Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Now I understood.

  They took me to the courthouse, hustling me through the basement door directly into the sheriff’s office. They uncuffed my hands, but before I could take it as a hopeful sign, they cuffed them in front of me and sat me in a chair in a small room with green cinder block walls and left me by myself. I smelled disinfectant and wondered how many times they’d had to clean up after incontinent prisoners. My watch told me it was after one when the door finally opened and Jeff came in, followed by Ross Flynn. Jeff wore jeans and a windbreaker, and Flynn was dressed in camos and boots and I figured they’d gotten him off a hunt, which accounted for the sour look on his face.

  “I’m glad to see you,” I said as Jeff came in. “How about getting these cuffs off?”

  “How about you tell us what happened first?” Jeff said. “And you know you’re entitled to a lawyer.”

  “I asked for one, damn it, but your men out there wouldn’t listen.”

  “Just following procedures,” Jeff said, his face deadpan. “You want a phone so you can call your lawyer now?”

  “No, not now that you’re here, I just wanted to get those monkeys off my ass. This is a put-up job. Didn’t you see Chaney Reilly out there?”

  The sheriff and D.A. exchanged looks.

  “Chaney Reilly isn’t out there,” Ross Flynn said, his voice raspy. “Now listen: I got other things to do, but since they called me in, I’ll lay it out for you. The sheriff’s office got a call that somebody heard screams from the archaeology camp. When the first unit responded they found you leaning over Alice Mae Dupree, who was naked on the bed, and half conscious. Blood tests are being done but the best bet is that she was drugged. Maybe that date rape drug. And some white powder was found at the camp. That’s the long and the short. If we charge you, it’ll be with attempted rape. If the tests show she had intercourse, it’ll be rape. If you want to make a statement we’ll listen.”

  I half rose from the chair. “This is insane. Jeff, what is this? Tell him this is crap. Your deputy out there saw me turn into the camp. He didn’t answer the damn call—he was waiting for me to get there. I was set up. Besides, a blood test will prove I’m innocent.”

  Jeff stared at me, his face giving away nothing.

  “Your credentials as a deputy of this parish are revoked,” he said. “Effective immediately. Until the district attorney decides what to do, you’ll be held, and if you’re charged, I think Judge Galt is the duty judge this weekend. I’ll see if he wants to order a blood test. May take a while to get the results, though.”

  I kept listening for some indication that this was a joke but his voice was level, and I even thought I detected a hint of anger.

  “Jeff, you don’t believe this?”

  He said nothing, just stood there, arms crossed.

  “I think I want to call my lawyer now,” I said.

  I made a long distance call to Stanley Kirby, AKA Dogbite, in Baton Rouge. If I was lucky, the rain had reached Baton Rouge last night and made it too wet for golf, but you could never tell. I listened to the fourth ring and was about to give up when I heard his voice on the other end.

  “Stan, this is Alan. I need your help.”

  “If it’s a traffic ticket, pay it. I have a recital to go to.”

  “Listen, Stan, this is serious. They’re saying I raped a girl.”

  “I thought you were tight with Pepper these days. Why would you want to go and do that?”

  “Damn it, Stan, I didn’t. It’s phony. I need to get out of here.”

  “That could be hard. Jeez, Alan, why couldn’t it just be something like drunk driving?”

  “Stan, this is life or death.”

  “For me, if I don’t make it to my daughter’s recital. Actually, she’s pretty good. Have you ever really listened to the French horn?”

  “Stanley …”

  “Okay, who’s the ADA? Have they assigned one?”

  “ADA? The D.A. himself is handling this.”

  “No way. He hasn’t handled a case since Noah started his zoo. Wait a minute … Where the hell are you?”

  I told him and held the phone away from my ear as he swore.

  “Cane River effing parish? That’s the asshole of beyond. I’m not going up there. That’s one of those country places where they make it up as they go along. Look, you’d do better to get a local lawyer.”

  “I don’t know any local lawyers.”

  “Well, there was a fellow named Quigly, over in Simmsburg. He might … No, he got disbarred over that vote-buying business. Well, hell, I dunno.”

  “Stanley …”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Were you going with this girl?”

  “She was the cook, damn it.”

  “Oh, Alan …”

  “Get me out of here.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that but there wasn’t anything I could do. They took away the phone and left me in the little green room for the rest of the day and I wondered what was going on. The deputy who brought me a tuna sandwich for lunch wasn’t informative, just left the sandwich on a paper plate with a soft drink in a paper cup and went out again.

  Just after six another deputy opened the door and handed me an orange jumpsuit. “Put this on and hand out your clothes,” he said.

  My heart sank.

  “Has anybody called for me?” I asked.

  “Quiet as a graveyard,” the man said, waiting. He watched me strip and don the jumpsuit with CPP on the back for Cane River Parish Prison.

  “You’ll get your stuff back when you leave here,” he said, and I tried to tell myself it was a good sign, because he was broaching the possibility. “Come on, time to take some pictures.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Pictures and fingerprints.”

  I followed him to a camera and a background. He turned on a bright light and handed me a menu board.

  “This is ridic—” I began and realized he’d already taken the picture. He asked me to turn profile and I did so: I never realized before how being stripped of one’s dignity and clothing also stripped away the will to resist.

  “Now we’re gonna have to find a safe place for you,” he said, pointing toward the hallway. “Don’t want to put you too close to Luther, on account of what you did to his daughter. But I think we got a free cell on the end.”

  He led me through a big steel door and into a corridor with cells on either side. Some of the cells were occupied and faces looked up in curiosity as we passed. I didn’t know any of the faces until we got to the last occupied cell and saw him.

  “Mr. Graham?” Luther cried, his knuckles white as he grabbed the bars. “It ain’t true what they say, is it? You didn’t do what they say?”

  “No, Luther, I didn’t.”

  We reached a cell at the end and I was glad to see it was empty.

  “Don’t pay no attention to Luther,” the deputy said. “Still, you got to understand how he feels.” He shut the door behind me. “You know, this is a first since I been here.”

  “What is?”

  “We ain’t never locked up a geologist before.”

  “I’m an archaeologist.”

  “Whatever. Sweet dreams. If you have trouble going to sleep, try counting dinosaurs.” He laughed gently at his joke and walked away.

  It wasn’t one of the better nights of my life. After a supper of corn bread, red beans, and a couple of boiled wieners, the jailers left us alone. One of the inmates decided to audition for the Grand Old Opry but his musical talents were unappreciated by the others, who screamed and stomped their feet until the deputy on duty came and told him to shut up. There was another prisoner, fortunately at the other end of the corridor, who let out random howls, and drew admonitions to shut up until he finally went to sleep. The one thing I didn’t hear, which both gratified and disturbed me, was anything further from Luther Dupree.

  I settled down to the hard cot and tried to muster some self-control. I
was as scared as I’d ever been. It wasn’t just the momentary physical fear of death or injury, where you could lash out with at least a prayer of altering your situation: This was the kind of fear that comes from isolation and with it, helplessness. The kind of fear that grows because you have time to reflect, the kind of fear that increases every time you open your eyes and see that the stone walls and the bars and the Lysol smell and the dim glow of the neon bulbs in the center of the corridor are all still there and this isn’t a dream.

  It wasn’t cold in the cellblock but I was shaking.

  The only way to make it stop was to figure out exactly what had happened and why, and then maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to develop a plan.

  It was all I had.

  And, of course, it had been the work of Tally Galt. I’d scared her and she’d flown into action. The question was determining the chain: If she’d called Jeff, then it didn’t explain Chaney Reilly’s being on the scene, because he and Jeff were political enemies. So, unknown to Jeff, she’d probably called Reilly. Which meant that not only was she hiding her affair with Jeff from her husband, but also her dealings with her husband’s political foe. It sounded like good ammunition to use against her but it was only my word. They had the girl and I had no doubt that chemical tests would show she’d been drugged. They’d find the same kind of drugs in my Blazer, conveniently put there by one of the deputies who’d made a deal to stay on after Chaney Reilly got back in. Alice Mae, never a paragon of mental acuity on her best days, would be bluffed, threatened, and confused into saying whatever they wanted to hear. On cross-examination she might not hold up and the whole case might head south. But men had been convicted on less, especially in country towns, and besides, they didn’t necessarily need a conviction: All they needed was enough smoke to get me out of the way. Ross Flynn, still an enigma to me, could impanel a grand jury and get an indictment without any trouble, since I wouldn’t be able to cross-examine witnesses and have a lawyer in the grand jury room. Even if the indictment were dismissed months later, it would be an ugly cloud over my head, and my professional reputation would be ruined. The Department of Transportation and Development, hearing about it, would probably issue a stop work order on our contract and we’d never get any projects from them again.

  Thinking about it didn’t do much to abate my shakes.

  It was Jeff’s role in all this that puzzled me the most.

  What had turned him suddenly against me? Was it Tally? Or was his stance a political one, born of the need to survive? If so, was he willing to sacrifice me for expediency’s sake? Was he really a craftier person than the bluff, open Thomas Jefferson Scully who’d been my employee ten years ago? I recalled Tally Gait’s ironic laugh when I’d told her I knew what kind of a person Jeff Scully was. She was letting me know how little I really knew him these days, and I was beginning to see she was right.

  I lay back on the bunk finally and drew the thin cotton blanket over me. Things seemed bad now because it was night but I knew they’d seem better tomorrow. Or would they? I wondered what Pepper was doing now. Surely she’d made calls when I hadn’t come home, been told what had happened. And she would have appeared at Dogbite’s door. Nobody faced with a determined Pepper could refuse her, and she and Dogbite might be outside at this very minute, demanding a writ or whatever it took. After all, Pepper would know any kind of charges against me, especially rape, would have been trumped up. Wouldn’t she? It was no use speculating, because no matter what might be going on outside, the fact was that I was inside right now.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but even though the hullabaloo in the other cells had been replaced by snores and snorts, I couldn’t put aside the mixture of shame, anger, and fear. Just being here made me feel guilty, as if I deserved it somehow, or else why would I be undergoing this?

  Then I tried to put aside the immediate problems and think back to a hundred sixty years ago. Because I was sure now that was where the real answer lay. I tried to visualize Jim Bowie, the hero of a hundred cheap novels and films, riding into town one day on his way to Mexico, dressed in buckskins, two pistols in his belt and the big knife in a scabbard at his side. At least that was the way he was represented in fiction. But from what I’d read about him in the last few days, the heroic figure of legend didn’t jibe with history. He’d been a brave man, surely, but his bravery was often a form of recklessness, as if he hadn’t thought things through. He’d been ambitious, but without the patience to carry a plan to completion. Instead, he’d looked for shortcuts. Even his land dealings had suffered from a failure in thoroughness, for the Spanish grants on which the titles were supposedly based had been so clumsily forged that their fraudulence was self-evident. Patriot, knife fighter, hero—none so aptly described him as the simple word adventurer. And after a lifetime of adventures that he had lived through due to his brashness, he’d at last met the final one at the hands of Santa Anna’s army.

  He’d bought the land adjacent to Jeff’s cabin in the hills, legally or illegally—it probably didn’t matter now. On his way out of Louisiana for his fatal rendezvous in Texas, he’d sold it to a man named McElwain, and it had stayed in the McElwain family for thirty years. Then, a hundred thirty years after the McElwains had lost the land at a tax sale, another man named McElwain, living forty miles away, had been brutally beaten to death, and a catchall of his property had been taken. Some of the property had turned up in the house of another murdered man, a few months later. And a fragment of coin that came from old Tom McElwain’s lock box was found with the corpse of the man who’d probably headed the break-in gang.

  But what among Tom McElwain’s possessions could have been so valuable that it was worth murdering for? What item or items might connect McElwain to the man his distant ancestor had bought some land from over a century before?

  The stolen guns couldn’t have been the object of the burglary. That left the lock box. I tried to remember what it had held. A picture of Tom McElwain with a young woman. Was the object some kind of blackmail? It seemed unlikely. An old gold man’s wristwatch. It didn’t seem the kind of thing to kill for on the face of it, but you could never tell and I wasn’t an expert on watches. Some silver coins. Well, they’d wanted the coins, all right, because part of one had showed up with Jacko. I was assuming all the coins were Spanish pesos, but I’d only gotten that from Tom McElwain’s nephew, who probably knew as much about coins as he did about fine wines. If one of the coins was a rarity, such as a Brasher doubloon, that would be plenty of motive for murder, and Clovis Hightower was the kind of man I could see coveting a rare doubloon. Jim Bowie had been a treasure hunter—could he have won a valuable coin in one of his famous card games in Natchez Under the Hill? Maybe used the coin again in a card game with the original McElwain? It made sense, except that if Hightower had set up the burglary, it was an aberration for him to have used a bunch of bunglers like Jacko and his crowd.

  What else was in the box, then?

  Some papers. That was all young McElwain had said. Papers. That could mean anything. Deeds, a will, a notarized statement, a birth certificate. Even a treasure map.

  Had he been holding back a map to the place on the old McElwain property where Bowie had buried some Mexican silver? A treasure trove was a pretty good motive for murder. Yet no map had been found in Hightower’s possessions, or if it had, it hadn’t been recognized. But that didn’t mean anything: Jeff had only been there for the initial search. If the paper had been especially valuable, Hightower probably would have put it in a safety deposit box, and maybe it was there still, to be found when the box was opened under court order. Or maybe he had his own hiding place somewhere on his property. If that were the case, it might never be found. Or, most likely of all, maybe Jacko and his henchmen had decided not to give the map to Hightower and had held it out for themselves. Maybe that was why Hightower, too, had been killed. But if that were the case, the map might be lost, because Jacko’s crowd didn’t keep things in deposit boxes. They hid
them under mattresses or in tin cans buried in the backyard. And old papers didn’t stand up well to that kind of abuse.

  The only other two items in the lock box had been a butcher knife and a cheap import Derringer, and there, alone, I was willing to take the younger McElwain at his word when he’d said his uncle had put the pistol in to protect the other things and the knife in case the pistol didn’t work.

  Eventually I went to sleep. I even dreamed, though the dreams were even more confused than usual. In one I saw Jim Bowie, standing on the famous sandbar, blood streaming from the knife and bullet wounds in his chest and shoulder. Sun glinted on something in his hand and I saw it close up, the famous blade, gleaming Damascus steel a foot long, with a guard of brass, as it began its deadly work, welded to its master’s hand … Except that when I looked, the face of the man with the knife was not that of Jim Bowie, whose portrait I’d seen in books, but, rather, that of the man I’d seen a few days ago in a sheriff’s office photo—Jacko Reilly. And I was the man on the ground, who’d just been savaged by the blade. I realized then I was dying and yet I felt nothing, and I decided that dying must be an illusion, and soon now I would awaken from the dream.

  Until I saw Luther Dupree standing over me, my cell door open, his eyes staring down at me on the bunk. As I watched he hawked and spat, and the gob landed on my chest, striking like a bullet, and I screamed soundlessly, wondering why I couldn’t make any noise, summon any help, until I saw the bubbles around me and felt the current cold as death itself and far above me saw the tiny blur of light that was the surface, dimming now even as my lungs burned for air …

  Someone was shaking me and I opened my eyes.

  “Get up,” the deputy was saying and I roused myself to a position on the edge of the bunk. My mouth was sour and my eyes burned. I didn’t know if it was still night, but I pulled myself upright and followed him out, down the corridor. As I passed Luther’s cell he rushed forward.

  “Mr. Alan, listen, I knowed you didn’t have nothing to do with what happened …”