Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “So what’ve you got there?” he asked, smiling through his gray beard. “A list of all the aboriginal pottery types in the Mississippi Valley?”

  “No, something more in your line,” I said and laid my book on the desk for him to see.

  He twisted his head to look at it and then whistled.

  “The Warren Report? Don’t tell me they asked you to evaluate the Texas Book Depository for the National Register.”

  “Not quite.” I told him about the project, my meeting with Cyn Devlin, and, finally, the rumors of Oswald’s visit “Anything to that, do you know?”

  Byron shrugged his big shoulders, a bear confined to a chair.

  “If there is, it isn’t in there. I taught a seminar on the Kennedy presidency a few years ago, and I had to bone up on the assassination. So far as I know, Oswald went from Dallas to New Orleans in 1963 and then back to Texas. Not that he couldn’t’ve gotten up to Jackson or Clinton while he was in New Orleans that summer, but one thing you have to keep in mind—he couldn’t drive.”

  “What about some of his New Orleans friends? Couldn’t they have taken him?”

  “Maybe. But there’s no good evidence he had any friends in New Orleans. Or any place, for that matter. I don’t care what the film said, or what Jim Garrison claimed. You and I both know that evidence Garrison dug up for the Shaw trial was a bunch of crap. And the jury knew it, too. Oswald was, as the Warren Commission wrote, a very alienated person.”

  “No conspiracy, no plot?”

  “What’s a conspiracy? So Oswald’s with some other kooks in New Orleans and somebody says, ‘They ought to shoot Kennedy.’ Oswald remembers and carries it out. Is that a conspiracy?” He reached for his pipe and started to fill it. “Remember, Oswald had already tried to kill General Walker in April. Whatever he heard, whatever influences there were, he was, to all intents and purposes, playing a lone hand. Or is that something you didn’t want to hear?”

  “No, I can accept it.”

  The historian lit his pipe, and a few seconds later the room was filled with sweet smoke.

  “I remember that Friday. I was in my senior year at Tulane. I was standing in line at the Union for lunch. Somebody said, ‘The president’s been shot in Dallas.’ I turned around and almost spilled somebody’s tray. I saw people all over the room with their heads together, funny looks on their faces. I left the chow line and went to find a TV set. I never did eat that day.”

  Smoke floated up to the ceiling in silence and crawled along the acoustic tiles.

  “What happened to us that day?” he whispered. “Was that when everything started to come apart? Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostages …” He shook his head. “We talked about it in the seminar. How there were other events. The U-2 incident, for example. Before that, nobody even thought to question the government when it put out a story. Or the Bay of Pigs and the way Kennedy left the invaders stranded on that beach. The missile crisis … But that day in Dallas—it was so damned impossible.”

  I didn’t say anything, but even though I’d only been in the fourth grade when Kennedy died, I’d felt some of the same things.

  “Alan, it sounds more like it’s in the domain of the folklore people. But let me know what you find out.”

  I got up to go, but his hand caught my arm.

  “Look, I’m having some folks over tomorrow night. Plan to come.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. What can I bring?”

  “Pepper, if she can come.”

  “She’s in Mexico. A dig,” I said, a pang shooting through me at the sound of her name.

  Byron studied me for a moment like an owl and then smiled.

  “I’ll try to fix you up then.”

  I said goodbye and walked out with the Warren Report. He was probably right about Oswald. But the rumors had whetted my curiosity. Maybe, after I’d written Pepper a long letter tonight, I’d do some reading.

  FIVE

  The waste dump job was a version of hell. A recent rain had made a mire out of the survey area, a series of plowed fields. The mud sucked at our boots, and when we stopped, we sank further into the gumbo. The sun had reached its full summer fury, and a steamy mist hugged the ground, plastering our clothes to our bodies. We finished the job at four, more dead than alive, and slogged our way back to the Blazer. Sum total: no artifacts, no sites.

  “Well, how did you like it?” I asked one of the new people, Chris Keller.

  He shook his head. “Are all the jobs like this?”

  “Only the easy ones,” David said, and Chris’s mouth dropped open. Meg smiled.

  “When’s the next one?” she asked.

  That evening I relaxed in the old four-footed bathtub, letting the water eat away the smell of the field. I knew why Meg was trouble now: Nobody else on the crew could keep up with her. A sure way to upset the men. Well, that was their problem. I closed my eyes and reached for my beer.

  What was Pepper doing right now? Was she still grimy from her day in the field? The rainy season was about to begin, so they were probably racing to finish up on site before heading for the lab in Chetumal. Or were they already in the lab? Lounging on the beach with Cubas in their hands, while a suave Eric Blackburn, wife and family far away, regaled her with exaggerations from a career fueled by his family’s money and old boy connections?

  The phone started to ring, and I jumped up, splashing water on the floor. Maybe it was her.

  By the time I got to the phone, it had stopped ringing, and the message light of the answering machine was on.

  I pressed the Playback button and died a little when I heard her voice.

  “Hi, Alan, I just wanted to call. We’re leaving to head down to Belize. There’s a man I need to talk to about some colonial documents. I’ll try to call when I find out where we’re staying. I—” I heard a man’s voice in the background, too distant to make out. “Well, take care.”

  The line went dead.

  I dialed the number she’d left for me, and after a series of clicks as it made the international connection, the phone started to ring. But I was too late: They were already gone.

  Damn.

  I wandered back to the bathroom and finished drying myself. As I did, I looked at my face in the mirror. A little blurry without my glasses, the brown hair not as thick as a few years back, but not a bad face. I liked to think it showed what my mother called character. Not pretty-boy handsome, like Eric Blackburn’s face. You didn’t get character by sliding upward through life.

  Pepper would never be deceived by mere looks and money.

  Would she?

  I shaved, donned a fresh guayabera, a pair of clean khaki pants, and Mexican sandals. Then I picked up a six-pack of Dos Equis at a convenience store and drove over to Foster’s place.

  Byron lived on West Parker, just outside the south gates of the campus. It was a shady neighborhood of sleepy old houses mixed in with newer apartment complexes, catering to students and younger faculty.

  His own house, which he’d bought ten years before, was a low wood-frame with azaleas in the front and a trellis with honeysuckle. There were cars already there, and I heard soft rock music. I could never keep Byron’s love life straight: Sometimes there was a young woman, and other times he lived alone. This time I was met by a blonde in her thirties, who identified herself as Clea and acted as if she was organizing the affair. The other guests were a mixture of graduate students and faculty, and I exchanged greetings with the people I knew.

  I was escorted past a center table, with chips and dips, and another table against the wall, with an assortment of liquors. Byron was in the kitchen, talking to a woman whose long, dark hair cascaded down her back.

  “Ah, Alan.” He disengaged as he saw me. “I’m glad you could make it. I want you to meet somebody.”

  He touched the woman lightly on the arm, and she turned around. Even as her expression showed her surprise, I realized I’d seen her before.

  “This is one of my students, Cyn Devlin. Cyn,
this is Alan Graham.”

  “We’ve met,” I stammered, trying to convince myself that the woman in front of me was the same one who had all but run me off her land.

  “Oh, really?” Byron asked. “Well, then I can leave you two alone and say hello to some of my other guests.” And he was gone, leaving us staring at each other.

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” she managed.

  “I didn’t know you were a friend of Byron’s,” I responded.

  “Why, am I too old to be a student?”

  “Of course not. Look, I didn’t come here to fight.”

  “Me either. Maybe I came across too strong the other day, but you can’t know what it’s like to have people crawling all over your land.”

  “I try not to crawl,” I said.

  “A bad choice of words.”

  “Well, maybe not. Sometimes I feel like I’m crawling.”

  She gave me a tiny smile, and I noticed for the first time that she was really a beautiful woman, with a pointed chin and creamy skin.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.

  She motioned to a glass on the counter. “I have some Coke.”

  “Nothing stronger?”

  “No.”

  I opened one of my beers and put the rest in the refrigerator.

  “So will you shoot me if I use the trail to the cabin to get back to Buck’s property?”

  “Probably not.” She gave a hopeless little shrug. “There’ll be enough people back there, anyway.”

  “If it ever gets off the ground,” I said. “Lots of these projects never get built.”

  “And lots of them do.”

  “Maybe we should start over,” I said. “Tell me what you’re studying.”

  “History,” she said. “I’m a junior. I need twenty-eight more hours to graduate. I figure I can do it in two semesters, three if I go part-time.” She picked up her glass. “I intend to be halfway educated before I die.”

  “You’re not from around here,” I said.

  “No. I’m from Farmerville, in Union Parish. My father grew beans until he drank his way out of the land. Then he went to Monroe and became a construction laborer until he dropped a block of cement on his foot. Good excuse to drink some more. There were six of us, and I left home when I was fifteen, married when I was sixteen.”

  “Mr. Devlin?”

  She gave a bitter little chuckle. “Doug didn’t come along until a lot later. No, Number one was a drummer in a band. Died of an overdose when he was twenty-six. I didn’t meet Doug until I was an ancient twenty.” She poured herself some more Coke. “He figured he could make an honest woman out of me. It cost him the goodwill of most of his family.”

  The sarcasm in her tone was unmistakable.

  “And did he make an honest woman out of you?”

  She nodded and then looked me in the eyes. “Yes. At least, until our son died.” She looked away. “So why isn’t an archaeologist teaching at the university?”

  “I did once,” I told her. “My teaching methods were too unorthodox, and I was having a hard time with a relationship. Things kind of fell apart for a little while.”

  “And you came here?”

  “I grew up here. My father was old and sick, and I came home to be with him. Then he died, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. But I ran into my old anthropology professor, Sam MacGregor, one day and he said he needed some help on a job he was doing. He’d just retired and was doing a lot of consulting in contract archaeology. We set up a company together, and then a few years later he retired again and left me with his clientele. I’ve been running it ever since.”

  “You didn’t marry?”

  “A long time ago. It didn’t work.”

  “And there’s nobody now?”

  “There is. But she’s in Mexico.”

  “What do you do in the meantime? Besides archaeology, I mean.”

  “I have a collection of fifties rock records, the Platters, Fats Domino, some Jerry Lee Lewis. I like to listen to them and I like old movies on the VCR. I play poker with my friends when their wives let them, and I like to cook.”

  “And you like parties, I guess.”

  “I don’t really go to that many.”

  She stared at me and didn’t say anything.

  “I guess some day when I’m too old for it, I’ll get out of the game,” I said. “But nobody’s ever retired from contract archaeology.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too new. Part of the environmental movement.”

  “And yet you’re helping them build that thing.”

  “I’m just doing a survey.”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly I felt like a Nazi.

  “We’ve found some necessary sites that way,” I explained. “Sites that would have gone unreported without us.”

  For some reason it was necessary that I make her understand.

  “Would you like to see our lab?” I asked.

  She hesitated and then shrugged. “Sure. When?”

  “How about now?”

  “Now?”

  “It’s just the other side of the campus.”

  She stared back at me, then put down her glass.

  “All right.”

  We slipped out without anyone noticing, and I led her to the Blazer. I drove up Highland and out the north gates to State Street, where I turned right. I went south on Carlotta and a few seconds later was stopping before the old house where we worked.

  “Not the best neighborhood,” I said, “but low rent goes with archaeology.”

  I showed her up the walk, opened the door, and punched the code into the alarm pad. Then I turned on the lights.

  The vessel our student had been working on was now completely reconstructed, and I lifted it off the table for Cyn to examine.

  “You see the curving lines? Marksville motif: This bowl is two thousand years old. We found it in a site in Pointe Coupée Parish. We think the people that made it had some kind of trade connections with the mound builders of the Ohio Valley.”

  “Do you do radiocarbon dating here?” she asked.

  “No, that requires a special lab and a few million dollars’ worth of equipment. Even the university here doesn’t have a radiocarbon lab. We have to send our samples off.”

  On one of the other tables was a fragment of flintlock rifle.

  “Eighteenth century,” I explained. “Probably English.”

  She lifted it, turned it over in the light, and then put it back down.

  “Looks to be about fifty caliber,” she said.

  “You know about guns?”

  “My husband was a gun collector. I picked up some of it from him.”

  “Was he hunting when he was killed?” I asked.

  “No. I’m not sure just what he was doing. All I know is it had something to do with the cabin.”

  “The cabin?”

  She looked away, and when she spoke again, her voice was flat.

  “There were these rumors—you’ve probably heard them—about Lee Oswald’s ghost hanging around there. None of us believed that, except that after our boy died, I started to get the feeling somebody was using the cabin for something. I told Doug, but he never saw anybody. It was just footprints and cigarette butts. I told him it was probably some poacher or maybe kids were sneaking back there, but he said it was something else and he was going to find out. So he left early one morning and went back to wait. I didn’t like the idea, and I even wanted to go with him, but he had his rifle and he could handle himself.”

  I waited, afraid of what she was about to say.

  “When he didn’t come back by noon, I went looking for him.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to talk about it …”

  “I saw where he’d been at the cabin: His blanket was still there. I followed the trail to the end of the woods and looked down at the creek, and that was when I saw him. He was lying just on the other side, facedown, with his rif
le next to him. I knew he was dead, but I went down and looked anyway.”

  She was staring into the past now, and I was no longer in the room.

  “There was a wound in his head, and I knew he’d been shot. Somebody with a military rifle, an old 6.5 millimeter, the State Police laboratory said.” She turned her face toward me until she was staring up into my eyes. “Don’t you see? A 6.5, the kind a Mannlicher-Carcano fires.”

  “A Mannlicher-Carcano?”

  She nodded. “Yes. The kind of weapon Oswald used to kill President Kennedy.”

  SIX

  “It has to be a coincidence,” I said.

  “That’s what the investigators said. It was a screwed-up investigation because he was found across the creek, in East Feliciana, but the shot may have come from West Feliciana. Nobody could decide who was supposed to run the thing. It ended up with the two sheriffs at each other’s throats, and, of course, that started the rumor that there was a cover-up. Now there are people in the area who’re sure it has something to do with the Kennedy assassination.”

  I shrugged. “There have to be lots of Mannlicher-Carcanos around. They were selling them for twenty-five bucks back when Oswald bought his. It could have come from anywhere.”

  “I know where it came from,” she said.

  It was my second surprise.

  “Just before Doug was killed, the house was burglarized. Some of Doug’s guns were stolen. One of them was a Mannlicher-Carcano.”

  “Was there all this Oswald talk before that happened?”

  “I’ve thought about that, too. It seems to me there was talk about Oswald coming to Jackson to apply for work at the hospital, but there wasn’t anything connecting him with the cabin. I think it all came about because of the kind of gun that was stolen and somebody in town added two and two and got five.”

  I walked over to the bulletin board and my eyes wandered up to a notice the government had sent us saying no employee could be forced to take a polygraph.

  “Tell me about Blake Curtin,” I said, turning around and leaning back against the wall.

  Her face went expressionless. “What about him?”

  “He was at the house when you took me there. He was the man I saw down at the creek. Why did you lie about him?”