Just Cause (43 page)

'It's sealed.'

'Screw it.' He tugged the door open with a single pull, breaking the yellow tape.

Cowart hesitated, then stepped inside the house behind him.

The death smell lingered in the kitchen, mingling with the heat, giving the room a tomblike oppressiveness. There were signs of police processing throughout the small space; fingerprint dust streaked the table and chairs. Chalk notes and arrows showed locations. Each of the blood splotches remained on the floor, though samples had clearly been scraped from them. Cowart watched as Brown absorbed and assessed each sign.

Tanny Brown went through an internal checklist. In his mind's eye, first he saw the forensic teams steadily working the scene, the busy work of death. He knelt down next to one of the swatches of blood that had turned almost black against the light linoleum of the floor. He reached out and rubbed a finger against it, feeling the slick, brittle consistency of dried blood.

When he rose, he pictured the old man and woman, gagged and bound, awaiting death. For an instant he wondered how many times they had sat in the same chairs and shared breakfast or dinner, or discussed the

Bible, or did whatever they did that was routine. It was one of the awful things about homicide work: that the banal, humdrum world in which most folks lived was suddenly rendered evil. That the places people thought safe were abruptly made deadly. In the war, of all the wounds he'd tended, he'd hated those caused by mines the most: toe-poppers, Bouncing Bettys, and worse. It was not so much the savagery of the damage the mines did as the manner in which they did it. You put your shoe down on the ground, took a single step, and were betrayed. If you were lucky, you only lost a foot. Did these people know they were living on a minefield? he wondered. He turned toward Cowart.

At least he understands that, he thought. Even the ground is unsafe. Brown left the kitchen, leaving

Cowart standing next to the dying spot.

He walked quickly through the small house, inventorying the lives that had festered there. Barren, he thought, clinging to Jesus and waiting for Mr. Death to come calling. They probably thought they were being stalked by old age, when it was something altogether different. He stopped in front of a small closet in the bedroom, marveling at the row of shoes and slippers that were lined up across the floor, like a regiment on parade. His father would do the same; the elderly like everything in its place. A pile of knitting, balls of yarn, and long silver needles were gathered in a basket in the corner. That surprised him: What would you knit down here? A sweater? Ridiculous. He saw a pair of small plaster figurines on the bureau, two bluebirds, throats wide open as if singing. You saw, he mentally spoke to the birds. Who came here? Then he shook his head at the mockery of it all. His eyes kept sweeping the room. A room of little comfort, he thought. Who killed you? he asked himself. Then he moved back into the kitchen, where he found Cowart standing, staring at the bloodstained floor. He turned.

'Learn anything?' Cowart asked.

'Yes.'

'What's that?' Cowart asked, surprised yet eager.

'I learned that I'd like to die someplace lonely and private, so's folks don't come and inspect all my things,' Tanny Brown replied.

Cowart pointed down at a chalk notation on the floor. It said Nightclothes.

'What's that?' Brown asked.

The old woman was naked. Her clothes were folded up nice and neat, just as if she was planning to put them away in a drawer instead of getting killed.'

Brown straightened up abruptly. 'Folded carefully?'

Cowart nodded.

The policeman eyed the reporter. 'You remember where we found Joanie Shriver?'

'Yes.' Cowart pictured the clearing at the edge of the swamp. He realized he was being asked a question but wasn't certain what it was. He walked around the clearing in his mind; remembering the splotch of blood where the little girl had been killed, the way the shafts of sun had torn through the canopy of trees and vines.

He walked to the edge of the black, still swamp water and stared down beneath the tangled roots to where Joanie Shriver's body was submerged, then he followed it back to where the searchers had taken her, until finally he remembered what they'd found at the edge of the killing place: her clothes.

Folded carefully.

It had been the sort of detail that had occupied a prominent spot in the original story, a small, little irony that had made the moment more real in newspaper prose; the implication being that the little girl's killer had an odd neat streak within him, and that rendered him somehow more terrifying and more tangible all at once.

He turned toward the detective. 'That says something.'

Brown, filled with a sudden fury, allowed rage to reverberate within him for a moment before clamping down hard on it and shutting it away. 'It might,' he struggled to say. 'I'd like it to say something.'

Cowart gestured toward the house. 'Is there anything else that suggests that…'

'No. Nothing. Maybe something that says who got tailed but nothing that says who did the killing. Excepting that little detail.'

He looked over at Cowart before continuing. 'Although you probably still want to think of it as a coincidence.'

Then he stepped over the bloodstains on the floor and headed out, without looking back, aware that the sunshine outside the small house illuminated nothing he thought important.

The two men walked quietly away from the murder scene, back to their car.

Do you have a professional opinion?' Cowart asked.

'Yes'

'You feel like sharing it?'

The policeman hesitated before replying. 'You know, Cowart, you go to some crime scenes and you can still feel all the emotions, right there in the room. Anger, hatred, panic, fear, whatever, but they're all hanging around, like smells. But in there, what was there? Just someone doing a job, like you or me or the postman that was here when you found the damn bodies. Whoever went in there and killed those old folks knew about one thing, for sure. Killing. He wasn't scared. And he wasn't greedy. All he was concerned about was one thing. And that's what happened, isn't it?'

Cowart nodded.

Brown returned to the driver's side of the car and opened the door. But before sliding behind the wheel, he looked across the roof toward Cowart.

'But did I see anything in there that told me for sure that Ferguson did that crime?' He shook his head. '… Except whoever did that crime took time to fold some clothes neatly and then sure seemed mighty comfortable and familiar with a knife. And I know one man who likes knives, don't I?'

They drove out of the Upper Keys, leaving Monroe County and reentering Dade, which gave Cowart a sense of being on familiar ground. They passed a huge sign that directed tourists toward Shark Valley and the Everglades National Park, continuing toward Miami, until Brown suggested they stop for something to eat. The detective lieutenant vetoed several fast-food outlets, until they reached the Perrine-Homestead area. Then he turned the car off the highway and headed down a series of meager streets strewn with bumps and potholes. Cowart looked at the houses they swept past: small, square, single-story cinder-block homes with open jalousie windows like razor slashes in front and flat red-tile roofs adorned with large television antennas. The front lawns were all brown dirt streaked with an occasional swatch of green crabgrass. More than a few had cars up on blocks and auto parts strewn about behind chain link fences. The few children he saw playing outdoors were black.

'You ever been in this part of your county, Cowart?' 'Sure, the reporter replied. 'Covering crimes?' That's right.'

You wouldn't come out here to cover stories about kids who get college scholarships or parents that work two jobs and raise their children right.' 'We'd come out for those stories.' 'But not often, I'll bet.' 'No, that's true.'

The policeman's eyes covered the community rapidly. 'You know, there are a hundred places like this in Florida. Maybe a thousand.' Like what?'

'Places that scratch at the edges both of poverty and stability. Not even lucky enough to be categorized as lower middle class. Black communities which haven't been allowed to flourish or fail, just allowed to exist.

All the houses are two-income, you know, only both incomes are pretty small. The guy who works in the county refuse center and his wife who's an in-home nurse. This is where they come to get started on the

American dream, you see. Home ownership. Local schools. They feel comfortable here. It's not like they're willing to blaze any trails. They just want to get along and go along and maybe make things a bit better. Got a black mayor. Got a black city council. Police chief's probably black and so's the dozen guys he's got working for him.'

'How do you know?'

'I get offers, you see. Career cop. Head of homicide for the Major Crimes Unit of a county force. In law inforcement in the state I may not be well known, but at least I'm known, if you follow. So I get around the state a bit. Especially to little places like Perrine.'

They continued to drive through the residential district for several blocks. Cowart thought the land seemed harsh and unfertile. Almost everything grows in South Florida. Leave a spot of ground untended and the next thing you know it's covered with vines and ferns and greenery. But not here. There was a dustiness to the earth that seemed to belong in some other location, Arizona or New Mexico or some place in the Southwest. Some place closer to the desert than the swamp. Brown steered the car onto a wide boulevard and eventually pulled the car to a stop. They were in front of a small strip shopping center. At one end was a huge warehouse food chain, and at the other a cavernous discount toy store. In between were two dozen smaller businesses, including a single restaurant.

'There we go,' the policeman said. 'At least the food'll be fresh and not cooked according to some formula devised in some corporate headquarters.'

'So, you've been here before?'

'No, I've just been in dozens of places like it. After a while, you get so you can recognize the type.' He smiled. 'That's what being a cop is all about, remember?'

Cowart stared down at the toy store at the end of the shopping mall.

'I was here once. A man kidnapped a woman and child coming out of the store. Just snatched them at random as they walked through the door. Drove them around for half the day, periodically stopping to molest the woman. A state trooper heading home after the day shift finally stopped the car when he thought something was suspicious. Saved her life. And the kid's. Shot the guy when he pulled a knife. One shot. Right through the heart. Lucky shot.'

Brown paused and followed Cowart's eyes toward the toy store.

'They were buying party favors for the kid's second birthday,' the reporter said. 'Red and blue balloons and little conical white hats with clowns on them. They still had the bag when they were rescued.'

He remembered seeing the bag clutched tightly in the woman's free hand. The other held her child, as they were gently deposited in the back of an ambulance. A blanket had been draped around them, though it had been May and the heat was oppressive. A crime like that has a frost all its own.

'Why'd the trooper stop them?' Brown asked.

'He said because the driver was acting suspiciously. Weaving. Trying to avoid being looked at.'

'What page did your story go on?'

Cowart hesitated, then replied, 'Front page. Below the fold.'

The detective nodded. 'I know why the trooper stopped the car.' He spoke quietly. 'White woman. Black man. Right?'

Cowart knew the answer, but was slow to say yes. I Why do you want to know?'

Come on, Cowart. You were once quick with the statistics to me, remember? Wanted to know if I knew the FBI stats on black-on-white crime. Well, I do know them. And I know how rare that sort of crime is. And I also know that's what gets your goddamn story on the front page instead of being cut to six paragraphs in the middle of the B-section roundup. Because if it had been black-on-black crime, that's where it would have landed, right?'

He wanted to disagree, but could not. 'Probably.'

The policeman snorted. ' "Probably" is a real safe answer, Cowart.' Brown gestured widely with his arm. "If you think the city editor would have sent one of the reporters from downtown all the way out here if he wasn't damn sure it was a front-page story? Nah, he'd have had some stringer or some suburban reporter file those paragraphs.' Brown turned toward the restaurant door, speaking he started to cross the parking lot. 'You want to know something, Cowart? You want to know why this is a tough place to live? It's because everyone knows how close they are to the ghetto. I don't mean in miles.'

What's Liberty City, maybe thirty, forty miles away from here, right? No, it's the closeness of fear. They know they don't get the same dollars, the same programs, the same schools, the same any damn thing. So they have to cling to that dream of lower-middle-class status just like it was some life preserver leaking air. They all know what it's like in the ghetto, it's like it sucks away at them, trying to pull them back all the time. All those get-up-early-and-be-on-time-every-morning jobs, all those paychecks that get cashed as soon as they get cut, those little hot houses, are all that keeps it away.'

'What about in North Florida? Pachoula?'

'Pretty much the same. Only up there, the fear is that the Old South – you know, the backwoods, no plumbing, tar paper shack poverty – will reach out and snag you once again.'

'Isn't that what Ferguson came from? From both?'

The detective nodded. 'But he rose up and made it out.'

'Like you.'

Brown stopped and turned toward Cowart. 'Like me,' he said with a low edge of anger in his voice. 'But I don't welcome that comparison, Mr. Cowart.'