you want,” Daydee said, wondering if she had emptied the ashtray of pot ashes.
“Is everything in the letter true?”
“As far as I know. I don’t remember the rape. Winston told me that he didn’t have anything to do with who is in the grave, but I guess that wasn’t true.”
“I need to have one of my officers come along. I need some more answers from you until we find him.”
They sat and explained to him the story about her father, Donald, returning to Paris and her trials with Edward and Jack. She left Winston and Sarah out completely. And the money that was no longer in the house anyway. The sheriff was not mentioned by anyone including Ted.
When the second officer arrived, they went out to the house.
* * *
They spent most of the time looking through the things in the garage. Daydee had gotten rid of almost all of her mother’s personal belongings when she moved into the house, so this was all that really remained. Her father offered to play the piano while they searched. Ted, the police chief, eyed her with a grimace. She shooed her father out to go watch television.
“So according to our police report, your burglars said they had women with them,” he said as they were rearranging the boxes.
“I didn’t see any,” she told him.
“There wasn’t another vehicle outside?”
“Not that I saw.”
“You were pretty rough with them.”
“What?”
“Where did you learn to handle yourself? Were you a marine or something?” he asked.
“New Orleans can be a rough place when you’re young. I got there at sixteen.”
“They were deported without charges being filed against them. Did the sheriff mention that to you?”
“No. I guess I forgot about it. I’ve been busy with the estate and my father. Those things seem like they take years. I guess I thought I’d be contacted to come and testify when you all were ready and just forgot about it.”
“You know anything about the fire at Edward Stills’ house?”
“Was there a fire? When did that happen?”
They didn’t really find anything. The police chief asked about what might be out at the cemetery. She offered the accounting log book that she had given to the sheriff.
“I’ve been through every record out there, trying to make sense of her bookkeeping, but it’s pretty much a mess. I keep thinking some family is going to show up and I won’t have anything that they paid for.”
“Well, I’ll call you and arrange to come out and take a look.”
“You know Edward Stills will be after my father pretty soon. He’s proof of somebody else buried out there in my father’s plot.”
“It’s doubtful that he has seen it yet.”
“If the sheriff has a copy of the confession, then Edward has seen it.”
“I’ll assign a patrol to check in over here. I will tell Rob that you are a cooperating witness in the case and that he is to back off and, if available, he should assign a deputy over here. That should keep him from trying to help Edward.”
“You read the letter,” Daydee said. “He is much more involved than you think.”
“This is a small town. I need to proceed carefully.”
She wanted to tell him off. He was just another fucking dick. But she only nodded. This was all she had other than her mother’s shotgun. And her little toy gun she kept for safekeeping.
Chapter seventeen
She knew she hadn’t asked the right questions. What was involved in digging up a grave? She owned the cemetery. Did she have the right to dig up anything she wanted to? That was a question for the new lawyer. Would the chief have to go to a judge to exhume a body? Was he even going to do that? If she was in Edward’s situation, she’d go get Jack and dig up that casket in the middle of the night and drive off with it to dump in Lake Michigan or somewhere. And if her father disappeared, it would just be her word against the sheriff about the death certificate. Was the chief going to investigate or was he going to just ignore it all? He hadn’t acted like he was going to ignore it. She just couldn’t trust the cops. They all were self-appointed judge and juries. And they never explained anything.
She called the lawyer. It took him a day to get back to her. Since the casket was legally considered her family member, it was legal to dig up the body and move it. The chief was next. She told him what the lawyer had told her and invited his department to be in attendance. She only needed to know when he wanted to do it. He told her to wait. He finally said, after a long pause, that he wanted a Criminal Court Judge for the county and the mayor to be in agreement to go ahead before he would be ready to do it. Fucking cops!
* * *
She had seen the chief on the sidewalk walking towards Edward’s office yesterday. Was he going to see him? She had a moment of panic. She had made a mistake going to him for help. They were all the same. There wasn’t a cop in New Orleans that wasn’t on the take. Or a mob boss that didn’t send Christmas presents to everyone that could look the other way. And she had agreed to wait. She wanted to cry.
* * *
The quilting bee that Sarah had invited her to was tonight. She told her father that he could go with her or stay locked in the house with the shotgun beside him. Those were the only options. He chose to stay home. They had been going for walks around the neighborhood. Until now, she hadn’t been willing to let him out of her sight. They had grown accustomed to being around each other without much being said. She missed the gibberish chatter sometimes. He seemed to have developed making funny noises with his mouth when he got up or sat down. A sigh or a little groan or something in between. His illness was showing. It took him a long time to get dressed and out the door. He had mentioned a couple of times that the ‘crazies’ did seem to wipe away body pain. Or at least he didn’t remember it.
He seemed to enjoy the way his boots crunched on the snow-covered sidewalks. This was Daydee’s first snowy winter since her early teens. It wasn’t bad, if you could bundle up and stay dry. The city didn’t seem to be in much hurry to plow the streets in their part of town, so the streets were so many ruts through the snow that were slowly growing wider and darker. There really wasn’t anything to do at the cemetery. No one seemed to care if the markers were covered. She wished Winston was around to ask if she was expected to clear the drives around Christmas time. Did families come out to put flowers up? But there had been no word from him.
* * *
The quilting bee was at Sarah’s business office. She had pulled the desk back against a wall and put out one of those big folding tables and put folding chairs around it. There was plenty of fabric and scissors and thread to go around. Hanna was there and a teller from the bank that had her mother’s accounts. And about four other women she didn’t know. Almost all were younger except for Sarah and Hanna. They all seemed to know each other and they all seemed to know how to make quilts. Sarah gave her a basic hand-sewing lesson and started her off on one square for the quilt. She kept sticking herself in spite of the thimbles she soon had on three fingers. She sucked the blood until it stopped and started sewing again. So far no blood on her square.
The beer was served around and most of the women took one. No glasses, which Daydee took as a good sign. She declined, patting her belly. Then one of Sarah’s friends told her it was good for the baby, so she decided one would be ok. It tasted goo
d.
That started one of the women on a long story about her pregnancy and her old German doctor who prescribed good German ale and hot baths for whatever the pregnant ailment might be. It turned out that two other women had had at least one of their children delivered by this doctor.
She was slowly picking up the knack of this. There were two done for each one of hers but she didn’t mind. They started gossiping about some women, primarily from the church, that they had not invited. She didn’t mind that either, since two of the women had come with Jack’s wife to arrange to get rid of their plots at the cemetery. She wondered what it would be like to live here forever and know as many people intimately as these women did? It seemed very strange. She had never had more than a couple of friends at a time in her whole life. These gals were kind of fun.
The talk turned to complaining about the men in their lives. Dirty boots tracked across newly mopped floors. Dirty clothes, mostly socks left lying about like leaves blown by the wind. A lot of the men here took no responsibility for being adults. They were picked up after, fed and clothed much like a child in this world, much like she had done for her father. She kept asking why and they would shrug at her as if it was the way of the world and nothing could be done to change them.
Sarah was the exception because she was the ‘fallen woman’ – a divorced soul set adrift. It was a little in-joke between them. They all knew Edward and understood completely why a woman would leave him. It turned out that Sarah had a ‘boyfriend,’ a contractor from the next county over where Sarah spent some of her weekends and ‘he’ was on ‘his’ best behavior almost all of the time, which made Sarah the object of great envy. Daydee knew why the ‘boyfriend’ was so perfect.
Hanna talked about how her husband did bring her fresh meadow flowers one Valentine’s Day. He had stopped in the middle of fertilizing to pick them for her and nursed them in his thermos with his drinking water in his pickup all afternoon. She was proud that he gave up his drinking water on a hot spring day to bring her flowers. Daydee was surprised that Sean could be nice.