Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “The wrong one?”

  “That’s what I said: Jacko said, ‘We got the wrong one.’ Didn’t make any sense. When he saw me listening he cussed me.”

  “You don’t know who he was talking to?”

  “No.”

  “The sheriff said he ran with a group of men. He gave me their names.”

  “He wasn’t running with nobody that night. They’d all split. His cousin Skeeter was in jail in Alec for stealing a John Deere. Presley Hobbs was working offshore. Fact is, Jacko was all sad and depressed without his little gang to boss around. That’s why he was so ready to beat up on me.”

  “Did he ever say anything about going up into the hills?”

  “The hills? Jacko would just as soon be caught dead as go out in the woods. His idea of going into the woods was sitting behind the trailer with a case of beer, bullshitting about how to score some jack. One bug bite and he was ready to come in. Jacko was good at convincing other people to go get bug bit. He was a real shithead, my Jacko.”

  “But you hired Chaney Reilly to find out who killed him.”

  Her eyes darted away, to the empty cigarette pack, and then she cursed under her breath as she realized it was empty.

  “It didn’t cost me nothing. Sheriff Reilly come and stuck some papers under my nose, said maybe there’d be something in it for me if he could find out who killed him. Jacko didn’t leave me a goddamn thing but a four-year-old kid I can’t feed. Thanks to him, I gotta live with my parents. Do you know what it’s like living with people like that? All day Sunday in church, no smoking, no drinking, not doing nothing, for Christ’s sake. That’s why I left to start with. Now I’m right back. It ain’t fair, damn it.”

  I thought she was going to stamp her foot but she didn’t. Then her eyes nailed me with a sly look.

  “You think there’s a chance Jacko may have left something, is that why you’re here? I got the first right. I was his wife. I got a right to anything that belonged to him, you hear?”

  “I’m sure the sheriff will make sure you get what you deserve,” I said.

  “Sheriff Reilly promised …”

  “Sheriff Scully, I mean.”

  Her guffaw was a harsh sound, like bones being scraped.

  “I told you about him,” she said. “He ain’t good for nothing. He’s too busy with his own little goings-on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “About him and his girlfriend.”

  “He’s not married. Why shouldn’t he have a girlfriend?”

  “Oh, sure, a man his age with a girl what? Sixteen? Seventeen?”

  “What are you talking about?” My mouth was dry and I had trouble getting the words out. “I don’t know about any girlfriend.”

  “No? Well, I do, ’cause I seen ’em together in Natchez one day, only they didn’t see me. I seen ’em coming out of the dining room right after breakfast, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Scully the high-and-mighty sheriff, and a girl half his age, who could get him chucked out of office if her old man knew.”

  “Who?” I demanded. “Who was he with?”

  Lisa Reilly sneered and cocked her head back, as if she was proud of what she was about to say: “It was Carline Flynn, Mr. District Attorney Flynn’s daughter. It wasn’t enough she was sneaking down from that girls’ school in Jackson, Mississippi, where her old man sends her, not enough she was after my Jacko, who wasn’t much, but he was mine. She was after the sheriff, too.”

  I left Lisa Reilly screaming at Junior and drove back to the archaeological camp, morose at what I’d just heard. Jeff had lied about where he was Sunday night and now I was being told he was seeing a girl who, if not underage, was close enough to it to ruin him with the powers of the parish. That was plenty of reason for him to he to me. I thought of driving over to his house, laying it on the line, but decided against it.

  Who was I to be holier-than-thou? Last year, while Pepper had been in Mexico, I’d come close to having an affair with an attractive widow. I knew how things could get out of hand when a person got lonely. But I hadn’t lied to my friends.

  Still, it was political suicide, if it was true, and it didn’t make sense to waste my time on somebody with a death wish.

  The crew was still in the field but Alice Mae was inside the house, cooking, and to my surprise Luther was outside, skinning some kind of animal.

  “Howdy, Mr. Alan.” He grinned toothlessly. “I made ’em let me go. Told ’em I had better things to do.”

  “Is that a deer, Luther?”

  “Best venison you ever tasted,” the little man bragged. He had an ancient butcher knife with a wooden handle and he was sharpening it on a whetstone. “I get this thing sharp I’ll show you how to dress a hide.”

  “Where did you get the deer, Luther?”

  “Now, Mr. Alan, don’t worry about that. There’s plenty of deer in the woods, ain’t nobody’ll miss this one.” He held the blade up, inspected it, and handed it to me: “Try this and tell me if that ain’t sharp now?”

  I took the knife and touched the blade to my thumb.

  “It’s sharp,” I said, handing it back. “And I didn’t see a thing, if the game warden asks.”

  I went inside and was just pouring myself a drink when the phone rang.

  I picked it up and heard Pepper’s voice.

  “Alan? You’d better come home.”

  I felt my stomach go weak. “What happened?”

  “It’s Sam. He had a heart attack a few hours ago. He’s in the coronary care unit at Our Lady of the Lake. It doesn’t look good.”

  FIFTEEN

  It was just before seven and already dark when I reached my house on Park Boulevard. Pepper’s Integra was on the street outside and she flew into my arms as I opened the door.

  “Have you heard anything more?” I asked.

  “No. I guess that’s good.”

  “Was it a bad attack?”

  She shook her head. “I just know his heart stopped at one point and they had to resuscitate him.”

  “Damn.”

  I ate a quesadilla, washing it down it with a glass of milk as Digger yapped from the backyard. I told Pepper about my interview with Calvin Capshaw and the trip to Simmsburg. And I told her what Lisa Reilly had said about Jeff. “I don’t know where to go from here.”

  “Maybe you need to let Jeff handle it,” she said.

  I nodded. She was doubtless right. I changed the subject: “When can I see Sam?”

  “Next visiting hours are at nine,” she said.

  I checked my watch. “I can’t sit around here. I’m going to the library. I need something to take my mind off things.”

  “Sure. I’ll meet you at the CCU,” she said.

  I drove out to the university, parked behind the office, and set out on foot. In my mind I could see Sam lying in the sterile cubicle, hooked up to the monitoring machines, eyes half closed … He was an old man, and old men died, but I’d already lost my parents and I didn’t want to go through this again. What would the world be without Sam?

  I checked the computerized card catalog and went to the third floor, then sat on the floor between the shelves.

  I skimmed the books, made notes, and at eight I walked out of the library. I was anxious to see what insights Sam would have.

  And then I remembered.

  I got out of my car in the hospital lot at eight-forty and threaded my way across the four lanes of the boulevard into the hospital. I went up the escalator in the lobby and down a long hall, following the signs, until I came to a clutch of people huddled outside a set of heavy, gray swinging doors. A sign said visiting hours were nine A.M., one P.M., five P.M., and nine P.M.

  Libby and Pepper disengaged from the others, and Libby hugged me. “It’s good to see you.”

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “Holding on. The next few hours are critical, they said.”

  “He’ll make it,” I told
her, as much to reassure myself. She squeezed my hand.

  The swinging door opened and the nurse stood aside as the visitors threaded their way in.

  It was like the command center of a missile battery, all computer screens and beeps, except that instead of consoles around the perimeter there were smaller rooms. Some doors were open, others closed. Each had a big window, through which a person outside could see the bed and the person in it, except for a few where the window was covered by a curtain.

  We followed Libby to a room in the middle.

  I let Libby and Pepper go in first. Maybe, if I took my time, I wouldn’t have to go in at all. Maybe I could hang on to the illusion that Sam was still the vigorous man I always remembered, a perpetual sixty, with hair just going silver …

  Then I forced myself into the little room.

  The walls were white, like the sheets, and the man in the bed was white, too, as if all the blood had been drained out of him. There was an IV drip going, and a wire ran from under the sheet to a green oscilloscope. Oxygen tubes led from a clip under his nose to a breathing apparatus.

  Libby bent to kiss him and I hung back, wondering if he even knew we were there.

  Then I heard his voice.

  “Can’t you get me out of here?” he begged.

  Pepper pecked his cheek and then I moved toward the bed.

  “How are you?” I asked and felt silly as soon as I’d said it.

  “I don’t like it here very much.”

  “They’ll let you out in a day or two,” Libby assured him.

  “I can go home?”

  “They’ll send you to a regular hospital room.”

  “I want to go home. People die up here. Besides”—his eyes rolled around to see if he was being overheard—“that last nurse that came in here was ugly.”

  “We’ll get you a pretty one for downstairs,” Libby promised.

  “There was a pretty one when I woke up. I thought I’d died and there really was a heaven. But I never saw her again.”

  “We’ll come back next visiting hour,” I said.

  But he was already asleep.

  We went back out into the hallway.

  “I’ll be back in the morning,” I promised Libby. “Call me if there’s anything …” I halted, not sure how to finish the sentence.

  She touched my arm fondly. “Thank you. They tell me he’s stable for now.”

  I nodded, not saying what was on my mind, which was that stable just meant nothing was happening right now. He’d been stable right before he’d had his heart attack …

  We ate at the Ground Pat’i on Jefferson, because I didn’t know if there was enough food in the house to fix a meal. She ordered ribs and I had a hamburger with cheese, and, to compensate, a Diet Coke.

  “He’ll be okay,” she said, taking my hand under the table.

  “Yeah. But it’s the future that bothers me.”

  “You mean the damage to his heart?”

  “I mean nobody lives forever. Other people, even my parents, died. Classmates died, were killed, committed suicide. But there was always Sam. Now I have to admit he’s not immortal.”

  Her hand squeezed mine.

  “Tell me about your research,” she said, and I knew she was trying to get my mind away from Sam. “I have the feeling you’re onto something.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was reading about old Jim Bowie, the knife fighter. His name keeps popping up through this whole business. It’s almost like Jacko Reilly was his reincarnation.”

  “But Jim Bowie was a hero,” she said. “He was killed at the Alamo with Crockett and Travis.”

  “That’s how he ended up but before that there was a lot about his life that was pretty shady. Slave trading, forging land titles, brawling. He had political ambitions, and in 1828, the year after the famous Vidalia knife fight, he was, on paper at least, one of the richest men in the country. Then his land schemes came to light and even though he and his brother, Rezin, went to Washington to try to pressure the authorities into accepting his forged land papers, everything fell apart. He ended up in Texas looking for new wealth.”

  “But what’s this got to do with Jacko? You don’t really believe in reincarnation.”

  “No, of course not. But I believe an old story everybody up there seems to know may have something to do with what happened to the town’s bad boy.”

  Pepper smiled. “It’s tough to lose your heroes.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, everybody thinks of Jim Bowie as the hero in The Iron Mistress.”

  “I’ve heard of that. Wasn’t it a movie?”

  “With Alan Ladd, in the early 1950s. Paul Wellman, the Western historian, wrote the book. I loved that story when I was a kid, though it’s been years since I’ve seen the movie. In The Iron Mistress, Jim Bowie goes to a blacksmith named James Black with a wooden knife model and tells him to use it to make the knife. And the blacksmith looks it over and shakes his head, because he knows this is a knife design like no other he’s ever seen, and then—and this is the part I love— he goes into the back of his shop and comes out with a box, and he opens it and takes out this piece of meteorite. He tells Bowie he’s going to put a piece of a star into it.”

  “Nice touch,” Pepper said, stealing one of my fries.

  “So Bowie rides away, tells him he’ll come back in a week or two, and Black promises to have the knife ready for him. You see Black heating his forge and melting the steel and then he takes out the little box and drops the piece of meteorite into the molten metal. Then you see him hammering the steel into shape and, finally, putting on the handle. When Bowie comes back—and this is the part I like—he says, ’Here’s your knife, Mr. Bowie. It’s got a little bit of heaven in it. And a little bit of hell.’”

  “I think I remember that part,” she said. “Well, it makes a nice story.”

  “Yes, but there was fact in it. There really was a James Black. He lived in Washington, Arkansas, and years later he told about how Jim Bowie showed up one day in 1830 with a wooden model for a knife.”

  “I thought the sandbar fight was in 1827.”

  “It was. In Black’s version, the sandbar and a few other scrapes convinced Bowie he needed a better knife than the one he’d been using up to then.”

  “And that was the real origin of the Bowie knife.”

  “The origin of the myth, anyway.”

  That night I slept fitfully, half expecting the phone to ring with Libby’s trembling voice on the other end. I drifted in and out of dreams. I saw Jacko in his submerged Firebird but water kept washing in and floating him out of it and turning his body over and over. I was looking at his face and suddenly I realized it was Sam’s and I started upright in the bed.

  Pepper turned over and mumbled something in her sleep. Looking at her, I felt a calmness descend over me, as if, with her just being here, everything would be all right. I lay back and closed my eyes.

  This time a scene from an old movie flashed in front of me. I was watching a man on the deck of a riverboat, standing at the railing. Like me, he was in love, and he was on his way to meet his woman. Thoughts tumbled through his mind, memories of a past life filled with duels and romances. And he was leaving all that.

  Without thinking his hand reached down to his belt and drew his great knife from its scabbard. He studied the blade for a moment, thinking of the men it had killed and the piece of star that had been used to make it, and then, with a flick of his wrist, he dropped it over the side.

  I saw the final scene of the movie, as the blade sank down into the depths, coming to rest on the bottom.

  Except that in my dream a skeletal hand—Jacko Reilly’s— reached out to grab it.

  SIXTEEN

  I caught Libby outside the CCU just before morning visiting hours began, and she told me there’d been no change, that Sam had been asleep when she’d visited last night. I told her Pepper had class or she would have come with me, and then the big door swung open and we went inside.
r />   This time he was propped up with a pillow behind him, and when he saw us he smiled.

  “You look a whole lot better,” Libby said.

  “I am better. They got rid of that ugly nurse.” He squeezed my hand. “You didn’t bring me a little Dant, did you?”

  “They’d throw us all out if I did,” I told him, “but when you get out of here I’ll buy you a gallon.”

  “That’s a deal.” He coughed. “It’s so damn boring in here. I can’t stand to just lie here. What’s going on in the real world?”

  Libby looked over at me and I shrugged. “Still working up at Lordsport.”

  “That place has a fascinating history,” Sam said. “You ever been to the Morgan House, that old hotel from the last century? And there’s a bunch of Cunys buried on top of that Indian mound right inside the town itself.”

  “Who?”

  “The Cunys were a big family in the first part of the last century. Dr. Richard Cuny was the brother of General Samuel Cuny. The general was killed in the Natchez Sandbar fight, but Richard was there, too. Treated some of the victims.”

  “Interesting you should mention that. I was doing some reading about old Jim Bowie,” I said.

  “That rascal,” Sam wheezed. “He made a fortune running slaves up from Galveston Island. Bought ’em from Jean Lafitte. Jim Bowie would do anything for a dollar. Only one in the family with any character or brains was his brother Rezin. But Jim got all the glory because he was hot-tempered and didn’t mind cutting folks with that big knife he carried. He’d have gone down as just a brawler and a land speculator if it wasn’t for the Alamo. He was stupid—or lucky—enough to end up there. Jim Bowie owes his legend to the Alamo.”

  “You don’t think he killed a dozen Mexican soldiers on his sickbed?” I asked.

  “Man was dying of typhus. He couldn’t crap without help. A lot of nonsense has been written about Bowie and his knife.”

  “You don’t believe in Excalibur,” I said.

  “There aren’t any Excaliburs,” Sam pronounced. “And there aren’t any King Arthurs. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  “It’s nice to believe,” I said.