With as mean a look as Sam had seen, he leaned toward her. “Queer as they come. Mr. Handsome-Boy. Has everyone fooled.”
“Including Loreen, do you think?” asked Sam.
The mother-in-law kept opening and closing her mouth like the wide-eyed nurse on the TV screen. She was speechless.
Butts waved a deprecating hand at Sam. “Oh, hell, man. Women can hardly ever tell. A real man can, that’s all.” And he looked Sam up and down as if calling his manliness into question, since apparently Sam hadn’t figured out Boy Chalmers.
But the look changed when Sam said, “So neither one of you thought he was guilty.”
In the silence, only the creak of the rocking chair was audible; and even it stopped, finally. Neither one of them would meet Sam’s eyes.
They knew what he was thinking: that the two of them had kept silent because the other main suspect was Carl Butts.
Butts began defending himself against Sam’s silence. “Well, the jury thought so. And maybe they’re smarter.”
Ma Gris leaned towards the TV set, switched it off, sat back. She said nothing, nor would she look at Sam.
Sam stood up. “I guess I’ll be going. Thanks for the beer. Mr. Butts . . . Mrs. Grizzell.” He nodded toward each of them, though the eyes of each were now fastened to the dark screen.
Sam let the door swing quietly behind him and walked down the rubbishy pavement. In the gathering dusk he saw the faint gleam of a firefly, ready for the dark.
• • •
Nearly a year ago, that screen door had shut.
He’d gone through half a pack of cigarillos sitting out here in the dark watching Bunny Caruso’s house.
He hadn’t expected that any talk with Carl Butts would have turned up new evidence, and it hadn’t. Even if Butts and Loreen’s mother had agreed to testify to the characters of both the victim and the alleged murderer, it wouldn’t have been enough to turn the case around. A mother is obviously going to say her little girl wasn’t “that type”; and though the husband was as sure as Sam himself that Boy Chalmers was a homosexual, it was a supposition on their parts. The kid wasn’t a practicing homosexual; Sam had spent plenty of time with his friends and family, obliquely asking that question. A few of the men who knew him were inclined to wonder about Boy’s sexual leanings, but, again, he was so well liked no one wanted to come right out and voice their suspicions.
Anyway, wondered Sam, starting in on a fresh cigarillo, what the hell would it have proved? Even if the kid were a rampaging fag and everyone knew it, who’s to say a gay might not in a moment of gross and perverse behavior try to rape a woman? Sam didn’t believe it, not about Boy Chalmers, but it wasn’t something anyone could prove.
So Boy Chalmers had by now lived out a year of a life sentence.
When Tony Perry and then Loreen Butts had been murdered, Sam had remembered the Hayden crime—not that he’d ever really forgotten it—and walked into the mayor’s office and told him he thought the Eunice Hayden case should be reopened, that he, Sam should be given access to the files on it, and that Sheriff Sedgewick should cooperate in every way possible.
This was before the murder of Nancy Alonzo, and Mayor Sims was in the fourth year of the throes of his re-election campaign. He could never stop campaigning, because he must have realized how tenuous was his hold on the job and seen an opponent behind every tree. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many who wanted the position—a young attorney here, a chairman of the board of education there, but no one seemed to be taking it seriously. You get into the habit, Sam supposed, of seeing the same man turn up in the Rainbow on the same stool talking about the same town business. For Sam to walk in with something so politically inflammatory as wanting to drag out an old murder and tie it to a fresh one made the mayor wave away his curtain of cigar smoke (he honestly thought that his cigars and seersucker suits would put people in mind of Spencer Tracy) and look at Sam as if he’d gone crazy.
“You trying to tell me that that murder-rape over in Elton County a couple years ago and that Eunice Hayden case—you trying to tell me that because of this you think there’s some Jack the Ripper type out there?”
“No.”
“Then you trying to tell me you think the same sombitch did all these women?”
“Yes.”
“Just because there’s been three murders in four years—four years, mind you—”
Sam interrupted. “All of them done the same way. And I’d say that sort of thing in two tiny places like La Porte and Hebrides might suggest our women better bolt their doors.”
Sims leaned back and smiled meanly. “Well, I guess I know what your problem is. You never did find who killed Eunice Hayden, so you want to make it look like neither did Sheriff Sedgewick find who really killed the others. That it?”
“No, that’s not it.”
Sims’s mode of argument was to ignore answers and repeat himself. “So since you never did discover the Hayden girl’s killer, you want to throw up a little dust to make it look like maybe Sheriff Sedgewick over there didn’t do a good job?”
“I think maybe he didn’t. I think the wrong man’s in prison. I also think the criminal justice system showed signs of working pretty quick, for once.”
“And just what’s that supposed to mean? You inferring there’s something fishy?”
“I’m just saying Boy Chalmers went inside as quick as the jurors went out.”
This was too much of a conundrum for Sims. He stared at Sam through squinty eyes and tossed down his pen. “My god, but you got crust. There’s nothing to show Boy Chalmers ever even knew Eunice Hayden, so the Hayden case, that’s got nothing to do with these two others. Why, not even our state attorney could get past Chalmers’s alibi, and she’s tough as they come.”
Sims loved Billie Anderson, who was just as political as he was. What Sims was too stupid to see was that his own argument was circular. Follow it around again and it would show that if Boy Chalmers hadn’t killed Eunice Hayden, it was a good bet he hadn’t killed the other two women. But all Sam said was, “There’s nothing to prove Chalmers knew Antoinette Perry, either. It was just assumed, wasn’t it?”
Apparently, the mayor was so certain he was right that his anger drained away and his small, wet mouth twisted into a pearly little smile as he leaned back, hands locked behind his neck. “Well, you do take the biscuit, Sammy, you really do. First off, that Perry and Butts woman, they were raped. Eunice wasn’t ever raped.”
“Oh. What would you call it, then, that knife stuck up in her? ‘Interfered with’?”
“Watch your mouth, DeGheyn. The doc said she wasn’t raped. Now, I’m not a big-time policeman like you, but even I’ve heard of what is called an MO. Then why wasn’t the Hayden girl done the same things to as the others? You tell me.” Mayor Sims drew some papers toward him and started signing—his indication the interview was over. “Now get outta here and check the parking meters.” He looked up. “You just might be needing a vacation, Sammy.”
Meaning: lay off or you’ll be taking one. Sam hadn’t expected cooperation, so he wasn’t especially disappointed; as far as the threat was concerned, he couldn’t care less.
But Sam didn’t lay off; he kept on asking questions about Boy Chalmers. What he found was that Boy had never had a serious love interest, though he was extremely popular—one girl thought he looked like Robert Redford, and talked as if Boy’s incarceration couldn’t be really happening, that it was more like a movie, and maybe Paul Newman would come along and somehow get Boy out.
And two months ago, back at the end of June, Boy had gotten out. It hadn’t been with the help of Paul Newman, though; it had been Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers.
• • •
A little over two months ago, at the end of June, Boy’s mother had gone to visit him in prison. It was Boy’s birthday, and Alexis had been permitted to take him a cake. Oh, there’d been no files, knives, or guns in it; it was pretty much hacked up and kind of pasted back togeth
er by the time Alexis and Boy sat down to blow out the unlit candles.
But because it was his birthday and because Boy had been a model prisoner, they were allowed to sit in one of the detention rooms with a guard at the door, to celebrate.
The guard told the authorities later that Mrs. Chalmers had even offered him a piece of cake—a real nice woman, Mrs. Chalmers—but of course he’d just put the slice of cake aside. “You don’t think I been stupid enough to eat it? Coulda been drugged.”
But Mrs. Chalmers had become violently ill, and he had gone quickly for help. And the chain of events, the several flukes from then on, from that unguarded door all the way down the hall to freedom, was a warden’s nightmare. Another guard had been in the john; still another had left his post at the bidding of two other guards who were having trouble containing a prison fight. And the last guard, the one who stood between him and the outside world, Boy had managed to overpower. It was a small prison and not a maximum-security one.
People figured Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers was the best little actress they’d ever seen. But they could never be sure, because she really had got sick, and the pretty little pink-icing rosebuds had turned up traces of salmonella poisoning. What had passed between Boy and Alexis, sitting there eating that cake, no one knew. Since he hadn’t got sick, people figured Alexis must have planned the whole thing.
It was only twenty-four hours before they caught Boy in Dubois’s used-car lot, trying to hot-wire an old Ford. He’d been stupid enough to run back to Hebrides and right into Sheriff Sedgewick’s arms instead of running hell-for-leather in the opposite direction.
For Boy, it was the wrong twenty-four hours. This, at least, was Sam’s thinking; for, in spite of the awful coincidence of Boy’s escape and the murder of Nancy Alonzo in that same wood, near the spot where Loreen Butts was murdered, Sam still didn’t think Boy was guilty.
• • •
The mayor, on the other hand, seemed hardly to be able to contain his jubilance at proving Sam DeGheyn one hundred percent wrong.
Right after Boy’s recapture, he’d gloated. “I guess that pretty much shuts you up about Boy Chalmers, don’t it, Sammy?”
All Sam could think of, looking at Sims’s mouthful of teeth, which he’d happily punch out, was that the mayor could stand a visit to the dentist. The rise of anger he felt was at Sims’s ability to laugh in the face of this horrible tragedy. Sam hadn’t known Loreen Butts or Tony Perry personally, but he had known Nancy Alonzo.
While Sam just stood there, his hands under his armpits, his arms hugging his chest in an attempt to smother his rage, Sims had gone on signing whatever documents were on his desk, signing them with a flourish. And talking.
“Yeah, I reckon Billie Anderson’ll throw the book at him this time. No more birthday parties for Boy. Now maybe you can use your energies on something more useful, huh? Maybe you can start earning your salary.”
Sam didn’t answer. He just stood there, and although there was a trickle of sweat down his back and dampness under his arms, he felt stone cold as a statue.
“Cat got your tongue?” Mayor Sims smiled broadly, showing those teeth again that seemed to be shrinking away from the gums, as if the teeth weren’t too happy about being so close to Sims, either.
Sam just stood there.
The smile disappeared suddenly. The goading wasn’t working, and Sims didn’t like that. “Now, I heard you don’t agree with some of the evidence. I heard you think that crime-scene officer was wrong.” When Sam didn’t answer, Sims leaned forward. “Well? What did you think that man who’s got more experience and smarts than you ever had was wrong about?” When Sam still didn’t answer, Sims went on, but with increasing uncertainty. “Hell, she writes his name in her own blood on the ground there and you still say maybe Boy Chalmers is innocent. My godamighty, man! What kinda proof you need, anyways? Man’s a jailbreaker and out one day and another woman gets her throat slit? I mean, what kinda proof—?” Pure exasperation stopped him. Sims just shook his head at Sam’s foolishness.
But when Sam still didn’t answer him or move a muscle, Sims got up, leaned over his desk with his hands fisted, and nearly bellowed. “Let me just tell you something, fella! This Alonzo case is closed. I don’t give a tinker’s damn if she was a La Porte girl, or if she did do cleaning at the court house here, or if she was a friend of yours. The case is closed. Now, why don’t you get out there”—and here he waggled his arm in some general “out there” direction—“and maybe do something useful. Drag your Deputy Donny Dawg out there to the Red Barn and clean up the sugar bowls.” His face was mottled purple.
Sam nodded and turned away.
“You hear me?”
“I hear you, Mr. Mayor.” Sam’s voice was without expression.
• • •
Sam had been the sheriff around here for too many years to give a thought to Mayor Sims’s temper or Mayor Sims’s threats; he was as much a fixture as the courthouse pump, a town relic, a piece of history the people could no more do without than their Labor Day parade.
He was the loot. Sam smiled.
He heard voices, a man’s and Bunny’s, her piping voice which sounded eternally surprised, and looked through the screen of pines. Bunny and her customer were standing on the tiny, slanting wood porch, and she was waving away moths that had fluttered in when the porch light flicked on. Fireflies thronged the patchy grass, and mosquitoes hung like a veil of gauze over the water holes. The man was slapping the back of his neck, uttering some obscenity. Then he laughed.
Sam watched Bunny Caruso, standing there in her long, loose dress—her “medium’s gown.”
He wasn’t thinking of loose women; he was thinking of misfits.
Tony Perry had lived alone with her two children, never been married, hadn’t had much to do with people, except the men she slept around with. Sam frowned.
Eunice Hayden wasn’t Sam’s idea of “loose”; whatever Eunice had been up to those last months before her death, Sam could still remember her as the washed-out young girl he’d seen standing on the corner of Tremont and First like a shipwreck victim, marooned.
“She didn’t make friends easy,” her mother had said, probably meaning that Loreen, as a youngster, didn’t have any at all. Maybe the girl had been smart; maybe not. Smart can kill you socially at that age.
Bunny Caruso, who was giggling on her front porch, had been counted the school idiot, more or less—laughed at, kept forever on the fringes of the crowd. Got fired from one job and then another; treated with contempt by some of the La Porte people long before she’d found her True Calling. A misfit, to say the least.
Willow Pauley, who lived her agoraphobic life, had reported someone watching her house: a man in the trees. “Swingin’ from them, Willow?” Another woman alone; another misfit.
And Sam’s favorite misfit: Maud Chadwick.
TWO
Watched her through the trees.
The memory of watching her through the trees rose in him like thick black smoke. If he didn’t get at her, he would suffocate.
Sitting here now with the drawer of knives, he found himself gulping air.
He had run his thumb over each one, meaning to choose the one that drew blood with the lightest touch. He barely caressed the blade of the hunting knife—his favorite; drew it easily and smoothly along until the thread of blood came to the skin’s surface.
He breathed easier.
Letters, he had been thinking, were bad news. One had been propped on the cold potbellied stove, and it wasn’t even to him, but to that sorry old drunk with his sharp whiskers and callused hands he’d had to call “Dad.” He’d had to call him that or his mother wouldn’t lie with him anymore. And the letter had been for that old drunk.
Letters. Women. They came and they went. The women around here saw him and didn’t know they’d seen him. They didn’t know he was imprinted on their eyes.
He thought of Sam DeGheyn watching through the woods. Now, that was really funny
. He giggled, thinking of it. The sound rose in his throat like froth. It was so funny, he cut himself deeper, running the knife blade absently across the palm of his hand.
Licked it. He didn’t care; he didn’t often feel pain. In his crotch he felt pain, the pressure from that thick coil of smoke rising upwards through his limbs, engorging.
Watching from the woods, he knew just where she went, and when.
And what was funny was that Sam thought he was out there all alone, watching them.
Yet there he’d been while Sam was watching.
The sheriff’s shadow.
Now, that—that was funny.
Both of them—with a gun, with a knife—watching through the trees.
Oh, that was a scream. He was out there somewhere. That was a scream. He felt a pressure in his throat rising and he tossed his head back.
Beyond the window the sparrows took off.
THREE
Bunny Caruso’s coy giggle was matched with the man’s hawking laugh that sounded more like a man having a seizure than a man having a good time. They stood on the tiny porch.
Because his back was partially turned, Sam couldn’t make out who it was. At first he thought it might be Dodge Haines’s brother Rob, but then he heard that laugh. Sam thought he recognized it; and when the screen door creaked shut and Bunny’s friend’s lounge suit moved like quicksilver toward his car, Sam gaped.
Bubby Dubois.
His first reaction was a short gasp of astonished laughter; his second was a molten anger that seemed to twist his stomach muscles as if he had a cramp. He felt, he supposed, the way a father must who finds his daughter’s young man screwing another girl. Why he thought Dubois, unfaithful to his own wife, would be faithful to Sam’s, he didn’t know. Why he should feel what would be Florence’s own humiliation, he didn’t know, either. He felt betrayed.
The engine of Bubby Dubois’s Cadillac ticked over with the precision of a time bomb, and Sam pulled his dark glasses from the glove compartment, put on his cap, drew on his black gloves, and got out of his car. To avoid slamming the door, he left it open and started across the hard, rutted road. Smoke plumed from the Cadillac’s exhaust. Sam avoided the gravel and came up on the driver’s side just as Bubby tossed his arm over the passenger seat and looked over his shoulder and started backing slowly.
The End of the Pier Page 9