The Cantaloupe Thief (36 page)

Branigan settled down to wait for a homeless man who, for some unfathomable reason, was biking ten miles out of town to sleep in her barn and, from the luscious smell in here, eat her cantaloupes.

 

It was a measure of Branigan's lack of fear of Malachi that she fell asleep. She hadn't intended to. But she jerked awake when she heard the loud screech of the barn door opening, followed by the softer squeak of bicycle tires. Malachi left the door wide open — she could see the farmhouse off in the distance, lights glowing inside and out. She couldn't see him in the stall below, but she heard him humming.

For the next half-hour, he puttered, going to the barn door every ten minutes or so to look across the field at the farmhouse.
What is he waiting for? For me to turn out the lights?

He lit a candle in the stall. She still couldn't see him, but could see the ring of light that flickered outside the stall. Then she heard more squeaking of bicycle tires.

The squeaking grew louder, and suddenly another figure stood in the doorway, dark against dark.

She squinted to see him, but couldn't. Then the newly arrived figure spoke.

“So you finally shown up. You gonna kill your sistah now too?”

What? If Malachi was in the doorway, who was in the stall?

And then she heard the voice she'd heard every childhood day on this farm; the voice that she loved above all others.
But he's in the gospel mission,
her mind clamored.
He can't be here.

“Of course I'm not going to kill my sister.”

“But you kilt them others,” said Malachi.

“What others?”

“Vesuvius. Rita. Max.”

“It wasn't me. I read in the paper they were killed by the church van. How would I get the church van?”

“I 'spect you talk Mr Chan into tellin' you where the key was. You is his daddy, ain't you?”

This new information was coming so fast, so discordantly, that Branigan refused to take it in. She wondered wildly, disconnectedly, why Malachi was letting his grammar slip.

“Malachi, you're letting your imagination run away with you.”

“I don' think so. You bought you a pitcher from Vesuvius, but then you threw it away. That's what made me start thinkin' of you.”

“I did buy a painting from Vesuvius. But I planned to give it to Branigan. She's a big art lover.”

“Why din't you give it to her then? Why you throw it away?”

“I don't have to explain anything to you. In fact, you're trespassing on my family's property.”

Malachi didn't back down. “I figures you kilt some rich lady a long time ago. Then you comes back to town and hear Rita yappin' 'bout it. She done tole Vesuvius and me and Max and Dontegan and who knows who else? An' you start spreadin' money 'round tryin' to stop the talkin'. But there's too much talkin'.

“What I din't unnerstan at first was why you come back. Then I saw you at the li-bree with Mr Chan. And it make sense.

“What I don' unnerstan is why you gots to kill V. He done stop talkin' when you buy his pitcher. Why you gots to kill him?”

This was obviously another bad dream set in Pa's barn. Branigan's mind skittered away from Malachi's outlandish accusations and settled on his speech patterns. So country. So uneducated.

And suddenly she knew what Malachi was doing. He was luring Davison into confessing to an ignorant, uneducated man who didn't matter. The confession wouldn't matter because Malachi didn't matter. She wanted to scream a warning to Davison. But she didn't.

“I had to kill Vesuvius because he was ‘touched in the head', as we used to say,” Davison said. “How could I trust him to keep quiet?”

“How you got him outta Jericho Road after dark?”

“I called his cell phone and told him I wanted to meet about commissioning a painting. The fact that street people have free cell phones is enormously helpful.”

Malachi's voice turned chillier. “Why you move in Rita's shack under the bridge? You plan to kill her there?”

“Hell, I didn't know who she was. And I sure didn't know she'd seen me at Mrs Resnick's. I only put that together when I heard Branigan and Liam talking.”

There it was: her worst fear. Her meddling had gotten Rita killed. She felt the pina coladas coming back up, but forced herself to swallow and keep quiet.

“And the ‘rich-ass family' she talk about payin' to keep quiet, that's yo' family, right?”

“Yeah, except that shows how little she knew my family. You see them paying to keep me anywhere? And Branigan's trying her hardest to send my butt to prison.”

Branigan hugged herself and clinched her eyes. If she'd thought there was nothing worse than getting Rita and Max killed, she'd been badly mistaken.

“Why you not run Max down with the church van?” Malachi was relentless. “Why change your MO?”

She had a mad desire to laugh at Malachi's use of police lingo.

“My MO?” Davison said mockingly. “My MO changed because I was afraid that damn Liam would connect the church van to Chan. That's how I got it. Chan told me where the key was and I made a copy.”

Branigan clamped a hand over her mouth, repulsed that Chan had been pulled into this ugliness.

Malachi didn't let up. “You give Max money?”

“I gave the old drunk $100, but he used it to get drunker and keep talking. So I went to his tent. Took another bottle and offered it to him. He went off on me, demanded $200. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”

“From the Jericho Road box?” Malachi guessed.

“It was only good the one time,” Davison said.

“So what you doin' here in the barn?”

“You tell me. Obviously you expected me.”

“I think you come to kill your sistah 'fore she figure ever'thin' out.”

Branigan didn't know who was more horrified — her or Davison. He let out a roar and rushed Malachi. Too late, she saw the gleam of a knife in his hand.

She wanted to scream a warning to Davison, to tell him Malachi was military-trained, street-smart. You didn't survive fourteen years on the streets without knowing your way around weapons.

But another part of her brain knew a deeper reality — knew that Malachi's words, as crazily painful as they were, were true. And so she screamed something quite different.

“Malachi! He's got a knife!”

The disembodied shriek coming from the barn rafters startled Davison and gave Malachi the time he needed to swing around and grab Davison's wrist. The knife scuttled into the darkness.

Malachi twisted Davison's arm behind him as her brother sank to his knees.

“Branigan,” he cried. “I caught this guy waiting to break into the farmhouse.”

She clambered down the ladder and stood over him, her breath breaking unevenly.

“He was waiting for your lights to go off,” said the voice of her dreams, the voice of her nightmares. “I've seen him before. He's homeless.”

“Yeah, he is,” she said. “But he's so much more.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Branigan supposed she could have called the Cannon County Sheriff's Office. It was their jurisdiction should anyone want to charge Davison with the attempted murder of Malachi Martin. Or, for that matter, the attempted murder of Branigan Powers. Davison swore he'd never planned to do that. She chose to believe him.

The truth was bad enough without that.

Instead, she called the Grambling Police Department, and she and Malachi waited in the barn for the nine minutes it took Detective Scovoy and his colleagues to arrive, blue lights flashing, sirens screaming. They charged Davison with four counts of murder: Alberta Resnick, Vesuvius Hightower, Rita Mae Jones, Max Brody.

During the interminable wait, as Malachi kept Davison on his knees, his arm locked securely behind him, Branigan tried to clear her head. “I believed you when you said you'd never been homeless in Grambling,” she said. “But you lived in Mrs Resnick's pool house the spring before her murder, didn't you? Those were your books.”

“Yeah, but I didn't move in until after Billy did,” Davison said. “When he attracted so much attention, I left.”

“And did you come to the farm before contacting Liam? That footprint outside my window before I knew you were back. . .”

In the candlelight, she saw a look pass over his face — a look she'd seen in the past week and identified as embarrassment, or even shame. Now she recognized it as cunning.

“I wanted to see where you were living, Brani G. I wanted to see if we couldn't get back to the way things used to be.”

It was that look that sealed things. Things she wanted to believe slipped away. She felt the dark weight in her chest crack and shift.

“I thought you loved Mrs Resnick.”

“I did, I guess, when we were kids. She bought us ice cream, remember? From the ice cream truck.” He shrugged. “I guess I loved crack more.”

He must have seen the look of horror on his sister's face, because he grew defensive. “You just don't understand, Branigan. You never have.”

“What's to understand? You let drugs rule you. You let drugs ruin everything.” She checked her anger. There was so much more she needed to know. She took a breath. “Rita. She was killed the night we got back from the beach. You sneaked out?”

Davison pointed to her bike. “After what you told me on the way down, I knew she was a ticking bomb. All I had to do was bike to town, pick her up in the church van and offer her crack. Then I put her out and, well... you know the rest.”

“But why'd you put her out on Mrs Resnick's street?”

“I wanted to know what she'd seen all those years ago, how she knew me. She said she knew me — and you — from when we shopped at the mall. It was her idea to drive to Mrs Resnick's so she could point out where she'd been hiding. She thought I wanted to talk about paying to keep her quiet, so she was plenty talkative. Right up 'til the end.”

Branigan was too numb to ask anything else, so Malachi took over. “What happen to you, man? You had everythin'.”

Davison sighed. “You've been out there. You know what this life can do to you. I knew the old lady had money. All I needed was enough to get high, and she wouldn't give it to me. Slammed the door in my face.

“I got away with it too. Would've gotten away with it forever if I hadn't come back to see Chan.” He shrugged, turned his face toward Branigan.

She couldn't see him clearly — could see only the angle of that face so like her own. That's why his next words cut so deep.

“Would've gotten away with it if I didn't have you for a sister.”

For the first time, her tears began to flow. They flowed for a gentle disabled artist named Vesuvius. For a horribly damaged woman named Rita Mae. For a mean drunk named Max, who undoubtedly had his own demons. For a brother so lost to her he would wish away their kinship.

“That's something I'll have to live with,” she whispered. “I just wish Chan didn't have to live with it too.”

 

Branigan and Malachi followed Detective Scovoy's convoy back to Grambling, Malachi's bicycle in her trunk.

“I owe you an apology,” she told him. “You've been sleeping in my barn to protect me. And you left those bottles to let me know.” She was too ashamed to tell him she'd misread his signal, taken it as a threat rather than a promise. In her own way, she was as bad as all those people who looked through Malachi.

“No problem, Miz Branigan.” He'd dropped his slang; was mirroring her speech patterns again.

As devastated as she was, she still had a job to do. “How did you know it was Davison?” she asked. “I thought it was Heath Resnick and we'd never be able to prove it.”

“The main thing,” he said, “was V's paintin'. It didn't make sense to spend money on a paintin', then throw it away. The fact that it ended up in the trash under the bridge pointed to a homeless dude.

“The other thin' was Mr Chan. He seemed awfully unhappy for a young man headin' off to college. Somethin' bad had a-hold of him. I think he suspected his real daddy had taken the church van after he got him to tell where the key was. But he didn't know 'bout the old lady's murder, so nothin' made sense. Why would a homeless dude go out and run down other homeless dudes?

“The third thing was there was a lot of talk goin' on in the homeless camps. A lot of what you hear you got to take with a grain of salt. But everybody knows when somebody comes into money. So V and Max kind of stuck out. Rita, not so much. If your brother gave her money, she smoked it up.”

“I had all the same information and didn't put it together,” she said.

“Without living out here, you couldn't know these folks,” said Malachi. “And you loved your brother. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.”

 

Malachi asked to be dropped off on North Main. She watched him wheel his bike through the glow of the streetlights, then disappear into the trees on the courthouse lawn, donning his familiar cloak of invisibility.

She drove down Main Street to
The Rambler.

The newsroom was as crowded as it got these days, alerted by Jody who, along with a swarm of TV reporters, was at the police station. Tan-4 and Marjorie and Julie were compiling and editing his remotely filed pieces for the website.

Tan greeted Branigan with uncharacteristic gentleness. “We're breaking the story online and in Saturday's paper,” he said. “But it'll only be enough to whet readers' appetites for Sunday. I want Jody and Marjorie taking the lead. Branigan, feed 'em what you've got.”

“No,” she said, not loudly or belligerently. “I'm writing this.”

“No way. It's about your brother.”

“I'm writing this.”

Tan stood over her desk, glowering.