The Shameless

by Ace Atkins

  NARRATOR: And the one thing you won’t hear anyone say is Sheriff Beckett had often been accused of bribery, physical force against prisoners, and being the enforcer for the county kingpin, a man named Johnny Stagg, who would later go to federal prison for his crimes.

  MAN’S VOICE [BACKGROUND NOISE OF CICADAS BUZZING OUTSIDE]: That was all a bunch of gosh-dang malarkey. Sheriff Beckett knew this place would return to a hell on this earth, the lawlessness after the Indian days or right after the Civil War. He knew Tibbehah County had a wild streak a mile wide and he had to be tougher than most. Maybe we did get a little rough with the prisoners sometimes. But let me tell you something, we never did nothing to anyone who didn’t deserve it. This place would’ve been up there with Phenix City, Alabama, if Hamp Beckett hadn’t taken care of us. All the nonsense about him throwing in with Johnny Stagg is a dang lie. Beckett hated Stagg and did everything in his power to get rid of him.

  NARRATOR: But Beckett never could. Thirteen years after he ruled Brandon Taylor’s death a suicide, Sheriff Hamp Beckett took his own life while still in office. He shot himself in the kitchen of his family farmhouse, a plate of pork chops and Cajun rice on the stove, the report says. Foul play suspected. None ever proven.

  MARY WATKINS: He just couldn’t live with what this place had become. Stagg had gotten too powerful. And after those folks had moved up to Hell Creek, the ones who followed that devil, Gowrie, he lost all control. A lot of folks started dying because of those drugs and Johnny Stagg did his dead-level best to make sure Hamp couldn’t make any trouble. He was old then, just hit sixty-seven, thinking on retirement, which never would have suited him. I saw his hands start to shake many times when I waited on him. Or when we were together in the off hours. He was a sick man. And he was humiliated. That’s why he killed himself.

  NARRATOR: Hamp Beckett had been in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Twice awarded the Purple Heart and once the Bronze Star. He credited the military for shaping his life, leading him to a disciplined, moral path. Later, he’d try to instill those same beliefs in his nephew, Quinn Colson. Beckett and his wife, Halley, never had children, often looking out for Quinn and his sister, Caddy, as if they were their own.

  QUINN COLSON: My uncle put a .22 in my hand on my sixth birthday. We shot cans and bottles. He taught me how to fish and to hunt. Some of my best memories were walking into the woods with that man. He seemed to stand taller than the rest. He just kind of showed you how to act by the way he treated his own family and even those he had to arrest. I never wanted to be like my father, but I wanted to be like my Uncle Hamp. Whatever is whispered about him now doesn’t tell the whole story. Something awful happened to him, but Hamp Beckett was once a damn good man.

  FIFTEEN

  Tashi knew approaching Maggie Colson at the hospital again would be a major fuckup. She had to wait until she was off, away from Quinn, and not so guarded about talking. Making a run for Quinn at the El Dorado had been her biggest mistake since coming to Mississippi. She should have tried to validate what she’d learned, talk to Quinn when she had everything in order and not just some working theories. But with the money running out, her people in New York desperate for progress, and the need to push, she’d gone too far too fast. She and Jessica decided the best thing to do was to get Maggie back with the program, make her feel as important and part of the team as when they’d first met. Everything they wanted to know Maggie had answered. Every little detail about the summers of 1996 and 1997 came from her strong recollections. The magical summers full of endless nights, flickering fireflies, and kids making out behind the old stadium and down at Choctaw Lake. A wild, tangled teenage romance.

  And now, if there was a connection to Quinn, she’d be their best bet.

  It was Wednesday, weeks since they’d gone to Quinn with more questions about his time poaching on the Hawkins land and the fight they’d heard about from E. J. Royce. She decided to go at it alone, leaving Jessica at the county courthouse searching more records from the mid-1990s, Jessica already knowing the clerk’s favorite brand of cigarettes and love for Little Debbie snack cakes. Maggie Colson was their best bet, but she’d grown distant, evading phone calls, refusing to talk when they ran into her in town. Maggie wouldn’t even look her in the eye the last time she and Jessica had shown up at the hospital.

  Tashi followed a long, winding road up to a little hamlet called Fate and then off onto County Road 380, deep into some newly planted loblolly pine (she’d learned about the local trees online to add color to the podcast), and into some cattle pastures and wide expanses of farmland. The locals called the place the old Beckett homestead even though the homesteaders and the last Beckett had died off. Quinn Colson had lived in the house for nearly a decade now, the same house where his uncle had taken his own life. Maggie and her son moved in after they married in June.

  She knocked on the screen door, the main door open wide into a long, wide hallway, country music loud and coming deep from inside the home. Tashi didn’t know the song, something about Satin sheets to lie on, satin pillows to cry on . . .

  Tashi knocked again, the recorder strapped over her shoulder and microphone in hand almost becoming an extension of herself. The music grew softer and Maggie appeared down the hall with a basket of laundry in her arms. She didn’t look pleased to see Tashi. Maggie put down the basket and came to the screen door, not opening it, only looking through the mesh at Tashi. “We’re done,” she said. “I’ve tried to be polite. But y’all don’t seem to understand. I can’t believe you’d accuse Quinn of something so horrible.”

  “I didn’t accuse him of anything,” Tashi said. “We heard some details and we went right to him. That’s what we do. We investigate.”

  “Quinn and I didn’t even know each other back then.”

  “Not at all?”

  “We were friendly, but we weren’t friends,” Maggie said. “Y’all are trying to make it like Quinn had some kind of secret thing for me. He had a girlfriend named Anna Lee Amsden. They were in love and damn near got married right out of high school. Why don’t you talk to her? I wasn’t but just some knobby-kneed kid to him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You bet,” Maggie said, ready to close off the conversation and slam the solid-wood door. “Sorry you drove all this way.”

  “Can I come inside?” Tashi said. “Just for a minute? I know you’re angry. But if you would just answer a few questions, maybe we can clear this part up and we can move on. Your husband won’t work with us anymore. You know why we’re here, Maggie. The only thing that’s important is finding out what happened to Brandon Taylor. That’s it. And in doing so, we’re going to piss some people off. I’m sorry. It’s just part of the process.”

  Maggie hung there behind the screen door, not bothering to open the latch. Her eyes an intense green, her mouth a tight little knot. “I’m busy, Tashi,” she said. “I’ve got four days’ laundry to finish in the next few hours while I study for certification in geriatrics and still pick up my Brandon at school. How about I call you later?”

  “You never call us back,” Tashi said. “Every time we try and talk, you say you’re busy.”

  “What more do we need to discuss?” she said. “You want me to tell you Quinn had the hots for me when we were kids and took some shots at Brandon? That’s truly the craziest damn thing I’ve heard in my life.”

  “Some people swear it happened.”

  “Who?” Maggie said. She asked the question with contempt, like she already knew who.

  “I really can’t say,” Tashi said. “Not yet. We’ve got a lot of questions about what kind of kid Quinn was and what his Uncle Hamp did to shield him. It may not be anything. But it’s something we can’t ignore. To us, he looks like a person of interest.”

  Maggie shook her head, forearm resting against the doorframe, as Tashi shifted the recorder strap on her shoulder. “I wish y’all all the luck
,” Maggie said. “But we’re done. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Why not?” Tashi said, making sure to get the question on the record if Maggie was really going to cut them off. “You told us Brandon’s death has haunted you all of your adult life. Isn’t that right? Why quit on him now?”

  “I’m not quitting,” she said. “But don’t you dare try and run down my husband. Y’all have no idea of the people who are whispering into your ear. Did you take a second to pause and look at the record of that man, E. J. Royce?”

  “He was second-in-command to Sheriff Beckett for more than twenty-five years,” Tashi said. “He may be a reprehensible human, but we never found any marks on his professional record.”

  “And why would you?” Maggie said. “You two can’t even find the records on one of the biggest mysteries in this whole county. Why would they keep around the records on a warped old racist like E. J. Royce? Why don’t you ask Quinn about that man and what he did back in 1977 to some black soldier who wandered into Tibbehah County at the wrong time?”

  “Some say Quinn was pretty wild,” Tashi said, trying to stay on the question, not wander into some ancient history. “Two of his former teachers called him a juvenile delinquent. He once stole a county vehicle and nearly destroyed it in a chase along Highway 45.”

  “He and Boom Kimbrough took a volunteer fire truck for a joyride,” Maggie said. “They weren’t but sixteen. It was stupid, but they were just kids.”

  “That’s a felony,” Tashi said. “Right? And the charges were dropped a week later.”

  Maggie started to pull the door closed, still watching Tashi from behind the screen. “Y’all two think you’re smart,” she said. “You don’t know a damn thing about my husband. Why don’t you check his record when he was in the Army?”

  “We know who he became,” Tashi said. “We just want to know who he used to be.”

  “Quinn’s always been the same person,” Maggie said. “You need to spend some time checking up on E. J. Royce. It didn’t take me long to learn he’s the nastiest racist old fool in this county. He has enough dirty secrets and lies to fill up a million of your podcasts. Whatever he’s saying about Quinn is a goddamn lie.”

  “I don’t like Royce any better than you do,” Tashi said. “Being in his presence makes me sick to my stomach. But I’ve learned details and leads can come from unlikely sources. Like you said, you didn’t know Quinn then. And you really can’t know what he was capable of doing.”

  “Rumor is not fact,” Maggie said. “Lies will never become truth. Y’all are no damn better than Sheriff Beckett, looking for an easy answer to something really horrible.”

  “Did Quinn and Brandon ever argue over the Hawkins land?”

  “That never happened.”

  “Who is the girl they found?” Tashi asked. “Has he even mentioned her to you? A woman wrapped in a blue tarp buried on the Pennington property.”

  “God,” she said. “You people are like damn scavengers.” Maggie Colson slammed the door so hard the windows shook, leaving Tashi alone on the front porch.

  She pressed stop on her recording and walked back to her car.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Royce,” Quinn said, calling out at the man’s back. “Stop right there.”

  “Goddamn it,” Royce said, turning around in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. His brown-and-yellow-striped dress shirt ruffling loose and open around his undershirt. “Can’t a white man buy him some damn groceries without being harassed? My dogs ain’t et in two days and I ain’t et in one. The church quit delivering meals to me on account of me patting the backside of Mrs. Sorrows. Didn’t mean a damn thing by it. Hell, the woman must weigh two-fifty. I was just trying to thank her for being so kindly. Fat women love to get attention.”

  “I heard it wasn’t her backside you patted.”

  “That woman’s so big it’s hard to tell the front from the back.”

  Royce lifted a bag of Butcher’s Best dog food and tossed it into the bed of his truck. Quinn could smell the rank whiskey on his breath from six feet away. He had on an old white undershirt, stained down the front, and a pair of threadbare jeans. The MAGA hat crooked on his head as he stared at Quinn through a pair of dirty eyeglasses. Maggie had just called Quinn, told him Tashi Coleman had shown up at their farm, asking more questions about what Royce had whispered in their ear.

  “You told those two reporters from New York I took shots at Brandon Taylor out at the Hawkins place. Where in the world did you come up with a lie like that?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, boy?”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Quinn said. “Always have been.”

  Royce leaned against the grocery cart, a light wind rippling all the plastic bags. He rubbed the white whiskers on his chin, smelling of booze and body odor. His fetid breath like an old ashtray. “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree,” Royce said. “I recall your uncle covering for your ass one too many times.”

  “I never denied my uncle looked out for me,” Quinn said. “And kept me out of a lot of trouble. But to say I had some kind of run-in with Brandon Taylor? I barely knew the kid.”

  “Funny how the mind works,” Royce said. “It’s etched in my memory right clear.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t you take that tone with me, Sheriff,” Royce said, grinning. “Those New York women sure took a shine to this old man, took a seat at my knee like I was their papaw, wanting to know things ole Hamp kept off the books. This is just a set of alternative facts, son.”

  Quinn wanted very much to grab the man’s skinny neck and wring the hell out of it. But Quinn knew knocking some sense into E. J. Royce in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot wouldn’t look good to a lot of people. Even though the old man deserved it. You couldn’t knock good sense into a stupid man.

  “I don’t want to take sides in this matter,” Royce said, holding up the palms of his hands. “I don’t want to get involved in some kind of personal pissin’ match between you and your wife. I seen pictures of her when we were looking for that Taylor kid. You know, she sent him some pictures of her in a baby blue bikini down at Panama City Beach. Goddamn. Hard to erase something like that from my mind. Boys that age can do some crazy things with their hormones and peckers going crazier than a divining rod.”

  Royce popped a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a match. He coughed and coughed, using the cart to steady himself, smiling through the smoke. E. J. Royce had been waiting for years for this. Ever since Quinn and Lillie learned he’d thrown in with a psychopath named Chains LeDoux and the Born Losers to lynch a man in the seventies, Royce had wanted to turn things on Quinn. Quinn just studied the old man’s face like you’d watch an animal at the zoo.

  “Someone paying you, Royce?” Quinn said. “That’s a lot of groceries.”

  “I get my monthly check,” he said. “Just what are you trying to say?”

  “You never had an original idea in your life,” Quinn said. “Trying to tie me into Brandon Taylor’s death didn’t come from you. It’s too creative for your warped mind.”

  “I didn’t say you did or didn’t,” Royce said. “I just said your Uncle Hamp never told them state people about running you off that hunting land.”

  “I never once saw Brandon Taylor out hunting anywhere,” Quinn said. “And I sure as hell didn’t take a shot at the kid.”

  “Like I said, funny how the mind works,” Royce said. “Different set of facts. I guess we see the events in two different ways. Maybe it’s best to let them women decide on what happened to the Taylor boy. I’m just trying to do my best to help them ladies out.”

  Quinn looked into the open window of Royce’s truck and saw a brand-new black baseball cap emblazoned with a Watchmen Society patch. He looked back at Royce and shook his head. “Vardaman will eat you
r old ass up.”

  “That man’s got vision, Quinn Colson,” Royce said. “What the fuck do you got?”

  Quinn watched Royce load the backseat of his truck with bags of canned goods, raw hamburger meat, and cartons of cigarettes before climbing behind the wheel. The old man ashed the cigarette out the open window, cranked the ignition, and peeled out of the lot.

  He could arrest Royce for speeding, reckless driving. But it was best to let him go, let the line out and see under what stump or stone the man would go hide.

  Quinn reached for his cell and called Reggie Caruthers. “Reggie?” Quinn said. “I need you to watch someone for me. Yep. Just let me know where he goes.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Caddy watched Boom work under the hood of her ancient GMC truck, peeking out every few moments to complain about the condition of the engine. She’d driven over to Boom’s place an hour before, bringing him a plate of catfish, fries, and hush puppies from Pap’s Place for lunch. The last time they talked, she knew Boom had been drying out, not eating much, on a black coffee and cigarettes diet. And she knew some catfish and a little honest work never hurt anyone.

  “These are the worst-looking spark plugs I’ve ever seen,” Boom said. “These hadn’t been changed in ten years. How long you had this truck?”

  “Eight years.”

  “You ever changed them in that time?”

  “She’s never let me down before.”

  “You call your truck a woman?”

  “Why not?” Caddy said. “Jason named her Big Bertha.”

  “She’d be an ugly woman,” Boom said. “All these scratches and dents. Busted-ass windshield. Tires balder than Ole Man Skinner’s head. You got maybe five hundred more miles at the most.”

  “Scars add character,” Caddy said. “Scars tell a story.”