The Devil and the River (39 page)

McNamara opened the door. Gaines walked to his car, pulled back out onto the main road, and waited for McNamara to come out after him in one of the official MSP pickup trucks.

They drove for another mile, maybe a mile and a half, and then—seemingly out of nowhere—another complex of low-slung white-painted buildings appeared out of the landscape, as if they had just grown from the dust and dry air.

McNamara pulled over. Gaines parked behind the pickup, and McNamara came around to the driver’s-side window.

“You stay here. I’ll check what gang he’s on and then go fetch him. Anyone asks what you’re doing here, just lie, all right, son?”

Gaines nodded.

McNamara drove away once more, and Gaines was left stranded in the middle of the Mississippi delta, a half-dozen miles from the highway, no valid reason for being there, and he wondered whether he would ever see Ted McNamara again.

I
f Ted McNamara was precisely as Gaines had imagined, Clifton Regis was not.

Despite the fact that he wore regulation stripes, that he had been out on a chain gang for pretty much the entire day, he somehow managed to look anything other than browbeaten and disheveled. He was a tall man, a good three or four inches over Gaines, and aside from a fine scar running the length of his left nostril and ending a quarter inch beneath his left eye, his face was unmarked. His hair was close-cropped, nothing more than a shadow, and only when Gaines extended his hand and Regis took it, did Gaines realize that the pinky and ring fingers were missing from Regis’s right hand.

It was like shaking the hand of a small child, and it was unnerving.

Regis said nothing at all as he sat down. McNamara had in fact given them use of the chapel, though the term
chapel
was applied in the very loosest sense of the word. It was a shack, constructed—it seemed—not only from random sections of wood and offcuts, but also heavy branches and sawn logs. The floor was wood in places, oilcloth in others, and in the corners the dry earth beneath was visible. The roof was corrugated iron, rusted in the main, punched through with fist-sized holes, and it was solely through the gaps in the walls and the roof that any light entered. Thus John Gaines, here on a wild mission to find something that seemed impossible, and Clifton Regis, thankful perhaps for nothing more than an hour away from the work party, sat on a rickety wooden bench in the gloom of a makeshift building on Parchman Farm and looked at each other in awkward silence for a little while.

“You know who I am?” Gaines eventually asked.

“I know you’re law,” Regis said, and—yet again—Regis surprised Gaines with his diction and accent. He was almost accentless, if such a thing were possible.

“Any idea why I might have asked to see you?”

Regis shrugged. “Only three or four reasons the law comes out to see people like me,” Regis replied. “You think I’ve done something which I haven’t, you think I know someone who’s done something they didn’t do, you want me to find out something from someone in here about something they didn’t do, or you brought me a reprieve and a pardon from the governor.” Regis smiled sardonically. “I’m guessin’ we can rule out the last one, right?”

“We can rule out all of them,” Gaines said.

Regis’s expression changed then, noticeably so, and not for the good. He slid a little farther away on the bench and eyed Gaines suspiciously.

“I have to level with you, Clifton,” Gaines said. “Otherwise this is all bullshit.”

“You got smokes?” Regis asked.

Gaines took a pack from his shirt pocket, handed them over. Regis withdrew one and Gaines lit it for him. He set his Zippo there on the packet as an open invitation for Regis to just help himself.

“I want to talk to you about Della Wade.”

The reaction was immediate and astonishing. Regis seemed to visibly pale, as if the blood was being drawn downward from his face. He seemed nervous. He looked away, shook his head, turned back to Gaines.

“I been here seventeen months, sir,” Regis said. “Took me a year to forget what she looked like, another three or four to forget why I loved her, and I just started working on convincing myself that I lost my fingers some other way. Now you show up and spoil it all.” Regis switched his cigarette from his right to his left and then held up his right hand for Gaines to see. “That, sir, is my constant reminder of Della Wade and her crazy-ass family.”

“Heard word that you took ten thousand dollars from Earl Wade.”

“Is that so? Well, that’s precisely what I’d expect you to have heard.”

“Not the truth?”

“About as far from the truth as you could hope to get and then some.”

“So, the truth is what?”

Regis dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the ground, put his foot on it, took another from the pack and lit it with Gaines’s Zippo. It was simply nervousness, something with which to be momentarily distracted.

“I
have
to talk to you?” Regis asked.

Gaines shook his head. “No, you don’t have to talk to me.”

“Then give me a good reason why I should.”

“Because I have a dead girl with her heart missing, a dead war veteran with his head and his hand cut off, and I think both of these things are connected, and I think both of these things have something to do with the Wades.”

Regis looked at Gaines for some time, as if his mind was simply trying to absorb the information he’d just been given.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “And you think you can touch the Wades?”

“I can try.”

Regis smiled, started to laugh. “Then you have bigger balls than me, sir. However, you do have one thing that I don’t.”

“I am the law.”

Regis laughed again. “Shit, no. You think the law has any authority or influence over people like the Wades? No, the thing you have that I don’t is your color. Being a colored man, see, everyone knows we are lying before we even say a word.”

“Things are changing—”

“Tell the Freedom Riders that. Tell the niggers they got swinging from trees south of here every Saturday night. You go looking for the Wades, you’re gonna find yourself in a whole heap of Klan trouble, my friend, and the fact that you’re a white sheriff won’t count for much of anything, believe me. They might not hang you literally, but they’ll hang you some other way. I guarantee it.”

“So what was the deal with you and Della?”

“Romeo and Juliet.”

Gaines frowned.

“I loved her, man, and she loved me, and that’s all there was to it. If I was some white fella out of Mobile with a daddy and a plantation then I wouldn’t be here. She and I would be married, and around about now we’d have gotten ourselves a handful of kids and I’d be talkin’ with Mr. Matthias Wade about how there might be an opening somewhere within one of his companies, seein’ as how I was like family an’ all.”

“And the money?”

“Was her money, sir. That ten thousand dollars was her money, and her money alone, and she got it for me, and she gave it to me, and it was how we was gonna get away from that damned crazy family and go disappear somewhere and start over. That was the plan.”

“Her money?”

“Hers by law and by birthright and by anything else that’s supposed to be meaningful, but that brother of hers got involved. He found us together, and he took her back.”

“And he cut your fingers off?”

Regis shook his head. “Someone like Matthias Wade doesn’t do his own business. No, he had a fella with him, and he got me sat down quiet while Matthias gave me a talkin’ to.”

“And he said what?”

“He said that he didn’t believe I had stolen the money, that he knew Della was deluded, maybe a little crazy, and that she had somehow gotten it into her mind that she loved me, but such a thing was not possible, me bein’ a black fella an’ all, and so he was going to give me a choice. Either he was going to report me to the police and have me arrested for raping Della and then stealing the money, or he was going to take away my livelihood.”

“I don’t understand,” Gaines interjected. “Your livelihood?”

“You think I’m a thief? You think I’ve always been in trouble with the law? No, sir. I was a musician. I am a guitar player. That’s how I met Della in the first place. I used to know her brother, Eugene, down in some of them blues and jazz joints in New Orleans, and she came on down to see him and that was that. One look at her and it was all over.”

“So he cut your fingers off?”

“Well, he had his fella cut my fingers off. It was either that, or twenty-five to thirty up here, and that was something I could never have done. I get myself out of here, I can learn to play guitar again, missing two fingers or not. That gypsy fella in France did it, right?”

Gaines reached for a cigarette himself, lit it, inhaled, closed his eyes for a moment, and wondered where he would next take this conversation.

“So you want Matthias, or you want the old man?” Regis asked.

“Matthias,” Gaines replied. “I think Matthias killed a girl twenty years ago, and I think he killed another man just recently.”

“And I am sure he got a few of my kind with the old Saturday-night necktie parties, as well.”

“So how do I get to Della?” Gaines asked. “That’s what I need to do. I need to get to Della. As far as I can see, she is the only one who might be able to help me.”

Regis shook his head. “You don’t get to her,” he said. “That’s the point.”

“When did you meet her?”

“Late summer of seventy-two.”

“In New Orleans?”

“Right.”

“And you started dating?”

Regis laughed. “If that’s what you want to call it, yes.”

“How soon after you met her?”

“Right away, the same night. It was like that. I saw her, she saw me, and we was done for.”

“And how long did the relationship go on until she gave you the money?”

“Four, five months. She would come down to New Orleans every weekend with the pretense of seeing Eugene, but she was coming to see me. Far as I could tell, she didn’t have a great deal to do with Eugene. Never had. But Eugene knew what was going on. I think Eugene feels the same way about his family as Della does. He stays out of their business, and they stay out of his. He has his music and his church, and he pretty much keeps himself to himself. Live and let live, you know?”

“And Eugene had no problem with you being with her?”

“You’ve met Eugene?”

“No, I haven’t.”

Regis smiled. “No, Eugene never had a problem with us.”

“And she brought the money, when?”

“Twenty-first of December.”

“And Matthias came to see you how soon after?”

“Two days.”

“The twenty-third.”

“Right.”

“And he gave you your choice.”

“He sure did.”

“And then when were you arrested for this thing here?”

“Arrested at the end of January 1973, held over, tried, sentenced, shipped up here in March of the same year, and, like I said, been here all of the seventeen months since.”

“And you did the burglary you got this three-to-five for?”

“Never burgled anyplace in my life.”

Gaines frowned and shook his head. “But—”

“But what, Sheriff? You know how this goes. We all look the same. We all do the same things. We’re all guilty of the same shit, so it don’t matter which ones they throw in jail. I agree it was a little stretch to have me climbing walls and breaking windows and whatever, having lost two of my fingers only a month beforehand, but hell, what does a detail like that count for when you have the kind of public defenders we get assigned to us?”

“You think Matthias Wade had any part in getting you sent up here?”

“Seems like it would be a good way for him to get me a couple hundred miles away from Della, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does,” Gaines replied.

“So what now?” Regis asked.

“Like I said, I need to get to Della. I need to ask her some things.”

“And you think she’ll say enough for you to be able to get something on her brother for these killings you spoke of?”

“That’s the plan.”

“You don’t have a prayer, sir, not a single, solitary prayer. Della would no more turn her brother in to the law than she would . . . well hell, I don’t know what. But you’re just wishin’ on some kinda wild dream there.”

“You could testify that he threatened you, that he was there when this man cut your fingers off.”

“For what? What the hell have you been smokin’? Jeez, do you have even the faintest idea who you’re dealin’ with? Even if something like that got a charge, you’d have three hundred lawyers and the judge hisself swearing they was home with Matthias Wade as their dinner guest at precisely the moment I got my fingers removed.”

“You know who this man was who was with him?”

“No idea. Just one of Wade’s people. There’s no end of people who’ll do that kind of work for someone like him.”

“If I could get a message to her for you, would that be something—”

“Man, if you could get a message to her, that would be just un-fucking-believable.”

“You want to get her back, right?”

Clifton Regis looked at Gaines then, and the expression in his eyes was one of such desperate hope that it was all Gaines could do to remain implacable. However, beneath that hope was a sense of exhausted resignation. Gaines did not so much see it, as
feel
it around the man.

“You ever been in love, Sheriff Gaines?”

Gaines felt himself sigh inside. He remembered Linda Newman. “One time,” he replied, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Doesn’t matter how long ago it was. It’s still gonna make you feel the same.”

“You think she still loves you?” Gaines asked.

“If I believed she didn’t, then there’d be no point going on. That’s what I tell myself, you know? But sometimes I believe I just have to accept that she’s gone for good—”

“But bringing down Matthias Wade gives you a chance of seeing her and finding out whether there is some hope you could be together again.”

“Bringing down Matthias Wade? Like I said, I think you are dreamin’. You bring him down, then you’re gonna have to bring down a great deal more than just him. They’re all living out of each other’s pockets. The lawyers, the judges, the rich folks, they’re all working for one another, and that’s one hell of a lot of people. All that stuff I said, how I’ve been working as hard as I can to forget her . . . that’s just because I know there’ll never be a hope that we’ll be together again.”