Cinnamon Skin (13 page)

She looked bewildered. "I don't know anybody killed anybody, mister. You've got the wrong person."

"Just tell us if this is the man you once knew as Larry Joe Harris."

He slid the color print out of the folder as he spoke.

She stared at it and made a strange, loud, moaning cry and bent forward from the waist as though she had been struck in the stomach. She put her hand against her mouth.

A man in a white chef's hat came bursting through the swinging door out of the kitchen, a ten-inch knife in his hand.

"iQue pasa!" he said. "Whassa matta, Betsy Ann?"

"Nothing. It's okay Arturo."

"What do you mean, nothing?"

"Everything is okay, really."

He looked at her and at us with suspicion and went back to the kitchen. A young man with a beard was leaning out of a booth to look at us.

She tottered, then sat quickly in one of the other chairs at the table, eyes closed, and said, "Sorry. Sorry."

Meyer covered her hand with his. "I'm really sorry."

She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. "Where's the picture? I want to see it again. Thanks." She leaned over it and studied it. "He's kind of better looking than when he was young. I've told myself he died, or he would have got in touch somehow. But he didn't. I knew he never would. Sure, that's Larry Joe Harris. Is that all you want from me?"

"Yes. And we're grateful."

"He killed your niece?"

"It seems probable."

"It was eighteen years ago. How did you know about him and me?"

"We talked to some people over in Freer."

"Sure. That's where Hume's damn sister lives. That's the worst thing he ever did to me, telling his sister what happened with me and Larry Joe, telling her he looked through the window. I suppose you could say I did something bad to him, too. All right. But telling his sister was like putting it on a billboard in living color in the middle of town. I just wasn't that kind of a person. I was twenty-three when I married Hume Larker and he was forty-three. I loved that man. You don't want to listen to all this dirty laundry."

"Betsy Ann, we want to learn as much as we can about Larry Joe Harris."

"He came by with those Japanese lanterns, and I thought they were just lovely. I got Hume to buy me one for the garden. I thought the salesman was a nice boy. I guessed he was twenty-two or twenty-three. He had a nice smile and he was polite. One morning around eleven o'clock, about a month later, he came by and asked me how I liked the lantern. I said I liked it fine. He said he sold lanterns and he read palms. I said that was nice, but I didn't have any money for palm reading. He said he would read mine free, right there in the doorway. So I held it out and he took me by the wrist and studied it, and then smiled into my eyes and he said that he could read in my palm that I was soon to have a love affair. I said I was married. And he said it was going to happen very very soon. He just hung onto my wrist and smiled at me, and he walked me right back through my own house. And… it happened. I was like a person in a dream. You know those dreams where something is happening and you can't stop it? I wasn't that kind of a woman. He should have known that. But I guess he knew something else about me that I'd never known. He came back to the house eight more times while Hume was off working. I know the number because I counted. And we hardly ever had anything to say to each other. It was always just like the first time. I would say to myself I was going to tell him off next time he came by, and when that old pickup came banging into the drive I would get all pumped up to tell him no, I wouldn't, we shouldn't, but he would take my hand and I would go right along with him like some dumb kid. And I must have been years older than him then. He had power over me. I don't know what it was. When Hume went out to find him and kill him, I hoped he would, because Larry Joe had ruined my marriage. But Larry Joe had already took off with Izzy Garvey. Just a dumb little school kid, and she ran off with him, taking all the money Walker Garvey had hid in the house and just about everything else wasn't nailed down. Where is Larry Joe?"

"We don't know. Where did he come from originally?"

"Like I said, we hardly said a word to each other. All the rest of the time we lived there, people stared at me and whispered. That damned sister of Hume's. You're a nice man, Mr. Meyer. I'd tell you anything I know that would help. But I don't know anything. Every time I think about it, I feel so damn dumb. I could live a million years and still never know how that could happen to me that way. And the hell of it is, Mr. Meyer, if he came in right now and smiled at me and took me by the hand, I think he could lead me right off wherever he wanted."

"I do appreciate your being so open and honest with us."

"I hope you find him. You should do with him like they do with witches and vampires. Pound a stake right through his black heart."

"You have no idea where he went when he left?"

"No, and neither did the law. Walker Garvey called them in on it first thing. They left with over two thousand dollars from under a loose board in the floor of his closet, some watches and some guns, and some sterling silver flatware that had come down from Izzy's grandmother on her mother's side. And of course, the pickup truck, which was found, I heard, in Abilene weeks and weeks later."

"And the girl never came home?"

"Never even wrote."

A group of men came into the restaurant, talking loudly and laughing. She got up quickly.

"I don't know anything that would help you. Really. And I'd just as soon not talk about it any more."

"Thank you for everything you told us," Meyer said. "I know how hard it must have been for you, remembering it."

Her face softened. "It was a long long time ago." She hurried off to take orders from the new arrivals. When she came back toward the kitchen, we signaled to her and ordered the Spanish beef stew. When she waited on us she was polite but remote. It was as though the conversation never had happened.

We stopped twice to ask about the old Garvey place, and at the second stop we got explicit directions and were told to look for the name Statzer on the rural mailbox. That was one of old Garvey's daughters, they said. Christine.

The Statzer drive was about four hundred yards long, and the buildings were spread out on a long knoll. Kids and dogs came swarming out. of the bushes. The dogs looked big and dangerous, but the little kids whapped them across the side of the nose and chased them back out of the way.

A chubby blond woman came out on the porch, shaded her eyes, and shouted, "Who you looking for?" She wore jeans and a T-shirt advertising Knotts Berry Farm.

"Christine Statzer?"

"That's me. What's it about?"

"Isobelle Garvey."

"Izzy?" She plunged down the three steps and came trotting to the car as we were getting out. "Is she alive? Where is she?" All the little kids were standing around, wide-eyed.

"I don't know where she is," Meyer said. "We came to ask about her."

The animation went out of her face. "So who is asking?"

"My name is Meyer. This is my associate, Mr. McGee. He is helping me look for the man we think married and then killed my niece. When he was using the name Larry Joe Harris, the same man is reported to have robbed your father and run away with your sister."

She tilted her head to the side and frowned. "Friend, that was eighteen damn years ago! That ain't exactly a red-hot trail you're following."

"The more we can learn about him, the better chance we have of finding him. We thought you might be willing to give us what help you can."

She shooed the children away and led us up onto the long deep porch. "They aren't all mine," she said. "Summertime, two of my sisters bring their kids up from Laredo for me to look after. It all evens out sooner or later. Set."

Meyer sat in a rocker. She sat on a bench and I sat on the porch railing. There was a mother cat with a basket of kittens under the bench. Three geese walked across the side yard, angling their heads to peer up at us.

"Papa didn't know a thing about Larry Joe. The way he found him, Papa went over there to Galveston when they wired him about those damn Jap lanterns coming in on a freighter. Do you know about the lanterns?"

"Your father got mad at a garden-supply dealer?" I said.

"Right. He got mad easy and often. He tried to import a dozen and then fifty, but thirty tons was the least he could take. He got the license and went ahead with it, and by the time they came in, he had almost forgot about them. So he went over and arranged for them to be trucked right here to the farm. On the way back, Papa picked up Larry Joe, hitch-hiking, and got onto the problem of the thirteen hundred garden lanterns, all of them in three pieces, and this Larry Joe told him he could sell anything to anybody anywhere, and they struck a deal. I must say that everybody liked him. When I met him, I liked him fine. At that time I'd been married almost a year, and my first baby was beginning to show. You see, Izzy and me, we were the two youngest of the seven. And when I left the place to move in with Burt and his folks, just Izzy and Papa were left here."

Meyer slid the photograph out of his folder and handed it over to her. She studied it. "Must be real recent. He's forty here if he's a day. Fine-looking man. Who's that beyond him?"

"Norma. My niece."

"She's blurred but she looks pretty. Anyway, it looked like Papa had made a good choice, because Larry Joe surely unloaded those weird lanterns. He must have put ten thousand miles on that old pickup. The people that bought them made a real good buy, if you like that kind of thing. He got rid of all but about a dozen. They're still out there in one of the sheds, I think. I remember seeing them a couple of years back. Maybe Burt moved them, I don't know. Papa sicked the cops onto Larry Joe. I guess the trouble was that Papa always had too many deals going. He was always taking off to check out something he owned some kind of a piece of. And that meant that Izzy and Larry Joe were here alone probably once too often. We all really loved Izzy, all us sisters. She was the best of the lot, believe me. She was cute and warm and funny and loving. And just a kid. You know? Sixteen. Too young to really know what kind of man he was. After they'd been gone some time we heard of two situations where he was getting an extra bonus along with the pay for those lanterns. Some woman down near Encinal, and another one above Catarina. And if it came out there was two of them, you can be pretty sure there must have been ten more being so careful it never came out."

"Your father must have been very upset."

"He was like a crazy person. He never could figure out how Larry Joe knew about the money under the floor, because he'd never let on to any of us he kept that kind of cash money in the house. They took two gold watches out of Papa's desk, and they took the sterling silver flatware that came down from my grandma. And the pickup truck which turned up in a used-car lot in Abilene weeks later. It turned Papa meaner than a snake. Not that he was exactly cheerful beforehand. He stayed sour until the day he died. Mom died when Izzy was three, wore down from having all us girls. Look, I'm telling you things. Tell me more about Larry Joe Harris."

"When he married my niece earlier this year, his name was Evan Lawrence. Five years ago, when he ran away with the sister of a real-estate broker in Dallas, his name was Jerry Tobin. She was killed in an accident near Ingram, when the car hit a tree and burned and he was thrown free. We don't know who he really is yet. We're trying to find out." She got up suddenly and walked to the end of the porch. She stood by the railing with her back to us, then turned around and snuffled and knuckled her eyes.

"It fits too good," she said tearfully.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

She walked slowly back toward us and sat down. "Four years ago we had a rain here you wouldn't believe. A hurricane came in off the Gulf and must have dropped sixteen inches here on Webb County. There's a creek over there you can't see it from here-it runs down into the Nueces and it's sometimes a trickle and sometimes dry. It was a river all by itself when that rain came, and it carved out new banks, and afterward one of my eldest sister's kids, she came running to the house talking about bones sticking out of the gravel bank. I went and looked and called the authorities. The experts dug it out. It had been buried near the creek about two or three feet down. They estimated it had been there ten to twenty years. The leg bones and one arm was gone, and so they couldn't tell how tall it had been. The experts from the state said it was a female from twelve to twenty years old. They found a couple of scraps of fabric. The trouble was that Izzy had never had any cavities that had to be filled, and she'd broken just one bone in her life, and that was a bone in her leg, and nobody ever found the leg bones. They had washed on down into the Nueces and washed away. The skull was stove in the back kind of like she'd been hit with the flat of a shovel. We sisters all got together and talked it over. Nobody could prove that the remains were Isobelle, and nobody could prove they weren't. And there was, of course, the note she left Papa. Something like, Please forgive us, we're in love, we're running off to get married, wish us happiness. We could understand running off, because every one of the rest of us couldn't hardly wait to get out of this house and away from him. We talked it over, and it just didn't seem natural he'd kill her before they even got started. Three of us out of six had met and talked to Larry Joe, and we all liked him. What we decided, there's a track where you can drive down and park in a grove by the creek, and couples sneak in there. So probably it was somebody else, we said. But we hadn't heard from her, not once in eighteen years, and we all loved her and she loved us all. And from what you tell me about him…"

She buried her face in her hands. She cried silently, shoulders shaking. Meyer hitched his rocker closer and patted her shoulder. He is a good patter. He isn't awkward about it. And, like the veterinarian who can quiet jumpy animals with his touch, Meyer has good hands for patting and comforting.

She turned a streaming face toward him. "I think I knew it all along. I think I knew it even before the time it rained so hard." She hopped up and ran into the house, saying in a smothered voice, "I'll be back in a minute."

It was closer to ten. The geese went by again, looking us over with beady suspicion. A kitten crawled over the side of the basket and sprawled mewling on the porch floor. Meyer put it back where it belonged, and the mother cat seemed to smile at him.

The children came racing by all yelling, the dogs in tongue-lolling pursuit. After the sound died, I could hear a meadowlark in the distance, an improbable sweetness.

She came out smiling and embarrassed. "It was a long time ago. I didn't expect it to break me up like that."

"We understand," Meyer said. "Can you tell us anything at all about the man which would help us look for him?"

"Like what kind of thing?"

"His likes, dislikes, skills, habits."

"Let me think. I saw him like three times, altogether it wouldn't be an hour. Papa said he was a real good shot with a rifle. I don't know how Papa found that out. Oh, and he spoke good Mexican. All of us down here in south Texas have some, but he had a lot more than most. I get along, but he went too fast for me. There's another thing, but I don't know as it means anything. We've always had dogs, and Izzy told me the dogs didn't like Larry Joe at all. The hair on their backs would stand right up. Izzy said it made him mad the dogs didn't like him. She said he liked to have everybody like him, everybody and everything."

She decided to show us the lanterns, and she walked out back to the sheds. We followed. She opened the third one and peered in and beckoned to us. When my eyes were used to the dim light inside the shed, I could see the dozen or so lanterns clumped close together in the corner, standing there like little stone dwarfs in conical hats. They were a murky green-brown, and the vines had grown in through the breaks and splits in the old boards and wound around them, in and out of the oval holes where the light would shine out of them at night.

"That's all there is left. He certainly sold one hell of a lot of stone lanterns. I didn't think anybody could sell that many. I thought it was another one of Papa's crazy ideas. You want a lantern?"

"No thanks," Meyer said hastily. "Nice of you to offer."

As she walked us to the car, she said, "If you should find him, could you let us know, me and my sisters? You write me and I'll tell them. My oldest sister named her youngest Isobelle. She's thirteen now, and she looks so much like Izzy used to, it breaks my heart to look at her."

As we went down the long drive I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her back there, hands on her hips, a small plump figure in a wide rural land, encircled by kids and dogs.

"Eagle Pass?" I asked, glancing over at Meyer. He nodded agreement and sat there, arms folded, behind a wall of silence. When I came to a suitable place, I pulled over and looked at the map. Big Wells, Brundage, Crystal City. Maybe a hundred miles. A hundred miles of silence. A hundred years of solitude.

But it was only about thirty miles of silence. "Could you have believed this about him the night the four of us had dinner?"

"It would have taken some convincing." I replied.

"Yet now you believe he killed Izzy?"

"Of course. And Doris Eagle and Norma and maybe a few we haven't come across. Or more than a few."

"Motive?"

"I think my guess would be that he is a hunter. Women are the game he specializes in. He is a loner. A rare kind of loner, a man who seems affable, agreeable, gregarious, fun to have around. That is his act. That is his camouflage suit. That's the way he comes up on the blind side, downwind, every move calculated. Not every stalk has to end in death, Meyer. Betsy Ann was a practice stalk, no shell in the chamber. He got close enough to reach out and touch the game. The money is important to him only because it gives him the freedom to keep hunting. I have heard the same crap a couple of times from some of my delayed-development macho friends who go out and shoot things they have no intention of eating. 'My God, Travis, I was in love with that elk. The most beautiful damn thing you ever saw in your life. Stood there in the morning light, never knowing there was a soul within a mile of him. Raised his head and I put the slug just behind the shoulder, blew his brave heart to shreds. I tell you truly, I went up to him and squatted beside him, and I stroked his hide and I had tears in my eyes, he was so noble!'

"I think our buddy Larry Joe/Evan/Jerry must have some of the same bullshit running in his bloodstream. I think that when he mounts one of his victims-to-be, the idea that he is going to one day kill her dead gives him a bigger and better orgasm. In fact, he might be unable to make it unless he knows that's going to happen to her, at his hand. Murmurings of love on his lips, and murder in his damn black heart."

"Blackbeard," he said. "And other men down through history."

"Jack the Ripper?"

"No. That's quite a different motivation, I think. He wanted the world to know that murder had been done, that the evil women who sold their bodies had been punished by an agent of the Lord. We know of three possible victims of Larry Joe/Evan/ Jerry spread over eighteen years. In no case was it labeled murder."