by Ace Atkins
“Yes, sir.”
Stagg nodded, not listening anymore, standing back and appraising the table’s bounty, the silver and finery that belonged to the absent senator. He watched as Willie James pulled gallon jugs of Southern Comfort and Smirnoff Vodka from boxes and laid them all out in a pretty-straight line. A nut tray with a silver cracker was offered next to the crystal glasses and cocktail napkins.
The girl took a breath, robe hanging open loose and easy, exposing a pink bra-and-panty set. She wore blue Crocs on her little feet.
“I guess we all got to pay them pipers,” the girl said. “My daddy said the only way we’d ever sit at a rich man’s table is to set it for him.”
Staggs’s face colored, with more blood rushing to his weathered old cheeks. He reached for a peppermint in his pocket. “How about you wait with the other ladies, doll?” Stagg said. “The gentlemen will be here right quick.”
• • •
“Sure do appreciate y’all coming here this afternoon,” said the DA investigator from Oxford, a man named Dale Childress. “I thought this would be a good spot, New Albany being a good midpoint.”
Quinn and Lillie sat across from him in conference room at a Hampton Inn off Highway 78. As it started to rain on the way over, Lillie had declared the entire journey a big fuck-you. She said Childress didn’t drive to Tibbehah because he knew about Quinn hiring Stevens. Here he could sit down and chew the fat, be pleasant, and make sure they all knew this was routine. Childress opened up a file and smiled across the table at Lillie. He’d offered them some bad coffee and stale muffins.
“So are you going to shit or get off the pot?” Lillie said.
“Excuse me?” Childress asked. He was younger than Quinn had first thought on the phone, maybe five years older than Quinn and Lillie, with thinning brown hair and a short-clipped mustache. He wore a wrinkled polo shirt that read Investigator over the breast pocket and khaki pants nearly two inches too short.
“We been through this already with another investigator,” Quinn said. “Twice.”
“Me and him rotate on the counties,” Childress said. “On account of there’s only two investigators for eight districts. Y’all sure you wouldn’t like some coffee or muffins?”
“What we’d like,” Lillie said, “is knowing how much longer this is going to last. We’re hearing that y’all plan to take this to the grand jury. If this inquiry is trying to put together a case, we need our lawyer here.”
Childress held up a hand and said, “Whoa. No, ma’am. This is just a fact-checking visit, like I said on the phone. I didn’t want to show up in Jericho to make it appear to your constituents that it was anything but. I respect all law enforcement. I consider myself part of that team, and anytime I conduct an inquiry into official affairs, I’m not trying to buck the system. What y’all went through with them convicts sounded like pure hell. But if the DA didn’t cross the t’s and dot the i’s on what happened to Leonard Chappell, people might wonder. He was the chief of police.”
“And so crooked, they had to screw him into the ground,” Lillie said.
Quinn reached under the table and grabbed her knee.
“I’ve met with Mr. Chappell’s family and friends,” Childress said. “They’re still in a state of shock over the allegations and his death.”
Lillie snorted. Quinn took a deep breath.
“That man came to kill me and another man named Jamey Dixon,” Quinn said. “If I hadn’t shot first, I’d be dead. He has a long history of ethics abuse and was out of his jurisdiction.”
“Yes, sir,” Childress said, tapping his pen at the edge of his legal pad. “That part sure is clear to me. What we are trying to figure out is who killed all those other men and why. Why did you, Sheriff, drive a former convict, Jamey Dixon, out to the scene? What benefit was he?”
“He was the goddamn trade,” Lillie said. “Didn’t you read the reports before you had us drive all the way over here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Childress said. “I read the reports several times. But some things aren’t making sense to me. For me to get this gone and for all of us to go back to our lives, we got to make those weird pieces fit. It’s all like a puzzle.”
Lillie laced her fingers, clenched her jaw and leaned into the table. “I’m aware how it works, Mr. Childress.”
“OK,” he said. “OK. Let’s just start off with some basic info. Sheriff Colson, you are former military, serving in the Army for ten years?”
Lillie sighed. Quinn nodded.
“Might I ask what made you retire and return back to Jericho?”
“Oh, hell,” Lillie said. “Here it comes. Quinn, you have Sonny’s ass on speed dial?”
Quinn stared across at Childress. He did not blink and set his jaw.
“There were several men shot out at a place called Hell’s Creek,” Childress said. “That was before you became sheriff. Can you tell me what that was all about?”
Quinn stared across at Childress, the man grinning like the sun was shining and all was right in the state of Mississippi. Quinn took out his cell phone and scrolled through to find Stevens’s number. “I’ll be right back,” Quinn said.
• • •
The men came to the hunt lodge, exhausted from a day touring the tornado sites. They’d shaken a lot of hands and given a lot of hugs. There were prayers said, words of appreciation given, and many tears shed. Stagg had heard them all. There was the woman who’d been sucked out of a bathtub and landed five miles away. There was the old man who’d lost his wife of thirty years, his home, and his old black Lab. There was a cute set of orphans who rode it out under a table and an ugly woman who claimed Jesus held her hand while she sat on the shitter. Stagg liked hearing the stories, it gave the town some character and helped sell the forward momentum that Tibbehah County needed. Like the sign on Highway 45 read Gateway to Mississippi’s Future.
“Mr. Stagg?” said the black stripper named Jaquita or Janiqua. “I think I sprained my wrist.”
“Well, darling, I don’t think there’s any workmen’s comp for tossing a man’s pecker.”
“That ain’t what did it,” she said. “I ain’t done that tonight. One of those fools wanted to arm-wrestle and I thought he was joking but he took it real seriously. He was drinking Scotch from the bottle and kept on calling me his Little Hot Chocolate.”
“Go see Willie James in the kitchen,” Stagg said. “Let him get you a bag of ice. How about an extra fifty for the trouble?”
She left where Stagg sat alone at a big poker table facing the open room of the hunt lodge, thick pine beams steepled overhead, six bedroom doors opening out on the second-floor balcony. Every few minutes you could hear a woman’s cry or a man’s loud grunts as he finished his business. The whole party had grown sparse as the men and girls had paired off and left the silver trays of half-eaten chicken and picked-over, hardened cheese. Stagg made himself a ham sandwich to go with a tall glass of Alka-Seltzer and waited for the boys he’d called to show up. He’d deal with that mess and then drive on back to the Rebel, wait for Ringold to drive the van full of girls back to the Booby Trap and pick up eight fresh ones. This shit was going to go on all night or until the Viagra ran out.
At eight o’clock exactly, his cell phone rang. The ID reading BLOCKED meant the man was waiting outside for him. He got up and followed the stairs to the second bedroom door, knocking softly and hearing shuffling inside. The old gray-headed Trooper answered the door, looking pretty mad until he saw it was Stagg, and then grunted, “Let me get my pants and my gun. Is he here?”
“Yes, sir,” Stagg said. “Waiting outside.”
Stagg glanced through the cracked door and saw his little pixie lying on the bed, buck-naked and passed-out asleep. The old Trooper jerked a thumb at the girl and said, “Shit, Johnny. You git ’em young, don’t you? When I got her clothes off, I felt like you’d laid o
ut some jailbait.”
“Were you disappointed?”
The man slid into his pants, smiled, and shook his buzz-cut head. He reached for his badge and gun on a chest of drawers. Two ducks petrified in midflight hung over the bed. He let himself out and followed Stagg through the big room and through the kitchen and outside. It had started to rain sometime in the last few hours they’d been at the lodge. A light mist fell across the headlights of a black Crown Vic with the windshield wipers going.
Stagg and the old Trooper stood side by side, waiting for the man to get out. The engine was still running as he met them in the headlights and asked how the party was going.
“Come on in,” Stagg said. “We can fix you up a plate of whatever you like.”
“No, sir,” said the man. “I got to get home to Oxford. My wife would chew my ass if I get in too late.”
“How’d it go?” the Trooper said.
The man shrugged, wiping the rain off his short-clipped mustache. His receding hair plastered down on his head. “You got it?”
“Yes, sir,” the Trooper said. “Fuck, it’s why I’m here.”
The Trooper wandered off to a green Dodge pickup truck, saying he would never take an official vehicle off-duty, and opened up a passenger door and reached inside.
“Appreciate you making the trip,” Stagg said.
The man looked nervous and unfocused in the bright hot lights of his car. “I got to go.”
“Hold on, hold on.”
“Who’s inside?” the man asked.
Stagg just placed a finger to his lips and smiled.
The Trooper walked back to the men, carrying a rifle in a camouflage cover. He held it out in both hands as if presenting an official gift and waited for the other man. The other man hesitated for a bit, then took a breath and reached for it.
“Y’all got a warrant to search that dyke’s house?” the Trooper asked.
“Almost.”
“But y’all will take inventory of all them guns she collects?” Stagg said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good deal,” Stagg said, grinning. “Sure is good seeing you.”
He shook the man’s hand and walked back to the hunt lodge to finish the second half of his sandwich.
When Quinn walked into Mr. Jim’s barbershop the next morning, Luther Varner looked up from his copy of the Daily Journal and pronounced that rain was expected that afternoon, Ole Miss had screwed the pooch in the second half, and this country was still in the shitter. Mr. Jim was cutting the hair of Jay Bartlett, the esteemed mayor of Jericho, who was only six years older than Quinn and whose father had been mayor before him. Mr. Jim, a portly old man who’d served in Patton’s 3rd Army, glanced up from his work and wished Quinn a good morning. Bartlett didn’t say anything, looking to Quinn and then staring straight ahead at the TV on top of the Coke machine, the men checking out The Price Is Right, a special on celebrating Bob Barker’s ninetieth birthday.
“Barker must be doing something right,” Mr. Jim said. “Still got his own hair. Got good color and sense about him.”
“You know he works with all them animals?” Mr. Varner said, spewing smoke from the side of his mouth. “I heard he paid a million dollars to save an elephant.”
“Y’all ever watch anything else?” Quinn asked.
“Sometimes we watch Days of Our Lives.”
“Sometimes?” Quinn said. “Y’all been watching it every day since I was a kid.”
Luther Varner was rail-thin in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, his long, bony forearm proudly displaying a Semper Fi and laughing skull tattoos. He ashed the cigarette into his hand and walked over to the trash can to empty it. On the way back he shot a look at Quinn, tilting his head to Bartlett, before sitting back down.
“How you doing, Jay?” Quinn asked.
“Good.”
“How’d it go yesterday on the Square?”
“Fine,” Bartlett said, eyes never leaving The Price Is Right. A screaming fat woman had just been given the chance to win a small economy car.
“Damn,” Luther said. “Don’t think she could get in that car. What you think, Jim?”
“Part of her could get in,” Mr. Jim said. “But the rest of her gonna have to hang out the window.”
Bartlett kept on staring at the television. Mr. Jim put down the scissors and picked up a set of clippers, taking the hair off Bartlett’s neck. Bartlett touched the part in his hair and fingered it off to the side, not being able to stand a moment that his hair wasn’t spot-on. Mr. Jim put down the clippers and removed the cutter’s cape from Bartlett’s chest, dusting the hairs off his shoulders and neck. “Ready to go.”
Bartlett reached into the pockets of his khakis and paid Mr. Jim. “Appreciate it.”
Quinn hadn’t moved. He simply nodded to Bartlett as he walked out, Bartlett only slightly returning the nod, something off and nervous about the man, as he passed and the door shut behind him with a jingle.
“That boy is sorrier than shit,” Luther said.
Mr. Jim motioned for Quinn to take a seat. He fit the cape around his neck, finding the number 2 spacer he always used for the top of Quinn’s head.
“He’s a politician,” Mr. Jim said. “It’s in his blood. Them people don’t think like decent people.”
“Guess I won’t expect his support this spring,” Quinn said.
“Hell with him,” Mr. Jim said, turning on the clippers, running the spacer over Quinn’s head. Luther Varner shook his head at the sorriness of the whole situation, as he lit up another long smoke and turned his head to see if that fat woman had picked out the right numbers for the car. Mr. Jim finished up with the spacer and adjusted the clippers for the back and side of Quinn’s head. Before he started, he launched into a coughing fit, turning his head and putting his hand to his mouth. Quinn and Luther didn’t mention it, as Mr. Jim didn’t want to discuss his illness.
He returned to the spinning chair as if it had never happened.
“I wasn’t asked to attend the ceremony on the Square yesterday,” Quinn said.
“Maybe they forgot?” Mr. Jim said, looking a bit more pale, breathing ragged.
“Bullshit.”
“The supervisors got down on me early,” Quinn said. “But I have to say I’m surprised by Jay Bartlett. His father was a decent man.”
“Oh, hell no he wasn’t, Quinn,” Luther said. “Bartletts always do for the Bartletts. Ain’t none of them ever stood for what’s right. They stand for what people want to hear.”
Mr. Jim held the clippers in his hand but hadn’t turned them on yet.
“You think that’s what people want to hear?” Quinn said. “You think it’s gone that far?”
Luther squinted his eyes in the smoke and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice weathered and cracked like a good Marine. “I try and not listen to bullshit.”
“And if any of ’em bring it in here,” Mr. Jim said, “my hand gets a bit unsteady.”
“No one would have the guts to talk shit here,” Quinn said. “Not here or at the VFW. What this town likes more than anything is standing back in the shadows and pointing fingers and talking about things they don’t know a damn thing about.”
“Ain’t that always the way?” Luther said. “When I got home in ’72, nobody was on the Square with a marching band and the damn key to the city. People who ain’t been in it, been in the shit flying around them, can’t wrap their heads around it.”
“The worst of it,” Quinn said, “is them stringing this thing out. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
“You deserve better than this county,” Luther said. “I hate to say it. Jericho is my home. But hell, man, you know it’s true. I know why you come back, glad to be a part of it, but I hope you’ll find your own place. Somewhere that people deserve a good man.”
“How come?”
“’Cause you’ll go broke keeping that hair that short,” he said. “You know now that you’re out of the service, you can grow it any way you like?”
Quinn grinned at the old man who’d been a friend to his uncle and to his father and had given him his very first haircut. He shook his liver-spotted hand. “I appreciate what works,” Quinn said.
“You don’t say . . .” Mr. Jim said.
“Shit,” Mr. Varner said. “I hadn’t cut my hair different since ’65.”
“These days, you got more hair in your ears than on top.”
“Don’t bother me none,” Mr. Varner said. “Just pleased every day to see that old sun come up and not be among the dirt people. I hadn’t forgotten what that goddamn twister did to my truck.”
Quinn nodded at Luther. He’d been with the old man, helping the poor down in Sugar Ditch, when it hit.
Quinn grabbed his hat and coat from the rack and made his way to the glass door.
“It’s good to see you, Quinn,” Mr. Jim said, cleaning off his clippers and dropping his comb into the Barbicide. “Let me know when you get the new election posters. I’ll post them bigger than shit in the front window.”
• • •
“Did you talk to him?” Hank Stillwell asked.
Stillwell had stopped by the Jericho Farm & Ranch that morning, sitting out on the loading dock while Diane arranged sacks of feed, topsoil, and mulch. Wouldn’t be long until the spring planting would start and people would be buying their seeds and small plants. Winter was tough. People didn’t buy much when it was cold.
“We rode out to the site,” Diane said. “I told the sheriff everything that I recalled. He knows everything I know.”
Stillwell nodded, breathing in deep and hard through his nose. “Thank God.”