South of Shiloh (28 page)

“Yes,” Jenny said. “I am.” She was staring at the wall in front of her, which she realized was a repository for cremated remains. There were names and dates on some of the panels.

“I know this is…hard, ma’am. We never really met and I’m a thousand miles away but I got a situation here and I need to know more about this man,” Beeman said.

“So do I,” Jenny said.

Now it was Beeman’s turn to pause on the connection. After a moment, he started again. “Thing is, he’s carrying his camera in Paul’s—your husband’s—haversack. And he’s got his uniform in his car. I read his name in the bag and on some of the clothing. He’s been in town all day and he ain’…isn’t taking any pictures…”

“I guess we have to trust each other,” Jenny said.

“Ma’am?”

“You were next to Paul when he died. Davey Manning said you tried real hard to save his life, so I guess we have to trust each other.” She was trying to fit the man to the voice, but it was hard to read him through the filter of his Southern accent.

“He ain’t like any newspaper guy I ever met,” Beeman said.

“In your line of work I’m sure you know all the usual reasons people get in trouble. Well, John Rane is the kind of man who gets in trouble because he’s very, very good at everything, except getting close to people.”

“That may well be,” Beeman said patiently, “but what I’m after is something more specific, like exactly what’s he doing here with Paul’s bag and clothes?”

Beeman’s voice had this gentle sway, almost like music. “Of course,” she said, more attentive, “I see. When I met Rane almost twelve years ago he wasn’t a photographer…he was a St. Paul cop.”

“I know,” Beeman said. “I read up on him online. He’s been a lot of things. And now I got him in my county.”

Jenny became stuck. She stood up, advanced a step, and placed her open palm on one of the blank panels. The day was cloudy and threatening to bluster. The stone was cold to her touch.

“Mrs. Edin? You still there?” Beeman said, trying to keep the conversation going.

“The thing you should know, Deputy Beeman…”

“Yes?”

“The day you called, last Saturday afternoon. When you told me, I collapsed. A man picked up the phone and spoke to you. That was John Rane.”

“Damn,” Beeman muttered. “I knew there was something about him. It was his voice. I heard it before.”

Jenny looked over the names on the panels and wondered how many of these people died violently; abruptly scissored out of the family picture. She tried to visualize the size of the shears they used to cut through a cadaver’s chest.

“Mrs. Edin?”

“I’m here,” Jenny said. “The reason he’s got Paul’s things is my fault. Rane was at the house when Davey Manning and Tom Dalton came over to return them. That’s when he heard Davey and Tom discuss what happened, how they’d talked to you and how you expressed the opinion Paul’s death wasn’t an accident. I let him take Paul’s things. And your card.” She paused. “So, on the surface, yes, he works for a newspaper and he’s there to investigate a story. But I don’t think that’s why he went.”

“Why’s he here, then?”

“Ah, I think he’s trying to figure out how to be a father.”

“Say again?”

Jenny watched a large crow strut stiff-legged among the desiccated tufts of prairie grass. The bird was close enough for her to distinctly see the stern flash of the remorseless, alert eye against the swept black feathers. Beeman could be like that. Single-minded, suspicious. Cops spent their lives tidying up human roadkill, didn’t they?

“Mrs. Edin?”

Jenny debated. Rane was playing with fire again and she’d had a part in it. People could get hurt. She had intended to confide this to Patti but now she was telling it to a stranger.

“Deputy Beeman. Paul and I had—have—a daughter named Molly. But Rane is the biological father. I was pregnant by him when I married Paul. I had not spoken to him since before Molly was born except once on the phone when she was starting kindergarten. He’s been absolutely scrupulous about not intruding in Molly’s life.” Jenny paused and considered the photos and decided not to mention it. “Molly had—has—no idea who her biological father is…” Jenny paused again. “I know how scattered this must sound…how…bad…”

“Ma’am, I ain’t exactly…. a good-and-bad kind of person.”

Something in the deeply felt way his voice wrestled through that statement prompted her to say, “You’re struggling with this too…”

“Mrs. Edin…”

“Jenny.”

“All right, Jenny. The way it’s starting to look down here is somebody came to Kirby Creek with a plan to shoot me and hit your husband instead.”

She was looking at a wall full of ashes, talking to a man she’d never met, and it was turning into a surreal communication. Strangers linked by a cell phone, like a passenger on one of the doomed hijacked planes thrust in sudden intimacy with a 911 dispatcher.

“Deputy Beeman,” she blurted, her voice shaking. “I got a feeling you better catch the guy who shot Paul and lock him up quick. Last Saturday John Rane spoke to his daughter for the first time and had to tell her that her father was dead. The man has an almost suicidal habit of charging into dangerous situations. I think all this has turned his life upside down. And this conversation is starting to have the same effect on me.
Right this minute I’m standing outside the undertakers!
We have to stop this for now…”

“Damn right, ma’am. Hell, I mean…you have my number?”

“Yes.” Calmer now. “It’s written down half a dozen places at home. It’s on my cell.”

“Can we talk again?”

“I just need some time to think,” Jenny said. Then her tone relaxed and she asked, “Where are you?”

“Ma’am?”

“I mean where are you physically right now, what’s it like?”

“Ah, well, I’m standing on this back road, kinda, out here all alone. It’s a clear day, almost hot…”

“I gotta go,” Jenny said. She ended the call, stood up, and swiped a damp spot on the seat of her slacks. Something on the bench. Absently, she thought it might stain. Then she started walking back toward the building where Paul’s empty shell lay held together with Frankenstein stitches. With the bizarre echo of Beeman’s call still ringing in her mind, she realized that she’d never know if Mom was right about Paul leaving his heart in Mississippi.

39

BEEMAN LIVED DOWN A GRAVEL ROAD NORTH OF
town, in a large split-level rambler set in a wooded lot with a crater, edged in crime-scene tape, where the mailbox had been. More tape picketed the lawn in front of a picture window blinded by a sheet of fresh plywood.

“You been redecorating in yellow,” Rane said when they parked side by side in back of the house.

Beeman made a face. “Go on in, John. Door’s always open. There’s a spare bedroom and bath in the basement. I’ll be back directly and we’ll take a drive. You want to go to Shiloh with me you’ll stay put. Hear?”

Then Beeman put the Crown Vic in gear, turned around, went back up the drive, and left Rane alone.

Rane got out of the Jeep and spotted another long sag of the yellow tape surrounding a pond in the back acres. White floaters caught the sun.

He thought about it.

Okay. What’s happening is he’s holding you close; behind his folksy shit,
he’s checking you out.
Not like the Tennessee cops, who routinely ran him in the computer to see if he had any outstanding warrants. Rane got the impression Beeman became a cop because he had to; the kind of guy called to make a difference in people’s lives.
Paul’s kind of guy
, who had to walk the walk in cadence with Tex Ritter’s mournful lyrics.

Strap on the iron and do what a man’s gotta do…

Corny.

Except he steps in and catches you up as you’re about to spin out of control.

I wasn’t out of control.

Yes you were. They would’ve stomped you good in that bar if Beeman hadn’t been on the lookout.

Rane picked up his travel bag, climbed the deck steps, and pulled open the sliding door. He paused on the threshold. Door’s always open. First-name hospitality. Trusts me in his house?

He went in through the kitchen. The upstairs was conventional cozy. A clean, pressed county deputy’s uniform shirt hung on a hanger hooked to a chair. Magnets held a gallery of family pictures on the refrigerator door. Beeman’s wife was a wiry, dark-haired woman with large serious eyes and a smiling mouth. One of his sons looked to be seven or eight, shown hugging a black Lab. The other boy was older, perhaps twelve, with a stoic jock face to match his football jersey misshapen with shoulder pads. There was no sign of the Lab, so Beeman must have sent the dog away with his wife and kids. From the pictures on the walls it looked like he’d married early and stayed married.

Rane spied a diamond ring lying in the middle of the kitchen table, on a flyer advertising a barbecue at a Baptist church. File that away.

A panorama of Civil War paintings lined the walls of the living room and dining room; variations of Lee and Jackson on horseback. A large framed photograph showed a younger Beeman in a gray uniform, wearing full kit and shouldering a rifle, standing next to his wife, who wore a hoop skirt and bonnet and held an infant in her arms. A bivouac of white tents dotted the background. Finally, Rane’s eyes were drawn to the portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who peered from the wall over the desk in the living room with the iconic ferocity of a defiant Christ.

He carried his bag downstairs and found the guest room. Most of the lower level was taken up by a den with walls papered in a solid collage of law enforcement pictures mixed in with badges and shoulder patches from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama sheriff departments. It had the look of Alary’s South. All he needed was a car door hanging from the ceiling. Antique guns, pistols, and swords filled a display rack.

One corner was hemmed in by bookshelves full of crime fiction, which surrounded a comfortable easy chair and an ottoman. A lamp sat on a side table next to an ashtray and a corncob pipe. Something caught his eye on a shelf lined with nonfiction. Among the volumes of Civil War history, a single book stood upside down. Rane craned his neck and read the title:
The Mind of the South
by Wilbur J. Cash.

Four generations of men stared from framed photos over the fireplace mantel. Rane presumed that a sturdy man in a police uniform, in the newest picture, was Beeman’s father. The formally posed, whiskered elder would be a grandfather. Finally, a yellowed, acid-splashed tintype under glass showed a wisp-bearded young man in a Confederate uniform. The Rebel ancestor held a revolver across his chest and his dark eyes were fixed on the camera with the intensity peculiar to the 1860s, which one does not see in the eyes of modern Americans—the one picture he had taken in his life.

Another picture was familiar: Beeman in chocolate-chip camo and E-6 chevrons, standing with a black M2 rifle in one hand and plastic liter bottle of water in the other. The barren blend of sand and sky felt like Kuwait.

Rane checked the bump on his forehead in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t replace the Band-Aid. A car came down the drive. As he pulled the faded army cap from his bag and slipped it on, Beeman walked down the stairs.

“Let’s go,” he said, noticing but not reacting to the cap.

“Where to?” Rane asked.

“How about we try an’ figure out why Mitchell Lee Nickels went off his nut and wants to kill me,” Beeman said.

They eased out of the afternoon traffic coursing down Highway 72 and slowed in the left-turn lane. The light changed and Beeman turned south. “Tate Street, old Highway 45,” Beeman said, chewing on the stem of the unlit corncob pipe he had retrieved from his den. “We got two kinds of history, John: we have the Civil War for the tourists and we got the state-line mob days…” Beeman looked at Rane and smiled. “We don’t usually lay that on visitors too heavy up front; especially after we had to live down the Hollywood’s version of Buford Pusser.”

As they cruised past a strip mall into more open country, Beeman said, “But there was a hell of a criminal operation here in the fifties and sixties. Started up when they closed the cathouses and casinos in Phenix City, Alabama, and run the assholes out. They settled on this road across the state line north of town and here, just past the city limits.” They drove by a pasture, some car body shops, and a machine shop, then pulled over to a deserted patch of cracked asphalt stitched with weeds.

“They called this stretch Drewry Holler. Had your gin joints, hookers, gambling, and the El Ray Motel where Towhead White was killed. Not much left now.

“Around midnight, August 10, 1972, Tommy Lee Nickels, Mitchell Lee’s pa, was shot DRT—dead right there—on that slab of blacktop. Shot four times in the chest with a .38. According to the legend that’s how all this started. Everyone says my dad did it. Story was he put Tommy Lee down like a mad dog.”

“Did he?” Rane asked.

“Don’t honestly know. Daddy never would talk about it; died letting everybody still wonder. But Daddy did favor a .38.”

“He have a reason?” Rane asked.

Beeman sucked the empty pipe. “Didn’t take much in those days. Look at somebody wrong’d get you killed along this strip. Let me put it like this—I live in a lot of house for a deputy’s salary. My daddy built that house and I suspect illegal moonshine had a hand in it. My momma never liked that house and when the old man died she moved home to Rankin County with her family.” Then he waited for traffic to clear, executed a U-turn, drove back to 72, turned west, and in a few moments they were on new 45 heading north toward Tennessee.

“So there
is
bad blood between you and Mitchell Lee,” Rane said after a while.

Beeman laughed soundlessly. “You could say that. But up till now all we ever had was a few fistfights in high school.”

“What about the scene in the cemetery that time he shot at you?” Rane asked.

“That was for show. Him and his scummy lawyer cooked up that deal so he went to alcohol treatment and got out of shipping to Iraq with the guard. That’s what I mean, see, he
plans
things, schemes. Everybody knew he was going to marry Miss Ellender Kirby far back as high school and it took him twelve years but damned if he didn’t.” Beeman shook his head. “So why’s he making his move now all of a sudden? And in such a dumb-ass way, sending text messages?”

Beeman let the thought hang as he took a left turn, crossed the four-lane, and drove down a winding blacktop road with close-in foliage. Then he pulled to the shoulder, put the Crown Vic in park, got out, and popped the trunk lid. A moment later he returned with a Vietnam-era M16 rifle, the fully automatic military version with a forward assist on the side. He jammed a magazine into the rifle, pulled the operating rod to load a round, set the safety, and leaned the weapon in the front seat between them.

“Don’t mean to get too dramatic, John, but we’re headed out to Guys and this is prime Leets territory.” Beeman looked around. “I’m outta my jurisdiction and I ain’t real popular hereabouts. So keep them famous eyes of yours open.” He put the car in gear and drove slowly down the twisting road.

“Where are we heading?” Rane asked.

Beeman smiled. “Going to swing by Fiona Leets’s house, see if we can get a look at King Shit Dwayne himself. When he comes to visit he usually hangs out at his ma’s. He’s in from Memphis, has been all week.”

“The drug kingpin who put a contract on you for shooting his brother?”

“Word is.”

Rane scanned the surrounding tree lines and brush. “Can this Dwayne make a contract stick?”

“Oh yeah, big-time. He got rich selling drugs and now he’s invested it in pizza joints, dry cleaners, car lots. There’s a rumor he’s putting together a construction company. He’s got the connections to bring in a pro if he wanted.”

“Okay, I give. So why ain’t you dead?”

Beeman shrugged. “Almost was, last Saturday. In fact Dwayne was seen up by the Kirby house during the reenactment with a pair of binoculars, scanning the field.”

“Ouch,” Rane said.

“He wasn’t exactly out of place, ’cause he bought two of them cannons for the artillery boys. But when you think of it, him on one side, Darl on the other and Mitchell Lee maybe somewhere in the middle with a rifle?” Beeman raised his eyebrows.

“So bring Dwayne in?”

“No probable cause. They decided to carry Paul’s death as an accident. Woulda been me, they mighta ruled that an accident too.”

“Cleaner than a hit,” Rane said.

“Yep. Except it bounced funny.”

“Beeman,” Rane said, “we been driving around for a while and,” he pointed to the radio handset clipped to the dash, “that radio’s been awful quiet.”

“You noticed that,” Beeman said. “Well, it’s like this. Paul’s death is officially closed to keep ’em happy at city and county. But the sheriff knows something’s going on, especially with Mitchell Lee missing and me getting weird threats, so he’s taken me off everything else and’s letting me poke around on my own.” He grinned. “That way, the shit hits the fan he don’t get hit with too much splatter. Like I said, folks on the west side of Alcorn tend to favor the Leetses in this alleged feud. And they vote, even the ones who can’t read.”

Beeman slowed and pulled to the side of the road in front of a broad, well-tended lawn with a large bronze water sculpture set in front of a newer, sprawling ranch-type house.

“Fiona Leets’s place. Dwayne built it for her. Now look in back of the main house, see that one-room hillbilly shack with the sagging gray plank siding?”

“Yeah,” Rane said, scanning the house, the lawn, the surrounding tree line for a glint of sunlight on metal. Like a rifle barrel.

“Well, Fiona’s got this brand-new house with all the latest gadgets. I heard there a plasma TV in there the size of my garage door. But she likes to stay out in that one-room cabin with nothing but an old bed, a rocking chair, and a wood cook stove. She’s probably in there now, rocking, maybe with a pinch of snuff she keeps in this old silver Rooster Snuff tin. Then she’ll take a twig from a black gum tree, gnaw it down to fiber and make her an old-time toothbrush to tidy up her remaining teeth.”

Beeman sighed and leaned back. “Don’t see Dwayne’s Caddy. Guess he ain’t around.” Then he pointed to the lawn. “That’s what I really brought you out to see.”

“A fountain,” Rane said.

“Take a closer look and tell me what you make of that?” Beeman asked.

Rane scrutinized the stylized bronze tiers of tanks and tubes. Sunlight hitting the falling veils of water cast a trembling rainbow. “Some kind of metal sculpture?”

“Dwayne brought in the artist special from Nashville. Got heating elements built in so it never freezes and runs all year.”

“Yeah?”

Beeman leaned forward. “John, man, you
are
a city boy,” he said patiently, “that’s a sculpture of a fuckin’ moonshine still.”