Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (9 page)

His teeth were not catching the light. Like the rest of the Reverend’s face, they were beaten in, flattened, unrecognizable under a thick layer of congealing blood.

THREE SILENT SHERIFF’S
cars showed up within minutes. Memphis LaCour, Sheriff of Ochre River County and uncle to a certain Raven LaCour, made a quick call to dispatch. “I have a 10-57 here at the Park. I need a 10-79. Over.” He unfolded his long body from his car. That was something of a process. He was close to 6’-5” and every bit as handsome as his younger brother, though Tender had slightly lighter skin and a very handsome and well-tended mustache. His grey eyes swept the scene as he spoke out in a melodious baritone.

“Could you gentlemen cut some of these lights? This is not the Grand Ole Opry. Thank you.” With a flashlight, he took a better look, wincing at the pile of gore that used to be the Reverend’s face. “You moved him?”

Raven barely shrugged. “I turned him over.”

“He was on his face?”

“What’s left of it. I rolled him over, then went to my rig to call for help, and then I came back here and waited for the circus to come to town.”

“Very funny, Raven.” As the crime scene came to life, five men with instrument cases walked past in the dark. Any other resident of the park would have stopped, gawked, started hollering for folks to come on out and see what had happened to the Reverend. But the five men from Bone Pile didn’t slow, or even stare. They walked on past toward Space 13 while Memphis watched their unconcerned backs. The deputies’ men made a ring within the ring of cars, guarding the corpse from eyes that thankfully, didn’t hold any interest at all for the doings of the Law.

Nothing suspicious there. Bone Pile men wanted nothing to do with the law. But Memphis knew it was only a matter of minutes before another Park resident stepped out have one last smoke before bed. “Hiram, go find Gator Rollins.” Memphis spoke slowly to Hiram Tyson, since he was a Tyson, after all. “Check the bar and the Reverend’s trailer. When you find him, call me. I’ll tell you what to do next.”

Hiram shuffled off with a “Yessir, Sheriff.”

Memphis turned to the deputy he trusted most and spoke softly. “Garth? Those boys from Bone Pile? I want you to go over there and sit there with them in Space 13.”

Garth’s boyish face registered his disgust at this idea. “Sit with ’em? You mean, indoors?”

“Yes, indoors. I don’t want them on the phone, the CB, anything. Just sit there with them. Don’t let them talk to anybody.” His radio crackled and he turned it down before talking on it.

“Sheriff, I got a 10-89 here.”

Memphis took a quiet breath. “You have a bomb threat, Hiram?”

“No sir, I got a. You know. A 10… something. A 10-22? I got Gator here.”

“That’s a 10-95, Hiram. I want you to take him on in, then.”

“Arrest him?”

“No, just detain him for questioning. But go ahead and cuff him up real tight. And let’s just forego the codes for now, Hiram.”

“All right, Sheriff.”

The coroner arrived next, and he got right to work measuring, scraping, and talking to himself. His mutters were the only noise above the sound of a few trucks on the highway, the bark of a dog or two. But his work was fast. By one-thirty, what remained of the Right Reverend Henry Heaven was a rusty smear.

Raven waited beside him, as silent as her father, his brother. Memphis studied her under the bright moon. She was a pale hat over a dark shadow, bare arms and long legs and that shining, branching scar tracing the side of her face like a river delta. He had never known quite what to make of this young woman, his family by blood, a stranger in every other way.

“Raven? We need to talk about the Reverend.”

Raven had her father’s silver eyes. His niece was capable of looks so icy that a man’s future generations might retreat right up into his abdomen.

“RAVEN, I’M JUST
clarifying things, here.” Memphis had been sitting with his niece for most of an hour. That was his duty, to find out who was at the bar and who wasn’t.

“I gave you what I got. And why,
why
didn’t you tell me Gator Rollins was here?”

Memphis removed his hat and rubbed his eyeballs hard enough to possibly cause retinal damage. He had no good answer for her, so he didn’t even try. He replaced his hat and smoothed his mustache. “Why don’t you get some sleep. And don’t get it in your head to leave the area. You’re a person of interest in this case.”

She lay her hands on the wheel as if she’d be leaving the moment he exited the cab.

MEMPHIS GOT IN
his car and drove the two blocks to the Reverend’s trailer. As far as a clue, Memphis found nothing in his quick tour of the singlewide. Ancient, clean and bare, with foam-back drapes pulled tight and the AC unit turned up high. The noise from its compressor must have been hitting seventy decibels, making shouting a necessity. Two Lazy-Boys and one small sofa in the living room. The television left on to 24-hour religious channel. There were a few boxes of Bibles stacked in the spare bedroom, and a framed piece of sheet music signed by Chet Atkins hanging over the commode. The Reverend drank instant coffee, ate from paper plates and kept every suit he’d ever owned hanging in a closet. Each of the two bedrooms contained a double bed made up with white sheets and a navy blue corded bedspread. It reminded Memphis of a motel. He went through the solitary suitcase Gator had stashed at the Reverend’s. No weapons, drugs, pornography, nothing. Not a family photo or a personal letter from home. Just some spare clothes, a shaving kit. Gator had a nice Fender guitar.

He put up some yellow tape and left the rest of it to the county.

According to his watch, it was after closing at the Blue Moon Tap Room. Beau was pretty punctual about that. The bar would be empty. A good time to ask questions.

He exited his vehicle with dignity after driving the five blocks to the Blue Moon Tap Room, where he stalked around the parking lot on his long legs, peering at the dirt and gravel. He hoped for blood, carnage and the like, but he would have settled for a place where a pair of boot heels had dug themselves into the ground in resistance, or a place where the ground looked like a man had rolled, twisting away from blows. It just looked like a bunch of dirt and gravel, disarranged from the ins and outs of the night’s traffic.

Some heavy pounding brought Beau to the back door of the bar. “Sorry if I woke you, Beau.”

Beau’s face wore an alarmed expression familiar to the sheriff from many late nights of knocking on doors to deliver bad news. “Not a problem, Memphis.” Beau swallowed hard. “Is it Old Beau?”

“No, no. As far as I know, Old Beau is fine. He was out in the yard wagging his tail yesterday.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Word is, she’s spoiling him, taking him to a professional groomer’s and giving him ice cream. Truth is, she treats my dog better than she ever treated me.” Beau’s alimony payments were so high that he slept in his back storeroom on a cot. The last Mrs. Neely currently had possession of Beau’s truck, his bank account, and his trailer in Space 21 on Faded Love Lane. She’d kept it all: the truck, the big screen TV, the chest freezer. She’d even kept his dog, Old Beau.

Memphis looked at Beau. “Beau, there has been a death. The Right Reverend Henry Heaven.”

Beau whistled. “Are you serious? The Reverend? How?”

“He was probably run over. It was pretty ugly.”

“Well, alive he wasn’t all that pretty.” He walked behind the bar, poured himself a shot and drained it down. “Seltzer and lime?”

“Thank you.” Memphis was parched, and the bite and tang of seltzer helped, though a ginger ale would have tasted wonderful. But he avoided sugar as scrupulously as he avoided alcohol and white women. He carefully wiped his mustache. “According to my niece, the Reverend was up here last night.”

Beau rubbed his eyes, remembering. “It wasn’t that late. He was up here talking to Gator Rollins and some boys from Bone Pile, and then he left right about the time Raven got here.”

“What time was that?”

“Around ten. But Gator and the boys stayed. They set up and played. They sounded damn good, Memphis. Damn good. I think they might take the talent show.”

“And Gator was here the whole time?”

“He was. He was playing with those Bone Pilers.”

“Anyone else might be able to verify that?”

“The usual suspects. Jeeter Tyson, probably.”

“Jeeter?” Jeeter was maybe the dumbest man in the park, and he only won the honor because his brother, Deputy Hiram Tyson, lived in Ochre Water. Memphis wondered how the Tyson family had managed to pass on the family name. The Tyson men crawled up on their trailer roofs and adjusted aerial antennas during thunderstorms. They walked across the highway in the middle of the night while drunk. They jacked up cars and crawled under the chassis without setting the emergency brakes. Jeeter had nearly killed himself by using an electric shaver while sitting in the bathtub. Memphis wasn’t excited about the idea of trying to get any information out of Jeeter. “Anyone else?”

“Well, Quentin Romaine was in here, blowing off steam about unemployment among decent white Americans. He was trying hard to get the men riled up to go out and hunt Mexicans.”

“You’ll call me if that ever sounds serious?”

“If a time comes when it seems he might actually have a taker on that redneck vigilante border patrol idea of his, I’ll call you, Memphis.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.” Memphis knew that ragged Mexicans moved silently around their community every day and every night. He knew they stole and carried drugs and upset the community. He knew the Border Patrol was understaffed and under-budgeted. He also knew that whatever the answer was, it wasn’t some dimwit like Quentin Romaine roaming the desert with a shotgun, a flashlight, and a pair of inbred bloodhounds, hunting those desperate people for sport.

“Well, Memphis, there’s one thing more. I hate to tell you this, but…”

“Go on.”

“Well, yesterday afternoon, the Reverend had a few words with your brother about a certain lady. It was just a little charged, there, for a moment. But then, your brother left before it got too ugly.”

“My brother is not under suspicion of killing anyone, Beau.”

“Oh, I know, but there might be talk.”

“There’s always talk.”

Beau, known for his personal fondness for such talk, nodded. “Say, you and Tender given any thought to joining us for the talent show?”

“We’ll be there, I’m sure, but in the audience, not onstage.”

“A shame, that. The more acts we have, the bigger the prize. Plus there’ll be a talent scout from Nashville here. And I’d like to see that old trick you did.”

“Which one is that?”

“I hear you’d toss your instruments to each other, mid-song, and never miss a beat.”

“Well, we were twenty and seventeen when we came up with that one. I think we’d miss more than a beat if we tried that after all these years.”

“I’d love to see you try.”

“Those days are over, Beau.”

“Well, you think about it. As it stands, you understand that Gator will win.”

“If he wins, he wins. I have one other question. My brother never drinks anything alcoholic, does he?”