Into the Web (17 page)

The house itself was ablaze with lights so that it shone out of the blackness, a circumstance Porterfield found suspicious given the hour and his longtime familiarity with the routine of his old friend; the fact, as he carefully noted in his report, was that Horace and Lavenia Kellogg were both “early-to-bed types.”

Even so, it was less the lighted house that attracted Porterfield’s attention than the car he saw parked beside the hedge.

And so he’d pulled up behind the Ford rather than turning into the Kelloggs’ driveway. Getting out of his cruiser, he’d peered at a figure who sat motionless behind the wheel in the car’s unlighted interior.

According to Porterfield’s report, Archie made no attempt to conceal what had happened inside Horace Kellogg’s house moments before. Instead, he’d straightened himself abruptly when Porterfield neared him, like a frightened little boy before a demanding teacher, and said in a broken voice I could easily imagine, “Didn’t mean to, Sheriff. Didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Porterfield had scrawled only a few sketchy notes about the conversation he’d had with my brother during the next few seconds, but it was not hard for me to reconstruct the old sheriff’s authoritative questions, nor Archie’s fearful responses:

“In there” Sheriff Porterfield had found first Lavenia Kellogg sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, facedown, one arm still clawing upward, hand on the second step, her legs spread apart, her shattered eyeglasses resting between them.

As any other lawman would have done, Wallace Porterfield immediately abandoned any further search of the house, rushed back down the snow-covered drive to where Archie still waited behind the wheel of his car, and confronted him with what he’d just found.

Wallace Porterfield had needed nothing more but had instantly handcuffed Archie to the steering wheel of his car, then fired his next question:

He’d found Gloria in her upstairs bedroom, curled like a fetus in the womb within the covers of her bed, sobbing, utterly incoherent, so that Porterfield had made no attempt to question her, but had called Doc Poole instead, then returned downstairs. There he
found Horace Kellogg crouched in a corner of his den, his back pressed up against its wood-paneled wall, body bent forward, his hair touching the blood-soaked carpet beneath his shattered head.

A cheap thirty-eight with a brown wooden handle lay a few feet from Horace. Porterfield returned to Archie and only then noticed the old gun that rested on the seat beside him. He seized it immediately.

In my mind I could see the old sheriff turn, notice for the first time the physical detail he’d later described in his report, that there was a second set of tracks in the snow which led from the Ford to the Kellogg house, then back down to the car. They could not have been Archie’s-they emerged from the passenger side of the truck, then wound upward, through the snowdrifts to the front door of the house.

Someone else
, I thought, the very knowledge that must have sounded in Porterfield’s mind at that moment convinced him in an instant that Archie had brought someone with him, someone who’d helped him murder Horace and Lavenia Kellogg.

The interrogation that followed was hardly surprising:

He’d taken Archie to jail in Kingdom City, then, according to his report, returned to the Kellogg house to find Gloria sedated, sleeping deeply, Doc Poole in a chair beside her bed. He’d left the two as he’d found them, then gone downstairs and examined the bodies.

It was at that point he’d noticed Horace Kellogg’s other wounds, one in the arm, one in the knee, a finger on the right hand blown away, the lobe of the left ear shot off, a bloodstained hole in his blue shirt just below the third button, all this indicating that Horace Kellogg had not only been murdered but murdered with callous cruelty, “taken out in pieces,” as Porterfield had written in his report.

Two days later Doc Poole’s autopsy reached the same conclusion, one that fit perfectly with the description Gloria Kellogg had, by then, given of her parents’ murders, and which Sheriff Porterfield duly appended to his report.

In her statement Gloria described most of the events leading up to the killings, everything from her first meeting with Archie to their last date. She detailed the argument she’d had with her father on the night of the murders, how she’d fled the house, and found her way to Potter’s store. She’d called Archie from there, a call
that had been “picked up,” as she put it, by my father, who’d handed the phone over to Archie.

She’d waited at Potter’s store until Archie arrived, along with Lila and me. The four of us had gone to the movies in Kingdom City, then she’d been dropped off once again at Potter’s. In the frigid darkness of that country store, Gloria said, Archie had declared that he would come and get her at first light. He would honk his horn once as he approached the house, then turn off the headlights and drift the rest of the way, coming to a halt behind the wall of shrubs that stood at the driveway.

At just after five A.M. she’d heard the horn and slipped to the window of her upstairs room. From there she’d seen the roof of Archie’s car behind the hedge. She’d hastily finished packing the suitcase for the elopement and headed for the door.

Before she’d reached it she heard the doorbell, then her mother say “Dear God,” then a shot. This was followed by other shots, shots that had frozen her in place, stunned and mute, until the last echo died away.

She had no idea what Archie had done after that, she claimed, though she believed he must have remained in the house for a time. Finally she’d heard the front door open and assumed that he’d left, headed for his car, as she supposed, although she’d never heard it pull away.

For good reason, since the old Ford had still been parked beside the hedge at 5:14, when Sheriff Porterfield pulled up behind it, and found Archie.

I turned to the photographs Porterfield included in the file. Looking at them, I couldn’t imagine such capacity for destruction in my brother’s makeup, could not fit my brother’s fingers around the wooden handle of the
pistol Porterfield had found, and which, without doubt, had been brought with him from my father’s house.

For a long time I stared down at the pictures, Lavenia Kellogg’s blasted head, the tortured body of her husband, and struggled to picture my brother holding the gun that had carried out these murders, reaching for it in his belt, squeezing down on the trigger, watching as small geysers of blood leapt from the fleeing bodies, splattering walls, pooling on the floor. In the midst of all this horror, Archie remained utterly incongruous, a piece I could not make fit in a murderous puzzle.

Other pieces fit perfectly, however. A white identification tag hung from the trigger guard of my father’s gun, but otherwise it was the same thirty-eight my father had handed to Archie as we’d crossed the field toward Scooter. It still contained the single shell Porter-field had mentioned earlier, the old sheriff so supremely confident that he alone would retain possession of my father’s gun that he had not even bothered to unload the murder weapon.

Holding it now, feeling its weight, its terrible reality, I still could not imagine Archie aiming it at anyone. And yet, he had incontestably confessed to two murders, admitted them immediately, in his first conversation, if it could be called that, with Porterfield. Nor over the next three days had he recanted a single word of that confession despite the many opportunities he’d had to do so. Times when I’d been alone with him in his cell, when he could have merely leaned over, whispered,
I didn’t do it
, and left the rest to me.

In fact, rather than take back a single word of what he’d said to Porterfield outside the Kellogg house,
Archie had consistently elaborated upon the events he’d only haltingly described on that first occasion, adding more and more detail, painting an utterly persuasive picture of how he’d drawn up behind the hedge, honked to signal Gloria, then, when she did not emerge, trudged up the snowy drive to the house.

He’d encountered Mrs. Kellogg at the door, he said. She’d told him that Gloria was upstairs in her room, and that the girl was going to stay there. She’d tried to close the door in my brother’s face, but Archie said he’d pushed it back open and stepped inside. Mrs. Kellogg had then called for her husband, he said, an act that had panicked him so that he’d reached beneath his hunting jacket to where my father’s pistol was tucked inside his belt.

Mrs. Kellogg had screamed, Archie said, then turned toward the stairs. That’s when he’d fired. One shot. Directly into the back of Lavenia Kellogg’s skull. She’d fallen backward, then tumbled down the stairs, landing at their foot just as Horace entered from the adjoining living room. Like his wife, he’d fled at the sight of the gun in Archie’s hand, back toward the rear of the house, Archie following him all the way, firing as he went, hitting Mr. Kellogg again and again, until they’d finally reached the den. Kellogg had rushed for the gun cabinet, his wounded leg buckling under him, so that he’d finally stumbled into the corner beside the cabinet, the spot where Archie had at last caught up with him and fired the shot that killed him. After that, Archie had run back through the living room to the front door and then out of the house and down the path to the old Ford, where he remained, waiting for Gloria, everything a
blur until a light flashed in the distance, two headlights coming toward him, snow sparkling in their narrow beams.

This was the story my brother told and retold, and it was easy for me to imagine him sitting in his stark cell, Porterfield standing near its center, crowding the cramped space, drawing in the light.

And yet Porterfield’s intimidating presence had failed to elicit from my brother the one thing the old sheriff had already come to suspect: that someone else had been with him that night, either egging him on to murder, or committing murder himself.

I had no doubt that Porterfield had spent a great deal of time talking to Archie, for the final confession had to have been pieced together by Porterfield himself. Archie, in the best of times, would not have been able to accomplish such a fluid narrative. And yet, for all the many times Porterfield had coaxed Archie to tell it one more time, my brother had persistently refused to reveal at least one detail of that bloody night, the fact that I’d stopped on the road across from his car, rolled down my window, and called to him.

I might have stopped him, I thought now, might have gotten out of my car, walked over to my brother, and brought the whole foolish scheme to a grinding halt. I knew it would have taken no more than a few words from me to have changed his mind, nothing more than the most rudimentary reminder that he had little money and no job, that he knew no one in Nashville who might lend them a helping hand. Hadn’t he even given me the perfect opportunity to do all of that?

But I’d left him there, waiting for Gloria, as I pulled away, the feel of Lila’s body still warm on mine, mindlessly joyful with what I’d proven to myself only minutes before, that Lila Cutler was indeed “fresh,” a wild happiness flooding through me, blinding me to my brother’s peril so that I’d offered him nothing but a wink and some careless words of advice that he’d never mentioned to Wallace Porterfield, words I’d said only minutes before the murders, my final words, as it had turned out, before leaving my brother to his fate:
Okay, Arch, but don’t leave any witnesses.

Y
ou ’bout finished up in there?”

I turned toward the door of the garage, the old pistol still in my hand, and peered out to where Wallace Porterfield stood like a stone, blocking the light. His eyes fell toward the pistol. “Just throw that thing back in the box,” he said, now clearly impatient to be done with me.

I turned back toward the box, intending to return the pistol to it, then I felt an irrational need to defy Wallace Porterfield, and instead tucked the old gun into my belt and covered it with my shirt.

“Hurry up, now,” Porterfield said. “I got business to attend to.”

I paid no heed, but methodically returned the files to the envelope, then the envelope to the box.

“Don’t play with me, boy. Don’t ever do that.”

Before I could respond, he snorted. “You don’t favor your daddy. He was a pretty good-looking kid.” He smiled. “I taught him a lesson once.” His eyes were two dark fires. “Saved him from a world of trouble. Fucking shame he didn’t teach the same lesson to your brother.”

I said it coldly: “To know his place.”

The smile vanished, and Porterfield stared at me now, like a hawk watching a small gray mouse scurry across an exposed field. “So you know about that lesson I gave your daddy? I figured he must have told you about it.”

“He never told me, no,” I answered. “I heard about it in Waylord.”