There was a pause while Donnie Hawk waited for his message to soak into Agent Levine. “But, you do understand that I was not the coroner at the time that case was active. That was nigh on some forty years ago.”
“Of course, of course, understood,” Levine answered. “But am I correct in assuming that you do know who the coroner was at the time?”
“Hell, Mr. Levine, anybody from ’round here knows that. Locust County only had but one coroner all the time I was growin’ up. That would be Doc Begley, a real doctor too—served almost seventy years, he did—but I’m afraid he’s done dead and buried…oh…what you thinkin’, Jimbo,” he looked to his cousin, “about seven years?”
“’Bout,” Jimbo replied.
So,Levine thought,Deputy Bevins wasn’t completely lost in the soap opera.
“What about his records?” Levine continued pressing Donnie Hawk. “Notes? Files? I assume he passed on any official records to you when you were elected.”
“Yes sir, gave me everythin’ he had—might have included somethin’ from that case—but if he did, they all done blowed away in a tornado five years ago when I lost my first funeral home. This here one,” Donnie gestured grandly to make sure that Levine understood he was referring to the structure they were currently sitting in, “is only ’bout four years old. I’m afraid I don’t have a single record left over from Doc Begley’s term.”
Levine sighed. “And the remains, they were destroyed?”
“No. Now I don’t mean to give you the run ’round, but I sorely think I’d recall if he’d given any remains to me. I’d have to have found someplace to store them and all.” Donnie looked intently at the far corner of the room, his eyes moving about as if he half-expected to find some of the skeleton caught in a cobweb. He twisted his face in concentration as if he was wringing out a wet towel and it was somehow painful.
“Look, Mr. Hawk, unless they were destroyed in your tornado, they should be somewhere.” Levine’s temper started to flare again. He took a quick breath and momentarily held it. “You’re an educated man. You must have some educated guess as to what Doctor Begley might have done with those remains. Stored them, buried them, ground them up for herbal tea…”
Donnie Hawk continued to run his face through a series of facial contortions intended to convey that some serious mental gears were meshing. “If I was you, now,” he finally announced, “I might check with them Boy Scouts.”
“Boy Scouts?” The words just absolutely popped out of Levine’s mouth as if he’d Heimliched up a piece of lodged food. Suppressing his incredulity, he repeated, “You did sayBoy Scouts, didn’t you, Mr. Hawk?”
“Yes sir, I sorely did,” Donnie replied with absolutely no sense of the absurd. “Them bunch that meets at Oak Glen Baptist Church on…when’d they meet there, Jimbo?”
“Thursday nights, seven-thirty to nine,” Jimbo replied, still lip-reading his soap opera.
Levine took a deep breath and thought back to the Lamaze class he had taken with his wife before their first child was born.Breathing, slow, controlled breathing…that’s the key, controlled breathing . Even now he could envision his case report being Xeroxed and passed around the break room along with the page of latest blonde jokes.Hey —you read Levine’s last report? What a hoot. Boy Scouts…Let’s put it on the Internet. Who’s Levine? You mean that guy they transferred to the field office in Bismarck?He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly. Slow, controlled breathing.
“Mr. Hawk, I’m sure all this makes absolute perfect sense to you.” He smiled at the coroner, after he regained some composure. “But, as I keep being reminded, I’m not from around here. I don’t have a frigging clue as to what you’re talking about. A little help would be appreciated.”
“Really not that complicated, Mr. Levine. Doc Begley used to loan skeletons to the high school and whatnot for study. Usually they was Indian skeletons that someone would turn up with a bull-tongue or a Ditch Witch, or somethin’. I remember that them Boy Scouts had one for a while, they went and wired it all together real nice—now, I’ll be honest with you, I’ll be totally honest, I doubt it’s the same one you’re lookin’ for. But I’d still check with them if I was you.”
They rode in silence for a few minutes after leaving the Pacific Funeral Home. Levine sipped his soda—one of the six-pack young Donnie the Skeeter Hawk had finally returned from the store with—and stared out the window trying to wrap his brain around the events of the last hour.
What an absolute Hatter’s tea party.
He took another sip, hoping that the caffeine would help clear his head.
They were headed east, back into the center of town. Levine had asked Deputy Bevins to drop him off at the courthouse so that he could collect his car. The day had seriously mushed his brain, and although it was still early he had decided to skip town. It was worth the two-hour drive back to Memphis for a long weekend.With any luck, he thought,I can run my car into a concrete bridge abutment along the way. No, what am I thinking? I’d end up in Donnie Hawk’s jurisdiction. Then again, I might finally get to make Eagle Scout, provided the Boy Scouts can wire me all up real good…”
“Sir,” Jimbo Bevins interrupted Levine’s cannonball into the crazy pool. When the FBI agent continued staring out the window, scanning the countryside for a suitably sturdy bridge abutment, Jimbo simply continued. “I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on W.R., he’s got some weedy patch to hoe just now.”
“W.R.?” Levine roused himself and looked at the deputy. He had Donnie Hawk, Jr., and Skeeter Boy and the BSA fresh on his mind, and the initials “W.R” weren’t registering.
“Yes, sir, W.R. The sheriff. Sheriff Waymond. He’s got a terrible load on his mind.” Jimbo took his eyes off the road and caught Levine’s. For the briefest moment. He’d put his sunglasses back on, and it was hard to see where his pupils were focusing, but Levine figured it was on his face.
“Ahh, right, the good Sheriff Elmore. Almost forgot him. Well, tell him to get in line, Deputy Bevins, we’ve all got a seven-course plate of shit on our table. Me? I’ve only got a forty-year-old unsolved murder that the director of the goddamnF-B-and-I claims that he needs solved PDQ when in reality he couldn’t give a shit, a coroner who gives bodies to the Boy Scouts so they can wire them ‘all up good,’ and Sheriff Andy of Mayberry who wants to play stump the monkey.” He exhaled sharply through his nose and returned to looking out the window. “Well, guess what, Deputy, I’m not in the mood to be anyone’s goddamn monkey.”
Jimbo continued to look at the federal agent next to him. He had a look on his face as if he was trying to recite the twelve-times table in his head and had gotten to the last few hard ones.
They rode on in silence for a little longer.
“What sort of weeds?” Levine finally asked. Deputy Bevins seemed like a good-enough kid, a little volatile, perhaps, but good enough, and he didn’t warrant a whipping because other people had tied a half-hitch in Levine’s ass.
“Sir?”
“You said he had weeds to hoe—the sheriff—W.R.—you said he has some weeds…a weedy patch.”
The deputy puckered his lips as if he was fixing to blow a spit bubble. “Yes, sir, he does. Meanin’ no offense to your problems. The sheriff’s, well, they’s the usual ones, I suppose—but more of ’em than most right now. Kids are all growed and don’t have much to do with him no more. Haven’t even spoken to him in six years or so. Wife done left him a few months back…ran off with that big Honda dealer up there in Blytheville. Course his father, Big Ray, he got hisself killed almost fifteen years ago now and that was a blow; mother died a few years back, brother never came home from Vietnam.” He shrugged as if further elaboration was unnecessary.
“Let me get this straight,” Levine said. “There’s this Ray, you call him Big Ray…”
“Big Ray. He’s the daddy. He’s dead.”
“The father. And then there’s a brother who died in Vietnam…”
“The sheriff’s twin, yes, sir. Th
at’d be Ray Junior. He’s dead too.”
“A twin. And then there’s the sheriff. W.R. He’s not dead.”
“Yes, sir. Waymond Ray. He ain’t dead.” Jimbo Bevins shook his head to punctuate his words. “A terrible load.”
Levine noticed a wet ring had formed on his trousers from the sweat snaking down the side of his drink can. He took another drink, emptied the can, crunched it, and dropped it to the floor between his feet.All God’s children got problems, he thought. He wiped his hand on his trouser leg and looked out the side window.
“How’d his father die?” he asked, as much out of courtesy as curiosity. He was still looking out the window at the convenience stores and metal-frame buildings that had grown up on the periphery of the old downtown. Metal and glass weeds. Video stores and gas stations. Even one that advertised “Liquor, Guns, and Ammo” all in one drive-through location.
“Sir?”
“How’d his father die? You said the sheriff’s father was killed? Accident, murder, alien abduction?” Levine asked. He now directed his attention at his driver.
Jimbo checked the road and then turned his head to Levine. He clearly was having some difficulty getting a straight handle on this guy—interested, not interested; prick, nice guy; hot, cold. “Respondin’ to a domestic dispute,” he replied after a pause. Cop-speak.
“He was a sheriff too?” Levine’s flagging interest had suddenly been jabbed with a sharp stick. He ran some quick calculations in his head. If Sheriff Elmore was about Levine’s age—midfifties give or take a couple—that would make his father midseventies, maybe a little older if he was alive. And if he’d been a sheriff, that would have been thirty-five or forty years ago, about the time of the Jackson murder, give or take a couple of years. The problem was, Levine didn’t recall seeing a Sheriff Elmore mentioned in any of the case file documents he’d read.
“No, sir,” Jimbo answered.
Levine bobbed his head at Jimbo a couple of times trying to elicit a continuation. He stopped himself when he realized it made him look like a pigeon.
“He was chief of police—for Split Tree,” Jimbo Bevins said before taking a long swallow of his own drink. His cheeks puffed as he vented some carbonation. “Big Ray was chief of police all the whiles I was growin’ up, leastways until 1985 or so when he retired. Year or so later he got his head all caved in and died.”
Levine’s mind began trying to put these new puzzle pieces in place. Jackson’s and the John Doe’s bodies had been found outside city limits in Locust County, so it would have been outside Split Tree police jurisdiction—technically. That might explain “Big Ray’s” name not appearing in the documents he’d read. But still…Levine recalled reading something about Jackson having had a small run-in with the Split Tree police a couple of months before he disappeared. American Civil Liberties Union got briefly involved. Nothing ever came of it, as he remembered, and it was more of a footnote in the Bureau’s file than anything of substance.
Still…what are the chances that a chief of police—even if it were in Frog’s Ass, Crackerland—wouldn’t have some official involvement in the biggest homicide case to ever hit this part of the state?
Slim, that’s what the chances are.
And what are the chances that that same chief’s son, a cop himself, would barely remember the case?
Astro-goddamn-nomical, that’s what.
“You said he got his head ‘caved in’?” The deputy’s words had been slow to sink through to Levine’s brain. “How’d that happen? They ever catch the guy?”
“Oh hell yes. He done turned hisself in right after he done it. Felt real sorry for it. He and Big Ray knowed each other all their lives, almost.” Jimbo’s tone of voice implied that he thought Levine should have learned all this in grade school.
He continued. “See, Booger Red had caught his wife in an act of…” Jimbo leaned slightly toward Levine and affected a conspiratorial tone, “intimacy with one of them older Mooney boys—don’t recall which one—Hell’s they’re all the same, ya know. Anyhow, he caught ’em together and took to whuppin’ up on his ass with a ball-peen hammer. Well, Jennerette, Booger’s wife at the time, she runs out to the road and commences to holler and holler that ole Booger was goin’ to kill that Mooney boy—which he probably woulda. Anyhow, away ’bout then Big Ray comes drivin’ by…” Jimbo cast an unsure look in Levine’s direction. “You sure you’re interested in this?”
“Booger Red…ball-peen hammer,” Levine cracked a genuine smile. “Absolutely.”
“Well, Big Ray, he goes in and starts to put Booger in a bear hug, ya know—to calm him down—but by this time ol’ Booger, he’s in an absolute ass-whuppin’ frenzy, and just as Big Ray makes his move, Booger done swings his arm back to let fly and—pop—if he don’t catch Big Ray right smack on the side of his head.” Jimbo indicated the approximate location with his index finger. “Punched a hole the size of a peach pit right through the bone. Course, back then we didn’t have no hospital that could fix that sort of thing and by the time they got Big Ray to the one in Helena, half his damn brain had leaked out.” He sighed and took a couple of deep breaths.
He checked the road again and then Levine.
“W.R. was with his daddy when he died,” the story continued. “Big Ray weren’t right at the very end, ya know, he thought W.R. was Ray Junior, his other son, finally come home from the Vietnam. W. R. took it real hard, real hard—his daddy not knowin’ him and all.”
Levine had been looking at the deputy as he talked. Jimbo kept on with his story, about W.R. and his brother Ray Junior and a host of other things, but Levine wasn’t listening any longer. He turned his gaze out the passenger window and watched the brown, flagstone buildings of old downtown Split Tree slide by. The five-and-dime, the dry-goods store, a Rexall drugstore. Many closed. Brown empty shells. He folded his thoughts inward, thinking about his own return from Vietnam so long ago. It had been a hot summer then, too, early evening in the city. He’d gotten out of the taxi a couple blocks from home so that he could walk the old neighborhood and soak up the sounds and the smells and the familiar of home. But it hadn’t worked. The buildings were the same—Garfield’s at the corner of Church and Flatbush, Loew’s Kings Theater—the smells were the same—chicken fat and cinnamon rugalah and Fox’sU-bet syrup—but it was all different somehow. The sense of easy comfort and taken-for-granted security were forever gone. Lost in the sawgrass outside Bien Hoa and in rancid silt settling along the banks of the Mekong and in the damp darkness of the tunnels of Cu Chi. “Where you been?” his father had asked him when he walked in, his duffel bag slung over his left shoulder because his right arm was slow to heal and still tired easily.“Where you been?” this old man who’d never strayed more than a mile from Flatbush Avenue had asked. As if his son had simply been gone delivering groceries. As if he hadn’t gone to hell and back. Had his old man even looked up from his newspaper? His mother had quietly stood to the side kneading her hands and smiling as if she could apologize for her husband.
Had his father really not known, or had he simply not cared?
Chapter 7
Tan Son Nhut, Saigon, Republic of Vietnam
WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER1966
Somehow, Specialist Fourth Class Thad Dawkins always seemed to get the stinky cases. The real messes. The ones everybody else found some way to avoid. He’d been given a heads-up that this was a particularly ripe case, despite being what the identification techs irreverently called a “crispy critter.” Usually they were better—smellwise.
He’d also been given a heads-up that this one was a real glass ball—as in don’t screw up and drop it.
The helicopter had brought in a dozen or so body bags right before lunch. That seemed to be normal for his shift; always right before lunch. Most of them were recent kills—within a couple of hours of catching it, and some were still warm and wet. You could tell just by the way the body bag flexed and bent and the sound it made when it hit the table—a soft thump ra
ther than a clunk. But this one was a week or so old judging by the maggots—the cheese skippers—crawling all over the bag. He’d heard that it was burned, and that seemed right from what he could tell through the plastic. You could feel hard knobby stumps through the bag, and that usually meant burned. This one was particularly small and hard and very stumpy. He caught himself wondering what could have happened to this guy to get so fried—something pretty dang hot, that was for damn sure. He brushed some of the maggots onto the floor and stepped on them.
Good thing if it was burned, it’d be a real mess otherwise.
Spec-Four Thaddeus J. Dawkins had enlisted right out of R.W. Mann High School in Thacker, West Virginia. With his grades, the possibility of college was more like a nonpossibility, and rather than take a roll of the dice with Uncle Sam’s Selective Service System, he had voluntarily signed on the army’s dotted line with the iron-clad promise of becoming an MP—badge, baton, and barking out orders. Of course, that was before his Military Occupational Specialty test scores and the results of his physical came in. Thaddeus Dawkins was given the choice of being a cook or joining Graves Registration—and Thad Dawkins wasn’t cooking food for nobody.
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