A nod.
“Were you around here when he was killed?”
He shook his head “no” vigorously.
Then I asked him the question that was really on my mind:
“You’ve heard the story about Lee Harvey Oswald coming here. You ever see him?”
His mouth dropped open, showing yellow teeth, and the writing pad fell to the floor. He began to tremble and wheeled to flee, but Cyn put a hand on his arm.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Blake. Just answer the question.”
He raised his hands again, as if helpless, and I waited.
His mouth moved but no sound came out.
“Don’t worry,” Cyn soothed. “It’s okay.”
He stared down at the pad as if it were a murder weapon, and I picked it up and handed it to him. He took it hesitantly, and then, in a sudden surge of fervor, wrote something and thrust it at me.
Yes.
“Mind telling me when and where?”
The mouth opened again, and then he wheeled and ran out of the house. A few seconds later I heard his truck start and the sound of his tires spraying shells from the drive as he headed for the highway.
“I didn’t mean to upset him again,” I said.
Cyn went to the sideboard and took out a bottle of bourbon and a couple of glasses.
“This isn’t the first time it’s happened,” she said. “Do you take ice or just water?”
“Water will be fine,” I said.
I followed her into the kitchen. As I stood there, I was impressed by the vastness of the place, the immenseness of its rooms, and how small she seemed.
She handed me a glass and then raised her own in a toast.
“It’s nice to have somebody to drink with,” she said.
All at once I understood why she had come to my house and why we had ended up here in the country in a vast and decaying house. It wasn’t a plan, at least not a sinister one. It was something else very human.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
She led me back through the parlor and the living room to what appeared to have once been a sunporch but had since been enclosed and made into a den. She put an old-fashioned LP on the turntable.
“Do you like Stravinsky?” she asked.
“Yes.”
A few seconds later The Rites of Spring came floating out over the room.
“When I grew up, all I knew was rock and country,” she said. “And I’ve got to admit, some of it was good. But I wanted more than that. So when I married Doug, I started taking a few courses at the university. Music, for one. Doug didn’t think much of the idea. Education wasn’t something he ever felt a need for. But he tolerated it.” She smiled bitterly. “Tolerated. What a terrible word.”
“You and your husband didn’t have a lot in common?”
She raised her glass and stared into it.
“Not much. I fell in love with him because I was young and he had money and it seemed like a way out. He wanted me because I was a decoration and I wasn’t a threat to him.” She looked up into my eyes. “And then, one day, I became one.”
All the tenseness I’d sensed earlier was back, and I saw her fingers go white against the glass.
“Still,” I said in a near whisper, “you loved him.”
“Did I?” She set the glass down on the table and sighed. “I guess I did. You can’t live with somebody that long and not feel something. I kept telling myself that.”
“Do you still keep telling yourself?” I asked.
“Not often. Now I see him more for what he was. A bully, a drunk, lazy and ignorant. A man who was drinking in some bar when the word came about his son being killed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry, too, for dredging all this up. I didn’t mean to. I thought I’d done a pretty good job up to now.”
“I think you’ve done a great job.”
“You’re nice.”
“Sometimes. But I have my moments.”
She stood and came over to me then.
“No, I think you’re always nice. I can see it in your face.”
“Can you.” It was a statement.
“So who is she?” Cyn asked, surprising me.
I told her about Pepper.
“Is she coming back?” Cyn asked.
“Sure.” I tried to sound certain, but the word came out strained.
“My luck,” she said, pouring herself another drink. “The good ones are all taken.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, just watched her toss off half the glass.
“What if she doesn’t come back?” she asked suddenly. “You’d be free then, right?”
It felt like a stab in the belly, and I was still hunting for words when she set her glass down hard.
“See what a bitch I am? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, watching her refill her glass.
“Cyn …” It was the first time I’d said her name. “What was it about Staples when you saw him tonight?”
“I told you not to ask.”
“I’m sorry. But you’ve got to admit your reaction was pretty strong.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to answer.” Her words were a monotone, with just a touch of hopelessness.
I waited.
She looked at her glass as if trying to decide whether to drink any more and then lowered it.
“I don’t like Staples. He’s too smooth. Have you ever run into anybody that’s too smooth? He smiles, but there’s a knife behind it. He made his name around here by killing a man in a Shootout on Highway 9. The man was supposed to be the head of a big dope ring. But after Staples had shot him, it turned out the man didn’t have all the drug money he was supposed to be carrying and he had less than half an ounce of cocaine. Then, when Mark was killed, Staples investigated. He said Mark had been drinking. The autopsy showed a .05 level of alcohol. So Mark had had a couple of beers. He wasn’t drunk, but the story made the rounds of the whole damned parish. And when Doug was killed, there wasn’t any real investigation at all, because Staples and Cooney couldn’t decide whose jurisdiction it was, so they ended up deciding it wasn’t anybody’s. They went through the motions, that’s all. A poacher hunting out of season. That was the verdict. And that’s what I’ve had to live with.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s past.”
“Is it?”
She took another healthy swallow.
“I don’t know. All I know is you’re going to have to spend the night here whether you want to or not, because I’ve had too much to drive.” She giggled. “Unless you want to drive me to your place.”
“Cyn …”
She came up against me then, raised her face, and touched her lips briefly to mine.
“It’s okay. You can sleep in the extra room upstairs. I promise not to sneak in during the night.”
When she finished her drink, I let her lead me up the stairs. We went down a hallway, past closed doors, to another midway along. She opened it, and I saw that it was the master bedroom.
“The door across the hall was my son’s,” she said. “I don’t go there much. You can sleep in his bed.”
I watched her door close, then went into the room across the hall, shut the door behind me, and turned on the window unit.
With ten minutes I was asleep, but sometime in the night I awoke.
Something had shaken me out of my dreams, the sound of a door opening or steps outside in the hall. Then I heard a car engine start, faint and muffled by the sounds of the air conditioner. I got up and opened the door into the hall. Cyn’s door was cracked open and when I looked in, I saw her bed was empty.
The clock on the bedside table said one.
FIFTEEN
I pulled on my pants and tried to decide what to do next. She had the only transportation, so unless I planned to walk twenty miles or could find the keys to her jeep, I might as well make up my mind to stay here.
Then I thought about Meg. What if?
I made my way down the hallway to the master bedroom. I turned on the light and saw a phone on the bedside table.
This was not going to make me popular.
I dialed David’s number and after six rings heard him mumble a hello.
“David, I’m sorry to wake you up—”
“Alan? What the hell—?”
“I know. Look, I’ve got a crazy favor to ask you. You can kill me tomorrow but please do this for me now.”
“Do what? Jesus, man, it’s one in the frigging A.M.”
“I know. But I’m stuck in the country. I’ve got no car.”
“What?”
“Don’t even ask. But I’m worried about Meg. I need you to go stay with her for a couple of hours.”
“Where are you?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Please.”
He groaned. “All right. But what the hell are you expecting?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t let anybody that isn’t a doctor or a nurse into the room.”
“Like I’m a damn rent-a-cop.”
“Thanks, David.”
“We may be late getting on site tomorrow. Some of the crew may sleep through their alarms.”
“I understand.”
I hung up and sat down on the bed.
Did I really think Cyn could be using me to get to Meg?
It didn’t seem likely, but then, how many women left their bed at one in the morning to go driving by themselves? I rubbed my eyes and looked around the room.
It was tastefully furnished, with a mirror on the closet door and a separate chest of drawers on each side of the big bed. A gas space heater against one wall made me wonder if the big house didn’t get cold in the winter. There was a dresser beside the window, and I went over to look down at it, seeking some clue to the strange personality of the woman I knew as Cyn Devlin. A quick search of the drawers showed nothing but the usual accoutrements of a woman’s toilet. I turned to the chest of drawers on the left side of the bed and found her things carefully folded inside, one drawer for undergarments, one for blouses, one for shirts and pants. Nothing there.
Then I turned to the other chest, and the first thing I saw was the picture.
It was a small closeup photo framed in gold. The man in it was handsome in a beefy sort of way, the kind who had reached his peak in high school and looked like he would go to fat quickly afterward. His smile was half leer, half smirk. I decided instinctively it wasn’t the face of a man I would trust.
Doug Devlin. It had to be.
I set it back down and opened the top drawer. It was empty. So were the other drawers. She had taken out all his clothing.
Nor was there anything in the closet, for when I opened the door, all I saw was her own clothing beside a clutch of empty hangers.
It was after I closed the closet door that I turned and noticed the big trunk at the foot of the bed.
I opened it and saw that it seemed to be a repository for family documents. I flipped through an album that showed Doug and her on their wedding day and photographs of their son, Mark, shortly after birth and at various stages of life thereafter. A happy-looking child, with her delicate features but his father’s blond hair. I assessed his beanpole physique and wondered if his father had expected him to make the football team.
I saw him graduating from grammar school and I saw him on family picnics and playing catch with his dad. Each photo was carefully documented with a date and place, and I judged it was her handwriting, because some photos bore legends such as Mark and Doug at the beach, and Mark and Doug with Mark’s first buck.
And then, two years ago, the pages went blank.
I closed the book with a sense of having invaded a private tragedy.
Under the album was a cardboard box, and against my better instincts, I opened it.
A welter of papers confronted me. As I flipped through them, I saw that they were mostly bank statements and receipts.
A four-year-old dunning letter to Doug Devlin from a local car dealer and stapled to it a thank-you from the same merchant for full payment of the outstanding debt of $5,719. A series of credit card bills, to the limit, and stapled to them a canceled check signed by Doug Devlin for the full sum of $6,024. A receipt for a Yamaha four-wheeled ATV for $3,040, marked PAID-CASH. And there were others, including a stack of bank statements and canceled checks, most signed by Doug Devlin. They seemed to span a period of three years, from almost four years before the present to the time of Doug’s death.
I started down at them and slowly it came through to me why they were here: They were Cyn’s attempt to make sense of her family’s finances. I wondered if she had succeeded.
Then, under some clothes, my hand touched something else. A small envelope, yellowed now, with a stamped return address.
Rev. Thomas Wilbur,
P.O. Box 75 Farmerville, LA 71241
It was addressed in a slanted hand in blue ink, but it wasn’t the handwriting that got my attention, it was the address:
Cynthia J. Brown
No. 1764511
Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women
P. O. Box 26
St. Gabriel, Louisiana 70776
I stared down at it for a long time, thinking if I blinked, the letters might resolve themselves into some other words. The postmark was barely legible, but I made out the last two digits of the year, 78.
I took a deep breath and slipped the note out of the envelope.
The ink was faded, but I could read it. Aside from the date at the top, it was only a couple of lines.
Dear Cynthia Jane:
I know that this is a difficult time in your life but you must know that salvation lies in the Lord Jesus Christ and accepting Him. You will be in my prayers.
Sincerely,
Thomas Wilbur
I stared at it for a long time. Cyn had told me she’d come from poverty, but she hadn’t told me she’d been in prison. Maybe that explained her dislike for Staples. Maybe she felt that way about all lawmen. Or was it something else? Was she afraid he knew about her past, or, as bad, might find out?
From the date, it looked like she had been incarcerated just before she’d met her husband. I wondered if she’d told him or whether this was something she had locked away into the past and wanted to keep there.
But what could her crime have been? She hadn’t stayed long, so it couldn’t have been anything too terrible.
That only left a few hundred offenses, from attempted murder to extortion.
I was replacing the paper in the envelope when I heard the car returning. I thrust the note back down into the trunk, put the box of receipts and the album over it, and then closed the trunk lid and flipped off the light switch.
The door downstairs opened, and I tiptoed back to the bedroom at the end of the hall and slipped out of my pants. Then her steps sounded on the stairs and her door closed softly.
But I’d had a chance to look at my watch before I’d left her room, and the luminous dial showed she’d been gone only forty-five minutes, not nearly enough time to make it to Baton Rouge and back.
Meg was safe, and I was going to look like a fool in the morning.
I told myself I should feel relieved. The woman who was sleeping across the hall wasn’t a murderess.
But that was scant solace. For if she wasn’t a murderess, what was she?
SIXTEEN
I slept badly the rest of the night and finally roused myself when dawn began to lighten the texture of the darkness. I lay in bed a long time trying to put things together. Cyn had been in prison, though for what I didn’t know. She’d fled to a marriage with someone who wanted her for her good looks, and she’d been too young to ask many questions. Then she’d found that marriage wasn’t the answer to her troubles. Life had started to collapse around her again, first with the death of her son and then of her husband. And her husband’s demise seemed to be linked to some strange source of income that s
he had been trying to fathom, judging from the documents in the box.
But what source of income?
Then I remembered what Meg had told me in the hospital room yesterday and wondered why I hadn’t thought about it before.
The storekeeper was busy talking to the mailman when we got there. He asked us what we were doing, and David said we were archaeologists. Somebody asked us if we were looking for Lee Oswald’s buried treasure and everybody laughed.
Was that it? Lee Oswald’s buried treasure?
My skin began to go cold, and then I felt myself trembling. The implications were something I didn’t want to confront. Oswald’s treasure. Oswald had never had any money. All his short life he had bounced from one job to the other. Even his Marine Corps duty had been cut short by his request for a hardship discharge. It was all in the Warren Report, next to my bed at home.
Stories of treasure always sprang up around desperadoes. I could name a half-dozen communities in Louisiana that had buried loot from Jesse James, Lafitte the pirate, or, in the case of central Louisiana, the West-Kimbrel gang. There was the story of the lost Spanish gold in the Livingston Parish swamp and countless lost steamships with Confederate bullion. It would be natural—even inevitable—for such a rumor to spring up around a man who had committed what some considered the crime of the century.
Unless …
I got up and went to stand by the window, arms across my chest to keep from shaking.
Was it possible? I remembered what Clyde Fontenot had said the last time I’d talked to him. I’d written him off as a crazy man, but now …
“Alan.”
I turned my head to see her looking through the partly open door, fully dressed.
“I heard you moving,” she said. “You’re up early.”
“Just a bad habit,” I said, suddenly aware that I was in my shorts. “Like taking long drives at one o’clock.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I went for a drive. I do that sometimes. I can’t explain. It’s just this feeling of being cooped up, the need to—well—assert my freedom.”
Prison, I thought, but said nothing.
Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 10