The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

by Otto Penzler

  It was late, and as always on Saturday evening, downtown Loring was virtually deserted. If people wanted to shop or go someplace to eat, they’d be out on the highway, at the Sonic or the new Pizza Hut. If they had enough money, they’d just head for Greenville. It had been a long time since anything much went on downtown after dark, which made her daddy’s presence here that much more unusual. He waved, then walked over to the door.

  The manager was in back, totalling the day’s receipts. Except for him and Dee Ann and one stock boy who was over in the dairy aisle sweeping up, the store was empty.

  Her daddy wore a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved pullover with an alligator on the pocket. He had on his funny-looking leather cap that reminded her of the ones policemen wore. He liked to wear that cap when he was out driving the MG.

  “Hey, sweets,” he said.

  Even with the counter between them, she could smell whiskey on his breath. He had that strange light in his eyes.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “When’d you start working nights?”

  “A couple of weeks back.”

  “Don’t get in the way of you and Buckie, does it?”

  She started to correct him, tell him her boyfriend’s name was Chuckie, but then she thought Why bother? He’d always been the kind of father who couldn’t remember how old she was or what grade she was in. Sometimes he had trouble remembering she existed: years ago he’d brought her to this same grocery store, and after buying some food for his hunting dog, he’d forgotten about her and left her sitting on the floor in front of the magazine rack. The store manager had carried her home.

  “Working nights is okay,” she said. “My boyfriend’ll be picking me up in a few minutes.”

  “Got a big night planned?”

  “We’ll probably just ride around a little bit and then head on home.”

  Her daddy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He extracted a twenty and handed it to her. “Here,” he said. ‘You kids do something fun. On me. See a movie or get yourselves a six-pack of Dr. Pepper.”

  He laughed, to show her he wasn’t serious about the Dr. Pepper, and then he stepped around the end of the counter and kissed her cheek. “You’re still the greatest little girl in the world,” he said. “Even if you’re not very little anymore.”

  He was holding her close. In addition to whiskey, she could smell after-shave and deodorant and something else — a faint trace of perfume. She hadn’t seen the MG on the street, but it was probably parked in the lot outside, and she bet his girlfriend was in it. She was just three years older than Dee Ann, a junior up at Delta State, though people said she wasn’t going to school anymore. She and Dee Ann’s daddy were living together in an apartment near the flower shop he used to own and run. He’d sold the shop last fall, just before he left home.

  He didn’t work anymore, and Dee Ann’s momma had said she didn’t know how he aimed to live, once the money from his business was gone. The other thing she didn’t know — because nobody had told her — was that folks said his girlfriend sold drugs. Folks said he might be involved in that too.

  He pecked her on the cheek once more, told her to have a good time with her boyfriend and to tell her momma he said hello, and then he walked out the door. Just as he left, the manager hit the switch, and the aisle lights went off.

  That last detail — the lights going off when he walked out of the store — must have been significant, because the next day, as Dee Ann sat on the couch at her grandmother’s house, knee to knee with the Loring County sheriff, Jim Wheeler, it kept coming up.

  “You’re sure about that?” Wheeler said for the third or fourth time. “When your daddy left the Safeway, Mr. Lindsey was just turning out the lights?”

  Her grandmother was in bed down the hall. The doctor and two women from the Methodist church were with her. She’d been having chest pains off and on all day.

  The dining room table was covered with food people had brought: two hams, a roast, a fried chicken, dish upon dish of potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans, two or three pecan pies, a pound cake. By the time the sheriff came, Chuckie had been there twice already — once in the morning with his momma and again in the afternoon with his daddy — and both times he had eaten. While his mother sat on the couch with Dee Ann, sniffling and holding her hand, and his father admired the knickknacks on the mantelpiece, Chuckie had parked himself at the dining room table and begun devouring one slice of pie after another, occasionally glancing through the doorway at Dee Ann. The distance between where he was and where she was could not be measured by any known means. She knew it, and he did, but he apparendy believed that if he kept his mouth full, they wouldn’t have to acknowledge it yet.

  “Yes sir,” she told the sheriff. “He’d just left when Mr. Lindsey turned off the lights.”

  A pocket-sized notebook lay open on Wheeler’s knee. He held a ball-point pen with his stubby fingers. He didn’t know it yet, but he was going to get a lot of criticism for what he did in the next few days. Some people would say it cost him re-election. “And what time does Mr. Lindsey generally turn off the lights on a Saturday night?”

  “Right around eight o’clock.”

  “And was that when he did it last night?”

  ‘Yes sir.”

  ‘You’re sure about that?”

  ‘Yes sir.”

  “Well, that’s what Mr. Lindsey says too,” Wheeler said. He closed the notebook and put it in his shirt pocket. “Course, being as he was in the back of the store, he didn’t actually see you talking with your daddy.”

  “No,” she said. ‘You can’t see the check-out stands from back there.”

  Wheeler stood, and she did too. To her surprise, he pulled her close to him. He was a compact man, not much taller than she was.

  She felt his warm breath on her cheek. “I sure am sorry about all of this, honey,” he said. “But don’t you worry. I guarantee you I’ll get to the bottom of it. Even if it kills me.”

  Even if it kills me.

  She remembers that phrase in those rare instances when she sees Jim Wheeler on the street downtown. He’s an old man now, in his early sixties, white-haired and potbellied. For years he’s worked at the catfish plant, though nobody seems to know what he does. Most people can tell you what he doesn’t do. He’s not responsible for security — he doesn’t carry a gun. He’s not front-office. He’s not a foreman or a shift supervisor, and he has nothing to do with the live-haul trucks.

  Chuckie works for Delta Electric, and once a month he goes to the plant to service the generators. He says Wheeler is always outside, wandering around, his head down, his feet scarcely rising off the pavement. Sometimes he talks to himself.

  “I was out there last week,” Chuckie told her not long ago, “and I’d just gone through the front gates, and there he was. He was off to my right, walking along the fence, carrying this bucket.”

  “What kind of bucket?”

  “Looked like maybe it had some kind of caulking mix in it — there was this thick white stuff sticking to the sides. Anyway, he was shuffling along there, and he was talking to beat the band.”

  “What was he saying?”

  They were at the breakfast table when they had this conversation. Their daughter Cynthia was finishing a bowl of cereal and staring into an algebra textbook. Chuckie glanced toward Cynthia, rolled his eyes at Dee Ann, then looked down at the table. He lifted his coffee cup, drained it, and left for work.

  But that night, when he crawled into bed beside her and switched off the light, she brought it up again. “I want to know what Jim Wheeler was saying to himself,” she said. “When you saw him last week.”

  They weren’t touching — they always left plenty of space between them — but she could tell he’d gone rigid. He did his best to sound groggy. “Nothing much.”

  She was rigid now too, lying stiffly on her back, staring up into the dark. “Nothing much is not nothing. Nothing much is still something.”

>   ‘‘Won’t you ever let it go?”

  “ You brought his name up. You bring his name up, then you get this reaction from me, and then you’re mad.”

  He rolled onto his side. He was looking at her, but she knew he couldn’t make out her features. He wouldn’t lay his palm on her cheek, wouldn’t trace her jawbone like he used to. ‘Yeah, I brought his name up,” he said. “I bring his name up, if you’ve noticed, about once a year. I bring his name up, and I bring up Lou Pierce’s name, and I’d bring up Barry Lancaster’s name too if he hadn’t had the good fortune to move on to bigger things than being DA in a ten-cent town. I keep hoping I’ll bring one of their names up, and after I say it, it’ll be like I just said John Doe or Cecil Poe or Theodore J. Bilbo. I keep hoping I’ll say it and you’ll just let it go.”

  The ceiling fan, which was turned off, had begun to take shape. It looked like a big dark bird, frozen in mid-swoop. Three or four times she had woken up near dawn and seen that shape there, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. One time she stuck her fist in her mouth and bit her knuckle.

  “What was he saying?”

  “He was talking to a quarterback.”

  “What?”

  “He was talking to a quarterback. He was saying some kind of crap like ‘Hit Jimmy over the middle.’ He probably walks around all day thinking about when he was playing football in high school, going over games in his mind.”

  He rolled away from her then, got as close to the edge of the bed as he could. “He’s just like you,” he said. “He’s stuck back there too.”

  She had seen her daddy several times in between that Saturday night — when Chuckie walked into the kitchen murmuring, “Mrs. Williams? Mrs. Williams?” — and the funeral, which was held the following Wednesday morning. He had come to her grandmother’s house Sunday evening, had gone into her grandmother’s room and sat by the bed, holding her hand and sobbing. Dee Ann remained in the living room, and she heard their voices, heard her daddy saying, “Remember how she had those big rings under her eyes after Dee Ann was born? How we all said she looked like a pretty little raccoon?” Her grandmother, whose chest pains had finally stopped, said, “Oh, Allen, I raised her from the cradle, and I know her well. She never would’ve stopped loving you.” Then her daddy started crying again, and her grandmother joined in.

  When he came out and walked down the hall to the living room, he had stopped crying, but his eyes were red-rimmed and his face looked puffy. He sat down in the armchair, which was still standing right where the sheriff had left it that afternoon. For a long time he said nothing. Then he rested his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on his fists, and said, “Were you the one that found her?” “Chuckie did.”

  “Did you go in there?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s an asshole for letting you do that.”

  She didn’t bother to tell him how she’d torn herself out of Chuckie’s grasp and bolted into the kitchen, or what had happened when she got in there. She was already starting to think what she would later know for certain: in the kitchen she had died. When she saw the pool of blood on the linoleum, saw the streaks that shot like flames up the wall, a thousand-volt jolt hit her heart. She lost her breath, and the room went dark, and when it relit itself she was somebody else.

  Her momma’s body lay in a lump on the floor, over by the door that led to the back porch. The shotgun that had killed her, her daddy’s Remington Wingmaster, stood propped against the kitchen counter. Back in what had once been called the game room, the sheriff would find that somebody had pulled down all the guns — six rifles, the other shotgun, both of her daddy’s .38’s — and thrown them on the floor. He’d broken the lock on the metal cabinet that stood nearby and he’d removed the box of shells and loaded the Remington.

  It was hard to say what he’d been after, this man who for her was still a dark, faceless form. Her momma’s purse had been ransacked, her wallet was missing, but there couldn’t have been much money in it. She had some jewelry in the bedroom, but he hadn’t messed with that. The most valuable things in the house were probably the guns themselves, but he hadn’t taken them.

  He’d come in through the back door -— the lock was broken — and he’d left through the back door. Why Butch hadn’t taken his leg off was anybody’s guess. When the sheriff and his deputies showed up, it was all Chuckie could do to keep the dog from attacking.

  “She wouldn’t of wanted you to see her like that,” her daddy said. “Nor me either.” He spread his hands and looked at them, turning them over and scrutinizing his palms, as if he intended to read his own fortune. “I reckon I was lucky,” he said, letting his gaze meet hers. “Anything you want to tell me about it?”

  She shook her head no. The thought of telling him how she felt seemed somehow unreal. It had been years since she’d told him how she felt about anything that mattered.

  “Life’s too damn short,” he said. “Our family’s become one of those statistics you read about in the papers. You read those stories and you think it won’t ever be you. Truth is, there’s no way to insure against it.”

  At the time, the thing that struck her as odd was his use of the word family. They hadn’t been a family for a long time, not as far as she was concerned.

  She forgot about what he’d said until a few days later. What she remembered about that visit with him on Sunday night was that for the second time in twenty-four hours, he pulled her close and hugged her and gave her twenty dollars.

  She saw him again Monday at the funeral home, and the day after that, and then the next day, at the funeral, she sat between him and her grandmother, and he held her hand while the preacher prayed. She had wondered if he would bring his girlfriend, but even he must have realized that would be inappropriate.

  He apparently did not think it inappropriate, though, or unwise either, to present himself at the offices of an insurance company in Jackson on Friday morning, bringing with him her mother’s death certificate and a copy of the coroner’s report.

  When she thinks of the morning — a Saturday — on which Wheeler came to see her for the second time, she always imagines her own daughter sitting there on the couch at her grandmother’s place instead of her. She sees Cynthia looking at the silver badge on Wheeler’s shirt pocket, sees her glancing at the small notebook that lies open in his lap, at the pen gripped so tightly between his fingers that his knuckles have turned white.

  “Now the other night,” she hears Wheeler say, “your boyfriend picked you up at what time?”

  “Right around eight o’clock.” Her voice is weak, close to breaking. She just talked to her boyfriend an hour ago, and he was scared. His parents were pissed — pissed at Wheeler, pissed at him, but above all pissed at her. If she hadn’t been dating their son, none of them would have been subjected to the awful experience they’ve just gone through this morning. They’re devout Baptists, they don’t drink or smoke, they’ve never seen the inside of a nightclub, their names have never before been associated with unseemly acts. Now the sheriff has entered their home and questioned their son as if he were a common criminal. It will cost the sheriff their votes come November. She’s already lost their votes. She lost them when her daddy left her momma and started running around with a young girl.

  “The reason I’m kind of stuck on this eight o’clock business,”

  Wheeler says, “is you say that along about that time’s when your daddy was there to see you.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now your boyfriend claims he didn’t see your daddy leaving the store. Says he didn’t even notice the MG on the street.”

  “Daddy’d been gone a few minutes already. Plus, I think he parked around back.”

  “Parked around back,” the sheriff says.

  “Yes sir.”

  “In that lot over by the bayou.”

  Even more weakly: “Yes sir.”

  “Where the delivery trucks come in — ain’t that where they usually park?
”

  “I believe so. Yes sir.”

  Wheeler’s pen pauses. He lays it on his knee. He turns his hands over, studying them as her daddy did a few days before. He’s looking at his hands when he asks the next question. “Any idea why your daddy’d park his car behind the Safeway — where there generally don’t nothing but delivery trucks park — when Main Street was almost deserted and there was a whole row of empty spaces right in front of the store?”

  The sheriff knows the answer as well as she does. When you’re with a woman you’re not married to, you don’t park your car on Main Street on a Saturday night. Particularly if it’s a litde MG with no top on it, and your daughter’s just a few feet away, with nothing but a pane of glass between her and a girl who’s not much older than she is. That’s how she explains it to herself anyway. At least for today.

  “I think maybe he had his girlfriend with him.”

  “Well, I don’t aim to hurt your feelings, honey,” Wheeler says, looking at her now, “but there’s not too many people that don’t know about his girlfriend.”

  “Yes sir.”

  ‘You reckon he might’ve parked out back for any other reason?” She can’t answer that question, so she doesn’t even try.

  “There’s not any chance, is there,” he says, “that your boyfriend could’ve been confused about when he picked you up?”

  “No sir.”

  ‘You’re sure about that?”

  She knows that Wheeler has asked Chuckie where he was between seven-fifteen, when several people saw her mother eating a burger at the Sonic Drive-in, and eight-thirty, when the two of them found her body. Chuckie has told Wheeler he was at home watching TV between seven-fifteen and a few minutes till eight, when he got in the car and went to pick up Dee Ann. His parents were in Greenville eating supper at that time, so they can’t confirm his story.

  “Yes sir,” she says, “I’m sure about it.”

  “And you’re certain your daddy was there just a few minutes before eight?”