I thanked him. “So how’s Meg?”
“She wants to come back and work for you. And she may just do it.”
I told him she was welcome anytime and thanked him for the help.
The next morning I went in at nine o’clock, just in time to hear my phone ringing. It was Bombast on the other end.
“Alan, have you been complaining to people?”
“About what?”
“You know about what. I got a call from the colonel this morning, direct. He never calls anybody direct. A congressman was asking about this project.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I ask the questions.”
“What’s the question?”
“Did you complain to third parties about my Stop Work order?”
“No.”
I heard her sigh, a sound like wind rushing out of an ice cave.
“Well, I guess it must be the local politicians.”
“I think that would be a good bet.”
There was a brief silence.
“So are you ready to finish the survey?” she asked.
I started to answer, then caught myself. “Are you saying you’re revoking the order?”
She cleared her throat. “I’m reevaluating the situation in light of more evidence.”
“I’d have to be assured of the safety of my crew,” I said.
“You mean you’re refusing work?”
“No. I’m suggesting a wait of another two or three days to see if this business can’t be straightened out.”
“Are they about to arrest somebody?”
I thought quickly, then jumped in with both feet. “I think so.”
“Well, that makes sense. I think I can sell the colonel on that.” Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. “Any idea who did it?”
“Not yet. But I should find out soon.”
“I hope they get him,” she said.
“Who says it’s a him?”
“Well …”
Gotcha, I thought.
“I’ll let you know what happens,” I said.
“Right. Keep in touch.”
We hung up, colleagues in a murder investigation.
Right.
David drifted into my office.
“Did I hear that we’re on again?”
“Almost,” I said.
He frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means somebody’s got to be charged with killing two people.”
TWENTY-FIVE
It was only desperation that made me drive back to Clinton. After all, what could I expect to learn? But I was running out of ideas, and when I’d talked to Sam Pardue, he’d acted like there was something about Doug Devlin he was holding back.
Probably, I told myself, it was simply that he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. But there was always a chance it was something that would help, and I didn’t have much to lose.
This time, though, I drove around in traffic for half an hour until I was sure there was nobody behind me. When I was confident I was alone, I took Plank Road north past the airport and the refinery.
Once, it had taken people a whole day to get down from Clinton and St. Francisville to Baton Rouge. Two days for twenty-five miles. They’d laid a road made of planks to help them through the mud, but many had chosen to camp north of the present city and get a head start in the morning. Now a day would take you to New York or London. Or it could take you to the cemetery, the way it had Clyde Fontenot, Doug Devlin, and Doug’s son, Mark.
Mark: Something about him was clawing up at me from my subconscious.
I put the urgings aside, knowing from experience they’d emerge when ready, and concentrated on the narrow road ahead. I wanted this over with. I wanted the violence to stop and above all I wanted to lay the ghost of an assassin to rest.
Because as long as there was no answer as to why Oswald had come here, he would still live. The truth, I told myself, no matter how horrendous, had to be better than not knowing.
I reached Clinton and wondered if Sheriff Staples was in his office, plotting his next confrontation with Sheriff Cooney. Two sheriffs, as different as two men could be, and two dead men had fallen between them.
A hell of a thing, I told myself for the fiftieth time.
When I got to the Pardue house it was nine-thirty and already steamy hot. A station wagon and a truck were in the drive, and I wondered if the old man had finished his tree house project.
When I knocked, the door opened and the birdlike woman who’d been with him in the backyard frowned out at me.
“Is Mr. Pardue home?”
“Yes. But he’s not well.”
“Could I have five minutes of his time? I need to ask him something about the land he used to own.”
“I don’t know—”
“Angie.” It was Pardue’s voice, coming from deep within the house. “Is it for me?”
“You’ve woken him up,” she accused.
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged like it was all hopeless anyway.
“Well, you might as well come in.”
She showed me into the living room, and I saw him then, sitting in a stuffed chair in the dark, eyes barely open. He seemed to have lost ground since I’d seen him last, a little more life having leaked out, like air from a rubber boat.
“Who are you?” he wheezed.
“Alan Graham,” I said. “We met the other day. You were fixing your tree house.”
“Finished it,” he said. “Finished it two days ago. It’s all done. I wanted to finish it. For the grandkids, see.”
“And you did,” his wife assured him.
“Yeah. Now …”
He seemed to be dying in front of my eyes.
“Mr. Pardue, the other day we were talking about Doug Devlin and I had the feeling you were getting ready to say something. You remember what it was?”
“Doug Devlin?”
“Yes, sir.”
To my surprise he nodded. “I remember.”
I waited, my heart thumping.
“He bought my hunting bow,” he said.
“He what?”
“My hunting bow. He bought it. A fiberglass bow, cost two-fifty new. I never used it, decided to get rid of the thing. He paid for it with two brand-new fifty-dollar bills. I wanted one-fifty and he drove me down. A man like Doug Devlin. Spent all of Timothy’s money, can’t even hardly pay the funeral home to bury his son, and then buys a hunting bow. What kind of a man is that?”
I told him I didn’t know. He sank back into his chair, the light fading in his eyes, and I knew I’d gotten all I was going to get today and maybe forever.
I drove back toward Clinton. A hunting bow. Well, maybe it wasn’t so strange. Lots of people around here were bow hunters.
The memory of Mark, Cyn’s and Doug’s son, kept coming into my mind, as it had on the way up. Why did I keep feeling that the dead boy figured in the case, just as his dead father and his father before him and a dead assassin were all important? What kind of sense did it make? Then I thought about the scars on Cyn’s flanks and a little shiver went down my spine. I wasn’t sure what sense they made, either.
I found Dewey in the Jackson Post Office and asked him where the Devlins buried their dead.
“Just south of town,” he said and gave me directions.
I found the cemetery without any problem. It was located on a knoll, the kind Indians might have camped on. Now the place was populated by a village of gray granite stones. The postmaster had told me the Devlins were near the fence, and I walked to the far side. They weren’t hard to find.
Timothy’s was bigger than anything else in the cemetery, a cold, veined pillar six feet high that seemed to match the man himself. There was a cross chiseled on the left and a small American flag on the right, and below them, in letters that dared anyone to dissent:
Timothy Bardwell Devlin
1900–1980
Patriot & Father
&nb
sp; My stomach turned. Patriot. The man who had commissioned the killing of a president? Was that the kind of man whose grave I was now facing? It said something about justice and the ability to escape it that someone like Timothy Devlin not only died of natural causes, but died honored.
I turned away to the smaller stones to one side.
Harriet Connor Devlin
1903–1972
Beloved Wife & Mother
Obligatory, I thought, and wondered how it must have been to have lived with someone like old Timothy.
The next stone belonged to Mark.
Mark Connor Devlin
Beloved Son
1980–1997
There were fresh flowers in the vase at the head of the grave, and the grass around it had been plucked short. Suddenly, with an intuition verging on certainty, I knew where Cyn had gone that night when she’d left me.
The last stone in the plot was Doug’s.
Douglas Connor Devlin
1948–1998
Interesting, I thought: Son and father had the same middle name, as if Cyn had not wanted to inflict her past on her only child.
I stared down at the cold gray surface, hunting for some other inscription, but there was none. No inscription, no flowers, as if Douglas Devlin’s were just another of the forgotten markers scattered throughout the place.
I drove back no wiser than I’d been when I’d come here. Cyn had loved her son, doted on him. She hadn’t cared for her husband. She visited her son’s grave at odd hours, because there was nothing else in the world she had to hold onto.
Then, one night, she’d come here to explain to him why she wanted to let go and to beg understanding …
But did any of that get me any closer to understanding who had killed Clyde Fontenot or Doug?
I went back to the office and worked until two. I looked at a couple of cost estimates, made corrections, and then read through a longish report on the project we’d done a couple of weeks back in the muddy field. The culture history section was all boilerplate, telling how the first Indian peoples had arrived in the New World and bringing them down through twelve thousand years to the present. When I got to A.D. 900, though, I stopped. That was when the bow and arrow had been introduced to this area. Before that, the chief weapon had been the spear-thrower. The bow and arrow had made hunting easier and the supply of meat more stable.
Why was the thought of Sam Pardue’s hunting bow popping up to bother me?
I made a note to ask Cyn if her husband had been an avid bow hunter and thumbed through the rest of the report. We hadn’t found anything, so there weren’t any tables of artifact frequencies.
“I’m going home,” I told Marilyn.
She said something under her breath that sounded like, “We’ll all be going home soon if you don’t do something,” but she was that way.
When I got to the house, I started to get out of the Blazer, then halted.
There was a gray Plymouth parked across the street.
I sat with my door open for a long time, trying to decide what to do.
I was being hypersensitive. I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the car that had followed me to distinguish it from any other similarly colored car of the same make and general age. Still, it was a coincidence I shouldn’t ignore.
But my experience with Staples had left me chary of calling the law. I’d feel like a fool if there was nothing to it. And besides, why would someone who was breaking the law park right across from my house? I reached into the glove compartment, took out the old revolver, and carefully loaded it with cartridges. Then I eased my door closed and walked around the side of the house to the back gate. Digger ran up to greet me and gave a little yelp of happiness. I hoped if someone was inside they hadn’t heard. The dog raced to the back door, waiting for me to come. I closed the gate behind me and looked around. The old concrete birdbath still leaned a few degrees askew. A cardinal, resplendent in his red coat, fluttered up from under an azalea and cocked his head at me from the telephone line. I tiptoed up the back steps to the porch and wondered if I’d remembered to leave the screen door unlocked.
I had. I slipped in, leaving Digger outside, and made my way carefully across the boards to the back door.
Like everybody else in the neighborhood, I had an alarm system, which I’d installed after my father’s death. I slipped my key into the lock, turned it slowly until I heard a click, and then pushed the door open. I reached in, punched in the alarm code, and eased the door closed behind me.
If there was someone there they were being very quiet.
I entered the hallway and stopped at the sunroom, which I used as an office. I peered in.
Computer, printer, telephone—everything seemed to be in place.
I reached the end of the hallway and looked into the living room. Everything was in order. That only left the upstairs.
I took the revolver out of my belt, feeling foolish, and started up the stairs one step at a time, halting to listen for noises, but the old house was silent.
When I came out into the upstairs hallway, a board creaked and I froze, wondering if I’d telegraphed my presence. When there was no sound in response, I started forward again, coming at last to the door to my parents’ bedroom.
Why did I always end up here? Why was it this place that drew me? I knew the secret now. Why couldn’t I leave it alone? There was no one here. I was being driven by my imagination, by some stirring of the unconscious that was telling me I hadn’t finished with it all just yet.
I pushed the door open and froze in shock.
Colonel Buck Devlin was sitting at my mother’s dresser, arms folded, a smirk on his face.
TWENTY-SIX
“Better put that thing down,” he drawled. “Looks to me like it’s still got part of the cleaning rag in the barrel. Good way to blow up an antique.”
My eyes darted down, and before I realized what had happened he was on me, twisting the pistol out of my grip. I watched him toss it onto the bed and rock back on his heels.
“I believe in the Second Amendment,” he said, “but I swear there’s some people shouldn’t have guns.”
I felt the blood flood through my face.
“What are you doing in my house? And why’ve you been following me?”
Devlin shook his head in wonderment.
“Damn. Here’s a man who’s at the complete mercy of a burglar, and instead of begging for his life, he takes the offensive. I like that.”
“Answer my question. And how did you get past the alarm?”
His brows rose. He turned toward the dresser.
“You know, every time I come in this house I get a funny feeling. Sort of like the spook shows when I was little. Everything’s so damned neat. It’s sort of like that fellow Norman Bates in the movie. You aren’t Norman Bates, are you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“This mirror. There are a few smudges on it, you know that? Thumbprints. But I took your prints—they’re all over the downstairs—and they don’t match. I’ll bet these prints belong to the people that used to live here. Your parents. You haven’t changed anything since they were alive.”
He gave a little shrug and then his elbow crashed into the mirror, splintering the glass so that it trickled down onto the table.
“About time a few things were changed,” he said. “And don’t worry about getting a different alarm system. I can beat ’em all.”
“What do you want here?” I asked, trying to keep myself from rushing him, a move I knew would be disastrous.
“It’s simple.” He came a few steps toward me and stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was a velvet whisper. “I want you.”
“What?”
“You heard me. My brother and I didn’t get along that good. Oh, we managed, but mainly because I was away all the time. Tell you the truth, he wasn’t much of a brother. But he was all I had. Folks like us, from the backwoods, we only know one thing, and that’s blood. My family’s blood
ran out on the ground when he was shot. I want to know who did it.”
“And you suspect me? I didn’t even know your brother.”
“So it seems. But you knew Clyde Fontenot and he’s dead, too. Want to try to make me believe the two aren’t connected?”
I was silent.
“You seem to be into everything that’s happening, so I decided to check you out. I made a little visit here the other day. And what I found made me wonder. Man your age, living in a damn crypt. I asked myself, ‘Is this the kind of nut could do something and maybe not even know he did it? Or the kind who could imagine his dead mama or daddy telling him to do something?’ I decided to follow you, see what you were up to. Borrowed my maid’s car in case you’d noticed my Bronco. But you gave me the slip the other day. Pretty smart. And I asked myself, ‘Why would an innocent man give me the slip?’ By the way, where were you?”
I didn’t say anything, and he took a step closer. His expression remained deadpan, but suddenly his hand shot out, connected with my midsection, and all the air rushed out of me. I crumpled onto the floor and curled into a ball.
“Not smart to piss off somebody who can make you wish you hadn’t ever been born.” He sat down on the bed.
The room swam, and little spots of light danced in front of my eyes. An eternity later I felt air seep into my lungs again and realized I was breathing. I dragged myself up to a sitting position.
“Now, where did you go?”
“Down the hill,” I said.
“It isn’t nice to lie.”
His right hand clenched, and I stiffened for another blow, but it didn’t come.
“Then there’s my sister-in-law. Pretty nice-looking little piece. You getting some of it?”
I tried to push myself up, but his foot came out and shoved me backward.
“Steady, Bud.” He got up so that he towered over me, legs apart.
“Tell me, did she ever mention anything about her little problem with the law? She’s a jailbird, you know.”
I said nothing.
“So she told you.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. I always gave her credit for cunning. Probably figured you’d find out.” He crossed his arms. “You know, I wondered if maybe she’d put you up to it—killing Doug, I mean. I wondered how far back the pair of you went. So you know what I decided to do?” He bent forward, grabbed my hair with one hand, and put his face close up against mine, so that I could smell his breath, hot and slightly sweet, like blood. “I decided to come here and see what would happen if I let you catch me inside. I decided if you were the killer, you might have the guts to do something about it. But”—he let my hair go, and my head dropped—“you haven’t got the balls. You’re just a grown-up Boy Scout with your shovels and machetes and arrow points.”
Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 17