Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “Oswald? Forget it, man. He’s dead. You’ll have to hire somebody else to take care of Bombast.”

  “Seriously. Ever read anything about the Kennedy assassination?”

  He leaned against the wall.

  “I saw the movie. I thought it was a lot of bullshit, though. Why?”

  I told him about the local lore I’d picked up in Jackson.

  “It’s funny the way stories get started. But he apparently did go to Jackson once, not long before he left New Orleans for Dallas, and people remembered.”

  “Yeah, I think I read something about that in the paper once. I bet everybody’s got a story about the day he came to town, like Jesse James robbing the bank.”

  I sat on the edge of my desk, crushing a stack of papers.

  “They say everybody in the country who was old enough to think can remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. I know I do. I was ten, in the fourth grade. We were at phys ed, playing flag football, and I saw one of the teachers, Miss Daigle, talking to Coach Mapes. I’d been in a scrape in her class that morning, and I knew she was telling him to call me over. The whistle blew, and I started over to the sidelines. I was already getting my story ready. I walked right up to them and then I saw she was crying and I wondered how I could have made her do that. Then she turned and walked away, and I asked Coach what was the matter. He just looked at me like I wasn’t there and said, ‘The president’s been shot.’ ”

  I got up from the desk. “When I was growing up, I just naturally thought there had to have been other gunmen. But then, while I was in graduate school, there was an archaeology convention in Dallas, and I walked down to Dealey Plaza. I remember looking up at the Book Depository and then at the road and the buildings on the other side, and thinking, ‘Everything is so much smaller than it looks in the pictures. One man really could have made that shot.’ And that’s what I still think. But I’ve never quite understood why he did it.”

  “He was screwed up.”

  “Yeah.”

  I walked out into the lab, where one of our student workers was trying to fit together the fragments of an ancient Indian bowl. She had already glued six or seven big pieces in place, so that the delicate curve of the neck was plain, but most of the rest of the vessel lay in bits on the table. Sometimes you managed to get the whole thing together, but more often you were left with blank spots.

  The next morning I drove back to Jackson. I wanted to talk to a man named Clyde Fontenot, whose name had been given me by McNair as the closest thing to a town historian. When the project got under way, our own historian, Esmerelda LaFleur, would have to write a historical background of the area and check land titles, and I wanted to find out whether Fontenot would be a good source for her to interview for the local history.

  Clyde Fontenot’s house was a bungalow on the outskirts of town, but his wife, a gray-haired woman of fifty, said he was downtown at the barber shop. She said it like everyone in town knew to look for him there. When I found the barber shop, I saw why.

  Sandwiched between two wooden buildings with historical markers, the tiny brick structure looked out on Highway 10 through a dusty window with a diagonal crack. A couple of men lounged in chairs along the wall, while the barber sat in his own chair, a cigarette in his hand. When I came in, he got up.

  “ ’Morning,” he said, reaching for the sheet.

  I said I was looking for Mr. Fontenot, and one of the men along the wall stood.

  “That’s me.” He was skinny and not much over five feet, with thick glasses that made him look like a frog and eyes that projected like flags. He stuck out a hand and we shook.

  I told him why I’d come. “And I hear you know a lot about the history of this area,” I finished.

  He chuckled and scratched his head. “Well, I write columns for the News-Leader. I used to be a teacher at the high school here. Anything special you wanted to know?”

  “Well, if there are any Indian sites or historical sites of any kind on the tract they’re going to use for the dam …” I began.

  “There’s a big Indian site over on Fee Hudson’s farm,” the barber said. “Busted rocks all over the place.”

  “That isn’t what the man asked,” Fontenot said, turning to me. “You know about that site already, don’t you?”

  “There’s a mound on Ethyl Road,” the other kibitzer said. “A hundred feet high at least. Biggest thing I ever saw.”

  “Dewey, that’s a damned hill,” Fontenot said. “Indians never made that thing.” He turned to me. “Did they?”

  “A hundred feet’s pretty big for it to be man-made,” I said.

  “We always called it an Indian mound,” Dewey said, chagrined.

  “Well, I don’t cut hair and Gus doesn’t sell postage stamps,” Fontenot chuckled.

  “Hell with you,” Dewey said and folded his arms.

  Gus said, “Adolph here’s the assistant postmaster. Spends most of his time opening other folks’ mail. I don’t know what Clyde is. Mainly he just sits around here and bothers folks.”

  Adolph Dewey said, “Mister, do me a favor and take both of ’em.”

  Clyde gave a guffaw. “I think you got mail to sort. But I’ll be happy to go with this gentleman.”

  He proved to be an excellent guide with a deep knowledge of both the parish and the town itself. First we drove out to the Indian site, which, while not on the tract to be surveyed, deserved to be reported. We collected stone artifacts from the top of a ridge. I took pictures while Fontenot watched approvingly and discussed the history of French-Natchez relations and the Fort Rosalie massacre. I’d run into many like him in small towns: knowledgeable and intelligent, but without equals to talk to. It could be a lonely existence, but Clyde seemed contented enough, rattling on about the Houmas and their move south along the river, as the result of European pressure, to their present place in Terrebonne Parish near the Gulf.

  When we finished, we had a nice collection of points and scrapers and a couple of flint knives.

  Afterward he showed me where Cyn Devlin lived. It was a mile and a half north of town, but on the west side of the creek that was the parish boundary. The house itself was an 1890s-vintage mansion that sat a hundred yards back from the road in a grove of hickories with a gazebo to one side.

  Even from the highway I could see that the paint needed touching up in places and the gazebo could stand to have its latticework repaired.

  There was a station wagon in the drive, and I wondered if the lady herself was at home.

  “What does Miss Devlin do?” I asked.

  My guide laughed. “Not much, far as I can tell. But I’ve always gotten along with her. I taught her son, Mark, before I retired. Sad business.”

  “What’s mat?”

  “Bright kid. But he got killed in a traffic accident on US 61 a couple of years ago. He was just sixteen years old. Then, just last year, her husband, Doug, died right across the creek from the Devlin place. Shot by some poacher. Nobody ever got caught. Cyn’s had her share of trouble, and she isn’t even forty.”

  “I hear she’s against the dam. Think it has anything to do with her husband’s death?”

  “Don’t see how. She’s against it because it won’t do anything but ruin the land and make some crooks rich. Some are saying she’s crazy. Well, we need more crazy people like her.”

  “Can’t she just tie it all up in court?”

  “Not that simple. The land belonged to her husband’s family. Cyn isn’t from around here. When old Timothy Devlin died in 1980, the land got split between his two sons, Buck and Doug. Now Buck was off in the Army and gave a power of attorney to his younger brother, Doug. Doug had the house and the back pasture, and Buck took the woods to the north—told folks he didn’t figure to live here anyway. Then Doug got killed, and a few months later Buck came back. Of course, the power of attorney ended when Doug died. Buck lives in Baton Rouge now, but I hear he’s willing to sell. Cyn’s mad as a wet hen, but there isn’t much she
can do.”

  I turned around and headed back toward Jackson.

  “Tell me about some of the other people involved,” I said. “Gene McNair owns the land on the east side of the creek, in this parish.”

  “Right. The land where Doug got killed. Bought it two years ago right after the election, as quiet as a mouse. Got it from Sam Pardue for a song, before anybody’d whispered a word about this dam.”

  “How does Pardue feel?”

  “Like killing all the McNairs. But what can he do? His daddy got it at a sheriff’s sale during the Depression. All he was using it for was as a lease to a hunting club.”

  “What’s Gene McNair got to do with all this?” I asked.

  Clyde waved a hand disparagingly. “Gene isn’t anything but a flunky for his brother, Buell. Buell’s a state senator, in tight with the crooks that stand to make a fortune on this thing.”

  I started to ask him about the Oswald story but changed my mind. It was only the folklore of high school kids, so why bother?

  I dropped him at his house, where his wife came out to stand on the porch and watch to see that he came in, as if he might get away, and I drove back out to the old Pardue tract.

  McNair had given me a key, and I opened the iron gate and drove through.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I’d seen the tract already, and there were things I had to do in Baton Rouge.

  Maybe it had something to do with the idea of a man lying dead on the same ground I had walked over. Or maybe it had to do with the dilapidated little cabin that now belonged to the dead man’s brother but was linked in the folklore to another dead man, who formed a dark vortex in our national history.

  I came to the tree with its deer stand and gazed out over the valley, trying to envision how the area would look with the water lapping at my feet.

  Clyde Fontenot was right. The dam was a cockamamie idea in a state noted for such notions.

  I reached into a patch of briars and plucked a couple of blackberries. They were thick and sweet now, ready for the picking. In another two weeks they would start to dry from the sun. I thought about the blackberry cobblers my mother made when I was little. In those days you could drive five miles from town and find the berries alongside the roads. That had long since changed, with the blooming of the chemical industry and the fencing of lands.

  I turned to go and heard a splashing below me. I wheeled, expecting to see a deer, but instead it was a man. It was too far for me to get a good look at him, but he was white, wearing a checked shirt and jeans, and I couldn’t help suspecting that he’d chosen the second my back was turned to make for the other side of the stream.

  He reached the other side and started up the trail at a fast walk toward the cabin. I thought of calling out, but there was something furtive about him that made me hesitate. Instead, without weighing the decision, I followed.

  By the time I was at the stream’s edge, he had vanished into the forest above, and as I slopped into the creek, it came to me that if he had a rifle, I was in the worst of all possible spots.

  But he hadn’t carried anything in his hands, and unless he’d hidden it above, say at the cabin, there wasn’t anything to worry about.

  I started up the trail, stopping every few feet to listen, but there was no sound except the birds in the woods above and the gentle gurgle of the water below.

  I came to the trees and felt my eyes start to adjust as I entered the shade. The cabin was just ahead, and if he was there, he could probably hear my steps.

  The hollow windows stared out at me, and I halted before the sagging porch.

  There was no sound from within. I stepped onto the boards, tiptoed to the half-open door, and looked inside. Empty.

  I returned the way I’d come, back down the trail to the creek and across. Whoever it was had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Whatever his business, it didn’t seem that he had been a threat or would likely be one once our work got under way. A single, unarmed man generally wasn’t dangerous to a crew of men with machetes.

  The Blazer was just ahead, and I made a mental note to mention the incident to McNair when I got back to Jackson. But when I got to the vehicle and started to unlock the door, I realized it would be a lot longer than I’d planned before I could report the business to anybody.

  While I’d been on the other side of the creek, following my will-o’-the-wisp, somebody else had cut both my front tires. I was just trying to decide what to do when I heard movement behind me and started to turn.

  I didn’t make it. Something clobbered me from behind, and the last thing I saw was the ground coming up in front of me.

  THREE

  I came to sitting on the ground with my back against the Blazer’s front fender, a sharp pain stabbing down through the top of my skull. When I felt my head, there was a lump like a goose egg but little blood. After a few deep breaths I muttered some choice words, staggered to my feet, and then reached into the glove compartment for my cell phone.

  It was gone.

  Damn.

  I made some quick calculations. It was a mile back to the highway and after that three miles to town. I might get picked up on the blacktop, if there happened to be any traffic, but I hadn’t seen much in my two trips up here. And whoever had done this might have gone that way, too. On the other hand, it was probably a quarter-mile from here to the cabin on the other side, and then, if McNair was right, another mile and a half to the Devlin place via the back pasture. The only other option was to head due west across the Buck Devlin place and come out on Highway 421 north of Cyn’s house. But McNair had told me there were some pretty thick briar patches. Better to use the easier traverse of open pastures and rely on what charm I could muster if the owner saw me.

  I got my machete out of the back of the Blazer, where it had been hidden with the rest of my tools, and took a Brunton compass for good measure. Then I headed back downhill and across the stream.

  So had somebody followed me, or was it someone who was already here when I arrived? Could the mysterious man I’d seen headed for the cabin have doubled back? It seemed unlikely, but maybe he’d been working with a partner and had run away just to draw me off.

  It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to.

  I hurried up the slope, not stopping this time until I was in the cover of the trees. I rested for a few minutes, sitting on the porch of the cabin. My head still hurt, but I wasn’t feeling any light-headedness or disorientation, so the blow probably hadn’t done any serious damage. I heaved myself up and looked for the trail that would take me out.

  It wasn’t hard to find, but I took a compass bearing just in case. For twenty minutes I walked south through a pine forest smelling of ozone. Here and there I saw broken blades of grass, making me think my man had come this way a few minutes before, but it was hard to tell if the boot prints I saw in the dirt had been made that day or several days previously.

  I checked my watch. It was eleven-thirty, and I was grateful for the shade. In another hour I’d have the full brunt of the June heat.

  The trail wound right, and when I came out of the bend, I saw a gate ahead of me.

  It was an iron frame, held in place by a rusty chain and a heavy Master padlock. A new-looking sign on the fence said:

  POSTED

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  Beyond the gate was an open pasture bordered by a fringe of hardwoods. Some cattle grazed nonchalantly on the sweet grass, and I saw stacks of hay piled on the other side of the field.

  I took a deep breath and climbed over the fence.

  The cattle raised their heads and watched. I looked for a bull but didn’t see one. The path I was on was a pair of wheel ruts running alongside the fenceline. Across the fence I could see the land starting to drop off toward the creek. The sun was at its zenith now, pounding down like a big fist, and I wished I had a canteen. When I got to the other side of the field, I saw the trees ahead were just a windbreak and there was a cattle gap leading
into another field on the other side. I rested in the shade for a few minutes, wondering if I’d made the right decision in coming this way. At least on the other route there was plenty of shade.

  I crossed the cattle gap and started into the next field. There was some kind of shed in the distance but still no sign of the house. I checked my watch: five after noon. I couldn’t have that much more to go.

  I was halfway through the field when I saw the jeep.

  It was headed straight for me along the ruts, and I knew they had seen me and it would do no good to try to duck over the fence or run.

  There was nothing to do but stop and wait for them to reach me.

  A second later I saw that there was only one person, the driver, and a few seconds after that I realized the driver was a woman.

  Cynthia Devlin …

  I stepped off the trail, and the jeep jerked to a halt a few feet from me. The driver wore jeans and a red shirt, and a bandanna covered her dark hair. I couldn’t see her eyes because of the sunglasses, but there was no mistaking the displeasure in her face.

  “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” I said.

  “You could say that,” she replied. “There’s a sign back there. This land is posted.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had a kind of emergency, and this was the only route to take.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, and for the first time I saw the carbine on the seat next to her. “How did you get back there in the first place if you didn’t cross my land?”

  “I came up Highway 952 on the East Feliciana side,” I told her. “I was scouting the layout for some work I’m doing for the Corps of Engineers.” I reached into my shirt pocket and handed her a business card. She regarded it skeptically.

  “Moundmasters? What kind of name is that?”

  “We’re archaeologists. We’re checking the project area for historic and prehistoric sites as part of the environmental impact statement.”

  “The Corps of Engineers doesn’t own my land,” she said.

  “That’s why I went on the other side, through the McNair tract. But somebody cut my tires and hit me on the head for my trouble. So I thought it would be easier if I came this way.” I gave her my best smile. “I was hoping maybe you’d let me use your phone.”