Cypress Grove (3 page)

It wasn’t a missing-persons case. In fact it was just about everything
but
a missing-persons case. Robbery, assault, murder. God knows what else. And that’s the way it got passed out to us: they don’t get any more missing.

The Captain himself took roll call that day. Gentlemen, he said. Officers. Has there been a misunderstanding? When I asked that you pool your efforts and give your collective best, I had expected that you would understand this was to the end of
finding
the suspect. Instead you seem collectively to have lost him.

There was laughter, uneasy laughter of a sort we all got used to over the next few months. Little by little the laughter subsided, till finally we sat stone silent through roll call No jokes, no catcalls, none of the endless badgering that marks men thrown together in close quarters and shaky pursuits. We sat, we listened, some of us taking notes, then rose, claimed cars, and went stolidly about our business.

It had begun long before that, of course, on a Saturday night almost two months before, when a scumbag by the name of Richards found his way into an apartment house off campus of Memphis State where ten students lived. Most of them were out on dates. The three that weren’t, he attacked. Tied them down with lamp wires and went from one to the other, back and forth. He’d come in with his member hard as a rock, one of them said, put it in her, and leave. Then after a while he’d come back. Never climaxed, or seemed to gain much pleasure from it. Lot of blood on it there at the end, one of the young women said. I kept wondering if it was my blood or someone else’s, what he’d done to the others.

Richards spent his childhood in a series of foster homes, a social worker called in as consultant told us later, often shut into a room and ignored, brought food when they remembered, other times beaten or abused. My heart bled.

Anyhow, although Richards had been a busy boy, with a string of store robberies, B&Es of various sorts, auto theft and assault, rape was something new for him. But, like a chicken-killing dog, he’d got the taste. And he liked it.

Over following weeks we got to know that campus well, spent more time there than its students did. Ants at a picnic and just about as inconspicuous. But the next time Richards struck, it was across town, at a dorm next to Samaritan Hospital where nurses in training lived. The hospital put them up free, they attended classes half a day and helped take care of patients the rest, and after a year or so they got certified as LPNs. Women with poor and no prospects came up from all over the South. Richards went in there on a Friday evening about nine o’clock. Of the fifteen residents, eight were on duty, helping cover the evening shift as nurses although legally they weren’t. Five more had gone out together for pizza and a movie. They’re the ones who called it in when they got back home around midnight and found Mary Elizabeth Walker (Mobile, Alabama) and Sue Ann Simmons (Tupelo, Mississippi) strapped to their beds with duct tape. There was so much tape, one of them said, they looked like mummies, or cocoons. Mary Elizabeth stared at the wall and wouldn’t respond when they spoke to her. Blood was running from both vagina and anus. Sue Simmons didn’t respond either. She was dead.

We got on to Richards the usual way, through an informer. This informer lived in the neighborhood, often wound up in some of the same diners, poolrooms and bars as Richards, and almost certainly carried some grudge against him. Once we had this, still with nothing but hearsay and suspicion to take to market, we bird-dogged Richards in solid shifts, staking out his apartment from unmarked cars. For two days nothing happened. We learned a lot: that he kept unpredictable hours, had no visitors, and thrived exclusively on carry-out hamburgers. On the third day, he disappeared.

We went in with a judge’s order on the fourth day and everything was just as it had been the times we’d gone in without, clothes scattered about, toiletries in place, bottle or two of prescription drugs in the bathroom, piles of mustard, salt and pepper packets on the kitchenette counter by a pool of loose change. He was gone, purely gone. Evaporated. Vanished. No one ever heard from or of him again.

That was the first one.

“A vigilante,” someone said at roll call.

“The position of this department,” the Captain said, “is that it’s an isolated incident. That is also your position.”

I’d have to pull records to check, and of course I can’t, but it seems maybe two, three months went by before the next one.

These shitheads were hitting mom-and-pop stores all over the city, pistol-whipping whoever was behind the counter, mom, pop or one of numerous kids, when they objected or proved too slow at scooping up money. The perps were easy to mark. There were always three. One never spoke. He lurked on the fringes, carried a steel baseball bat over his shoulder, and moved in only when the others had got the goods and left. Then he’d swing his bat, smashing hips, knees, wrists and ankles.

Again and as usual, confidential information came up the line from one of the city’s bottom feeders. Three guys who’d always had trouble putting together the price of a draft beer of late had been seen with hands wrapped around the dewy necks of imports. One of them, the informant said, was truly spooky. Never spoke, smiled a lot, sat perfectly still. Always wore a baseball cap, Yankees one day. Dodgers the next, Orioles, Rangers. Must have one hell of a collection.

Like a lot of their breed, these guys started out doing occasional hits, then, when they got away with it repeatedly, and got used to the benefits as well, started making it a regular thing. That, along with informants, is what broke most of these cases for us. Soon these guys were surfacing every Friday night.

We knew where they were staying, in a swayback, half-abandoned apartment complex out in south Memphis, near Crump and Mississippi, kind of place where plywood’s been nailed up to make small rooms out of large and where to sit on the toilet you have to draw up your knees to fit them jigsaw like into the space between sink and door. But we still had to catch these guys with pants down. Every squad car went out with a list of mom-and-pop convenience stores in central Memphis that
hadn’t
been hit. We circled them like sharks.

One Friday, then another, went by without these guys showing at the crib. Hadn’t been around the bars either, our informant said when his contact tracked him down. No one had seen them. No one ever saw them again.

“Comes from inside the department,” scuttlebutt had it in locker rooms and lounges, “who else would know.”

Couple more, at least.

Someone who was offing cabdrivers. He’d hit late at night when drivers were inclined to take just about any fare they could get, he’d direct them to the city’s fringes and leave them there with their heads bashed in. The department pulled hundreds of pages of copies of log sheets and dispatcher’s records. We’d just begun heavy cruising of areas from which calls had come in the past when, abruptly, the killings stopped.

Next, a series of suspected arsons in upscale housing developments under construction. Two of those developments, then three, went up in flame. At the third, an elderly couple had moved in prematurely, before construction was completed. They went up in flame, too. Then it all stopped.

What the hell, the Captain said, sentiments echoed by many others, by the press, for instance, repetitively and at great length, is going on here?

We never really knew. But almost a year later, on an anonymous tip, in the woods just across the Mississippi line we found six shallow graves side by side, each topped by a wooden plaque into which had been burned a smiling skull and crossbones.

“No thanks, Sheriff.”

Introducing herself, spelling the last name, Valerie Bjorn had settled in beside Don Lee.

“You new up at State?”

“Over a year now.”

“Can’t help noticing you’re out of uniform.”

“Out of—oh. I’m not a trooper, Sheriff. I’m attorney for the barracks. Commander Bailey asked if I’d mind picking up the evidence kit.”

“State’s paying top dollar for messengers these days, then.”

She smiled. “I live here, Sheriff. Well, not here exactly. Not far out of town, though.”

“The old Ames place.”

“I moved in two months ago.”

“Heard someone bought it. That house’s been empty a long time. Few rungs down from fixer-up would be my guess.”

“I’m doing most of the work myself. My grandfather was a builder, the kind that back in his day handled everything himself, plumbing, electric, carpentry. He raised me. I started crawling under houses when I was eight or nine.”

“And haven’t quit yet,” I said.

“I thought I had. But we’re so often wrong about such things, aren’t we? Not that I get much chance to crawl and so on, between my own work and what I do for the barracks. Hope you don’t mind my tracking you down, Sheriff. I saw your Jeep outside.”

“Not at all, Miss Bjorn.”

“Val. Please.”

Suddenly Thelma was at the booth saying, “Here, let me clear some room,” scooping up plates and laying them along her left arm. “Get you anything else, boys? Ma’am?” Their eyes met briefly. “Some more coffee? Just made a fresh pot.”

“Gettin’ too late for this old man,” Bates said. “Prob’ly be up through Tuesday or so, as it is.”

Don Lee and I also declined.

“I’m fine,” Val said. “But thank you.”

“We have the check?” Bates said. Thelma turned back and shook her head. He shook his.

“How long we been doing this, Thelma? Four, five years now?”

“Sonny says I don’t give you a bill. You know that.”

“And you know—”

“He’s my boss, Lonnie. I got to do what he tells me. That’s how most of us live. What, this job isn’t hard enough already?”

“Okay, okay. Anyway, your shift’s almost over now.”

“Life’s just chockful of almosts, ain’t it.”

Waiting till she was gone, Bates pulled out his wallet, extracted a twenty and a five, and tucked them under the sugar bowl. Easily twice what the bill came to.

“She’s dying to know who you are,” he told Val.

“I got that.”

“You want to come on back with me to the station, pick up that kit?”

“Would you mind if I waited and came by on my way in to work tomorrow, Sheriff? I’d dearly love to go on home now, get some rest.”

“Wouldn’t we all.” He nodded. “What time you figure to be swinging by?”

“Seven, seven-thirty?”

“Good enough. I’m not still there, Don Lee will be.”

We stood and made our way to the door.

“Goodnight, then,” Val told us outside. Her eyes met each of ours in turn. She shook hands with Bates.

“Lisa’s gonna hang me out to dry,” Don Lee said.

“Reckon she will. Not to mention having fed your dinner to the pigs.” Bates turned to me: “You’ll be needing a ride back.”

“You don’t live in town?” Val said.

I shook my head. “Cabin up by the lake.”

“Nice up there.”

“It is that.”

“Awfully late, though. He’s one of yours, Sheriff, right?”

“Well . . .”

“Look, the lake’s a long way. I have a spare room. Not much in there yet, an old bunk bed with a futon thrown across it, some plastic cubes, a table lamp without a table. But all that could be yours for the night.”

“A kingdom.”

We drove out of town in the opposite direction from the lake, past Pappa Totzske’s sprawling apple orchard and spread of seventy-five-foot chicken houses. The back seat of Val’s six-year-old yellow Volvo was piled with boxes, portable files, clothing, a stack of newspapers. When she hit the key, old-time music started up at full blast. Gid Tanner, maybe. She punched the reject button on the cassette player.

“Sorry, I usually have
this
world to myself.”

“Trying to assimilate?”

She laughed. “Hardly. I grew up with this, been listening to it, playing it, since I was ten years old.”

“Right after you began your carpentry career.”

“Exactly. Hammer, screwdriver, mandolin. Lot better with the hammer, though.”

The old Ames place was six or seven miles outside town, at the end of a dirt road so deeply pitted that it could have been passed off as a child’s projection map of the Grand Canyon. Papershell pecan trees and a huge, utterly wild and unkempt weeping willow stood by the house. Whole tribes could be living in the thing unbeknownst.

Val pulled up under one of the pecan trees and we climbed out. I had to hit the car door hard with the heel of my hand to get it open. She’d warned me it stuck some times. From the trunk she took a canvas book bag that looked to serve as a briefcase. A squirrel sat on a limb just above, fussily chattering at us.

“I’ve only got two of the rooms really habitable so far,” Val said as we entered, through the entryway into a small living room that, when the house was built, would have been used only on holidays and formal occasions. Now it sported a narrow bed, a rocking chair, a table doing triple work as desk, eating space and storage area. An antique wardrobe sat in one corner, drawers on the left in use even as the right side went on being stripped of multiple layers of varnish and paint, down to fine wood beneath. Sandpaper, a shallow dish and rags lay atop it.

On the wall by the table hung a gourd banjo. I ran my thumb across the strings, surprised to find they weren’t steel but soft, like a classical guitar’s.

“You really are into this.”

“I guess I am.”

She lifted down the banjo and, sitting, balanced it on her lap. Plucked a string or two, twisted pegs. Then started playing, back of the nail on her second finger striking a melody note then brushing other strings as the thumb popped on and off that short fifth string. “Soldier’s Joy.” Abruptly she stopped, putting the instrument back in place.

“Would you like tea?”

“Love it.”

We went through a double doorway without doors into the kitchen.

“Here’s my real bona fide as a southerner,” she said.

While even the living room had about it an element of improvisation, camping out or making do, the kitchen was fully equipped, pots and provisions set out on shelves, towels on drying racks, dishes stacked in cupboards, knife block on the counter by the stove. We sat at a battered wooden table waiting for water to boil.

“Funny thing is,” Val said, “I
wasn’t
into this, not at all, not for a long time. As a kid I couldn’t wait to get away.”

“You grow up around here?”

“Kentucky. Not a spit’s worth of difference. When I left for college, I swore that was it, I’d never look back. And I’d absolutely never ever go back. Took the two JCPenney dresses I’d worked as a waitress to buy, and some books I’d kind of forgotten to return to the library, and settled into a dorm room at Tulane. It was 1975. My Texas roommate’s debut had been attended by hundreds of people. She used most of my closet space in addition to her own—I didn’t need it. And those dresses looked as out of place, as anachronistic, as a gardenia in my hair.”

Val poured water into a round teapot.

“I was smart. That was one of two or three ways out of there. Tulane was full of rich East Coast kids who couldn’t get into Ivy League schools and poor southerners on scholarship. I lost the dresses first, the accent not long after. Most any social situation, I discovered, all you had to do was keep quiet and watch those around you. Sugar? Lemon or milk?”

I shook my head.

“By the second year you couldn’t pick me out of the crowd. ’Wearing camo,’ as a friend of mine put it. I finished near the top of my class, went to Baltimore as a junior partner, very junior, in a group practice.”

She set a mug before me, thoughtfully turned so the chip on its lip faced away.

“I don’t usually prattle on like this.”

“Not a problem.”

“Good.” Settling back at the table, she sipped her tea. “I was up there for four years—dancing with the one who brung me, as my father would say. I liked Baltimore, the firm, liked the work. And I was good at it.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing. Something. Me?” She smiled. “I wanted to, anyway. Do we ever, really?”

“Change?”

Nodding.

“If we don’t—if we can’t—nothing else makes much sense, does it?”

She half-stood to pour us more tea. Close by, just past the window, an owl hooted.

“You’re not a cop, are you?”

“Not for a long time. I was.”

She waited, and after a moment I told her the basics.

“Another Cliff Notes life.”

“What?”

“Those pamphlets on great books that students read instead of the books themselves. A lot of us experience our lives that way. Sum up who we are and what we’re about as a few broad strokes, then do our best to cleave to it. All the good stuff, the small things and distinctions that make the rest worthwhile—Sunday mornings sitting over coffee and the paper, taste of bread fresh from the oven, the feel of wind on your skin, sensing the one you love there beside you—all these get pushed aside. Unnoticed, lost.”

“If we let them.”

“If we let them, right. And as much as anything else, that’s why I’m here.”

Dark had become absolute. Far off, frogs called. Their cries bounced across the pond behind the house, amplified by the water as though it were in fact the metal dish that moonlight made it appear. Moths beat at the window beside us, and at the kitchen’s screen door.

“I drew my weapon three times,” I said. God knows why I told her this. “And each time someone died. The second time, it was raining, I remember. His blood was running down the street. I was in the street too, with his head in my lap. And all the time I kept thinking: My kids are home waiting for me.”

“Kids?”

“A boy and a girl. They grew up without me, have their own lives now. Probably for the best. . . . Thing is, there in the street, in some strange way I was closer to that stranger as he died, this man I’d shot, than I’ve ever been to anyone else my whole life.”

For some time she was silent. We both were.

“I don’t know what to say.’’

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Suddenly everything in my life seems so small.”

“Our lives
are
small.”

She nodded. “They are, aren’t they?”

I followed her outside, onto the porch.

“Don’t suppose you’re hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Seems I always am. Buy popcorn by the case, eat carrot sticks till I start turning orange myself and have to stop, chew celery till my teeth hurt.”

We stood looking up at the sky.

“What about the third time?” she said.

“That I drew my weapon.”

“Yes.”

“That time, it was my own partner.”

“Oh.”

“There’s a lot more to it,” I said.

“There would be.” She looked off into the trees. “Listen.”

I did, and for this one perfect moment silence enveloped us, absolute silence, silence of a kind most of the world and its people have forgotten. Then the frogs started up again and from miles away the hum of cars and trucks on an interstate reached us.