Temple shrugged. “Well, we already made an arrest. Just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
“An arrest?”
“A CCC boy. So what’d you think of the explosives?”
Trot coughed and spit a wad of phlegm onto the floor. “Noisy as all get-out. Stirred up a fair amount of dust. Sort of akin to a stockyard that way. Surprised you arrested someone already.”
“Yeah, well. Come up from Texas, did you?”
“Naw.”
Trot didn’t volunteer anything else. Temple figured the man was squatting and didn’t want to be caught out by the law.
Driving back to Vermillion, he thought about the photo of the young soldier. Would his own Jack have grown up to take after him? The boy had the makings of it. Same eye and hair color as Temple. But hard to say. Etha’s siblings all had widow’s peaks that had been passed along to Jack. And he had the Hart family’s oval face. The kid was sort of a mutt, Temple thought, which for some reason made him smile.
* * *
Earlier in the day, the movie house owner had also been reflecting on the past. Midmorning on a Thursday and Vermillion, in years gone by, would have been thrumming with voices and vehicles. But nowadays there was only the muffled emptiness of hard times. It amplified the sound of Chester’s shoes as he returned to the Jewel, bearing a handful of overdue bills from the post office. It conveyed the town’s hollowness up through his soles. The doorway of the vacant drugstore next to the theater stank of stale urine.
Five days before, Chester had wrestled with the adding machine an entire afternoon, and no matter which way he punched the keys, it came out the same. The Jewel was sinking fast, with profits no longer even treading water. It was hard medicine to swallow. He required a long night of drinking and the patient ear of Hank Stowe, the Gazetteer’s publisher, before he could even contemplate bringing that particular spoon to his lips. On Monday, Chester had telephoned the Salem China outfit. The eager commercial traveler on the other end of the line said he could be in Vermillion the next day to get the Jewel started on a dish promotion, but Chester put him off. “I’ve other appointments,” he’d said stiffly, knowing that his daily calendar was as empty as half of the town’s storefronts. “Thursday at eleven thirty will suit.”
Chester had asked Lottie to join him for the huckster’s pitch. Pleasant but firm in dealing with salesmen that called at her father’s store, she would make certain that the dish patterns and posters were as tasteful as possible in what was, Chester believed, an abomination on the silver screen’s high culture.
Now Lottie’s voice rushed to meet him from behind the candy counter: “There you are! I thought you’d jumped ship, leaving me standing alone on the deck in one of those unbecoming life vests.”
“Please, no melodrama,” Chester said, striding the twenty paces between the lobby doors and the refreshment stand. “Get me a pop, will you? My stomach is unsettled.”
As Chester lifted the bottle to his lips, the salesman breezed into the lobby, trailing a cloud of aftershave and peppy lingo. Unsnapping his case, the commercial traveler by the name of Russ drew out a large variety of dishes. As Russ talked up the attributes of the various place settings, Lottie described them to Chester.
After twenty minutes Chester interrupted: “I get the picture. Please take yourself outside for a smoke so the lady and I can discuss this in private.” Five minutes later, Chester settled on Lottie’s recommendation—the Monticello pattern. The three retired to Chester’s office to sign the contract.
Russ dropped into a chair and busily made check marks in the margins of a black notebook while Lottie read the agreement aloud. When she finished, Chester nodded grimly, slid his wooden writing board under the paperwork, and used its horizontal notches to execute a signature straight enough to center the bubble in a spirit level.
“You won’t regret this. You have my word on it,” Russ said, tucking the papers and money in his breast pocket. “Thank you for the . . .” he glanced at his watch. “Whoa doggies! I’m late. I’ll bring the crate into the lobby and be on my way.”
“Where you headed?” Lottie asked.
“Elk City. Just hoping the lodgings have been deloused. I got a nasty case of bedbugs in St. Joe’s not long back. The bane of the traveling salesman. I was talking to a fellow roomer there and he said the bedbugs hereabouts have nothing on the grasshoppers. Grasshoppers as big as prairie dogs is what he said. Come to think of it, I believe he was coming down this way too.”
“Vermillion is overrun with salesmen,” Lottie laughed. “Drummers hawking jabots, cancer cures, encyclopedias, udder balm. You name it, they’ve been here.”
“I’m not sure what he was peddling. Something that required a truck. And know-how he’d picked up as a doughboy. He was bragging on that. As if getting conscripted as cannon fodder makes you top dog. One of the other boarders took offense at all his boasting. Told the fellow to shut his trap. Drew out a pistol. But nothing came of it.” Russ appeared downcast.
As Chester put the writing board back in the drawer and reordered his desk, Russ mentioned an article he’d read in True Detective about a particularly gruesome killing of a schoolteacher. Lottie had heard about the case too, and began quizzing Russ about the details. The conversation then turned to gangland shoot-outs and other murders of the day. Chester shot his cuffs. He cleared his throat. The talk continued around him. I might as well be invisible, he thought. Their voices whirred on. The cruel irony of the sightless is that we are mostly unseen by the rest of the world. But not here. His status as a businessman, a person of import, and a stylish dresser with an eye-catching lady friend had rendered him highly visible in town. Now, however, the Depression and the dust were taking all that away, snatching it from his fingers. And Lottie and Russ were prattling on as if nothing had changed. Rage rose in this throat. He stood abruptly and leaned toward them with whitened knuckles planted on the desktop.
“Get out! Both of you!” he screamed. “Who cares about a husband who is a cuckold? The death of a two-bit gunman? A woman strangled by her stockings in Chattanooga? Who cares? You are nattering about things that don’t matter while I lose everything! Everything I’ve worked for. Do you have any idea how hard it is for a blind man to stand upon his own two feet? To be independent? And now I’m being carved away in bits and pieces until I am nothing but raw flesh. Until I’m helpless as a child and there is nothing I can do about it. Nothing I can do to stop it. Get out. Both of you.”
Neither moved. Then all was motion.
Russ jumped up and clattered down the steps. Lottie reached for Chester’s arm but he yanked it away.
She cried out, “I’m sorry, I had no—”
“Leave.” Chester’s teeth were clenched, his jaw rigid.
“Oh God.” Sobbing, Lottie stumbled back, knocking over a chair. She ran down the stairs and through the lobby, her footsteps fading.
When all was silent, Chester grabbed the pink cake stand, laden with ash and crushed cigarette butts, and hurled it across the room where it crashed down the stairwell, spinning out broken shards as it fell.
Chapter sixteen
It was not until the next day, Friday, that Etha had time to fill Carmine in on her findings. The young man’s jaw was now a mottled shade of chartreuse and his unwashed hair stuck up in greasy peaks. She told him about her visit to the Hodges’ house and described the setup.
“Does that sound like the place?” she asked.
Carmine swished a mouthful of coffee from one side of his mouth to the other. “Could be. Yeah.”
Pushing her back into the chair, Etha grinned. “Good. So I’m going to be paying Mr. Hodge a call today. We know his wife wasn’t there to witness your departure, but maybe he was. What do you think?”
Carmine stared past her shoulder, his eyes fixed in thought. Finally he said, “I’m grateful for all you’re doing. Really and truly. But I don’t deserve it. I mean, I didn’t kill that man, but you know, I’ve done other thin
gs, and maybe this is just settling the score.”
Etha stiffened.
“Things I’m not proud of.”
“What things?”
He exhaled. “I don’t want to say.”
“I need to know if I’m going to help you.”
Carmine wiped his nose on his hand. “Are you sure? It’s not pretty.”
Etha nodded.
“We was living in some crummy apartment on the South Side. This was after my mom died. Someone showed my dad how to rig a meter box and skim off the electric. He had a bad knee and so sent me up the pole outside our building. I was twelve. Something like that. I got a jumper line hooked up and it worked. Pretty soon everyone on our street was asking me to do the same for them. I rigged at least twenty over the next couple of years. And they were all good. I swear it! I was careful. But then there was this place across the street with maybe twenty apartments. Someone from over there, someone with a lot of kids, asked for my help. I must have cut a main without knowing it. The whole place burned to the ground.”
“Oh Lord.” A hollow opened in Etha’s breastbone. “Surely no one would blame you for—”
“Six dead, three of them kids.” Carmine pressed his knuckles to his lips. “I knew right away I’d done it. Dad said I’d better beat it west before the cops came sniffing around and asking who jigged the wires. He gave me ten bucks and hustled me over to the freight yard. Haven’t been back since.” He paused. “Anyway, that’s why I ran when I saw Commander Baker pointing me out to the sheriff. My legs took off.”
“Do you know for sure the wiring caused the fire?”
Carmine shrugged. “Dad said so. But things were bad then. Sometimes I think maybe he just wanted one less kid at the dinner table.”
“You’ll need to tell Mr. Jennings about why you ran.”
“You still willing to help me?”
“Yes, of course. You were just a child,” she said. “And I know you didn’t kill Mr. Coombs.”
They sat in silence. Then Etha raised a finger. “Be right back.” She returned with the library book. “See if this doesn’t take your mind off things for a while.”
* * *
Later that afternoon, Etha shut the courthouse door firmly behind her and set off to talk to Jimmy Clanton, who had filled in for Cy at the hardware store and possibly sold the entrenching shovel. The Clantons occupied rooms above a now-shuttered millenary shop. When Etha pressed the buzzer at the bottom of the stairs, there was a quick flurry of heels crossing above her head and then Georgina Clanton’s tightly bobby-pinned head poked from the apartment’s doorway.
“Yes?”
“It’s Etha Jennings.”
Georgina squinted. “Come on up.”
Etha adjusted her handbag. “I’d like to, but I’ve got a list of chores a mile long.” This was a common complaint among the women of Jackson County. For housewives, the hard times had brought more work as the necessities of “make-do” expanded to include repairing upholstery, taking in boarders, and sewing every stitch of the family’s clothes from underwear to coats. For Jackson County menfolk, especially farmers, it was the opposite: they spent most of their days in town, squatting on their lean haunches, their empty hands limp between their knees.
Etha said, “I’m wanting to talk with your Jimmy.”
“At the ball field. Or that was where he was headed an hour ago. What’s he done?”
“Nothing.”
“You know he’s never going to submit to piano lessons, if that’s what you’re after.”
Etha laughed. “It’s not that. Has to do with a customer at the hardware store.”
“Try the ball field.”
At a rough baseball diamond with sawdust-filled gunny sacks for bases, two youths tossed a ball back and forth. Etha tromped toward them, sandy soil spilling into her shoes. Jimmy was wearing a cap slung sideways with its brim flipped up. He stopped pitching when he caught sight of her.
“Forgot your mitt?” he asked, a one-sided grin breaking across his face. That grin sold many a cookpot and laundry starch on the two afternoons a week he clerked at the store.
“Want to loan me yours?” Etha shot back.
She recognized but didn’t know the name of Jimmy’s buddy, whose cheeks and chin were riddled with pimples. Etha recalled her first boyfriend. Each time he’d called at her parents’ house, she’d struggled to keep from staring at the angry eruptions. But after a few minutes the pimples seemed to recede, until she forgot them altogether. Funny how we manage to trick our eyes.
“I’m hoping you can help me,” she said.
“Sure.”
“My gardening shovel is busted. I have my eye on a replacement, but it’s a little pricey. Mr. Mitchem said you sold one last week.”
“You came all the way out here to ask me that?”
Although Etha detested lying and wasn’t good at it, she stuck it out. “Yes,” she said, knowing Jimmy wouldn’t question an adult beyond a certain point.
And he didn’t. “Since I only sold one shovel this whole month, I know which one you mean. Trench digger?”
She nodded.
“I was sort of surprised he wanted one. He doesn’t seem the gardening type.”
“Who bought it?”
“Mr. Hodge,” Jimmy said.
“Really?” More than once she and Temple had sat in the pew behind the Hodges and she couldn’t envision his fleshy form, always clothed in business suits, nor his smooth-skinned hands with their carefully pared nails, turning over soil in the garden.
Jimmy raised his palms. “Surprise, ain’t it?”
Walking back across the lot, Etha mulled over Jimmy’s information. Beyond the incongruity of the stolid lawyer planting seeds was a more worrying issue—where had he stored the shovel? If he’d hung it in the outbuilding, which was probable, that would add to the weight of evidence against Carmine. On paper, it now seemed that the boy had two chances to steal the type of shovel used to kill Coombs. Her spirits flagged.
Back on the sidewalk she emptied her shoes, brushed off her dirty soles as best she could, and headed toward the law office of John Hodge, Esquire. The only blemish on her conscience would be the new lie she was now concocting. She couldn’t just march into the lawyer’s office and demand to know if he’d seen a young man sneaking out of his yard on Saturday. Another lie, but a small one, was required.
Hodge’s offices were a block from the courthouse, above the telephone exchange. The attorney’s secretary was Alice Ames, who had briefly taken lessons from Etha before defecting to Vermillion’s other piano teacher. The one who pasted gold stars on the sheet music of even the worst students.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Jennings. Can I help you?” Alice asked, her face a polite mask.
Figuring that a false compliment might win her ten minutes with Hodge, Etha replied, “My, isn’t that blue blouse becoming on you.”
Blushing, Alice took the bait: “Why thank you. I wasn’t sure . . .”
“Oh, it absolutely works. I was hoping Mr. Hodge might have just a few minutes for me. It’s a church matter of sorts.”
Alice glanced at the closed door to her right with Hodge’s name stenciled in gilt. “He usually doesn’t want to be disturbed. But since it is church business, let me check.”
And in this way, Etha was ushered into the lawyer’s inner sanctum. He had pen to paper and, holding up one finger, signed the document laid out before him with a flourish. After setting the paper aside, he raised his immense head. Hodge was beefy all over but his head was huge, with a jowly moon-shaped face and fleshy ears. All this was set off by a stiff shirt collar that Etha knew, by the sweetish smell, Florence had achieved with heavy doses of starch.
“And to what do I owe this honor?” he asked.
“I’m sorry to intrude. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
He laced his fingers over the mound of his belly and tipped back. The springs of his chair squealed. “There is always work to be done. But I certainly have
time when a lady from my church calls about some little matter. That’s my duty as an elder.”
She smiled tightly. He was the last person she would seek advice from, spiritual or otherwise, but she’d do this for Carmine. Removing a hankie from her sleeve, she patted her forehead. “This will sound foolish, but I am here about one of our shut-ins. Mrs. Hargrove?” She noticed that the lawyer’s fingers were squeezing impatiently. Strong piano hands, she thought.
“I believe the church women have arranged to bring her meals?”
Etha nodded. “My day is Sunday. When I got to her house this week—she lives a block down from yours as a matter of fact—she was in a dither. Her cat had slipped out during the storm the day before and hadn’t come back. As of today he still hasn’t turned up. I’ve been asking neighbors if they might have seen the cat on Saturday taking shelter right before the duster. I thought perhaps he got shut in a . . . an um . . . a garage or shed. You have a shed out back, don’t you?”
“I didn’t see any cat. However, I will ask Florence.”
“Oh, but Florence wasn’t home during the storm. She said so herself when I stopped by yesterday.”
“You were at the house? Florence didn’t tell me.” Hodge’s face contracted.
Etha hastily added, “I was only there for a minute. She probably forgot. I was running errands and felt faint. With the heat and all. Your wife very kindly gave me a glass of water.” Why did Etha suddenly feel as if she had to protect the woman? “We chatted about the storm. It occurred to me that maybe you caught a glimpse of Mr. Jinx.”
“Who?”
“The cat. Mr. Jinx. It’s a silly name, but you know how people—”
“I didn’t.”
Etha pushed on: “I thought maybe if you noticed something right before or even during the storm, you might have seen the cat . . . or something.”
“Actually, I was at the pictures on Saturday. So, it seems I can be of no help on this little matter.” He rose.
This didn’t sit right. First, the idea of the lawyer attending a Saturday matinee by himself was almost as ludicrous as the image of him planting tomatoes. There was also a discrepancy between his account and Florence’s. For a man who usually insisted on accompanying his wife to a fitting, as Lottie had said, why had he skipped out to the movies and then told his wife he was at the office?
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