The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

by Otto Penzler

  ‘Yes sir.”

  “Because your daddy,” the sheriff says, “remembers things just a little bit different. The way your daddy remembers it, he came by the Safeway about seven-thirty and hung around there talking with you for half an hour. Course, Mr. Lindsey was in the back, so he can’t say yea or nay, and the stock boy don’t seem to have the sense God give a betsy bug. Your daddy was over at the VFW drinking beer at eight o’clock — stayed there till almost ten, according to any number of people, and his girlfriend wasn’t with him. Fact is, his girlfriend left the country last Thursday morning. Took a flight from New Orleans to Mexico City, and from there it looks like she went on to Argentina.”

  Dee Ann, imagining this scene in which her daughter reprises the role she once played, sees Cynthia’s face go slack as the full force of the information strikes her. She’s still sitting there like that — hands useless in her lap, face drained of blood — when Jim Wheeler tells her that six months ago, her daddy took out a life insurance policy on her momma that includes double indemnity in the event of accidental death.

  “I hate to be the one telling you this, honey,” he says, “because you’re a girl who’s had enough bad news to last the rest of her life. But your daddy stands to collect half a million dollars because of your momma’s death, and there’s a number of folks — and I reckon I might as well admit I happen to be among them — who are starting to think that ought not to occur.”

  Chuckie gets off work at Delta Electric at six o’clock. A year or so ago she became aware that he’d started coming home late. The first time it happened, he told her he’d gone out with his friend Tim to have a beer. She saw Tim the next day buying a case of motor oil at Wal-Mart, and she almost referred to his and Chuckie’s night out just to see if he looked surprised. But if he’d looked surprised, it would have worried her, and if he hadn’t, it would have worried her even more: she would have seen it as a sign that Chuckie had talked to him beforehand. So in the end she nodded at Tim and kept her mouth shut.

  It began happening more and more often. Chuckie ran over to Greenville to buy some parts for his truck, he ran down to Yazoo City for a meeting with his regional supervisor. He ran up into the north part of the county because a fellow there had placed an interesting ad in National Rifleman — he was selling a shotgun with fancy scrollwork on the stock.

  On the evenings when Chuckie isn’t home, she avoids latching onto Cynthia. She wants her daughter to have her own life, to be independent, even if independence, in a sixteen-year-old girl, manifests itself as distance from her mother. Cynthia is on the phone a lot, talking to her girlfriends, to boyfriends too. Through the bedroom door Dee Ann hears her laughter.

  On the evenings when Chuckie isn’t home, she sits on the couch alone, watching TV, reading, or listening to music. If it’s a Friday or Saturday night and Cynthia is out with her friends, Dee Ann goes out herself. She doesn’t go to movies, where her presence might make Cynthia feel crowded if she happened to be in the theater too, and she doesn’t go out and eat at any of the handful of restaurants in town. Instead she takes long walks. Sometimes they last until ten or eleven o’clock.

  Every now and then, when she’s on one of these walks, passing one house after another where families sit parked before the TV set, she allows herself to wish she had a dog to keep her company. What she won’t allow herself to do — has never allowed herself to do as an adult — is actually own one.

  The arrest of her father is preserved in a newspaper photo.

  He has just gotten out of Sheriff Wheeler’s car. The car stands parked in the alleyway between the courthouse and the fire station. Sheriff Wheeler is in the picture too, standing just to the left of her father, and so is one of his deputies. The deputy has his hand on her father’s right forearm, and he is staring straight into the camera, as is Sheriff Wheeler. Her daddy is the only one who appears not to notice that his picture is being taken. He is looking off to the left, in the direction of Loring Street, which you can’t see in the photo, though she knows it’s there.

  When she takes the photo out and examines it, something she does with increasing frequency these days, she wonders why her daddy is not looking at the camera. A reasonable conclusion, she knows, would be that since he’s about to be arraigned on murder charges, he doesn’t want his face in the paper. But she wonders if there isn’t more to it. He doesn’t look particularly worried. He’s not exactly smiling, but there aren’t a lot of lines around his mouth, like there would be if he felt especially tense. Were he not wearing handcuffs, were he not flanked on either side by officers of the law, you would probably have to say he looks relaxed.

  Then there’s the question of what he’s looking at. Lou Pierce’s office is on Loring Street, and Loring Street is what’s off the page, out of the picture. Even if the photographer had wanted to capture it in this photo, he couldn’t have, not as long as he was intent on capturing the images of these three men. By choosing to photograph them, he chose not to photograph something else, and sometimes what’s outside the frame may be more important than what’s actually in it.

  After all, Loring Street is south of the alley. And so is Argentina.

  “You think he’d do that?” Chuckie said. “You think he’d actually kill your momma?”

  They were sitting in his pickup when he asked her that question. The pickup was parked on a turnrow in somebody’s cotton patch on a Saturday afternoon in August. By then her daddy had been in jail for the better part of two weeks. The judge had denied him bail, apparently believing that he aimed to leave the country. The judge couldn’t have known that her daddy had no intention of leaving the country without the insurance money, which had been placed in an escrow account and wouldn’t be released until he’d been cleared of the murder charges.

  The cotton patch they were parked in was way up close to Cleveland. Chuckie’s parents had forbidden him to go out with Dee Ann again, so she’d hiked out to the highway, and he’d picked her up on the side of the road. In later years she’ll often wonder whether or not she and Chuckie would have stayed together and gotten married if his parents hadn’t placed her off-limits.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He sure did lie about coming to see me. And then there’s Butch. If somebody broke in, he’d tear them to pieces. But he wouldn’t hurt Daddy.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Chuckie said. A can of Bud stood clamped between his thighs. He lifted it and took a swig. “Your daddy may have acted a little wacky, running off like he did and taking up with that girl, but to shoot your momma and then come in the grocery store and grin at you and hug you? You really think anybody could do a thing like that?”

  What Dee Ann was beginning to think was that almost everybody could do a thing like that. She didn’t know why this was so, but she believed it had something to do with being an adult and having ties. Having ties meant you were bound to certain things — certain people, certain places, certain ways of living. Breaking a tie was a violent act — even if all you did was walk out door number one and enter door number two — and one act of violence could lead to another. You didn’t have to spill blood to take a life. But after taking a life, you still might spill blood, if spilling blood would get you something else you wanted.

  “I don’t know what he might have done,” she said.

  “Every time I was ever around him,” Chuckie said, “he was in a nice mood. I remember going in the flower shop with Momma when I was a kid. Your daddy was always polite and friendly. Used to give me free lollipops.”

  ‘Yeah, well, he never gave me any lollipops. And besides, your momma used to be real pretty.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything. I’m just stating a fact.”

  ‘You saying she’s not pretty now?”

  His innocence startled her. If she handled him right, Dee Ann realized, she could make him do almost anything she wanted. For an instant she was tempted to put her hand inside his shir
t, stroke his chest a couple of times, and tell him to climb out of the truck and stand on his head. She wouldn’t always have such leverage, but she had it now, and a voice in her head urged her to exploit it.

  “I’m not saying she’s not pretty anymore,” Dee Ann said. “I’m just saying that of course Daddy was nice to her. He was always nice to nice-looking women.”

  “Your momma was a nice-looking lady too.”

  “Yeah, but my momma was his wife.”

  Chuckie turned away and gazed out at the cotton patch for several seconds. When he looked back at her, he said, “You know what, Dee Ann? You’re not making much sense.” He took another sip of beer, then pitched the can out the window. “But with all you’ve been through,” he said, starting the engine, “I don’t wonder at it.”

  He laid his hand on her knee. It stayed there until twenty minutes later, when he let her out on the highway right where he’d picked her up.

  Sometimes in her mind she has trouble separating all the men. It’s as if they’re revolving around her, her daddy and Chuckie and Jim Wheeler and Lou Pierce and Barry Lancaster, as if she’s sitting motionless in a hard chair, in a small room, and they’re orbiting her so fast that their faces blur into a single image which seems suspended just inches away. She smells them too: smells after-shave and cologne, male sweat and whiskey.

  Lou Pierce was a man she’d been seeing around town for as long as she could remember. He had red hair and always wore a striped long-sleeved shirt and a wide tie that was usually loud-colored. You would see him crossing Loring Street, a coffee cup in one hand, his briefcase in the other. His office was directly across the street from the courthouse, where he spent much of his life — either visiting his clients in the jail, which was on the top floor, or defending those same clients downstairs in the courtroom itself.

  Many years after he represented her father, Lou Pierce would find himself up on the top floor again, on the other side of the bars this time, accused of exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl. After the story made the paper, several other women, most in their twenties or early thirties, would contact the local police and allege that he had also shown himself to them.

  He showed himself to Dee Ann too, though not the same part of himself he showed to the twelve-year-old girl. He came to see her at her grandmother’s on a weekday evening sometime after the beginning of the fall semester — she knows school was in session because she remembers that the morning after Lou Pierce visited her, she had to sit beside his son Raymond in senior English.

  Lou sat in the same armchair that Jim Wheeler had pulled up near the coffee table. He didn’t have his briefcase with him, but he was wearing another of those wide ties. This one, if she remembers correctly, had a pink background, with white fleurs-de-lys.

  “How you making it, honey?” he said. “You been holding up all right?” '

  She shrugged. “Yes sir. I guess so.”

  “Your daddy’s awful worried about you.” He picked up the cup of coffee her grandmother had brought him before leaving them alone. “I don’t know if you knew that or not,” he said, taking a sip of the coffee. He set the cup back down. “He mentioned you haven’t been to see him.”

  He was gazing directly at her.

  “No sir,” she said, “I haven’t gotten by there.”

  “You know what that makes folks think, don’t you?”

  She dropped her head. “No sir.”

  “Makes ’em think you believe your daddy did it.”

  That was the last thing he said for two or three minutes. He sat there sipping his coffee, looking around the room, almost as if he were a real estate agent sizing up the house. Just as she decided he’d said all he intended to, his voice came back at her.

  “Daddies fail,” he told her. “Lordy, hoto we fail. You could ask Raymond. I doubt he’d tell the truth, though, because sons tend to be protective of their daddies, just like a good daughter protects her momma. But the truth, if you wanted to dig into it, is that I’ve failed that boy nearly every day he’s been alive. You notice he’s in the band? Hell, he can’t kick a football or hit a baseball, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine. I remember when he was this tall —” He held his hand, palm down, three feet from the floor. “— he came to me dragging this little plastic bat and said, ‘Daddy, teach me to hit a baseball.’ And you know what I told him? I told him, ‘Son, I’m defending a man that’s facing life in prison, and I got to go before the judge tomorrow morning and plead his case. You can take that bat and you can hitch a kite to it and see if the contraption won’t fly.’” v

  He reached across the table then and laid his hand on her knee. She tried to remember who else had done that recently, but for the moment she couldn’t recall.

  When he spoke again, he kept his voice low, as if he were afraid he’d be overheard. “Dee Ann, what I’m telling you,” he said, “is I know there are a lot of things about your daddy that make you feel conflicted. There’s a lot of things he’s done that he shouldn’t have, and there’s things he should have done that he didn’t. There’s a bunch of shoulds and shouldn ’ts bumping around in your head, so it’s no surprise to me that you’d get confused on this question of time.”

  She’d heard people say that if they were ever guilty of a crime, they wanted Lou Pierce to defend them. Now she knew why.

  But she wasn’t guilty of a crime, and she said so: “I’m not confused about time. He came when I said he did.”

  As if she were a sworn witness, Lou Pierce began, gently, regretfully, to ask her a series of questions. Did she really think her daddy was stupid enough to take out a life insurance policy on her mother and then kill her? If he aimed to leave the country with his girlfriend, would he send the girl first and then kill Dee Ann’s momma and try to claim the money? Did she know that her daddy intended to put the money in a savings account for her?

  Did she know that her daddy and his girlfriend had broken up, that the girl had left the country chasing some young South American who, her daddy had admitted, probably sold her drugs?

  When he saw that she wasn’t going to answer any of the questions, Lou Pierce looked down at the floor. “Honey,” he said softly, “did you ever ask yourself why your daddy left you and your momma?”

  That was one question she was willing and able to answer. “He did it because he didn’t love us.”

  When he looked at her again, his eyes were wet—and she hadn’t learned yet that wet eyes tell the most effective lies. “He loved y’all,” Lou Pierce said. “But your momma, who was a wonderful lady — angel, she wouldn’t give your daddy a physical life. I guarantee you he wishes to God he hadn’t needed one, but a man’s not made that way . .. and even though it embarrasses me, I guess I ought to add that I’m speaking from personal experience.”

  At the age of thirty-eight, Dee Ann has acquired a wealth of experience, but the phrase personal experience is one she almost never uses. She’s noticed men are a lot quicker to employ it than women are. Maybe it’s because men think their experiences are somehow more personal than everybody else’s. Or maybe it’s because they take everything personally.

  “My own personal experience,” Chuckie told Cynthia the other day at the dinner table, after she’d finished ninth in the voting for one of eight positions on the cheerleading squad, “has been that getting elected cheerleader’s nothing more than a popularity contest, and I wouldn’t let not getting elected worry me for two seconds.”

  Dee Ann couldn’t help it. “When in the world,” she said, “did you have a personal experience with a cheerleader election?”

  He laid his fork down. They stared at one another across a bowl of spaghetti. Cynthia, who can detect a developing storm front as well as any meteorologist, wiped her mouth on her napkin, stood up, and said, “Excuse me.”

  Chuckie kept his mouth shut until she’d left the room. “I voted in cheerleader elections.”

  “What was personal about that experience?”

  “It was my
own personal vote.”

  “Did you have any emotional investment in that vote?”

  “You ran once. I voted for you. I was emotional about you then.” She didn’t even question him about his use of the word then — she knew perfectly well why he used it. “And when I didn’t win,” she said, “you took it personally?”

  “I felt bad for you.”

  “But not nearly as bad as you felt for yourself?”

  “Why in the hell would I feel bad for myself?”

  “Having a girlfriend who couldn’t win a popularity contest — wasn’t that hard on you? Didn’t you take it personally?”

  He didn’t answer. He just sat there looking at her over the bowl of spaghetti, his eyes hard as sandstone and every bit as dry.

  Cynthia walks home from school, and several times in the last couple of years, Dee Ann, driving through town on her way back from a shopping trip or a visit to the library, has come across her daughter. Cynthia hunches over as she walks, her canvas backpack slung over her right shoulder, her eyes studying the sidewalk as if she’s trying to figure out the pavement’s composition. She may be thinking about her boyfriend or some piece of idle gossip she heard that day at school, or she may be trying to remember if the fourth president was James Madison or James Monroe, but her posture and the concentrated way she gazes down suggest that she’s a girl who believes she has a problem.

  Whether or not this is so Dee Ann doesn’t know, because if her daughter is worried about something she’s never mentioned it. What Dee Ann does know is that whenever she’s out driving and she sees Cynthia walking home, she always stops the car, rolls her window down, and says, “Want a ride?” Cynthia always looks up and smiles, not the least bit startled, and she always says yes. She’s never once said no, like Dee Ann did to three different people that day twenty years ago, when, instead of going to her grandmother’s after school, she walked all the way from the highway to the courthouse and climbed the front steps and stood staring at the heavy oak door for several seconds before she pushed it open.