Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  But when I was done the phone was still silent.

  I got up, washed my dishes, and threw my cans into the trash.

  I thought of trying Jeff again but decided against it: He knew where I was, just as Pepper did.

  Digger went to the door and whined.

  “Okay,” I said, heaving myself up. I let him out into the yard and followed.

  Another cold front was moving in and the wind bit into my bare arms. I went to the Blazer and got Digger’s chain.

  “Come here. You’re a city dog. I don’t want you wandering around out here and getting lost.”

  I snapped one end onto his collar and looped the other end around the pipe well in the yard. I’d let him stay out for a half hour or so and then let him inside again before I went to sleep.

  Once back in the house, I warmed up for a few seconds in front of the living room heater and then went into the bathroom, where an old four-footed iron tub confronted me.

  Well, there wasn’t anything better to do.

  I drew a hot bath and was about to step into the tub when I heard Digger barking outside.

  A coon, maybe, or a passing possum.

  Except that when he’d had a duel with the possum in the backyard at home his tone had been different—angry that something had invaded his territory. This barking was higher-pitched, almost frantic.

  I threw on my clothes, grabbed my jacket, and started outside, wishing I’d brought a flashlight.

  “What is it, boy?”

  He lunged toward the corner of the house and I started in that direction, aware that I was stepping into darkness.

  “Who’s there?” I asked, just in case. “Is somebody there?”

  I bent over, grabbed a stick from the ground, and felt ahead of me.

  My feet made a crunching sound in the leaves and I was suddenly aware that Digger had stopped barking, his cries replaced by a low-throated growl.

  I poked the darkness and felt the bushes part.

  This was crazy. What if it was a snake? I could step right on top of it.

  Except that snakes were in hibernation right now.

  Okay, a bear. Black bears weren’t usually aggressive, but poke one and it might surprise you. Or a rabid fox. That was all I needed …

  I was still pondering the possibilities when I heard a phone ringing and realized it was coming from inside the house.

  Damn. Pepper …

  I turned, and in the instant my back was turned he lunged out of the darkness, knocking me off balance, and I felt my breath rush out as I hit the ground.

  I lay in the cold, on the leafy mat, trying to breathe normally, vaguely aware of footsteps dying away in the night.

  By the time I got back to my feet the phone had stopped ringing.

  I unhooked Digger’s chain, brought him inside the house with me, and bolted the door.

  Whoever it was had long fled. I’d report it to Jeff tomorrow. If Jeff ever came back.

  SEVEN

  The next morning when I pulled in at Jeff Scully’s house I smelled bacon frying.

  He let me in, gave me a firm handshake, and watched as I released Digger to play with the Catahoula.

  “I figured the least I could do was fix you breakfast,” he said as I came inside. It was just after six. I’d called him as soon as I’d woken up and was gratified to find him at home. Now he took my jacket. “Come on back, it’s almost ready.”

  I followed him through a living room decorated with hunting trophies and a gun case. There was also a piano, and I wondered if it had been left to him by his mother and whether he played.

  “There was a pileup on Highway 20 last night. When it comes to the bad ones, I go myself. It’s not my favorite part of the job, especially making the notifications.”

  “Anything more on Miss Crawford?”

  He shook his head. “I put out an APB on her car but it’s like she was beamed off the face of the earth.”

  He laid a rasher of bacon and a couple of fried eggs on my plate, and then ladled out a monster helping of grits.

  “You may want to wait for the orange juice before you finish,” he said, laughing, as I stirred my egg yolks into the grits and dove in. “But go ahead: There’s plenty.”

  “You think somebody kidnapped Miss Ethel?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t have any family. There’d be nobody to pay a ransom.”

  I downed the last of the eggs and grits and went to work on a piece of bacon.

  “Have you considered whether this is a put-up job?” I asked between chews.

  “You mean whether she took off on purpose?”

  I nodded. “She got a lot of attention out of this UFO business. But when Jacko Reilly turned up, everybody forgot about her. Now she’s the center of attention again.”

  “Yeah. It would help if she’d told either one of us what it was she wanted the other day.”

  “I was assuming it had something to do with what she thought she saw—or heard,” I said. “But what if she noticed something we didn’t when the car was dredged up?”

  “You mean something that would be dangerous to the killer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Always possible, but what?”

  “I don’t know. By the way, did you figure out how long Jacko’d been down there?”

  Scully took my plate and returned it with another helping of everything.

  “Last anybody admits to seeing him was around Thanksgiving, right after Judge Galt’s big Thanksgiving family turkey smoking for the rest of the Galt clan. Jacko wasn’t invited, of course, but he made sure to show up on the highway that goes past the judge’s place and try to run a few people off the road. By the time I disentangled myself from the crowd and made it out to the highway he was gone, and as far as I know nobody saw him again until we brought the car up the other day.”

  “Was he married?”

  Scully snorted. “After a fashion. He hooked up with a girl from Jonesville, Lisa Fowkes. Dad runs a gas station. Decent people. Pentecostals. Jacko got her right out of the tenth grade. Course, Jacko never finished the ninth grade. Can’t say her parents were real enthusiastic about the match, but what could they do? Jacko moved her into his double-wide outside of town here and they settled down to marital disharmony. Then, two years after the baby was born, Carline showed up.”

  “Carline?”

  “Yeah. Came home from prep school to visit her father in Lordsport. Naturally, since she was a cut—or two or three— above Jacko, he wanted her.” Jeff brought his own plate to the table and sat down next to me. “You know how it is, Alan: There are some men that attract women purely because they’re rotten. Here was Jacko, a high school dropout, crackhead, swaggering thief and bully, and some women just fell all over the bastard.”

  “It says something about that kind of woman,” I said.

  “Boy, does it. Anyway, pretty soon Carline and Lisa were pulling Jacko in both directions and taking up all his valuable time that he could’ve spent drinking and burgling and spotlighting does out of season in the hills. So he hit on a solution.”

  “I’m scared to ask what.”

  “It was brilliant: He brought ’em together, had ’em both pile into the back of that old Ford truck he used to have to haul off the hogs he’d rustled, and drove the two gals out to the town dump. Then he made ’em get out and told ’em to fight until there was a winner.”

  “So who won?”

  “Lisa, the wife.”

  “So he put out Carline?”

  “He made Carline ride back in the truck bed and let Lisa ride up front. Then he went back to his double-wide with Lisa.”

  “When was all this?”

  “Early November, right before he disappeared.”

  “I guess both of the women have alibis.”

  “Who can say? We don’t know which day he got killed.”

  “What about Carline? Where’s she now?”

  “Her father shipped her back to
Mississippi. He told her not to ever set foot in the parish again without telling him.”

  “Then her father had a motive, too.”

  My friend nodded. “Yeah, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about him right now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her father’s Ross Flynn, the district attorney.”

  My fork froze halfway between my mouth and the plate as the news sank in.

  “Damn, Jeff, just about everybody around here had a reason to do Jacko in.”

  “You said it. I guess you could even say Snuffy Stokes had a reason, because Jacko was a one-man crime wave and he wasn’t exactly good advertising for the town.”

  “What about Jacko’s friends? A guy like that has followers.”

  “Yeah, there were some numb-nuts that followed him around. His cousin Skeeter, fellow named Presley Hobbs, and four or five others that alternated between Jacko and the parish work gang. Wasn’t exactly the mafia, but every burglary in a five-parish area got blamed on ’em. Drugstore gets hit in Winnsboro, must be the boys. Old man gets his head splattered in Columbia and his guns stolen, the red car down the block must mean our boy did the killing. Good for embarrassing the sheriff, if you know what I mean.” He wiped his hands on a towel and waved me away from the sink. “Never mind the dishes, I have a woman coming in later to clean.” He walked out into the living room and then through a door into the hallway. “Come on and talk to me while I put on my monkey suit for court.”

  I stood outside his bedroom, in the hall, and watched him stand in front of a mirror, tying his tie.

  “Jeff, answer me something.”

  “What’s that, bud?” He pulled the knot tight against his neck and reached into his bureau, coming out with a silver tie pin.

  “While we were waiting for them to pull the car up the other morning, you knew what was coming.”

  He adjusted the tie and stepped back to look at himself.

  “I had a feeling. Why would a car be down there in the middle of the river if there wasn’t something somebody was trying to hide? Then, when I saw it was a red Firebird, I pretty well knew: There wasn’t another like it in the parish, and Jacko loved that car. He wouldn’t have deep-sixed it on his own.” He reached into a closet for his coat jacket and slipped it on.

  “Now I’m all dressed up for a hangin’.”

  I grabbed my own jacket, followed him out the front door, and watched him lock it.

  “See you later on,” he said, heading for the white cruiser parked to one side. “But in the meantime do me a favor …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Call that woman of yours so she doesn’t go bothering me again late at night.”

  My heart leaped.

  “What?”

  “Pepper left a message on my machine last night. Said she’d called the camp earlier and nobody’d answered and she wanted to know if you were staying with me. I called the number she left when I got in this morning and told her I hadn’t seen you but that when I drove past the camp, on my way home about five A.M., I saw your Blazer in the drive. That quieted her down some.”

  I remembered the ringing phone, right before I’d been jumped from the bushes.

  “I’ll call her,” I said, feeling suddenly guilty, “but something funny happened to me last night.” I told him about the incident and saw his shaggy brows arch.

  “You didn’t get any kind of look at ’em?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you can come in and file a report, but unless they left some kind of physical evidence I don’t know what anybody can do.”

  “I don’t, either. I just thought I ought to mention it.”

  He nodded. “Sure. There haven’t been any camp burglaries around here since Jacko went to shovel coal, but you never know when somebody’s gonna start up. Folks have the idea archaeologists dig up treasure, so it must be stored at the archaeology camp, right? I’ll have the patrols keep an eye out.”

  I drove back to the camp a hundred pounds lighter.

  Pepper had called. She cared. She hadn’t just blown it off and assumed I’d blink first. She gave a damn.

  I pulled into the drive and let Digger run free, then went into the house.

  I was dialing her number when there was a soft knocking on the back door.

  “Just a minute.” I replaced the receiver and went to the back door.

  A tall, rawboned young woman was standing on the porch, shivering under a thin shawl, her arms crossed against the morning chill.

  “Alice Mae,” I said. “What are you doing out dressed like that?”

  Alice Mae Dupree darted into the warm house, rubbing her hands together to get rid of the chill. She was thin, with a pinched face and the air of a beaten dog.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I come in Paw’s truck. Heater don’t work but it ain’t far.”

  “Sit down,” I said, pointing to one of the kitchen chairs. “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  She sat tentatively, as if the chair might collapse under her, and stared up at me with mournful brown eyes.

  “Mr. Alan, I need help.”

  I took a seat in one of the other chairs and waited.

  “It’s about Paw,” she said. “He’s in jail and I don’t have no money to get groceries, on account of he used up what Mr. David gave him for this week and I’m scared Mr. David—”

  I nodded. “I heard about it.”

  She nodded, looking at the floor, her stringy brown hair falling over her face, and twisted nervously at the stem of an old-fashioned, clunky gold wristwatch that was her only jewelry. “Sometimes he drinks too much. Usually. And he don’t have no thoughts about hunting laws.”

  “Well, I doubt he’ll be in jail long.”

  “But what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” She leaned forward, eyes beseeching. “This is all we got right now, ever since Maw died and …”

  I was beginning to understand.

  “You want me to get him out of jail.”

  “If there’s a way, yes sir. You’re friends with Sheriff Scully.”

  I sighed again. “I’ll do what I can.”

  She jumped up, threw her arms around me. “God bless you!”

  God save me, I thought, coming up here and getting pulled into everybody’s private problems.

  She rushed to the sink, began putting the clean plates into the cabinets. “I’ll have the place looking good for Mr. David and the others,” she declared. “When you get back from town everything’ll be clean and—”

  I patted her arm. “I’m sure it will.”

  I left her to her cleaning and drove to the courthouse, where the nearest parking places were all filled. I found a space a block away, in the shadow of the bridge. As I got out of the vehicle I turned and looked out over the river. The brown surface was still and just across the water in a plowed field sat the lonely shack of Jeremiah Persons. The place appeared to be shut tight, and there was no smoke coming from the chimney. I wondered if the old man was home and where he went when he wasn’t.

  When I got to the courthouse the hall was crowded, mainly with local people, though here and there a suit with a briefcase indicated a lawyer. I went directly to the sheriff’s office, where I asked for Jeff. After a wait of ten minutes in one of the hard-backed chairs, the same deputy who’d come with us to fish out the car swung open the gate at the end of the counter and motioned for me to come through.

  I was shown into a large office with a window that looked out on the great hill that hovered over the town. Jeff sat behind an oak desk, below the stuffed head of a huge buck, hastily thumbing through a set of papers that looked like a pleading of some sort.

  “Alan.” He glanced up, surprised. “What’s going on?”

  I told him about my visit from Alice Mae Dupree. “She wants Luther out of jail,” I explained.

  Jeff Scully shook his head. “I don’t want him in jail, either. He’s about to bankrupt us. Still, the judge is a hard case. He’ll demand bail …”<
br />
  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a thousand.”

  “How about recognizance?”

  “Jesus, bud, you’re pushing. Still, I don’t reckon it’ll help the parish for Alice Mae to go back on food stamps. Not to mention Luther’s hospital bill after he has one of his attacks.”

  I waited while he chewed his lip.

  “Okay,” he said finally, “we’ll see what Galt says. You keep quiet and let me do the talking, you hear.”

  He jumped up from the desk and opened a side door that led directly into the hall. “Come on, we’ll use the elevator.” He led me into the hallway, to the elevator.

  We got out on the second floor and went into another hallway, with wooden doors on either side. Jeff stopped in front of one of the doors and knocked twice. A deep voice from inside told him to come in, and he motioned for me to follow.

  I found myself in a room as big as Jeff’s, except this one was walled with law books and the few bare spaces were decorated with framed parchments. I recognized the Magna Carta, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. I did not recognize the two men who stopped talking to look at us as we came in.

  The first man was forty, with graying hair and a limp mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. He wore a coat and tie and a pair of lizard-skin cowboy boots. When he saw us he set his glass down on the desk, next to an open bottle of Wild Turkey. Across the desk, in a padded executive chair, sat the second man. Stocky, well over two hundred pounds, he sported a Lincoln beard and, unlike the other man, was dressed in a sport shirt and slacks, and I saw a bead necklace nestling in his chest hairs. The glass in front of him was half full.

  “Well, Jeff, to what do we owe this pleasure?” the man behind the desk drawled. His dark eyes narrowed slightly as he saw me. “And this is …?”

  “Dr. Alan Graham, the archaeologist who helped me find Reilly’s car,” Jeff explained. “Ross Flynn, the district attorney, and this is Judge Galt.”

  I moved forward and shook hands with the pair.

  “We were just talking about the late unlamented,” the judge said and lifted a photo from his desk. He handed it to Jeff, who snorted and handed it to me.