“But last night it was something else,” she went on. “I had to think.”
I waited.
“I’d been around before I met Doug. He wasn’t the first man for me or the second or third. Knowing that drove him crazy. But at the same time he liked what I knew how to do. Sometimes I felt like I was just his whore. And sometimes he treated me like that. It’s not a part of my life I like to dwell on, and I thought I was pretty much past that, doing things on impulse. I liked to believe that these days I was cool and collected and planned every move. But last night I was willing to forget everything.”
“What’s the crime? Being human? That your life isn’t over because you’re widowed?”
“I know, I’ve been through all that. It’s probably my upbringing. My mother was religious. I often wondered if that was what drove my father to drink, all that piety. I spent Wednesday night in church and most of Sunday. I grew up with a healthy sense of sin, or maybe unhealthy. I rebelled against it, of course, but it’s still there.”
“Well, we’ve all got a lot of excess baggage,” I said.
“Yes.” She gave a wistful smile.
I turned around and reached for my pants. She gave a little gasp.
“What are those marks on your leg?”
I looked down at my calf and laughed.
“I got into an ant nest last year. The marks take a while to go away.”
“That’s not an ant bite,” she said, pointing to the dead-white swath on my ankle.
“No. That’s a burn. I caught on fire once. In Mexico.”
Her fingers reached out to trace the dead flesh and then drew back.
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“It did then. Now it only itches sometimes.” I shrugged. “Face it, you’re looking at a beat-up old archaeologist, or what’s left of him.”
My skin was tingling where she’d touched me, and she must have been able to tell, because she turned quickly and walked out of the room. I knew the temptation was past. For now.
We had breakfast and then she took me to the hospital. We circled the lot until I saw David’s Land Rover, and then she took me to the door.
“I guess this is it,” she said.
“For now,” I replied.
I got out quickly and walked in through the automatic doors, past a statue of the sad-faced Virgin.
I found David stretched between two chairs in Meg’s room. He roused himself as I came in and rubbed his eyes.
“Did I do good?” he asked sarcastically. “I chased out a nun, two attendants, and somebody looking for Uncle Elmer.”
“You did good,” I said.
“Think it’s time to tell me what the hell this is all about?”
I saw Meg stirring and motioned him to come outside.
In the hall I told him what had happened.
“I just couldn’t take a chance,” I said.
“Well, we all have to do our part.”
I stared past him. “I owe you one. Thanks.”
“Bullshit,” he snorted. “You owe me ten or twenty.”
We made it to the field by eight-thirty, not too bad, except that in three hours the sun would be scalding down like a hot poker. We’d picked up another hand, this one the business major. I gave him about half a day, but what the hell? We were short of people and he deserved a chance. I just hoped we didn’t have to carry him home.
I took over the crew until noon, giving David the easier job of finishing up work at the site we’d found. Halfway along I told myself I was too old for this sort of work. When I stepped on the hornet nest I decided anybody was too old for this.
I got away with just a couple of stings and stood there sweating. In my imagination I heard Bombast’s voice.
You mean this transect was not linear? The government is paying for linear transects …
I mumbled a curse at Bombast and made my way around a berry patch.
I dropped my shovel and screen and stopped to wipe the sweat out of my eyes. Below me was the creek, fresh and cool. I had an urge to abandon my tools and stumble down to the sands and lie in the cold waters, letting them cleanse me of the perspiration and dirt.
As I watched, I suddenly found myself wondering if the man who had shot Kennedy had gazed down on the same view and had the same desire.
Or had he been looking out over the terrain for another purpose, searching for the right place to hide something, something he had been given in payment for an act too terrible to name?
If so, who had given him the money? They would all be dead now, wouldn’t they?
By noon I’d managed to survey another hundred and fifty yards and made my way back to the staging point.
A few minutes later David showed up with some bags of artifacts from the site and brought out the cooler with his lunch.
After lunch I left David in charge and took the Land Rover into town.
I was looking for Clyde Fontenot, who seemed to think he had the answers, but his wife said he was out and she didn’t know when he’d return. Instead I dropped by the post office and found Adolph Dewey working on a ham sandwich and a bottle of orange pop.
“You look like hell,” he chuckled. “Found anything?”
“A few hornets,” I said.
“Got to watch those berry patches. By the way, how they looking? Ripe yet?”
“Just about,” I said.
“God, I love a berry pie,” Dewey said. “You like blackberries?”
“My mother used to make cobblers,” I said. “We’d go out picking in early June. What she didn’t use for the cobbler she’d put in jars.”
“The old people knew how to do it,” he lamented. “My wife does okay. But not like her mother. Though I wouldn’t tell her that.”
“Speaking of the old-timers,” I said, “who were the political powers in this parish thirty-five years ago?”
Dewey squinted and wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“Thirty-five years ago? Well …” He suppressed a belch. “There was the sheriff, Ryan Bilbo. Finally got himself indicted for vote fraud and spent a year in one of them federal country clubs, three, four years back. I was a deputy then. There was Judge Persons. He handled this whole district. Tough man, the judge. He’s been gone since about ’75. Strong states’ rights man. Ran for governor once, almost got elected. There was the D.A., P. O. Martin. But he mainly did what the others wanted. And there was two or three who weren’t elected to anything, just pulled the strings of them that was. Old man McNair tried to buy the whole damn parish. Owned half those gravel pits on the Amite. Got himself killed in an airplane crash in the early sixties. Shadwell Grimes owned the bank. But he didn’t get involved in much that didn’t affect him personally. Still, you wouldn’t have wanted to cross the bastard. Died going over his books after they passed the inter-parish banking law back in ’84. And then, of course, there was Timothy Devlin.”
“Timothy Devlin?”
“Oh, yeah. He had land and he had money, and that made him somebody to listen to, at least around here. And God but he hated a nigger.”
“Did he?” I said.
“You better believe. ’Course, lots of folks up here don’t have much use for niggers, but with old Timothy it was damn near a crusade. Wouldn’t even have ’em around to mow the lawn. Said they was all shiftless and thieves.” He shrugged. “Well, you know what I mean.”
“Was he Klan?”
“Klan, White Gentlemen, White Citizens’ Council, you name it. There wasn’t anything halfway about old Timothy.”
I thought of the grizzled face in the little picture beside Blake Curtin’s bed.
“John Birch Society?” I asked.
Another chuckle. “Seems to me he was in that, too. Always screaming how the politicians were selling out the country. Had one of them bumper stickers, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Always passing out petitions. Got a lot of signers, too.”
“How did he feel about the Kennedys?”
Dewey emitted a guffaw.
“They were Satan hisself. I never seen old Timothy so close to a stroke as when somebody said something good about JFK after the missile business. Said John Kennedy was just the spoiled son of a bootlegger, that he was ruining our way of life, and his brother was just like him. It was Roosevelt all over again.”
“Anything else?”
“Well …” Dewey wadded up his napkin and threw it into a trash can. “You gotta understand, talk’s cheap and in those days the idea of somebody actually killing the president was more like science fiction.”
I waited.
“Lotsa people wished Jack Kennedy would drop dead. He made a lot of people down here mad.”
“What did Timothy say?”
“Like I told you, he was always sounding off about something or other, so people didn’t take him very serious. But he did say it at least in my hearing once.”
He traced a pattern in the moisture ring the orange pop had left on the counter and then looked up at me.
“What?” I demanded. “What did Timothy say?”
Adolph Dewey gave a crooked little grin, and I saw that one of his lower incisors was gold. “He said, ‘I wish somebody would kill the son-of-a-bitch and put this country back on the right track.’ ”
SEVENTEEN
I stared at him.
“Do you remember when?”
The assistant postmaster shrugged. “I dunno. A year before Kennedy was killed. Or a few months. More likely a year, because he never said nothing more about it afterward and I didn’t remember it until a good time after the assassination. I think he knew he’d shot off his mouth too much and he didn’t want people coming around asking questions. After that old Timothy just laid low.”
Timothy Devlin. A virulent states’ rightser and hate-monger. A man with more than enough money to pay an assassin …
“You look kinda weak,” Dewey said. “You had a little too much sun, fella?”
I took a deep breath.
“I’ll be okay.”
“You wanna sit there ’til you get your strength back?”
“I’m fine. Thanks, Mr. Dewey.”
“You ain’t seen any ghosts out there on the old place, have you? Lee Harvey, for instance?” He laughed loudly, and I managed to shake my head. “Well, keep a lookout.”
I made my way back out into the sun and got into the Land Rover. The atmosphere was stifling. Reality swam like a mirage in front of my eyes.
We had gone berry picking every year at a patch just outside of town on the river road, and my mother had made sweet cobblers with homemade dough. Before Lee Oswald had come to Jackson, Louisiana, looking for work at the hospital.
Except that now I wondered. Had it just been a ruse? A lie to cover the actual reason he had really come here one August day? Had he come because powerful men in New Orleans knew someone here who’d be willing to pay for a job only an Oswald would do? Had they listened to Oswald brag at French Quarter parties about his marksmanship in the Marines and the rifle he had bought from a mail-order house and how he could change the course of history if given the right chance? Had they known about Timothy Devlin and his hatreds, known that he would put up the money to hire the sick young man with a craving for fame?
There were details missing, of course. Somebody had to have known several months ahead of time that Kennedy would be in Dallas that day, and the official story was that the trip hadn’t been planned that far in advance. The motorcade route hadn’t been published until four days before Kennedy’s arrival. But there had always been rumors about someone high in the administration who had been a part of the plot.
Was I going crazy? It was too strange to believe. Above all, I didn’t want to believe it.
But it had a terrible plausibility, and there were people who had seen Oswald here.
I thought about the receipts in the trunk in Cyn’s bedroom. Old Timothy had given Oswald a down payment, and Oswald had buried it somewhere on the property. Then Oswald had been killed. The money had stayed there until years later, when Timothy’s son had found it and used it to pay off his debts. And then had been killed himself, either by accident or by someone else looking for the money. Cyn had figured part of it out, enough to know her husband, once desperate for money, had found the stash and spent only a fraction of it by the time of his death.
Another terrible thought came to me then. Was that why she was opposed to selling even Buck’s land? Was she convinced the cache lay somewhere in those woods and that selling the land would cheat her of the chance to find it? Was Buck, then, the only one of the family who was completely innocent of what had happened? Buck, the professional military man, who could probably kill with a piano wire or a knife?
I drove into Clinton and stopped at the courthouse, where I found Esmerelda in the clerk’s office, engrossed in the conveyance books.
“So did you fight back?” she asked when she saw me.
“Against what?”
“The bear that left you for dead.”
“Very funny.”
Esmerelda closed her legal pad and shoved her glasses further up on her thin nose.
“Not trying to be. David says you’ve been acting funny lately. Aunt Esme is here to listen.”
I managed a smile. Esmerelda was everybody’s aunt. A widow who had gone back to school ten years ago and earned a doctorate in Southern History, she was a denizen of the conveyance books and tax records, and seemingly only came up for air to look bored in times between work.
I glanced around the room, but the only other person was a sleepy-looking clerk near the front.
“What have you found about Timothy Devlin?” I asked.
“Timothy Devlin?” She stared at me through her lenses like I’d asked about the dead czar. “Nothing. He isn’t in here. Why?”
“Isn’t in there?”
“No. The Devlin property is on the west side of Thompson Creek. That’s West Feliciana Parish. I haven’t made it to the St. Francisville courthouse yet.”
I hit the counter with the flat of my hand.
“Score one for you.”
“You need to know something about him?” she asked, peering at me.
“I want whatever you turn up. He died in 1980. I’d like to know what of.”
She nodded. “That’s easy enough. But why do you want to know? Is this one of your wild-goose chases? This have something to do with Meg?”
“Meg? Why should it?”
“Because I know you, Alan. You’ve got something in your teeth and you’re running away with it.”
“Well, maybe. Just check for me, will you?”
“Sure. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Esme.”
“You won’t thank me when you get my bill.”
I went back to the survey area and, instead of waiting for the others, walked down to the creek and then up again to the cabin.
Had Oswald really come here, then? And had he buried his assassin’s fee somewhere nearby?
But why here? Why not take it back to New Orleans with him? Why bury it on someone else’s property when he couldn’t even drive an automobile and would have had to make special arrangements to come up here and get it? When someone else who knew the land might find it first?
Or had he fallen in with somebody already here, someone who had put the notion in his head?
Doug Devlin?
I thought of the woman in the big house, with her own demons to battle. Had she suspected her husband of complicity in the Oswald affair? Any connection with Oswald would have been before they met, when Doug was very young, a teenager. A teenager under the sway of a powerful, domineering father …
I went back down to the creek, stooping to scoop up some water and splash it over myself, washing away some of the sweat and dirt. But I knew it would take more than water to wash away the other kind of dirt I felt.
We packed up and half an hour later were in Baton Rouge. I went straight home, not bothering to check for messages at the office, and submerged
myself in the tub. When I had sponged off the last of the grime, I dried, dressed, and drove out to the hospital to see Meg.
A stern-looking man with thinning hair was standing by her bed with a dumpy blond woman who looked up at me in alarm.
“Oh, Alan. I want you to meet my parents.”
Mr. Lawrence gave me his hand in slow motion, and Mrs. Lawrence tried to smile.
“We flew here as soon as I could get away,” Meg’s father said. “Are you the person responsible?”
I gulped. “I’m the owner of the company.”
“You’re the one who left her to work alone in that building,” he accused.
“Now, Norman,” the wife said, but Norman was only getting up steam.
“Don’t you have any sense of responsibility?” he demanded.
“Daddy,” Meg remonstrated, “it was my idea. Alan didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You just listen, Margaret,” her father commanded. “It’s his responsibility to take reasonable care.”
I felt queasy. Norman Lawrence talked like a lawyer.
“Mr. Lawrence, we have an alarm system and it functioned. Nobody could have foreseen what happened. But I do feel responsible, because I like Meg and she’s doing a good job, and if there’s anything at all …”
“What you can do, Mr. Graham, is find another employee, because this one doesn’t work for you anymore. And you might talk to your attorney in the morning, if you haven’t already.”
“Daddy!” We all turned to the tiny figure in the bed. “If you don’t stop that, I’ll get up and walk out of here right now. They’re going to discharge me in the morning, but I feel well enough to walk this minute, and I will. I’ll go stay with a friend. And if you try to sue Alan, I swear you’ll never see me again!”
Norman Lawrence’s mouth opened, and his wife grabbed his arm.
“Norman, she means it.”
“You’re damned right I do,” Meg shouted, and her father flinched like somebody had slapped him. “Alan hasn’t been anything but nice to me, and what happened isn’t his fault. If you were any kind of father at all, you’d be helping him get to the bottom of it instead of standing here making threats. What kind of a lawyer are you, anyway?”
Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 11