Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  There was something metallic near the east bank.

  I waited until we reached the bend downstream and had turned, then called out for Jeff to take first transect again. I wanted confirmation.

  Once more the printout showed high readings.

  I held up my hand and Jeff throttled back the engine.

  The silence enveloped me, and then I heard the lapping of the waves.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “There’s something down there,” I said. “Something big.”

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered. “You mean she really did see something?”

  I stayed over with the crew that night, because it wouldn’t be until the next day that Jeff Scully could get a diver on site. Supper was excellent, a plentiful helping of pork roast, fresh green beans, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, mint jelly, and homemade apple pie. When I’d finished a second helping, rinsed my plate in the sink, and gone back to my place beside the space heater, I felt my eyes trying to close. The crew members had driven to Natchez, looking for something to do, but David had stayed, to keep me company and to finish his field notes.

  “Good food, huh?” he said.

  “So hiring the Duprees to cook worked out,” I said.

  “More or less.”

  “More or less?”

  “Alice Mae’s a good cook. But the problem’s Luther.”

  “Oh?” The Duprees were a father-daughter combo who’d been recommended by Jeff Scully, whose judgment I was quickly coming to doubt.

  “Like I say, Alice Mae can cook but she has to rely on Luther for the food. Now, usually it’s pretty good—venison, fresh fish, and the like, though I’m not too sure about where Luther gets it all. But I don’t ask questions.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem’s Luther.”

  I looked down at my glass. “Oh?”

  “They locked him up for drunkenness two weeks ago and the food went to shit. Alice Mae had to scrounge whatever she could, but the nearest real grocery’s in Simmsburg, which meant I had to send somebody shopping with her. Now …”

  “Now?”

  “Luther got caught a couple of days ago by Mr. Pope, the game warden, for hunting in the wildlife preserve without a license. He bonded out, but Alice Mae’s almost out of provisions, and if Luther gets put away for a long stretch…” He shrugged. “I’m scared the crew’s gonna quit But I don’t know anybody else around here who wants to cook three meals a day for an archaeological crew. “

  “Jesus,” I swore.

  “Tell me about it,” David said. “And now we’ve got a flying saucer.”

  “It isn’t a flying saucer,” I said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  He watched me get up and move to the kitchen counter, where the telephone sat. I punched in my home number and waited. Two rings, three, and then the answering machine came on.

  Damn it, where was she? I tried the number for her apartment, which she’d insisted on keeping as a sign of her independence, and waited.

  “This is Pepper. I’m not at home right now…”

  I hung up. It was eight o’clock. She was always at home by eight. Well, maybe she’d stepped out for a six-pack of Cokes.

  What was I thinking? She was a Yankee: She didn’t have the Coke addiction of a well-brought-up Southern girl.

  Chips, then?

  But why eat chips when she could get real food at a place that served short orders and beer and played music. A place like the Chimes Bar, near campus. Or, even worse, the Alligator, ten miles out in the country, on a lonely road…

  I felt my heart throbbing and started to pace.

  “Not home, huh?” David asked. “Well, she probably found some young stud, closer to her age.”

  “Screw you.”

  He poured another five fingers of whiskey into my glass. “Have another drink.”

  The next morning the diver came. He was a skinny young man named Elvis, with a scuba tank instead of sideburns and guitar. He parked his Ranger near my Blazer and the sheriff’s cruiser and slipped into his wetsuit.

  “Little bit warmer today,” he said, and Jeff and I nodded. The front had moved through and the temperature was up to a pleasant sixty degrees.

  “Aren’t you worried about radiation?” Miss Ethel asked.

  He gave her a perplexed look and turned on Scully.

  “What you say was down there?”

  “Dunno,” the sheriff said, looking in my direction for help. “Alan took the mag reading …”

  “Maybe a chunk of meteorite. Or some space junk,” I said. “Or something that fell off an airplane.”

  “I ain’t going where there’s no radiation.”

  “There isn’t any radiation,” Scully declared.

  “How do you know?”

  “The mag would’ve showed it,” he blurted and dared me to contradict him. I looked away quickly.

  But the diver, surprisingly, didn’t take him up.

  “I’ll see what it is,” he said. “But if I don’t like it I’m not gonna stay down there long.”

  “Aren’t you going to take a camera?” Miss Ethel asked.

  Elvis shook his head. “You can’t see anything down there with the mud. You have to feel your way. So it better be something that feels right.”

  Miss Ethel glanced around nervously. “That boy from the newspaper’s supposed to be here.”

  “I’m sure he’ll come,” Scully said. “I think I heard he had a birthday to cover first. Old man Gibbons turned a hundred.”

  Jeff and I cranked the boat down off the trailer behind my Blazer. Once it was in the water, we held it as the diver climbed in and I followed. Jeff shoved the craft into the stream, and I yanked the starter cord of the outboard. I nudged us into the middle of the river, about where the mag had shown the anomaly, and pointed. Elvis nodded, fitted his mask over his face, and went over the side. I watched his foam turn into bubbles and then moved upstream a few yards. I threw the anchor—a concrete cinder block on a rope—over the side, and cut the engine.

  Traffic rumbled over the bridge, and I caught a glimpse of a blue car reflected in the muddy water. When I looked up, the blue car was crawling down the shell road toward the place where the other vehicles were parked. The car pulled up beside my Blazer, and a tall, blond young man with a camera got out.

  The press, I thought, here to immortalize every second of our embarrassment.

  I wondered if I could just drop into the water like Elvis and surface a hundred yards away, out of sight.

  Miss Ethel was already giving him an earful, and he was dutifully jotting it down on his pad.

  Something gray and bullet-shaped exploded from the surface twenty yards downstream, and I recognized Elvis’s head. He saw me and treaded water while I let out anchor rope, drifting down to where he floated. He grabbed the gunwale, and I helped him into the boat.

  “Well?” I asked.

  He pushed up his face mask. “Like I said, it’s darker than a well digger’s ass down there. And almost as cold. Get me back on land.”

  Jeff helped him out of the bow as I guided the boat up onto the shore and Miss Ethel rushed forward, accompanied by the reporter.

  “Did you see it?” she demanded.

  “No, ma’am. But I sure felt it.”

  I heard her suck in her breath.

  “I’m Tim Raines, editor of the Weekly Trumpet,” the young man with the camera burst out. “Can you tell me what you felt?”

  “Well,” Elvis drawled, “it had windows.”

  “Windows?” the librarian asked. “You mean it was some kind of craft?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What kind?” the reporter asked, eyes big behind thick glasses. “I mean, could you find a hatch or anything?”

  “No, but there was a door.” He held up a small aluminum object. “And I’d say from this key, it was General Motors.” He turned to Jeff. “Sheriff,
I think we need a wrecker with a grappling hook.” I heard Scully groan.

  “Right,” he said, walking over to his car for the radio.

  It was noon when the wrecker arrived, and by then a small crowd had congregated on both sides, to watch. A thin, grizzled man in an army field jacket and an orange hunter’s cap was introduced to me as Snuffy Stokes, the mayor. Chainsmoking and clearing his throat with a sound like a chain saw, His Honor watched impassively as the diver disappeared under the surface to attach the grapple.

  “Who’d drive their car down here,” he asked nobody in particular, “when the bridge is up there?”

  I didn’t like the look on Jeff Scully’s face, pale with tinges of green.

  “Unless they just wanted to get rid of their old car,” the mayor went on.

  “No,” Jeff said. “They didn’t want to get rid of it.”

  The diver reappeared and climbed back into the boat, which I’d let one of the deputies handle. He waved an arm, and the wrecker driver started the winch.

  “I don’t care,” Miss Ethel said as the water bubbled and frothed. “It was not a car that fell in.”

  “Yeah,” the mayor said, as the front bumper broke the surface, “but a car’s what you got.”

  I watched as the vehicle, smeared brown with mud and trailing a filament of fishing line, was hauled slowly up onto the shell bank, where it sat with rivulets of water pouring from every opening.

  It was a red Firebird, six or seven years old, with the windshield intact and the tires in place. The driver’s side window was down, and I saw Tim Raines peer inside and then draw quickly back.

  “My God,” he gasped, the camera falling out of his hands to swing limply at his neck. “There’s a body in there.”

  “But who …?” Miss Ethel began.

  Jeff Scully shook his head, not bothering to look.

  “Five’ll get you fifty,” he said, “it’s Jacko Reilly.”

  FOUR

  I drove home the next morning. It was Friday, and I wanted to spend the weekend with Pepper. Besides, I couldn’t take many more days like yesterday.

  The car and body had no sooner been pulled out of the water than the reporter had started snapping photos. I knew what was going on in his head. A small-town weekly didn’t print much real news, and here was a ticket for a young reporter to get out of a backwater and land a spot on a big-city newspaper.

  There was no telling how we’d all be misquoted.

  And then there was Miss Ethel Crawford, telling all who would listen that we’d looked in the wrong place, because the splash she’d heard certainly hadn’t been a car. But her protests were lost in the uproar, because something had been found, regardless of what she’d told us, and a body inside a car was more newsworthy than a claim of something that, at best, had only been heard. As for Hawkeye, when a deputy went to his cabin during the afternoon the old man wouldn’t come out, insisting through the closed door that he hadn’t seen anything.

  To make things worse, the meal that night was a disaster.

  Luther Dupree, a scrawny, gray-haired man with a game leg, ladled skimpy helpings of an unidentifiable stew onto the plates, along with a single slice of two-day-old bread.

  “Armadillo?” Meg asked.

  “Old shoes,” Frank Hill suggested.

  Only the vegetarian Mahatma seemed blissfully unconcerned.

  David’s eyes caught mine with an “I told you” look, so I shoved back my chair and went out to where Luther was making for his truck.

  “Luther, we’ve got to talk,” I told him, as he opened his truck door. It was just after twilight, and a cool breeze was ruffling the leaves of the pin oaks and hickories. “The crew’s complaining about what they ate tonight. I wasn’t so happy with it, either.”

  The little man nodded. “I know, Mr. Alan, I know. If that game warden had of been doing his job instead of following me up on the preserve, I could of had something in time, but Alice Mae didn’t have no money and by the time I got shut of them bloodsuckers at the courthouse it was too late. I tell you, Mr. Alan, somebody’s got to do something about this country.”

  “Damn it, Luther, it’s not our fault you can’t obey the law. We gave Alice Mae money.”

  “You gotta see it like it is, Mr. Alan. Up here the law ain’t like it is in the city. Old man Pope, the game warden, has had it in for me ever since I beat him on that rare species fishing business three years back, made him look like a fool. Now he ain’t got nothing better to do than try to get even. Alice Mae spent the money to get me out.”

  “Our crew has to eat.”

  “Don’t I know.” The little man shuffled miserably. “And I’ll do my best if they’ll just let me.” He shook his head. “But it’s only got worse since Jacko Reilly disappeared.”

  “Jacko Reilly?”

  “He used to keep ’em all busy, Jacko did. Breaking into camps, selling dope—oh, they’s a hell of a lot of dope in this parish, Mr. Alan—even selling treasure maps like he did to that poor stupid bastard in Jena. I pure hated to hear Jacko was gone. Now all they got to do is bother folks like me.”

  I sighed. “Luther, you’d better figure something out.”

  “Yes, sir.” He climbed into his truck, slammed the door twice before it would lock, and tried to start the engine. The motor groaned, and I was heading for my Blazer and the jumper cables when the engine caught, the lights flickered on, and Luther made a quick semicircle in the yard, then lurched into the gravel drive.

  I didn’t know whether my talk with Luther would do any good or not: A lifetime of shiftlessness doesn’t go away that easily. But I felt sorry for Alice Mae, a gangly girl in her mid-twenties who seemed to have little going for her and needed the work. And I didn’t know who else we could find to cook. So I crossed my fingers.

  The last straw occurred half an hour later when, after three futile attempts to reach Pepper, I heard the front door open and turned to see Jeff Scully in the entrance, a brown paper bag in one hand. At first I thought he’d been drinking, but by the time he was inside I realized he was sober.

  The crew quickly found reasons to retire to their rooms and David went to the kitchen cabinet and got out a bottle of whiskey.

  “I don’t guess you got room for another crew member,” Scully cracked, claiming one of the stuffed chairs.

  “Tired of being sheriff?” David asked, sitting down in a folding chair and handing us each a drink.

  “Tired of little old ladies who think they see flying saucers,” Scully declared. “Tired of bastards like Jacko Reilly who get themselves killed in my parish instead of just leaving to bother some other parish.”

  “Nobody’s sorry he’s dead, are they?” I asked.

  “His old man will be, if the news travels as far as state prison. Ten or twenty women who thought he was a life form. His cousin Chaney, who just happens to be running against me.”

  “The old sheriff?” I asked.

  He nodded. “The one I beat three years ago, when folks in this parish said they were tired of Jacko and his carrying on.”

  “They won’t be sorry he’s dead,” David said. “They can’t hold that against you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Scully said, running a hand through his sandy hair. “The Reillys are all over the parish. They hate each other ordinarily, but let something happen to just one of ’em and they swarm. Right now they’re swarmin.’”

  “You didn’t kill him,” I said. “All you did was find him.”

  “They don’t see it that way,” he said. “They want to know why I couldn’t protect him. It’s Chaney Reilly who’s telling ’em all that crap. One of my deputies told me before I came over here. Chaney’s saying I spent all my time harassing poor Jacko, who was just a little wild, but not a bad boy, right? And then somebody murdered him and I not only didn’t stop it, I didn’t even know it happened.”

  “Who says he was murdered?” David asked. “Maybe he was drunk and missed the bridge.”

  Scu
lly shook his head. “His lights were off. We found that out when we looked at his car. And so was his ignition. Somebody turned off his lights and engine so as to not atttract attention and then rolled him into the water.” He hiccupped. “And old Doc Carraway, the coroner, found a cut mark on one of his ribs and a nick in one of his vertebrae where a knife point stuck. Looks like somebody stabbed him with a pretty big knife. Way I see it, somebody did the parish a favor. But the way they see it, I might as well have done it myself.”

  “No weapon?” I asked.

  “Nah. And not much of Jacko, just his body and the junk that was on the car seat, from his pockets.” He coughed. “Actually, there was something kinda funny there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, what it was, was all coins—nickels, dimes, pennies, a couple of quarters. A money clip with some threads of bills in it, mostly rotted.”

  He reached into his pocket then. “And this.”

  He opened his big fist and I found myself staring down at a tiny gray-colored wedge with what appeared to be writing on it.

  “Looks like part of a coin,” Jeff said. “But somebody cut it up.”

  Rex, the writing said.

  “It’s two bits,” I told him.

  “A quarter?”

  “A quarter of a Spanish peso coin. The coin itself weighed an ounce, but each coin could be divided into halves, quarters, or even eighths. Silver pesos were used as money in this country until well into the last century and were recognized by the U.S. government. Somebody cut this peso into quarters.”

  “But where did Jacko get it? He’s got to have stolen it from somebody.”

  I shrugged. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “Well, I can’t ask anybody around here.”

  “Sounds like you need an expert,” David said smugly.

  Scully smiled. “Kind of what I was thinking. Somebody who knows metals, knows about coins, knows about historic artifacts.”

  I started to get a weak feeling. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that your job? Don’t you have experts who can tell you about historic artifacts?”

  “That’s true,” David said. “You could take it back with you. Pepper can clean it up and check out some collectors who might know if anybody around here had a hoard.”