Paper Doll (15 page)

I went back to the Alton Arms and sat on the front steps. The Blue Tick hound that I’d seen on my last visit was stretched out in the sun on the front walk. He rolled his eyes back toward me, and looked at me silently as I sat down. I nodded at him. His tail stirred briefly.

“Contain yourself,” I said.

Across the street a couple of jays were darting about in the branches of one of the old trees. While I watched them, I put my closed fist down toward the Blue Tick hound. Without raising his head, he sniffed thoughtfully. Then he stood up suddenly and put his head on my leg. I scratched his ear. He wagged his tail slowly. Behind me the door of the hotel opened and a fat gray-haired couple came out. Sedale came behind them with four pieces of matched luggage. He stored the luggage in the trunk of a silver Mercedes sedan, accepted some change from the husband, and held the door while his wife hove herself into the passenger seat.

“Y’all have a nice day now, y’hear?” he said. Then he closed the door and smiled at them. As they drove away, he tucked the change into his vest pocket.

“High rollers,” I said.

The Blue Tick kept his head on my leg, and I continued to scratch his ear. Sedale smiled at me.

“How’re you today, sir?” he said.

“You got a minute to sit here on the steps and talk to me?” I said.

“Don’t like me to sit on the steps,” Sedale said. “But I can stand here while you sit.”

“They don’t mind if I sit on the steps?” I said.

“You a guest, sir,” Sedale said.

The dog left me and went to Sedale. He put his hand down absently, the way owners do, and the dog lapped it.

“I’m a detective,” I said.

“I know that, sir.”

“Be hard to prove given what I’ve detected so far,” I said.

“Probably a very difficult case, sir.”

The dog returned to me for more ear scratching.

“What do you know about me?” I said.

“Know you a private detective, down from Boston, looking into a murder. Mr. Jack Nelson’s daughter.”

“Un huh.”

“‘Cept she ain’t Mr. Nelson’s daughter.”

“You know Jefferson?” I said. “Works for Mr. Nelson.”

Sedale smiled.

I stopped scratching the dog’s ear as I talked and he tossed his head against my hand.

“Sorry,” I said to the dog and scratched some more. “I saw a picture on the wall of the track kitchen of a young woman who looked just like Olivia Nelson had looked at that age. The woman at the track kitchen said her name was Cheryl Anne Rankin and that she was the woman’s daughter. Now the picture’s gone, and the woman’s gone.”

Sedale smiled encouragingly.

“You know anything about Cheryl Anne Rankin?” I said.

“Nawsir.” I nodded.

“The thing is, Sedale, that it is too big a coincidence that there should be two people look like Olivia Nelson in town, and then find twenty years later that one of them has disappeared and someone is impersonating the other.”

“Yessir.”

“And since we know that the real Olivia Nelson is alive in Africa, it seems to me that the dead woman has to be Cheryl Anne Rankin.”

Sedale’s face was inert. He showed no sign of impatience or discomfort. I had no sense that he wanted to leave. He had simply gone inside; placid, agreeable, and entirely unavailable to a white guy asking questions about a white matter. He nodded.

“I want to find out who killed her.”

Sedale nodded again.

“Tell me about Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.

“Don’t know nothing ‘bout that, sir,” he said.

“The hell you don’t,” I said. “Jefferson knows something about her, so do you. But you duck into blackface the minute I ask you. Until five minutes ago, you were an actual person. Then I started to ask about Cheryl Anne Rankin, and you turned into Stepin Fetchit. Your accent even got thicker.”

“Yessir,” Sedale said and grinned.

We were both silent. I continued to scratch the dog’s ear. The dog continued to wag his tail. Sedale continued to rest his hips on the railing of the veranda. Then he reached into his vest pocket with two fingers and brought out a quarter and three dimes. He held them in the palm of his hand and showed them to me.

“See what those fatso tourists gave me for a tip?” he said.

“Let the good times roll,” I said.

Sedale grinned suddenly.

“You ain’t as fucking stupid as most honkies,” he said.

“And your dog likes me,” I said.

“For a fact,” Sedale said.

He looked at his watch.

“I get off in an hour. You buy me couple of drinks at the Hunt Grill on Elm Street, I’ll tell you ‘bout Cheryl Anne Rankin.”

The bartender nodded at me when I squeezed onto a bar stool. I ordered a beer and got it. His dark eyes were without expression. His face held neither hostility nor welcome. He put a bowl of peanuts on the bar in front of me and moved away. I picked up a peanut and ate it carefully. No need for a whole handful. One at a time was just as succulent. I sipped a little of the beer. I picked up two peanuts. Everyone on Jeopardy! was having a hell of a time. Just like me. I drank a little more beer. I took a handful of peanuts and munched them vigorously.

Sedale came in and walked toward me. The Blue Tick hound was with him. The bar was nearly full, but there was an empty stool on either side of me. Sedale sat on one. The hound sat on the floor near his feet.

“Seven and seven,” he said to the bartender.

“Do you like that?” I said. “Or do you just order it because you like the way it sounds?”

The bartender put the drink in front of him and Sedale drank half of it.

“You know the difference between a toilet seat and a hotel worker?” Sedale said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Toilet seat only services one asshole at a time.”

He drank the rest of his drink and gestured another at the bartender.

“His tab,” Sedale said and jerked his head at me. The bartender looked at me. I nodded. Sedale took a handful of peanuts and ate some and gave a couple to the dog. The bartender brought him his drink.

“My aunt Hester, my momma’s oldest sister, she a midwife. Been a midwife fifty-something years. She a lot older than my momma,” Sedale said.

He paused and sipped his second drink. “Woman named Bertha Voss come to my aunt Hester ‘bout forty years ago, little longer, and ask could she do an abortion for her.” The dog sitting on the floor had his nose trained on the peanuts. I took a couple, and held them down in the palm of my open hand, and he scarfed them off.

“Bertha was a no-account cracker. But she was white. Those days black people get lynched for things like that. My aunt Hester say, `No, you got to find somebody else, or you got to have the baby.”‘

Sedale sipped again. He took in his second drink quite delicately, holding the glass in his fingertips. The first one had been need. The second appeared to be pleasure. I finished my beer. The bartender looked over and I pointed at my glass. He brought a fresh beer and another bowl of peanuts. The first bowl had somehow emptied. Must have fed the dog too many.

“Well, Bertha couldn’t find nobody, I guess, ‘cause she married another no-account cracker name Hilly Rankin, and she had the baby. And she tell everybody it’s his.”

“Cheryl Anne?” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Sedale said and there was a gleam of mockery in his eyes.

“Rankin believe he’s the father?”

“Seemed to. Hilly ain’t very smart.”

“And do we know who the proud poppa was?”

“Sho ‘nuff do,” he said. “Care to guess?”

Sedale grinned at me like he was the host of Jeopardy! He let the pregnant pause hang between us.

“Jack Nelson,” I said. Sedale’s grin widened.

“You a by-God real live detective, ain’t you,” he said. “Bertha told my aunt Hester that it was Jumper Jack knocked her up.”

The Blue Tick hound nudged his head under my hand and stared at the bowl of peanuts. I gave him some. On the big-screen television, Jeopardy! had ended and the local news was on. It looked and sounded exactly like local news everywhere: a serious-looking anchor; an attractive, though not frivolous, anchorette; a twit to do the weather; and a brash guy that talked fast to do sports.

“You know where Bertha Rankin is now?” I said.

“Sure.”

Our voices sounded hollow to me. As if they weren’t connected to humans.

“Where?”

“She and Hilly got a dump out on the Batesburg Road ‘bout five miles. Right past the gravel pit, dirt road goes down on the right. They at the end of it.”

“You know Cheryl Anne?” I said.

“Nope. She musta gone to school in Batesburg.”

“They kept it a secret,” I said. “All this time.”

“Sure,” Sedale said. “Only the niggers knew.”

“And now she’s dead,” I said.

It was one of those things you know for a long time before you know it. The dead woman in Boston was Cheryl Anne Rankin.

I passed the gravel pit and turned right onto the dirt road and bumped slowly down to the end of it. My headlights hit on a cinder-block shack with a corrugated metal roof that looked like it might once have been used to house tractors. Someone had filled in the big garagetype doors with odd pieces of unpainted plywood, and cut a person-sized door in the middle of one of them. The door hung on badly nailed galvanized strap hinges, and opened with a rope pull. There was the rusted hulk of what might have once been a 1959 Plymouth in the yard, and several old tires. A dirty white sow lying behind one of the tires raised her head and stared into my headlights. I got out and knocked on the front door and the woman from the track kitchen opened it. She peered at me, trying to see into the darkness.

“My name is Spenser,” I said. “We met once at the track kitchen.”

She flinched back as if I had pushed her and glanced over her shoulder.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“Yeah, you do. And I know you. You’re Bertha Rankin, formerly Bertha Voss. You have a daughter Cheryl. Where’s your husband?”

“He’s asleep,” she said, and glanced back into the room again.

I could smell bacon grease and kerosene and a strong reek of whiskey.

“We need to talk about Jack Nelson,” I said. “If you’d like to step outside.”

She hesitated, and then stepped out of the house and pulled the makeshift door closed behind her. She was wearing some sort of shapeless dress, over some sort of shapeless body. Her gray hair was down and lank, and her face was red. There was sweat on her forehead and I could smell whiskey on her too.

“What you want?”

“I know that Jack Nelson is the father of your daughter, Cheryl Anne Rankin. I have no need to tell other people about that, right now. But I need to talk with you about it.”

“How you know that?” she said.

“Doesn’t matter. Tell me when Cheryl Anne was born.”

“1948.”

“Same year as Olivia Nelson,” I said.

Bertha Rankin didn’t speak.

“Did she look like Olivia Nelson?”

Bertha Rankin nodded.

“Where did she go to school?” I said.

“Batesburg.”

“Her father know about her?”

“Yes.”

“He give you money?”

We were standing in my headlights. As if on stage. She looked at me and then back at the house and then at the ground.

“Just you and me,” I said. “Did Jack Nelson give you money?”

“He give me a hundred dollars every month.”

“And told you to shut up,” I said.

“Didn’t have to. Hilly knew, it’d kill him. Hilly drinks some, but he loves me. I been faithful to him forty-three years. I wouldn’t never want him to know.”

There were tears now in her squinty eyes. Her face was puffy with booze and fat and age and tiredness.

“Did Cheryl Anne know who her father was?” I said.

The tears blossomed, and ran down her face. Her heavy shoulders sagged, and her breath began to come hard. She lowered her face suddenly and stared at the ground.

“She did, didn’t she?” I said.

Bertha nodded.

“Be hard not to tell her,” I said.

“I told her when she a seventeen-year-old girl,” Bertha said. “I wanted her to be proud of where she come from. To know that she wasn’t just like us.”

“And a little after that,” I said, “she left town.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t hear from her anymore.”

Bertha was crying full out now, her head down, her arms at her sides. She shook her head. I didn’t have it in me to tell her that her daughter was dead. She’d have to know sometime. But it didn’t have to be me who told her.

I put my hand out and patted her shoulder. She pulled away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And turned and got back in my car and drove away.

When I thought about it, on the dark road back to Alton, I figured that she probably sort of knew that her daughter was dead. Which didn’t make me feel any better.

“Evening, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said.

“I need to talk to Mr. Nelson,” I said. “He in?”

I could hear the smile in Jefferson’s voice although the hallway was too dim to see it. “Mr. Jack always in, sir. What is it you need to see him about?”

“Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.

We stood silent in the dim, dog-smelling hallway. Jefferson still had a hand on the open door. The old alpha dog sat next to me waiting for me to pat him. I patted him. The silence dragged on. Then Jefferson closed the door softly behind me.

“This way, Mr. Spenser,” he said and we went back through the house the same way we had gone last time into the vast glass room where Jack Nelson kept his whiskey.

The last time I’d come, the room had been flooded with light. Now it was dark except for the eccentric glow of the television set. The raindrops flattened against the glass roof, and ran together, and ran off in convoluted streaks. The sound of the rain hitting was a kind of steady rattle in the dark.

Nelson was propped in his chair by the television. The water and the bourbon were at hand. The silent dogs were there. The air-conditioning was still turned up and the chilled room felt like a meat locker.

Nelson looked at me without reaction as I walked toward him. Jefferson held back a little, among the dogs, silent at the periphery.

I said, “Mr. Nelson, remember me?”

Nelson stared at me and shook his head. He seemed to have become more inert since I’d seen him last. Three hundred nearly motionless pounds of booze and suet. The sound was low on the television, where two guys were pretending to wrestle. Nelson’s breath wheezed in the quiet room.

“My name is Spenser. I’m a detective from Boston, Mass. I came a while back and talked with you about your daughter.”

“No daughter,” he rasped.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Nelson, but that’s not true. In fact, there’s two daughters.”

At the dark rim of the glass room Jefferson made a sound like a sigh.

“Nigger lover,” Nelson said. He drank some bourbon. His eyes went back to rest on the television set.

“Your daughter Olivia married an African,” l said. “Your daughter Cheryl Anne married a rich guy from Boston.”

Nelson’s eyes never moved from the television. He seemed to settle more deeply into his own mass. The rain streamed off the black glass of the conservatory roof.

“She was murdered a little while ago,” I said. “In Boston. I’m trying to find out why.”

Nelson drank some more bourbon, and fumbled for the bottle and poured another drink and muddled water into it from the pitcher. While he did this he never took his eyes from the television tube. He spilled some of the bourbon and some of the water. He didn’t bother with ice. I stepped in front of the television set.

“You have an illegitimate daughter named Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.

Nelson bent his head to the side trying to see past me to the screen. I seemed to have no meaning to him. He seemed to know only that I was an object between him and the picture.

“He ain’t going to talk, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said. “He don’t talk much anymore.”

“Then you’ll have to talk, Jefferson,” I said. “One way or another, I’m going to find out about Cheryl Anne Rankin. And if that includes getting an extradition warrant on Jumper Jack, then I’ll do it.”

Jefferson turned a switch somewhere and indirect lighting brightened the room somewhat. Nelson seemed oblivious of it. Jefferson nodded at a couch against the inner wall of the conservatory. We went and sat on it, he at one end, me at the other. Across the room Nelson sat and watched the wrestling match and drank whiskey among his dogs.

“Been with Mr. Jack more than sixty years,” Jefferson said. “Fourteen years old, graduate eighth grade, going to be a carpenter.”

Jefferson stood suddenly and walked over to the table by Nelson’s chair and made himself a drink and one for me and brought them back. He handed me mine and remained standing, holding his in both of his still-strong hands, looking out at the dark rain beyond the conservatory glass.

“Always like tools,” he said. “Like to make a miter fit snug. Like things square.”

He looked around the conservatory slowly. “Started working for Mr. Jack’s father on this room. Apprentice. But I was good at it, even then, and Mr. Jack’s father he say, `Boy, you a hard worker. Need a boy to work ‘round here.’ He say, `You want to work for me?‘ and I say, `Sure enough, Mr. Nelson.’ And I worked here ever since.”

He was looking at the darkness again, and through it probably, back down the corridor of his past.

“Cheryl Anne,” I said softly.

“Sure, you right. She Mr. Jack’s daughter. Mr. Jack, he a hand with the ladies. And maybe Miss Abby knew it, and maybe she didn’t, but nothing come of it, ‘cause Mr. Jack, he don’t never embarrass her, you understand? He maybe have a fling with a lady, but it always a lady of breeding and position, nobody gonna embarrass Miss Abby.”

“Miss Abby was Jack’s wife?”

“Yessir.”

Jefferson shook his head. Across the room Nelson fumbled together another drink for himself.

“Bertha come here to work in the kitchen. Not a cook, just to peel vegetables, and wash up, that sort of thing. She from Batesburg. She come over on the bus every morning, go home on it every night.”

One of the dogs wandered across the room as we talked and jumped up on the couch and turned around three times and lay down between us. Jefferson patted her head absently.

“She don’t look like much no more, but she look like something then all right. And she had that thing, you know, Mr. Spenser. She… she had a wiggle. She… hot, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And Mr. Jack, he can’t keep his hands off her.”

“It wasn’t his hands got him in trouble,” I said.

“Yessir. And when she have the baby, Mr. Jack was ashamed. He felt real bad about it and he didn’t want Miss Abby to know, and he don’t want anyone else to know either. So he give her some money, and he say it is a secret, and long as it stayed a secret, he’d keep giving her the money.”

“Hundred bucks a month,” I said.

Jefferson shrugged.

“Those times that a lot of money to somebody like Bertha Voss,” he said. “And she gets married to Hilly Rankin and she lets him think it’s his kid. So it worked out that it stayed secret.”

“Except she told her daughter,” I said. “And she told her to be proud of who her father was and she told her how rich her father was and the daughter always remembered that, and always hated that he wouldn’t acknowledge her, and for reasons that probably have to do with her being crazy, she took the legitimate daughter’s name and history.”

“Yessir.”

“And when she was forty-three years old and broke, she remembered about how rich he was, and she came to him for money.”

“Yessir.”

The hokum noise of the wrestling match on the television made the silence in the rest of the vast atrium seem somehow more intense. Jefferson went and got two more drinks and brought them back and gave me one. Jumper Jack never stirred. His gaze remained fixed on the television screen.

“Did he pay her?” I said.

“Don’t even know who she is,” Jefferson said. “Or he says he don’t. Hard to say what Mr. Jack know and don’t know anymore.”

“You pay her?” I said.

“Did for a while. Then no more.”

“Why’d you stop?”

Jefferson shook his head softly. “Ain’t no money,” he said.

“Jack too?” I said.

“Mr. Jack never had as much as everybody think,” Jefferson said. “And he spend what he got.”

Jefferson smiled thoughtfully, thinking back over the spending.

“Bought cars and horses, and whiskey and food and presents for Miss Abby and Miss Livvie, and he spent a lot on women. Mr. Jack always say he didn’t waste none. He say he didn’t get cheated. Horse players die broke, he say.”

“So he’s broke?”

“Yessir. This house free and clear, ‘bout all.”

“What’s he use for cash?” I said.

“Don’t need much. Feed the dogs, buy whiskey. ‘Bout all.”

“You get a salary?”

“I still do a little carpentry work, part-time, when Mr. Jack sleeping. My grandson come in, watch him for me. Put in some cabinets for people, do some finish work, that sort of thing. Can’t do too much heavy stuff anymore, but I still got the touch for finish.”

“You support him,” I said.

Jefferson took in some of his drink. I sipped mine. Bourbon wasn’t my favorite, but one made do.

“Yessir,” Jefferson said.

“And you told Cheryl Anne that there wasn’t money to give her.”

Jefferson nodded. He was looking out again past the dark fields beyond the atrium. He raised his glass and drank slowly. From the look of the drink it was mostly bourbon, but he drank as if it were milk. The rain washed down along the glass walls of the room.

“And she was unable to hide her disappointment,” I said.

“Say she don’t believe me,” Jefferson said. “Call me a thieving nigger. And she scream at Mr. Jack. He ain’t right anymore. You can see that. Anybody see that. Say he her father and he owe her the money. Say he got one week to get her some money. It upset him, her screaming at him like that.”

I sipped a little more bourbon. Jefferson finished his and looked at mine. I shook my head. Jefferson went for another and made one too for Jumper Jack. I scratched the hound’s ear that lay curled next to me on the couch. I looked at the rain that slid along the curving glass. I looked at Jefferson. He returned the look and we were silent. We both knew. It seemed as if I had known for a long time.

Seeing me scratch the hound’s ear, another dog got up and came over and put his head on the edge of the couch. The rest of the dogs noticed this change of position and stood and moved silently around the room, as if ordered by an unseen trainer, and settled back down in realigned order.

“And she left,” I said.

Jefferson nodded.

“And went back to Boston.”

Nod.

“And you took a framing hammer, with a long handle for leverage, because you’re not as strong as you used to be, and you went up there too.”

“On the bus,” Jefferson said, looking straight at me with no expression I could see. “Three days on the bus.”

“And found her address and waited until it was dark and when she walked by you beat her to death.”

“Yessir.”

Across the room Jumper Jack sat staring at his television, with three dogs in various positions of sleep on the floor around him. He drank half a glass of whiskey as I watched him and dribbled some down his chin and wiped it away with the back of his hand. It was the most active I’d seen him. He never glanced at us. It was as if he were alone in the room with his dogs and his whiskey, except that as I watched, tears rolled slowly down his face.

I put my drink down and rubbed my temples with both hands. The dog whose ear I’d been scratching looked up at me. I scratched his ear again, and he put his head back down on the couch.

“Jefferson,” I said, “I’ll get back to you.”