The Jezebel Remedy (5 page)

“So…I don't understand,” Hatcher snapped. “What exactly is it you're gettin' at?”

“Yeah, Joe, what're you tryin' to say?” Perry frowned. “At first you were kinda hintin' maybe she was killed in a dope deal. Or suggestin' it wasn't her. Help me with this, but since she didn't leave a will to some stranger and then wind up dead, since she left her buddy Joe everything, why is that peculiar to you?”

Joe shrugged. “Who knows. Hey, thanks for doing the DNA. Like I said, I'm just a little shocked to hear the news, but drugs would go a long way in explaining her personality—”

“And her bizarre behavior and skin-and-bones appearance,” Lisa interjected.

“When do you want to ride over there?” Perry asked Joe.

“Doesn't matter,” Joe said. “Whatever's best for you.”

“I might go too,” Lisa added. “We've never seen where she lived. It'll be good to have a look at our grand inheritance. Assuming, of course, we're so fortunate.” She walked to her husband and slid her arm around his waist so that the two of them were facing the policemen. “I've always wanted a summer home. And I understand she kept cash hidden. Probably three or four hundred dollars at the end of that rainbow.”

Joe never grew tired of eating at Byrd's Store, and it was on the route to Lettie's, so they agreed to meet Sheriff Perry and Hatcher at the trailer around one-thirty and dropped by the store for lunch. The business was housed in a sprawling frame building and had been run by the Byrd family since the 1920s. A country emporium, it had stout shelves stocked with Vienna sausages, potted meat, green cans of Del Monte fruits and vegetables, Little Debbie cakes, cookies, chips, gum, candy, off-brand motor oil, antifreeze, fishing lures, bread, flour, sugar and cheap, flimsy toys, mostly race cars and six-shooters. A woodstove in the rear was surrounded by a couple rockers and some mismatched ladder-backs, and more often than not a picked-apart copy of
The Martinsville Bulletin
was lying on one of the chairs. The small grill served standard short-order food, but there was always homemade gravy for the morning, and pinto beans and corn bread at noon, and usually a stew during cold weather, and a fresh from-scratch pie early in the week.

They ate by the stove, their forks and spoons white plastic disposables, and when “Act Naturally” played on the radio—dialed to the local AM channel—Joe mentioned he was a fan of Buck Owens and liked the song but hadn't heard it since the 2004 Galax Fiddlers' Convention.

“It's okay, I guess,” Lisa said. She was holding a bowl of Brunswick stew in one hand and spooning it with the other. Her Diet Coke was on the floor beside her chair.

“Buck's a dandy-fine musician. If you can survive
Hee Haw
and still have Dwight Yoakam cover you, that's pretty impressive.”

Lisa wasn't interested. This was a minor variation of a set piece she'd heard Joe recite many times before. Soon would come a mention of Merle Haggard. She bit into a saltine she'd daubed with stew. “Most of those guys sound the same to me. No difference.”

“It can be tricky, I'll grant you that. Buck Owens really is a talent and still holds up well, but poor old Porter Wagoner is an outright hick. A clodhopper extraordinaire. Conway Twitty will never be more than a sequined peckerwood with a hopeless name; Ferlin Husky's brilliant.” He swallowed a mouthful of beans and sang a few lines of the song, the part about the movies and becoming a big star, patted his foot with the music. “Of course, there's no disputing that Merle Haggard's a minor deity. In the pantheon.”

She watched him sitting there in his dark lawyer's suit against a backdrop of canned goods and dusty rural knickknacks, mouthing the refrain from a sixties novelty tune, filling up on pintos and yellow corn bread, the smell of food and burning kindling clouding around them, and she envied how damn content and satisfied he was with it all. “Yeah” was what she offered, a single mild syllable. She set her bowl on the floor beside the soda and didn't finish either of them.

He noticed she was distracted. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You sure? You seem awfully quiet.”

“A rough day,” she said. “Plus I'm not looking forward to crazy Lettie VanSandt's nasty trailer.”

Sheriff Perry and Hatcher were waiting for them at Lettie's, and after Perry unlocked the door they all filed into the trailer, everyone briefly silent as they entered, even Hatcher. The sheriff gave Joe Lettie's keys, the collection on a plain round ring along with a Food Lion shopper's card and a silver metal whistle. “Yours now,” Perry told Joe. “They were hangin' on a nail beside the door when we first investigated.”

The four of them walked to a tiny bathroom at the end of the hall. The sheriff went in, Joe and Lisa stood at the threshold and Hatcher peered over and around them as best he could. A section of discolored plywood, nailed down but not flush with the rest of the floor, covered an area in front of the shower. A kerosene heater was pushed into
a corner. A bare ceiling bulb wired without a proper fixture was the only light, a worn red towel was draped across the shower rod, a razor and a toothbrush were in a recycled jelly jar beside the sink, generic baby shampoo sat on a small shower ledge and store-brand aspirin, rubbing alcohol and oodles of patent medicines—labels visible, organized by height—were crowded onto an unpainted pine shelf. Bottle after bottle of fingernail polish, the hues garish and bright—purple, chartreuse and scarlet—were meticulously lined along the counter, grouped by color and shade. The top was missing from the toilet tank and the sink mirror black-flecked with a crack arcing across the glass above the bottom edge.

“So you've never been here before?” Perry asked Joe.

“No.”

“Pretty pitiful,” the sheriff said. “She even has cardboard stuck in the den window.” He squeezed his beefy hand into a latex glove, pinched the toothbrush between his thumb and first finger and dropped it into a plastic evidence bag. He placed the razor in another bag. He opened a drawer, inspected the contents, shut it, opened another, then removed a hairbrush with his protected hand. He held up the brush and they all could see strands of hair winding through the bristles. “That ought to do it,” he said, sealing a third bag.

“Thanks again,” Joe said. “Sorry for the trouble. For some reason, being here like this kind of drives home what's happened, though. Not much doubt how this'll turn out.”

“No kidding,” Hatcher groused.

Lisa stuck him with a hard look. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I agree with my husband: Joe's the executor, and he needs to be positive she's deceased. There's a correct way to do this.” She kept glaring at the smart-ass cop. “I'm sure this case will find its appropriate place in the lab line, probably ahead of the extremely important analysis of a joint you seized at a sorority party or the examination of a Mason jar full of moonshine you guys raided from a still over in Woolwine. The woman's dead, Officer Hatcher. Dead is significant.”

Before he could respond, Sheriff Perry spoke. “No problem. Joe's technically right. The rules say we should confirm if there's no visual ID.”

“I still say it's a waste of time and money,” Hatcher said stubbornly. “But the sheriff is goin' to do it your way, so you'll have your DNA.”

“You wanna take a look at where the fire was?” Perry asked. “Where we found her?”

“Is there any problem with that?” Joe asked.

“Nope. We shot photos and a video, and we had the fire marshal do his investigation. We've collected some evidence, what little we could. Her remains are at the hospital. We're finished from a police standpoint. We soaked it real good, too, so the cinders won't kick up on us.”

“Sure,” Joe said. He looked at Lisa. “Okay with you?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“The sooner the better,” Hatcher said. “It stinks of cat piss in here.”

There wasn't much to see. The fire had left a charred rectangle dotted with debris and ashes and burned chunks of beams and posts, and the tin roof had collapsed into the blaze and later been dragged to one side by the police or firefighters. Cats and dogs wandered around, several approaching them. A fat black tomcat sat at the apex of the tin pile. The shed had been in a clearing, the ground around it worn to the bare red dirt by the strays, so the blaze hadn't spread. A blackened cinder-block foundation marked off the structure's dimensions. A few items were identifiable: a metal barrel, a scorched metal chair frame, sections of wire, beakers, the guts of a radio, a tablespoon, pliers and wrenches, a pair of car wheels wrapped in melted rubber.

“Damn,” Joe said. “Ugly business.”

“Where exactly was she when you found her?” Lisa asked.

“Well,” Perry replied, “most of her, what we recovered, was at the far end over there.” He pointed.

“Sad,” Joe mumbled.

“Price you pay,” Hatcher chirped.

Joe locked on to him. “Shut the fuck up. You've made your point, Agent Hatcher.”

“Show some respect,” Perry quickly added. “No reason you can't be professional.”

“Hey, one less scourge making poison is the way I see it.” Hatcher smirked, not the least chastised. “World's better off. You have your opinion, I'm entitled to mine. So, Mr. Stone, you can shut the fuck up.
You make your dollars helpin' criminals, I make mine puttin' them in jail.”

Lisa had seen her husband walk into a barn stall and hold his own with a headstrong mare, and she'd seen him ejected from a Myrtle Beach bar for thrashing a letch who put his hands on her after twice being warned off. Joe possessed a big man's casual nature, was difficult to provoke and wasn't a tongue wagger, his size and build all the threat he needed in most instances, but once he was riled it came on him potent and feverish, and when he started to remove his coat and took a step toward Hatcher, Lisa realized it was serious, his dander genuine, and she jerked his arm, told him to knock it off, and Clay Hatcher's quick retreat toward the sheriff showed he realized there was no bluff in Joe's mood.

“Why're you so attached to the old shrew?” Lisa asked Joe as they were driving back to the office. “I've never understood it.”

“Nothing more than I've told you before,” Joe said. “She was a character, and the very first client to ever walk through my door. And there's a lot to be said for taking in stray animals, and hell, occasionally the shit she complained about deserved it. The world needs its agitators. Needs a few wasps and yellow jackets to keep things from going stale. As a bonus, you got the unvarnished truth from her—Lettie VanSandt was, if nothing else, a perfectly honest woman.”

Lisa smiled. “Yeah, in the tradition of Savonarola or the Oracle at Delphi. Or the Wicked Witch. Probably most of those dogs and cats can fly.”

Margaret Jane Carter was called Pug as a child, a curious nickname that didn't suit either her appearance or her personality. Growing up in Henry County, she was a pretty enough girl, maybe even on the outskirts of beautiful, and an excellent student, even if she wasn't the absolute
very
brightest among her classmates. Her mom pulled second shift at the textile mill, and her dad drove a route truck for the Lance company, stocked Nabs and peanuts in vending machines and emptied trays of silver pocket change into a cloth bank bag, started his snack deliveries at dawn and did some nighttime mechanicing on the side, mostly brake and transmission repairs. Margaret graduated from Bassett High School and received a substantial scholarship to Ferrum College, where she earned magna cum laude grades, changed her hair color from brown to a modest blond and shed the name Pug for good, becoming Meg.

During her sophomore year at Ferrum, she met a Virginia Tech student named Alton Warner Gold IV, a handsome frat boy from a rich Delaware family, and they married in 1995, only a few months after they both finished college. The wedding was a six-figure spectacle, but the Golds were snotty to Meg's parents, snickering about her daddy's accent and her momma's Sunday-best church clothes. Meg and Alton settled in Arlington, Virginia, because she'd accepted a job at a health insurance company and he didn't care where they lived; geography was no restriction for a layabout's universal skills.

Three years later, Alton had spent all the money his parents and grandparents were willing to waste on him, he'd jacked up credit
cards and bogged down equity lines, and he wouldn't work, hell no he wouldn't, though he did declare himself, at various times, a day trader, a financial adviser, a consultant, an entrepreneur, a freelance journalist, a life coach and a corporate troubleshooter. He printed impressive business cards and squandered money on office space. He leeched off Meg's paychecks and stole cash from the zippered slot inside her purse. His true gift was a passion for top-shelf highballs and Las Vegas, Tunica, Atlantic City and any cruise ship, backroom or Indian casino that offered green felt and a pair of dice. He stayed gone, rambling and carousing. He wrecked their car. He was arrested for shoplifting hair gel from a mall department store. He cheated on Meg. He charged a diner waitress's West Virginia abortion to their MasterCard and busted the account's credit limit, tacking on an extra thirty-five dollars and a collection call from the bank to the already dreadful insult.

Meg quickly moved into her own apartment and did all she could to salvage her finances and dump her no-count spouse. Still, untangling herself from a crybaby cad like Alton Gold was complicated. He'd surface at odd hours and pound on her door, sometimes penitent, sometimes enraged, occasionally promising rehab and religion but most often threatening to cut her throat or punch a screwdriver through her skull. She wouldn't even peep out at him, so he'd stand in the hall arguing with dead bolts and double locks until security arrived to remove him. Between disappearances with new druggie girlfriends and craps junkets financed by rubber checks, he'd ambush her in the parking garage at her job and insist—snarling, fussing, pleading—she owed him another chance, and he'd impulsively send flowers and, better still, store-bought cards with ponderous snatches from
The Prophet
printed across the front in fancy script. “Love, Alton,” he'd usually scribble in red ink, a shaky, deformed heart drawn underneath.

She visited a lawyer, but most of her options were Byzantine and costly, and injunctions and protective orders meant time away from work, more lost wages and more contact with her dumb-ass husband, whose family, no matter how dismal his behavior, considered it a matter of status and clan pride to ensure he was utterly lawyered-up in any legal proceeding, even though they well understood he was a bum and a spendthrift. And all those court orders and official documents with
seals and certifications were just sound and fury, little paper tigers that wouldn't mean diddly-squat to Alton Gold and would probably serve as a goad and a dare rather than any kind of effective restraint.

The worst of it came in March 2000, after she'd finally managed to pay an attorney for a divorce filing and the papers had been served on her husband. She arrived home to discover that Alton—drunk or high or both—had wormed inside her apartment and was waiting for her, and he rushed directly at her, grabbed her and rammed her hard against the wall, and her arm tangled in her purse strap and she lost her balance and twisted her ankle as she fell, and he was cursing and shouting and spit glommed on to every word coming out of his mouth. She smelled alcohol, stale cologne and a spike of rancid breath. He tore her blouse and jammed a knee into her thigh, making a red impression that turned blue, black and yellow in the days that followed. She tried to roll and twist and squirm away, and she pushed against his chest with both elbows, and she screamed, screamed again, and this only made him more combative. When he finally fought her pants down and then her panties, he couldn't have sex, humped her limp-dicked and slithered and ground and clawed her shoulders and scratched her neck, bit her nipple, drew blood. He was furious, enraged, and he slapped her and blubbered and caterwauled and said more than once, “Look what you've done to me, you bitch.”

He wrestled her into the bedroom and crashed down on top of her. Muttering and groping her, he soon passed out, his dead, worthless weight smothering her, and when he awakened, his wife, bruised and with a cracked rib and two broken fingers, wearing a pair of sweatpants, barefoot, still in her ripped blouse, was standing above him resting a .38 caliber Taurus revolver against his lips. The gun was a gift from her daddy. Big-city protection.

“Alton,” she said, calm as could be, “I'm done with this.”

He was groggy and sluggish. He closed his eyes. She inserted the short barrel of the gun into his mouth, felt the steel bump against his front teeth. He blinked, grunted, began to focus.

“Here's how this is going to work,” she said in the same deliberate voice. “We both know I'm not going to kill you, though you deserve it, and I could pull it off pretty easy. The cops would take a look at me,
talk to whoever you bribed to let you in and discover you're full of dope and liquor. It'd be self-defense.”

“Whoaammm, uh, lisnnn.” The sounds stuck mostly in his throat, clogged there. “Lissn.”

“No. You listen.” She glared at him. He appeared to be rejoining her, his expression starting to animate. “First off, you're going to apologize. Say you're sorry.” She raised the gun slightly.

“Am. I am.”

“And next you are going to humiliate yourself, just like you've humiliated me.”

He narrowed his eyes, unsure. His lips twitched.

“You and your shriveled little penis are goin' to say, ‘I'm a piece of shit and a failure as a man.' ”

He stared up at her. She noticed he was breathing through his mouth.

“Right now.”

“Ha. Uh-uh. No.”

“I'll ask you once more.”

“You won't do anything.” His hair was oily, messy, every which direction. One thin black strand stuck against his forehead and reached to his eyebrow, as if a fissure had begun, a dark split. He still had on socks and a shirt, which was mostly unfastened. She noticed he was tan to the middle of his groin, then pallid, then tan again, the different hues born of years spent lounging around in various tanning salons, a vanity he never neglected and bought with fraud and slick lies.

“Last chance.”

He flickered a grin, smug and spiteful, then lurched toward her, and in a smooth, quicksilver sweep she swung the gun sideways, set it at an angle against the thick of his biceps and pulled the trigger, bang, and she felt relief and satisfaction and a wicked, tit-for-tat joy, and it was a chore to stop at the single shot. Alton screamed and clutched his arm and blood started to color the bed, and it seemed to her the harsh explosion from the .38 stayed with them in the room for several seconds, loud, lingering, echoing, commanding.

“Alton, I'll shoot you again.”

He was whimpering and cursing, saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Alton: ‘I'm a piece of shit and a failure as a man.' Easy to say. And oh so true.”

“I hate you, you awful whore,” he shouted, but for the first time ever the words were puny and inert, their menace waning.

“The sooner you finish, the sooner I can call for help. For all I know, you might bleed to death.”

“I swear to god, you'll pay for this,” he yelled. He partially sat up, still holding his arm. Blood leaked from between his fingers. Crimson streaks and splatters stained a white pillowcase.

“I'm sure I will, Alton. I've paid for everything else.” She was standing, her knees at the edge of the mattress. She aimed at his leg, gripping the gun with both hands, dramatically closing an eye as she peered through the sight.

“I'm a piece of shit,” he recited. “And a failure as a man.”

“Say it again. Slower. Listen to yourself. Let it sink in.”

He repeated the words, and she called 911, told them she'd been attacked and was injured and had been forced to shoot her husband. “Please help me,” she sobbed to the operator, the hurt in her voice completely genuine and heartfelt, the catharsis so deep that no cop or attorney or juror could ever doubt her circumstances.

Alton located his pants in the den. Holding them as best he could with a bullet hole bored into his flesh, he hopped and wiggled them on but wasn't able to hook the clasp at his waist, and with the cuffs still below his heels and his shoes left behind, he scrambled through the door, realizing there wasn't much hope of explaining away his battered, beaten wife, especially when he was full of booze and had brazenly lied to the building's new manager to get inside Meg's apartment. She told the police he'd tried to rape her and, somehow, thank the Lord above, she'd been able to grab her pistol from the nightstand drawer and wound him in the arm. As simple and horrific as that. His partial handprint was visible on her cheek when the cops interviewed her, a lowlife's pink abuse.

Despite the fervent urgings of well-intentioned volunteers and the warnings from a slew of professional advocates with catchy
acronyms—S.T.O.P., CAFV, WEAVE, NOW—on their business cards, Meg declined to cooperate with her husband's prosecution. “I have my reasons,” she informed an assistant commonwealth's attorney in Alexandria.

The attorney, an office veteran named Andy Minchew, removed his glasses and twirled them a time or two and didn't show any emotion. “Your decision,” he said. “We can still go to trial, you understand. We can subpoena you and call you as a witness. Put you under oath and make you testify. I'd do that if I thought it was the wisest choice. If I thought it was in your interest.”

Meg scooted her chair forward. The gray, public-servant carpet snagged one of the legs, so she ended up closer to the desk but slightly crooked. “Alton Gold,” she said firmly, “is a bastard who has beat me and threatened me and stolen my money. He's a drunk. A womanizer. He used our credit card to pay for another woman's abortion. Ruined years of my life. He views legal proceedings, this whole world of yours, Mr. Minchew, as a chance to manipulate me. To prolong these awful things. To have me badgered by his high-priced lawyers. In a strange way, he'd probably enjoy court. Might even make him—how to say it?—more determined. He's not afraid of lawyers and judges—he has nothing to lose.” She leaned in Minchew's direction. She put her elbows on his desk. She laced her fingers, touched her chin with her thumbs. “But right now, sir, he's afraid of me.” She bent her neck enough to talk around her hands. “I don't want that to change. And I don't really want to spend a lot of time on the details of, you know,
how
he was shot.” She untangled her hands but kept leaning toward Minchew. She never quit looking at him, never broke off.