What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

by James Sallis

  The door opened. Flat, uninflected sound of TV from within. Cartoons, maybe, or a sitcom. But then I heard “Willa Cather tried in her own inimitable way . . .” I watched Sally Gene’s head tilt forward and down as the door came open. A child’s face stared up at us. Twelve, maybe. Wearing a yellow nylon shirt he’d grow into in another four or five years and a serious expression.

  “Daddy says not to let anyone in.”

  Sally Gene introduced herself.

  “Daddy says not to let anyone in.”

  “I told you my name. What’s yours?”

  “William.”

  “William. I’m sorry, I know this is confusing, and I’m not saying your daddy was wrong, he wasn’t. But I have to come in. Hey: I’d rather be home watching TV, too. But the people I work for tell me I have to come in and look around. They’re kind of like your parents, you know? Always telling me what I have to do?”

  The merest flicker as his eyes strayed to me, but I caught it. He was looking for a way out.

  “How you doing, William?” I said. “Friends ever call you Bill?”

  After a moment he shook his head.

  “You hungry, William?”

  Again the head went right, left, right. “I fixed breakfast. I know how to cook. I have a load of clothes in the dryer. Oughta get them out.”

  “Are your parents home, William?”

  “They’ll be back soon.”

  “How long have they been gone, William?”

  He just looked at me. More than he could handle, I guess. Like so many things in his life.

  “Miss Sally Gene and I need to come inside. Look: here’s my badge. You hold on to it till I’m ready to leave. That should be okay, shouldn’t it?”

  After a moment he nodded and undid the chain.

  In one bedroom we found a four-year-old girl locked in a closet. She’d very carefully defecated only in the rear corner by boots and old shoes, but urine had gone its own way, she’d had no control over that. A plate near the front held frankfurters and slices of American cheese.

  In the bathroom a younger child with severe diarrhea, maybe two or three, was lashed by brown twine to the bathtub faucets. A Boy Scout manual on the back of the toilet bore a folded square of toilet paper at a section on knots. Jars of applesauce and peanut butter and plastic spoons sat within reach.

  In a rear bedroom with bunk beds stacked north, south and east, children of various ages, six of them, sat straight-backed as army recruits. Their eyes swiveled to us as we came in. Plates of cold cuts and Oreo cookies sat on windowsills.

  “I had no idea,” Sally Gene told me.

  “You must have.”

  “Oh, I knew something was wrong. But this . . .”

  “Foster home?”

  “One of the few we’ve never had complaints about. No trouble at all.”

  “I found a credit card in the desk drawer.” William stood in the doorway behind us. “We haven’t had real food for a long time.”

  “A Visa,” Sally Gene told me, “and well past its limit. Two days ago someone tried to use its mate down in Vicks-burg to settle a hotel bill that included an impressive bar tab. The card got confiscated.”

  “Foster parents?”

  “Their card, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” William said. “I know it was wrong.”

  “You did okay, son.”

  “You did great,” Sally Gene said.

  “Daddy put me in charge. I was just trying—”

  “Who the fuck are you people?”

  We both turned. He held a 12-gauge shotgun.

  “Daddy!” The boy had moved on into the room beside us.

  “And what are you doing in my house?”

  I looked at Sally Gene, who fed me the name: “Sammy Lee Davis.”

  “Just stay cool, Mr. Davis, okay? I’m Detective Turner, Miss Lawson here’s from city social services. We need to talk to you, that’s all, just talk. Why don’t you start by putting the gun down. There’s a lot of kids in here, man. No one wants to see the kids get hurt. William: show your father my badge?”

  The boy held it out.

  “You’re trespassing.”

  Thinking this wasn’t the best time to discuss probable cause and his being at any time open to public inspection as a foster parent, I said, “Well, yes sir, truth is, we are. I can appreciate that’s how it must look to you.”

  “You’re the son of a bitch ran off with my wife, aren’t you?”

  The 12-gauge went to his shoulder. I have to give it to Sally Gene. She never once blinked, flinched or cut her eyes. He saw it in the boy’s face, though, and turned just in time to take Bill’s riot stick square on the forehead.

  “You guys through with your business yet?” Bill said. “It’s getting hot out there and I’m getting hungry. And that goddamn magnolia smells to high heaven.”

  Chapter Eleven

  SETH McEVOY played quarterback, was a top band member, and had a four-point average. He also, judging from the photo on his computer desk, went with the prettiest girl in town. Kind of kid you hated when you were back in school, couldn’t do anything wrong.

  Don Lee came with me. We’d spoken with the boy’s mother downstairs. Seth was busy filling out college applications. All the pictures on his walls hung perfectly straight. The spines of the books in the bookcase behind the door were all flush.

  “How come you’re so much older than the sheriff and Don Lee?”

  “Mr. Turner’s retired, Seth. He’s agreed to help us out, more or less as a consultant.”

  You could see the intelligence in his eyes, the interest. He’d rather ask questions than answer them. He knew about his world. Knew it too well, perhaps. Now he wanted to know about other people’s.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me again what happened.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything I can add to what I told the sheriff.” But he went along, forever the good kid, reciting all but verbatim what was in the official report. With time and retelling the story had baked to hard clay; nothing new or surprising was likely to peer out of doorways or corners.

  “Sarah stopped because she saw something move.”

  “Said she did. You’re gonna talk to her, too, though— right?”

  I nodded. “She didn’t scream, anything like that.”

  “Unh-unh. She just pushed herself up in the seat and said, ‘Seth, what is that?’ I didn’t see anything, but I got out of the car and went to look. After a minute she came up behind me.”

  “Was there blood?”

  “Not near as much as you’d expect. I remember thinking then how that made it all seem so much stranger. Just that hunk of wood sticking up out of him, and everything arranged so neatly there by him like he was, I don’t know, in his room at home.”

  “Were there field mice around, rats, anything like that?”

  “If there were, we didn’t see them.” He looked full at me. “Why would you ask that?”

  “No real reason. What you do is, you go ahead and ask whatever comes to mind, never mind if it makes sense or not, just trying to get the shape of the thing, hoping it might shake something loose.”

  “For you, or for me?”

  “I’d settle for either.”

  “Interesting.” He jotted something down on a notepad beside him.

  “How long have you and Sarah been dating?”

  “Sarah and I aren’t dating. We just hang out together.”

  “In the driveways of unoccupied houses.”

  He started to say more, then shrugged.

  I glanced pointedly at the photograph on his desk. “What does she have to say about that?”

  “A lot. Pretty much nonstop. But Sarah . . . Sarah and I have been friends a long time. A lot of the others don’t like her, think she’s weird. But there aren’t many people around you can have a conversation with, talk about the things you think are important. Look, you’re from the city, right?�
�

  “Yeah. But the place I came from’s a lot like this one.”

  He nodded. “Then maybe you know how it is.”

  I HAD NO IDEA what was playing on her CD. I wouldn’t even have known what to call it. It wasn’t like any rock and roll I’d ever heard. And it wasn’t on her CD player at all, as it turned out, but coming directly off her computer.

  Music’s the first handhold you lose in growing old, I thought as we made our way down narrow wood stairs to the basement Sarah Perkins had claimed as her own. The stairs were plain, untreated planks set into notches in doubled two-by-fours, heads of ten-penny nails dark against them. Sarah sat below in a pool of light. The music washed up from below, too, a drain in reverse. To me, it sounded like a slurry of things recorded from nature—cricket calls, footsteps over gravel, apples falling—then tweaked beyond recognition.

  Sarah turned in her chair as we stepped onto the cement floor. Years ago, someone had laid in a frame of two-by-fours, started putting up Sheetrock, even tacked up one wall of cheap woodgrain paneling before abandoning the project. Sarah had covered the spaces with old album covers (mostly 1950s jazz), movie posters (a decided taste for horror films) and a hodgepodge of pieces of dark fabric of every conceivable size, shape and texture. Books were stacked against every wall. But mostly the room took its form from the U-shaped desk within which Sarah sat in the midst of three or four computers and as many monitors, along with various cross-connected black boxes, scanners and the like. The huge half-dark, half-bright room was the inside of her head, this the cockpit from which she kept it on course.

  Almost instantly, she broke into Don Lee’s introduction.

  “How’s Seth?”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “You two haven’t seen one another?”

  “Our parents won’t let us. Here.” She handed across one of those clear folders with a plastic piece that slips over the edge to bind it. “This should help. And save time.”

  Don Lee looked at it a moment and handed it to me. The cover read, in small capitals: INCIDENT OF THE NIGHT OF MAY 14. Then, following a two-line space: AS AVERRED BY SARAH PERKINS. Below that, her address, phone number, two e-mail addresses and a signature.

  Inside, with approximate times, was a step-by-step listing of her and Seth McEvoy’s arrival at the subdivision, their pulling into the driveway, her first sight of what she believed to be movement, their investigation of same and subsequent call to the police. She had fixed the times by checking her memory of the music being played against the radio station’s log.

  “I have a good ear for music, and excellent recall,” she said.

  Oh?

  The second page of her report recounted what she and Seth had said to one another, beginning with “Seth, what is that?” and ending only with them saying good-bye when her parents (her mother, actually) picked her up at the police station. The third and fourth pages held computer-generated diagrams of relative positions: car, body, moon-light, the man’s belongings, the stake.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Turner. Is there anything else?”

  “Tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’m kind of over-whelmed here.” I had another look. “This is great.” After a moment I said, “Seth told me you and he aren’t dating.”

  “Seth and I are friends.”

  “Friends. That’s one of those words that can mean different things to different people.”

  “Words are like that.” She smiled at me. “Aren’t they?”

  “He also told me his girlfriend—what’s her name, again?”

  “Emily.”

  “That Emily isn’t too happy about you and Seth spending so much time together.”

  “Imagine that.” A couple of bells sounded somewhere in her instrument panel. She glanced briefly down. “Do you know what a truffle is, Mr. Turner?”

  “More or less, I think.”

  “They’re tubers. They grow underground, on the roots of trees that have spent years earning their place, struggling for it, working their way up into the light. The tuber lives off the tree and gives nothing back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Emily is a truffle.” ...

  “DOC OLDHAM takes care of most ever’thing medical ’round here.”

  “Even had a look at Danny Bartlett’s cows last year when they came up frothing at the mouth,” Don Lee said. “Been known to pull a tooth or two, need be.”

  “He had a few choice words to say about my bothering him, but he’s on his way.”

  “I could have gone to see him.”

  “I offered. Said he had to come into goddamn town anyway, he just hadn’t goddamn it planned on it being so goddamn early.”

  “Barks a lot, does he?”

  The sheriff nodded as the door opened and, borne on a flood of badinage, Doc Oldham entered. “Goddamn it, Bates, what’s the matter with you, you can’t handle a simple thing like this without hollering for help. This here your city boy?”

  Boy—though we were much of an age. I nodded, which seemed the safest way to go at the time.

  The sheriff introduced us.

  “Don’t talk much, does he?”

  “You looked like you had more to say. I figured I’d best just wait till you wound down.”

  “I don’t wind down. I ain’t wound down in sixty-some years now and I don’t aim to start. What the hell, you got coffee here to offer a man or not?” Don Lee was already pouring one, and handed it over. “Worked up to Memphis, I’m told.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You like it?”

  “The city, or the work?”

  “Both.”

  “I liked the work. The city, I got to liking less and less.”

  “ ’Spect you did. Saw things from the other side for a spell too, I hear.”

  “Didn’t much like that either.”

  “Make the city look right tame?”

  “Most ways it was the city—just a smaller version. Same tedium, same hierarchies, same violence and rage.”

  “Goddamn it, Bates, I will say one thing for you. You send for help, at least you got the decent good sense to bring in someone able to find his own head in the dark.”

  The sheriff nodded.

  “And he ain’t talkin’ all the time like some others. Momma brought him up right.”

  “Actually, sir, it was my sister. Our mother passed when I was five.”

  “How much older was your sister?”

  “She was sixteen.”

  “Good woman?”

  “The best. Lives out in Arizona now, has three kids.”

  “Bringing up her second family.”

  I nodded.

  “My folks disappeared when I was fifteen,” Doc said. “We never did find out what became of them. There were two kids younger than me, one older. I was the one took care of us. It’s a miracle, but we all turned out all right.”

  “That’s what families are all about.”

  “Used to be, anyhow.” He finished his coffee, put the mug down on the desk, and slid it towards Don Lee, who went to refill it. “You wanna put some goddamn sugar in this one to kill the taste?” Doc said. Then to me: “What’d you need?”

  “Considering what I have, just about anything would be welcome.”

  “You read the file?”

  “Sheriff Bates showed it to me.”

  “Don’t know as I can add much to what’s there.”

  “You didn’t do the autopsy yourself, right?”

  “Just the preliminary. Autopsy gets done up to the capital. Technically speaking I’m just coroner. Hereabouts that’s an elected position, doesn’t even require medical training.”

  Don Lee began, “It’s an important—”

  “It’s political bullshit’s what it is. Nobody else would take it, and for damn good reason.”

  “The body had been there a while, you said.”

  “Been there alive for some time before he was there dead, and that was three, four days.
”

  “The stake had been driven in there?”

  “No way. Where he lay’d be my guess. Someone mopped up as best he could. Lot of blood trace still. The bedding was rolled. Makes me think maybe he’d come back, laid down to rest thinking he’d go back out.”

  “So the body got moved.”

  “Absolutely. Some point after the stake went in—dead or almost, really no way to tell—he got wired to that trellis.” “Blood and skin under his nails?”

  “Looked to be. Could just be dirt, grease.”

  “Maybe that’ll give us something. I assume State’ll do blood typing, run the DNA?”

  “Blood, yes. Anything heavier’n that gets shipped out to Little Rock or Memphis, one of the big labs.”

  “You’re saying be patient.”

  “Be very patient.”

  “Nothing else?”

  I looked around the room in turn. Bates shook his head, as did Don Lee.

  “One thing I have been thinking on,” Doc said.

  “Okay.”

  “This man’s been out there, on the street, a while.”

  “Three, four months at least. Probably a lot longer.”

  “So how’s it come about he has soft hands?”

  Chapter Twelve

  FOR YEARS IT WAS KNOWN around the department as the Monkey Ward caper.

  We got tagged midday one Saturday. Dispatch was sending out a black-and-white, but the Lieutenant wanted detectives to rendezvous. Half a dozen calls had come in about whatever the hell was going on out there.

  It was one of those new developments north of Poplar near East High School, reclaimed land where long-boardedup storefronts, restaurants and thrift shops were being leveled to create innercity suburbs, row upon row of sweet little perfect houses each with its own sweet front and rear lawn.

  When we pulled up, one of the guys had a hedge trimmer, the other one a posthole digger. Took us some time to sort out they were in each other’s yards. They’d gone from insults across the fence to a swinging match, and when that did neither of them much good, they’d opted for technical support. One was busily defoliating every bush and small tree on his neighbor’s lawn, including plants in window boxes. The other was busily making the next yard look like a convention of moles had just let out.