What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (50 page)

“Near as we can tell,” Gibbs said, “he stopped to ask directions. Easy to get lost that side of town. Get caught up in there, everything looks the same—and there was a map half folded on the passenger-side seat . . . You know how it is: Maybe someone’ll get wasted in The Roundup and start talking and that’ll get back to us, but probably not. And maybe it didn’t have anything to do with The Roundup. I could pull the report for you.”

“Taken care of,” Tracy told him.

“You read it?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Wanted to hear you out first.”

Gibbs nodded. Approvingly, I thought. “He was stabbed three, four times. With a small knife, probably just a ordinary pocketknife. ME thinks the first one was in the neck, of all places. Then the chest twice, maybe three times.”

“Wallet?”

“Gone. Got to us a day or so later, some kids who’d found it in a doorway, brought it in thinking there might be a reward. No money. Didn’t look like anything else was taken.”

“But they left the car.”

“And the keys, right there by him. Thing is, he was a while dying. Small knife, like I said, and done quickly, more like punches than stabs. Shouldn’t have killed him. But somehow or another, with one of the chest wounds, a major vessel got snagged. Blood wasn’t pouring out, but it was coming strong. We found him, he was slumped against the side of the building with shoelaces tied around his thighs. He’d strapped his coat to his chest, by the wound, with his belt.”

“He was a nurse, he knew what was happening to him. Trying to keep himself alive until help arrived.”

“What the ME figured.” Gibbs finished his coffee and glanced into the empty cup. The answer wasn’t there. Just like the help Merle had waited for.

“That it?” Tracy said once we’d thanked Gibbs and stepped back into the hallway. Its walls were paved with bulletin boards. “You heading back home?”

I’d filled her in on the situation with Eldon; she knew I was.

“Then maybe you could do the department a favor,” she said.

Outside the property and evidence room in the basement, she spoke briefly to the officer in charge, who handed a clipboard across the half door. She signed and passed it to me, along with her pen. Officer Wakoski looked at the signatures, walked away into the maze of ceiling-high shelves, and returned with a package about six inches by nine.

“I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Van Zandt had in mind,” I said.

“Probably not. But Sam Hamill did.” My old friend, now an MPD watch commander. He’d have sent the release through earlier.

The package was wrapped in plain white paper and heavy twine. Originally the knot on the twine had been sealed with wax, as on old letters, but the seal had been broken—when MPD opened it to check contents, I assumed. The front, in arching, thick cursive reminiscent of overdrawn eyebrows, read:
FOR ISAIAH
.

CHAPTER EIGHT

AS I RODE BACK
toward home, along the river for a time before swinging inland, I watched a sky like old-time saddle shoes: horizon bright right up to the curving border where all went suddenly dark. It had been a season for storms. I remembered my grandfather’s storm cellar, bare earthen walls, doors thick as tables with brackets into which you’d swing a two-by-four to close them, wood shelves sagging beneath the weight of water jugs, canned food, lanterns, and fuel. We’d all go down in there as the winds began, sit listening to them howl. As a kid I always expected the world to be new, fresh, changed all for the better, when we came back up. By the time I was ten or so we had stopped joining Grandad and his new family in the cellar, rode out the winds like modern folk.

Only the insurance lights were on, one on Municipal’s side, one on ours, when I pulled in at City Hall. I put Isaiah’s package on my desk by a note from June asking me to call her. The J of her signature was drawn leaning to the right, toward the other letters, its crosspiece sheltering them. The exclamation point after
Call me
was a fat, balloonlike shape with a smiley face below.

“Billy’s taken a turn for the worse,” she said without preamble upon hearing my voice. “Something about a blood clot, and hemorrhage. Dad’s on his way up to Memphis. Doc Oldham went with him. Milly’s up there already.”

“I’m sorry, June. Are you okay?”

“I guess. Better get off the phone, though. In case Dad or the hospital calls? But one more thing—”

“Okay.”

“That detective from Fort Worth? He’s still around, asking questions. Did a swing through town first, hit all the stores. Then he drove out to the bars and roadhouses. Dad thought maybe you might want to look into it. ‘Since Eldon is nowhere about,’ as he said. He left a note for you, top drawer of your desk.”

I locked Isaiah’s package in our possessions safe, which just about anyone could open with determination and a state-of-the-art nail file, and read the note from Lonnie, which told me, among other things, that Officer Jed Baxter was staying at the Inn-a-While out by the highway. So I got back in the Jeep and made the longish drive.

It’s a habit you never quite get rid of. You pull in and sit for a time, watching closely, sizing up activity and positions, before getting out.

Three cars ranging from three to a dozen years old, an SUV with Montana plates, and a beat-to-hell pickup, half Ford, half spare parts, occupied the parking lot, making it a landmark business day for the motel. The number was missing from the door on room 8, but with 7 to the left and 9 to the right, and a Camry with Texas plates out front, I managed to figure it out. The Camry was gold-colored and well used, with stains on the carpet and seats, but all of it clean, none of the usual detritus of fast-food wrappers, sacks, paper cups. Even the boxes in the backseat were neatly stacked.

Jed Baxter didn’t look all that surprised when he answered the door in his boxer shorts and T-shirt.

“Sheriff.” He backed out of the door to give me room.

A bottle of bourbon stood on the bedside table. From the look of things, the two of them had been keeping close company. The TV was on, one car in pursuit of another against what was all too obviously a back-projected city, volume turned so low it could have been sound from the next room. Baxter had been ironing his pants atop a damp towel on the dresser surface. One leg was folded back on itself, like a cripple’s. He unplugged the travel iron and, since he was there by it, snagged his drink.

“You’ve been rooting around town, asking questions.” I’d settled in on the wide window ledge. He sat on the bed. We were maybe a yard apart.

“What we do—right, Sheriff?” He shrugged. “I wasn’t trying to hide anything. News in a town this size, it’s not likely to gather flies.”

“And I’m thinking you knew that; it was part of the plan. Maybe it was the plan.”

“Ah. The plan.” Baxter held up his empty glass and motioned with its toward the bottle, offering. Why not? Been a long day. He found another plastic cup in the bathroom, half filled it, and brought it over.

“We spoke with your people back in Fort Worth. Seems—”

“I’m on a leave of absence, Sheriff.”

“Okay. Not quite the way they put it, but close enough. Explains the lack of a warrant or any other paperwork. You’re here, they were careful to point out—a number of times—in no official capacity.”

Baxter smiled.

“So,” I said.

“So?”

“So it begins to look personal.”

He took a long sip of his bourbon before responding. “It is, but not the way you think. Back in town I definitely got the feeling that you weren’t eager to help.”

“I had no information for you.”

“Come on, Sheriff. You were just shining me on, didn’t even want to talk to me.”

“In which case, you acted in a manner that assured I would.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve been doing this a long time. Whatever works.”

“What do you have against Eldon Brown?”

Baxter shook his head. “Not him. My concern is Ron Nabors, the detective who nailed him for it and wouldn’t hear otherwise. Still won’t, for that matter.”

“You have reason to believe this Nabors was involved?”

“Laziness and habit, more like.”

“But you’re looking to what? Take him down?”

“Not going to happen. And not that I’d want to. But your friend had nothing to do with the murder, and Big Ron’s gotten away with too much for too long. Hell, we all have.”

I was not only a psychologist of sorts, I was a cop who had seen some of the worst mankind had to offer and an ex-con who had been privy to society’s best, gnarled efforts at greatheartedness and manipulation. Altruism gets handed to me, I’m automatically peeling back the label, looking to see what’s underneath. But I didn’t say anything.

Baxter held the bottle up and, when I shook my head, poured what remained into his cup.

“I just want this set right, Sheriff. Came here hoping I might persuade Eldon Brown to go back with me, turn himself in. Nothing more to it. This point, I’m not expecting a lot more from life. Small wins. Small rewards. And most of those for someone else.”

CHAPTER NINE

“A MAN IS SLUMPED
against a tree trunk in the jungle,” Cy, my old mentor, said that one time we met, “or the side of an overpass, or a building smack in the heart of ritzy downtown—and he’s dying. What he’s thinking is, I’ll never be able to tell Gladys how much I loved her, now I won’t even get to try. What do you say?”

“I’m there?”

“For the benefit of the exercise, you are.”

“I’m not your student anymore, Cy.”

“Habit. So tell me: What do you, as a trained professional, say?”

“I say . . .” I began, and foundered.

“Exactly. You don’t say anything. You listen.” Cy got up to leave. “And that’s the most important thing I can ever tell you. A small, simple thing—like most great secrets. You just listen.”

Strange how, as we age, our lives turn to metaphor. Memories flood in often and with little provocation, to the point that everything starts to remind us of something else. We, our actions, our lives, become representational. We imagine that the world is deeper, richer; in fact, it is simply more abstract. We tell ourselves that now we pay attention only to what’s important. But sadly, what’s important turns out to be keeping our routine.

Much like the town back there behind us.

Billy, it turned out, was going to be okay. He’d thrown a major clot, but it lodged in a leg vein and they managed to excise it surgically before it hit lungs or heart. Lonnie’s description of the procedure when I spoke to him on the phone just before we left made it sound a lot like pulling a worm out of its skin. Except for all the fancy tools, equipment, and degrees, of course.

And now Jed Baxter and I were hiking up-country through the heaviest growth, four or five hollows and a long hill or two away from Isaiah’s colony. Morning sunlight fell at a slant through the trees, struck the ground, and slid away into undergrowth without much purchase. Bird calls everywhere, growing silent as we approached, starting up again behind us. The barky, lisping chatter of squirrels.

The colony was looking good. The townspeople did a great job rebuilding, and the kids had done an equally great follow-up. Kids—I still thought of them as that, though none of them were, and most hadn’t been for some time. The old sign—
HIER IST KEIN WARUM
—was back up, over the common hall now. They’d left the scorched edges and glued the ragged crack running lengthwise down its middle. At the far end of the compound, they’d built a playground worthy of the swankest inner-city park: animal-shaped swings, treehouse, wooden jungle gym, tunnels made from crates, pint-size barn and corral. One of the colony’s newer members had been a woodworker, custom stairways, door casings, and the like for a builder back in San Francisco. The swing in the shape of a horse bore an elaborate swirl of hand-carved mane; delicate whorls ran into its ears.

The group was having its morning meal outside at one of the tables. Moira spotted us first, lifting a hand high in what served as both alert and greeting. The others turned, Isaiah came to meet us just inside the clearing, and nothing would do, of course, but that we eat with them. Fresh-baked bread, elderberry preserves, a kind of farmer’s cheese made (Moira signed, with one of the children interpreting) by curdling milk with lemon juice.

I’d told Baxter what to expect, but you could tell it was a reach for him, taking all this in, accepting it for what it was. After we’d finished eating, he and Eldon stood nearby playing horseshoes (horseshoes! how long had it been since I’d seen horseshoes?) and talking. We had helped clear the table and attempted to help more, but Moira and the others held up hands and pushed us away in pantomime, mugging in mock terror as though we were an invading army.

Isaiah and I sat beneath a pecan tree at a table splattered with dried bird shit. Isaiah wiped what he could of it away with his hand, then bent down to wipe his hand on grass. He’d come a long way for a city boy.

“It’s his brother’s diary, from the last days,” Isaiah said of the package I’d brought him. “The only other person, besides me, that Merle was ever close to. Thomas was dying from cancer, this weird kind that doesn’t metastasize but recurs. First time, they pulled a tumor out of his stomach that weighed eleven pounds. Called it Gertrude—and Merle sent a birth announcement instead of a get-well card. Everything fine, then a little over a year later it was back, bigger this time, with more organ involvement. With the fourth one, Thomas refused further surgery.”