A Killing in the Hills (25 page)

He seemed – and the idea startled her even more than the sudden sight of him had done, ambling around the side of this sad-looking house – a lot like what Carla might become, if she didn’t shed her present attitude. And then another notion struck Bell. She’d not dared consider it before. It had played around at the edges of her mind, pesky and impish, but she refused to give it words, even internally.

Now she did.

Maybe Carla would be better off with her father in D.C., after all.

‘Can we talk a minute, son?’ Fogelsong said.

‘Sure.’ Chess shrugged. ‘Guess you figured out that I’m Leroy’s grandson. Chess Rader. My mom’s inside. So’s my sister Alma. They don’t like me to smoke in the house, so I come out here.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The great outdoors, doncha know.’

After the sheriff and Chess shook hands, Bell offered the young man her own hand. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’ll be prosecuting the case against the man who murdered your grandfather.’

‘Does that mean you got ’em? You caught the sonofabitch?’ Chess said eagerly, pumping her hand with absentminded vigor, so thrilled was he at the news.

‘No,’ Bell said. ‘Not yet. But we’re working on it.’

He nodded. The shine fell out of his eyes. He withdrew his hand. ‘Okay. Well, we’re all just so sad about Grandpa, I gotta tell you. It’s been real rough on account of—’ He looked away from them. He swallowed hard. He looked back. ‘You know what? I didn’t get along too good with the old guy. We fought a lot. Hell, he fought a lot with everybody – my mom, my sister, my dad when he was still around. After Grandma died and he come to live with us here, it wasn’t no picnic. But here’s the thing.’

Chess put his hands back in his pockets and then pulled them out again. He needed the motion, Bell saw. Needed a place to put his restlessness. ‘Grandpa had
standards
. You know what I mean? The man had a way of doing things that he thought was the right way and that was that. He didn’t care what anybody else said about it.’

Fogelsong had slowly removed a notebook from his coat pocket. He was marking on the page with a yellow pencil no bigger than his thumb. Casually, without looking up at Chess, the sheriff said, ‘Pretty small house for all of you, isn’t it? You, your mom, your sister – and then your grandfather moves in? This house has – what, maybe two bedrooms, tops? One bath? Must’ve been kind of tight. And tense. You must’ve resented him a little bit, right? Crowding you up like that?’

Chess looked at the sheriff for a full minute before replying. ‘You are seriously off base, mister. Way, way off base. If you’d known my grandpa, you’d understand that.’

‘I did know him,’ Fogelsong said. ‘Just to say hello to. And he had a temper, as I recall. He could be headstrong. Unreasonable. He could piss people off.’

‘Sure he could,’ Chess shot back. ‘Like I said, he had standards. He knew his own mind. That’s why me and him tangled. He wanted me to go back to school and get a good job and help out my mom. And I told him it wasn’t any of his damned business. And you know what?’

Agitated now, riled up, Chess pulled his hands in and out of his pockets again. Bell guessed that he wanted a cigarette, to calm himself down. But she could also sense that he was fresh out, and that he had too much dignity to try to bum a smoke from either one of them.

‘You know what Grandpa did then?’

‘No, son,’ the sheriff replied quietly. He wasn’t writing anymore. He was looking at Chess. ‘I don’t. What’d he do?’

‘He went out and he sold his chop box and his jigsaw and his router – his
tools
, man, the things he loved more’n he loved anything else in the world, except maybe Grandma and my mom – and he tried to give me the money. Big damn wad of cash. He said, “You take this and you go to school, Chess. Anywhere you want, any kind of school. Just get your sorry ass
out
of here. Take this and get out. You can come back if you want, once you’ve got your education, but I don’t want you wasting your life in these parts with nothing to do except things that’ll bring shame to yourself and your family.”’ Chess paused, blinked. ‘That’s who he was. That’s the kind of man he was. You’d want to punch him in the mouth sometimes when you were arguing with him –
damn
, he could be stubborn – but in the end, he wanted you to do your best. To do the right thing. And he’d do whatever he could do to help you, too. I loved my grandpa, mister. If you’re thinking I ever would’ve hurt him in any way, if you’re implying that maybe I’d want to—’

Chess broke off his sentence and shook his head. ‘No way,’ he declared, fighting back a wave of emotion that seemed to pain him. ‘No way.’

The sheriff looked back down at the notebook page. ‘I believe you, son. I do.’

When the front door opened, a high-pitched creak from oil-starved hinges broke sharply against the chilly air. The sheriff and Bell turned to see an older woman – Eloise Rader, no doubt – start across the porch, clutching both halves of a jean jacket that refused to close over her pendulous breasts and round stomach. Her long black corduroy skirt trailed heavily along the porch floor.

‘Chess,’ the woman said. Suspicion turned the word into a whip crack. ‘What’s goin’ on?’

‘This here’s the sheriff, Mama, and this is the lady who’s gonna get Grandpa’s killer,’ he said.

Bell liked Chess’s simple description. He’d grasped the essentials. Now all she had to do was live up to it.

She looked more closely at the woman on the porch. It was a peculiar kind of obesity. It was as if Eloise Rader were in the grip of something outside her control. The excess weight seemed to be pulling her down, down, as if dark forces were reaching up from the earth itself to catch her, trip her up, hold her back. Her face was a large dollop of shifting, jiggling flesh in which the features had long ago been lost, like delicate pieces of jewelry in a churning vat of cake batter. She’d been crying, Bell saw; her massive cheeks were wet. The high collar of an enormous corduroy shirt – it was the color of rust – hid her chin. The untucked shirttail bumped over her knees.

‘Okay. Well, then,’ the woman said, ‘I’m Eloise Rader. Lee Rader was my daddy.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘I’d invite you in, but the house is a mess. If you don’t mind, we can just talk out here.’

‘Don’t mind at all,’ the sheriff said. ‘Been a pretty nice fall, ’cept for all the rain. You’d hardly know it was November today, would you?’

‘No,’ said Eloise Rader, joining him in the face-saving lie. ‘You wouldn’t.’

The four of them stood there silently for a moment, the fat woman on the porch, and out in the yard, her son and Sheriff Fogelsong and Bell. One of the things Bell loved best about Nick Fogelsong was just this: He understood people like Eloise Rader right down to the bone. He realized right away that to not invite visitors inside, to not be hospitable, to not offer them something to eat and drink, was humiliating to Eloise Rader. Yet she had no choice. The inside of her house would be much worse than the outside of her house. And she wasn’t able to offer them refreshments because she couldn’t afford it. She had nothing to spare.

Fogelsong had picked up on it right away, far quicker than Bell had: These people were struggling. Struggling hard. Living on the perilous edge of disaster. Lee Rader’s Social Security check was surely all that had kept them from complete economic collapse. They’d probably have to sell something to give him a decent burial.

‘First of all, I’m sorry for your loss, Ms Rader,’ the sheriff said. ‘Leroy was a good man.’

She nodded. Her eyes filled up again. Her chin trembled. But she didn’t say anything, so Fogelsong went on. ‘I know my deputies were out here on Saturday, talking to you right after the shooting,’ he said. ‘All we’re doing here today is tying up some loose ends.’

Chess Rader laughed. ‘They’re callin’ it “loose ends,” Mama, but what the man really means is that they want to see if we had anything to do with Grandpa’s murder. Like, were we mad at him? Did we go all crazy and send somebody after him?’

The sheriff looked gravely at Chess. ‘That’s not even close to accurate, son. But if you want to upset your mother even more than she already is, then sure. Go ahead. Keep talking.’

Chess dropped his head, ashamed. But Bell silently admired him: He had guts. She’d give him that. Because he’d identified the true nature of their errand today. Maybe something a family member had done – maybe something in which Chess or Alma were involved, up to their gray necks – had brought down a bloody wrath on Leroy Rader.

And on his two closest friends.

‘Don’t mind Chess, Sheriff,’ Eloise said. ‘He’s hurting. We’re all hurting. We don’t know what to say or what to do. Daddy was a big part of our lives. Now he’s gone – and not the way we thought it would be, not from the cancer or a heart attack or something, but in this terrible, terrible way. I can’t even stand to think about it.’ She began to sob. There was no preliminary sniffle, no wind-up; she just fell facefirst into a violent storm of weeping.

With two pudgy hands, she reached out and grabbed the single wooden rail across the front of the porch, steadying herself while she rocked and moaned.

The sheriff waited. Before Eloise had recovered herself, the door opened again and her daughter, Chess’s sister Alma, joined her mother on the porch. She was a chunky, unsmiling young woman in a dark green hoodie and black bell-bottom pants that rode low on her meaty hips. She was two years older than Chess, Bell recalled from the file, and like him, she was unemployed. She had the same dirty-blond hair that her brother did. And the same intelligent eyes.

‘Mama,’ Alma said.

‘I’m okay, baby. I’ll be okay. Just can’t think about your grandpa without getting all upset.’ Eloise reached over and drew her daughter closer to her. Alma patted the denim that covered her mother’s wide arm while Eloise coughed, caught her breath, then resumed speaking.

‘Sheriff,’ Eloise said. ‘Tell me how we can help. We sure do want you to find whoever did this to Daddy and his friends. It just don’t make no sense.’

‘We agree,’ Fogelsong said. ‘In fact, we came back out here today, Ms Rader, for just that reason. To try to find a connection between your father’s murder and – well, and anything else in his life. I don’t mean to be insulting to you or your children, but it seems to us that maybe somebody was sending your family – or the McClurg or Streeter families or maybe all three – a message.’

Chess used a boot heel to dig in the mud that served as their front yard. ‘Whaddaya mean?’

‘Like trying to get back at somebody,’ Fogelsong said. ‘Like maybe you or your sister. And using the murder of three innocent old men to do it.’

Chess lifted his head from his earnest contemplation of the ground. ‘I know what you’re saying, Sheriff. You think maybe Alma or me might’ve been working for one of them drug gangs and we got ourselves into some kind of bad trouble. Well, once again, you didn’t know Grandpa very well. If me or Alma had been doing anything like that – I mean
anything
– Grandpa would’ve locked us up and thrown away the damned key.’ He shook his head.

Alma picked up where her brother left off. ‘Grandpa wouldn’t have put up with nothing like that around him. If he’d thought for a second that me or Chess was selling drugs, that would’ve been the end of us. He hated drugs.
Hated
’em. Thought they were ruining the whole state. If he’d caught us doing something like that, he would’ve told Mama to toss us out of this house. And if she wouldn’t do it, well sir, he would’ve moved out
hisself
. Before you could say “Boo.” Right, Mama?’

Eloise Rader nodded. She had curled her bottom lip under her top one, to keep her sobs in check. Her chin quivered from the effort.

Bell decided she’d been quiet long enough. ‘So how do you know for sure?’ she said to Chess and Alma, moving her gaze between them. ‘How can you be certain that your grandfather hated the drug gangs?’

Alma’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s
easy
, lady,’ she declared. ‘He was just about to lose one of his best friends over it. That good enough for you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Saturday morning was gonna be his last time meeting his buddies like that at the Salty Dawg,’ Alma said. ‘Which is part of what makes this whole thing so awful for us. After Saturday, he wasn’t gonna go there anymore. He’d made up his mind. I’d heard him on the phone that morning before he left, talking to one of the other guys.’

Sheriff Fogelsong’s tone was urgent. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said something like, “Selling them drugs is wrong and I’ve told him so and I won’t sit there every damned Saturday with the man, pretending it’s right. So if he don’t quit, then I’m through. I’ll drink my damned coffee at home. This is it.”’

‘Who was he talking to?’ Bell said.

Alma shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It was either Shorty McClurg or Dean Streeter. One of them other two. So
now
do you believe me? If me or Chess was selling drugs and Grandpa knew about it, he’d a-never put up with it. We would’ve been kicked outta here a long time ago. Ain’t that right, Mama?’

27

On the drive back into Acker’s Gap, when the companionable silence descended once more inside the Blazer, a phrase tolled in Bell’s head:

Twenty-nine years
.

In all that time, Shirley Dolan hadn’t answered a single letter from her. Not one. When Bell had tried, over and over again, year after year, to see her sister during visiting hours at Lakin Correctional Center, the answer that came back was always the same one:

No
.

The bleak sameness of the county’s back roads churned by the windows like dirty smoke. Bell was thinking about Lee Rader and about the shooting, and about the man still at large, the man who’d walked into a restaurant and opened fire, and she was thinking about Albie Sheets and Tyler Bevins – but she was never not thinking about her sister as well. And about the parole hearing.

People always talked about multitasking as if it were a desirable skill. A valuable technique. An asset. But it wasn’t, Bell knew. It wasn’t a choice. It was a curse. You couldn’t not do it.

She looked over at Nick Fogelsong. His hat was off, flung into the backseat when he’d first climbed in, but he’d left his coat on. Hunched over the steering wheel as if he were protecting it from insult, he glared straight ahead at the perforated road, the way he tended to do, Bell knew, when he was engaged in serious and protracted thinking of his own. His musing-mosaic was different from hers – its pieces surely included his wife’s illness, and other things of which she was unaware – but there were also areas where the two pictures overlapped, places where Bell’s thoughts convened with his.