Somebody brought water in a paper cup and Maynard Griggs drained it in a couple of gulps, then shook his head. “Oh, Lord, what will become of me? What’s Ernestine going to say?”
“About what, Mr. Griggs?” the sheriff prodded.
“I should’ve known no good would come of all this, and now that fellow’s dead too. I told Faris it wouldn’t work.”
“What wouldn’t work?” Sheriff Bonner asked.
“Why, killing him, of course! He wanted to, you know. Faris did. That Jasper Totherow. Faris was all for killing him so he wouldn’t talk . . . but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t!”
The sheriff leaned across his desk and made a steeple of his fingers. “But you did know the woman we found in what was supposed to have been Faris Haskell’s coffin, didn’t you, Mr. Griggs?”
The man turned almost as white as the hair on his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do,” the sheriff said. “And we have reason to believe you put her there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
You can’t prove that!” The elder Griggs started to rise, then thought better of it and sat down again. “I can’t believe it’s come to this.” He reached shakily for another cup of water. “And if Faris Haskell told you I had anything to do with killing Jasper Totherow, he’s lying through his teeth!”
“But you did discuss it?” the sheriff said. “You and Mr. Haskell . . . Hawthorne . . . whoever. You talked about killing Jasper Totherow. Mind telling us why?”
“He was going to tell. Threatened to let everybody know Faris wasn’t dead.”
Sheriff Bonner frowned. “And I don’t suppose you know anything about how Colette Champion got into that coffin?”
“Who?”
“I think you know who. We turned up a car rented to you from an agency over in Rome . . . seems it had some dents that hadn’t been there before. Fellow said you told him you’d hit a dog.”
“That’s right, I did. Ran right in front of me. Unavoidable.” Mr. Griggs crushed his paper cup into a microwad.
Sheriff Bonner just sat there and looked at him. He didn’t speak.
“Look, I paid these people for the damages.” Maynard Griggs tried to look away. “Is that what this is all about?”
The sheriff spoke softly. “That wasn’t animal blood we found underneath your fender, Mr. Griggs. It was human blood. O negative. Same type as Colette Champion’s.”
“Blood? But how—I don’t understand.”
“Hard to get rid of bloodstains, Mr. Griggs. Ever read Macbeth.? Some stains just won’t go away.” The sheriff looked at his hands. “ ‘Out, out damned spot!’ “ I was surprised he remembered the quote after what my mother had said.
Mr. Griggs examined his hands too. “It was an accident,” he said. “I never meant to kill her.”
Thornton Bonner drew in his breath. “Maybe we ought to start at the beginning—back when Faris Haskell ‘died.’ Tell me something . . . just what was buried in that coffin all these years?”
The older man sighed and his eyes were bleak as stagnant water. “Nothing. Just rocks. He wanted everyone to think he died when his car went off the road at Poindexter Point. I was coroner then and I filled out a death certificate and buried a coffin full of rocks.”
“You were the one who dug up the grave!” I spoke without thinking and the others turned and looked at me.
“That was Jasper Totherow,” Maynard Griggs mumbled.
“But the two of you hired him to do it,” Detective “Clouseau” said, stroking his mustache. I resisted an impulse to smile. “Why?”
The old fellow blew his nose and looked behind him toward the door as if he might try to make a dash for it. “The two of us couldn’t handle it alone. We told him the family was moving the grave to another cemetery,” he said.
“So you and your friend paid Jasper to do the digging.” The sheriff played with a pencil, wove it in and out his fingers. “Then later you meant to bury Colette Champion in that same place. What happened?”
“Hell, we dropped the darn thing getting it out of the ground, and you could hear those rocks shifting about.” Mr. Griggs shook his head as if remembering. “Jasper couldn’t tackle the coffin by himself so the two of us had to help him remove it. It was freezing cold, and dark as pitch; we couldn’t half see. Had a devil of a time getting it out—and then that happened.”
“Did he know who Faris was?” Sheriff Bonner wanted to know.
“Pretended he didn’t, but he figured it out. Got more sense than we gave him credit for, I reckon.”
“Let’s get back to Colette Champion,” the sheriff said. “How did she figure in all this?”
“I don’t have to answer that.” Mr. Griggs spoke louder, but there was a tremor in his voice.
“Her blood was underneath that car and her prints were inside it. I expect to find yours there as well.” Sheriff Bonner paused. “Why did you kill her, Mr. Griggs?”
The older man shuddered. “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me!”
I had heard rumors of the elder Griggs’s infidelities, although looking at him today, it was hard to believe. Maynard Griggs had a wandering eye, according to Aunt Zorah, and I’d heard he’d had an affair with someone early in his marriage and paid her to have an abortion and leave town.
Apparently he had kept on paying. Things were tight back then and he was just getting started in his business. He couldn’t go to his wife’s family for hush money, Maynard Griggs explained. And at the same time, his wife Ernestine was expecting their first child.
And that was when my uncle Faris came into it, I learned. Faris Haskell gave his friend the money to pay off the woman and send her away. But it wasn’t far enough.
“I knew Faris was up to something that wasn’t right,” Mr. Griggs admitted. “Too much money all of a sudden, but I was desperate. I didn’t care where it came from!”
“Then later when Haskell needed your help to disappear, you buried an empty casket,” the detective said. “And years later it seemed the perfect hiding place for the woman you’d just killed.” He paced the length of the small room and back without even stepping into the wastebasket. “Colette Champion had no close relatives; few would notice her missing, and even if they did, who would think of looking in an old grave?”
The old man didn’t say anything.
“So what stopped you?” the detective persisted. “Jasper?”
“No, we sent him on his way, but a car drove up just as we were about to—you know . . .”
“Put Colette’s body in the casket?” Sheriff Bonner helped himself to the water, sipped it slowly.
Mr. Griggs nodded. “It was down there on that back road just below the cemetery. Kids park there sometimes. We couldn’t take the chance.”
“So you stored her in the shed, meaning to come back and take care of that business later?” The sheriff tossed his cup at the wastebasket and missed.
Maynard Griggs looked at me as if he recognized me for the first time. “I had no idea you’d come home, that anybody was around after your mother left. We thought the place was deserted.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you murdered Colette Champion.” The Clouseau look-alike leaned against the wall, arms folded.
“I didn’t murder her! I told you. It was an accident.”
Colette Champion had been blackmailing him for years, Maynard Griggs told us, until finally he’d had enough.
“So you decided to kill her. Is that why you went to that remote park and drove a rental car instead of your own?” Sheriff Bonner leaned back in his chair. It creaked.
“No! No, of course not! I drove a rental car because too many people might recognize mine, and I couldn’t afford to be seen with her. I went there to call her bluff, that’s all, to tell her she’d be getting no more money from me.”
Maynard Griggs slumped forward, twisted his diamond-studded wedding band. “Look, is there any way we can keep this q
uiet—at least until after the election? This is a god-awful thing to happen right now while Harold’s running for office!”
“A little late to think of that now,” the sheriff reminded him.
“The woman wouldn’t leave me alone! Just about drained me dry. Even threatened to tell Ernestine.” Maynard Griggs shook his head slowly. “I didn’t believe her. By God, she knew she’d never get another cent if she did that!”
He had picked up Colette Champion at the bus station in a rental car and the two drove to a small picnic area a few miles outside of town. “To talk,” he insisted. “Merely to talk; I didn’t want her making a scene in public.”
They got out of the car and sat at one of the picnic tables, he continued. “When I told her there’d be no more money, she threw a fit. Screamed and struck at me, called me every name in the book.
“I was furious,” Maynard Griggs said. “I knew if I hit her—and believe me, I wanted to—I might do serious harm. I just wanted to get away—drive off and leave her there until we could both cool off some.” He looked at the three of us in turn. “I swear to you, I’m not a violent man. Anybody will tell you that, but that woman—well, she just about pushed me over the edge. I got in the car and started out of the park“—he closed his eyes—”but she came after me screaming, running, holding on to the driver’s door. I couldn’t shake her loose. The woman was crazy!”
Sheriff Bonner straightened suddenly. “So you ran over her?”
“She fell. I didn’t mean to, didn’t realize what had happened until I felt that sickening thump. By then it was too late. There was nothing I could do.” He covered his face with his hands. “Oh, God, all I wanted was to get away from her!”
The detective filled another cup with water and held it out to him. He spoke softly. “So you contacted Faris Haskell to help you get rid of the body?”
“Right. I hadn’t heard from Faris in years, but I knew where to find him. We paid Jasper to help us dig up the coffin, didn’t think he’d ask questions.” The old man sighed. “That’s where we were wrong. When news got out about your finding Colette’s body in the shed, Totherow put two and two together. The little weasel tried to blackmail us!”
“And did you pay him off?” the detective asked.
“Some, but he kept coming back for more. We knew he’d never be satisfied.”
“And so you planned to kill him as well?” the officer continued.
“Look . . . maybe we did talk about it, but it never came to that. I’ll swear it didn’t!” Maynard Griggs was close to tears. His hand trembled as he mopped his face.
“Looks like you were pretty serious about it to me,” the sheriff said, “since you’d already started digging a grave for the guy. That was meant for Jasper, wasn’t it—that makeshift trench back of the Dobson place?”
“That’s ridiculous! I had nothing to do with killing that man.” Maynard Griggs folded his arms, reminding me of an aging Buddha, except he wasn’t smiling.
“Then who did?” the sheriff asked. “Ralphine claims he went into hiding, says he was terrified of somebody. And somebody had to have killed him. Faris Haskell says it wasn’t him.”
“Maybe you’d better ask Zorah,” the older man said. “Last time I saw that Totherow fellow, the two of them were going at it tooth and nail.”
Get real! I was tempted to say. My aunt Zorah wouldn’t get within hair-pulling distance of Jasper Totherow.
Sheriff Bonner smiled. “Come now, Mr. Griggs, surely you can do better than that.”
“Joke if you like, but it’s true. I heard them arguing—shouting really. Zorah was furious about something, picked up a shovel. I saw her.”
“And where was this?” The detective with the mustache barely looked up, as if he wasn’t even interested, but I could tell he was.
“At the Dobson place—out there in the barn, and it was right around the time you say he was killed. Find that shovel and you’ll see I’m telling the truth. Her prints must be all over it.”
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” the sheriff asked. “And just what were you doing out there when all this was going on?”
“I was supposed to give him money. Wanted a hundred dollars more to keep quiet about Colette—and that was to be the end of it. I’d already told him that.”
“And did you?” the detective asked.
“Did I what?” Mr. Griggs looked up under half-closed lids.
“Did you pay Jasper the hundred bucks?”
“Look, when I saw what was going on with those two, I didn’t hang around. I was kinda hoping Zorah would scare the little bastard off, but I didn’t think she’d actually kill him!
“Besides, I was in a hurry. My son wanted me to ride with him to Montgomery to pick up a body. Man who used to live here and wanted to be buried with his family. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to worry about the likes of Jasper Totherow!”
“Seems an upright, law-abiding fellow like yourself would’ve gone to the police about all this when Jasper turned up dead.” The sheriff spoke with a straight face. I don’t know how.
“What good would it have done? He was already dead, wasn’t he? And certainly no great loss. For all I knew, it might’ve been Faris who killed him.”
“Killed who?” The younger Griggs stood in the doorway looking more grim-faced than usual. “What’s going on here?”
The sheriff told him.
“Dad, you don’t have to answer their questions. I can’t believe this!” Griggs the younger reached for the telephone. “I’ll have the lot of you up on harassment charges. My father’s not well. Been under a doctor’s care for several weeks now.” He fumbled through the phone book, then threw it down and rubbed his face with his hands. “Damn! I can’t even find the blasted lawyer’s number!”
“Let it go, son.” Maynard patted Harold’s arm. “The truth will out, and the sooner the better. This has gone on long enough. Frankly I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“Dad! Surely you aren’t saying you had anything to do with what happened to Jasper Totherow?”
“Not Jasper, but it was my indiscretion that started it all. I’m sorry, son.” And Maynard Griggs put his head in his hands and wept.
“Do I have news for you!” I told Mom when I phoned her later. Our telephone bill was going to be out of sight. “Maybe you’d better sit down first, mix a strong drink.”
“Prentice, don’t do this to me!”
“Okay, to start with, Uncle Faris isn’t even dead.” I told her about the rigged-up car “accident” and faked death certificate. “Seems Maynard Griggs had an affair with some woman around here and got her pregnant . . .”
“Colette Champion,” my mother said.
“Uh—right.”
“I remember Colette. No better than she should be, but then neither was Maynard. Everybody sort of suspected something was going on, and then she left town and that was that.”
“Well, she had an abortion I guess,” I told her. “Maynard says he paid her off big-time, but she kept coming back for more.”
“What did Faris Haskell have to do with this?” Mom asked.
“Faris gave him the money to pay her. Money he’d embezzled, I guess, but Maynard wasn’t in a position to be picky. Of course he had to pay him back in the long run by helping to fake Faris’s death.”
“This is almost too much to take in, but then it’s like something Faris would do, and he and Maynard used to be thick as thieves—pardon the expression. But how did the woman end up in our barn?”
“Long story,” I said, and told her.
I could hear my mother breathing in the silence that followed. “Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m all right, Prentice, but I’m not so sure about your aunt Zorah. Dear God, what will she do? Have they arrested anybody?”
“They’ve arrested Maynard Griggs for the murder of Colette Champion, and they’re still holding Un—uh—Faris, but neither will admit to killing Jasper. You’re not goin
g to believe this, Mom, but Maynard Griggs is trying to blame it on Aunt Zorah!”
“Zorah! Prentice, that’s not funny.”
“Not meant to be.” I told Mom about the shovel.
“Surely the police aren’t taking him seriously. I always thought Maynard Griggs was more than a little peculiar. Whole family’s nutty! They said his mama bathed with her clothes on.
“They haven’t arrested Zorah, have they?” My mother sounded close to tears. “Prentice, this is a nightmare! I’d better come home.”
“Not yet. What could you do? Let me worry about things on this end. If anything develops, I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll feel better when you can join us down here.”
“You know I’ll come as soon as I can, but since things are in such a stew here, it’s going to be a little later than we’d planned. If it’s okay with you and Ola, Dottie said she’d be glad to drop off the things you need. She has a niece who lives at Hilton Head and she’s been looking for an excuse to go and visit.” I had spoken with Dottie earlier and she’d said she was more than ready for a break.
“Dottie Ives? Well, of course I’d love to see her. When can we look for her?”
“Sometime tomorrow. I’m leaving for her place in a little while and I’ll stay with Dottie tonight in Atlanta, then drive back to Liberty Bend in the morning.”
Frankly I was glad for an excuse to spend the night away from Smokerise. Even knowing it was Uncle Faris and company who dug up his own “grave” and left a corpse in our shed, we still weren’t sure who killed Jasper Totherow, and I had an uneasy feeling Pershing Gaines and his gang were regrouping for an attack.
“Maybe Dottie will stay long enough for me to show off Joey,” Mom said. “He’s the sweetest baby, Prentice. I think he looks a lot like your dad, but I’d forgotten how demanding it was to look after one that age. By bedtime I’m worn out!”
“Doesn’t Ola help?”
“Some. She gets up with him at night. I don’t think she sleeps much anyway. The woman cleans house in the middle of the night, then claims she didn’t do it.”
“Really?”
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