Mockingbird Songs
Mockingbird Songs
RJ Ellory
USA (2015)
Prison changes a man. Sometimes in ways you can see. Usually in ways you can't. The only reason Henry Quinn survived three years inside was because of Evan Riggs, a one-time country singer, one-time killer, now serving a life sentence. No parole. On the day he gets out, Henry promises Evan he will find his daughter, the daughter he never met, and deliver a letter. A free man, Henry heads to the small Texan town where Evan grew up and where his brother Carson now resides as sheriff. There's no sign of the girl and her uncle claims to know nothing of her whereabouts. But Henry isn't about to give up. He made a promise and, no matter what, he's going to find Evan's daughter. As Carson's behaviour towards him becomes ever more threatening, Henry realises that there are dark secrets buried at the heart of this quiet town. What terrible thing drove the brothers apart and what happened to the missing girl?
To my brilliant editors, Jemima Forrester and Jon Wood;
to my tireless agent, Euan Thorneycroft; to my fellow
Whiskey Poet, Martin Smith, and his wife, Sue,
in appreciation of her limitless patience and hospitality
as we recorded the first album.
A man could not be blessed with better friends.
As always, to my wonderful wife, Vicky, and my son, Ryan,
for everything that’s been, and everything yet to come.
CONTENTS
“A clear conscience is nothing more than a bad memory.”
For what it was worth, this was the last flawed pearl of wisdom offered by Evan Riggs on the day that Henry Quinn was released from Reeves County Farm Prison.
It was July of 1972, and Henry Quinn had served precisely three years, three weeks, and four days—a handful of hours, too, but up against the time he’d already done, such a detail didn’t count for much. Not until the final night. That final night the mattress seemed more unforgiving, the cell more claustrophobic, the sound of caged men more terrifying than anything he’d experienced since the day he’d arrived. Evan Riggs, there on the bunk above him, just slept through it all. Riggs had done more than two decades. If something disturbed his sleep, it was unknown to Henry Quinn.
Quinn knew that the teenager he’d once been—shuffling ankle-bound along the gantry to his new home, wearing nothing but shorts and shorn hair and a fierce, burning shame—was now so removed from the man he’d become that … well, it was as if his soul had been stolen and replaced by another.
He had served his time, had listened, perhaps learned. He’d been beaten, battered, bruised, close to broken, but had somehow survived. Much of the latter had been down to Evan Riggs, and for this he owed a debt that could never truly be repaid. Should he ever forget that debt, he merely had to look in the mirror at the scar that traversed his midriff from beneath his right shoulder to his ribs on the left. That had been a bad night, and it was a night he would not have survived alone.
And when—at last—Henry’s final hours in Reeves approached, Evan Riggs sat with him and they talked of everything but goodbyes.
“Success does not vanquish demons,” Riggs told him. “Remember that, kid. I tried to drown my demons in liquor, but they swam real good. That’s the trick right there. That passion for something, that burning desire to be somebody bigger than you are … well, that’s the thing that drives you to do whatever you gotta do, but it never sleeps, you see? The hunger that drives most creative people is the thing that ultimately kills them.”
“Why so many of them do drugs, I guess.”
“Maybe … Couldn’t say. Never took that route. Hell, in my own way I guess I did, but I just looked for some kind of peace in the bottom of a bottle. Looked real hard, never found it. Liquor doesn’t make people do bad things. It just makes them believe there are no consequences. Truth is, you get drunk enough, then everything and nothing makes sense. You’ll cry about it all; you’ll laugh about it all. Solutions to life’s problems are as clear as day after two-fifths, but when daylight actually comes, you realize you’re still as dumb as a box of rocks. Every sunrise I believed things would get better. Every sunrise I was wrong.”
Evan Riggs, onetime guitar picker, onetime singer, onetime West Texas radio star, onetime murderer, looked intently at the young man sitting on the edge of the facing bunk and then he smiled.
“And now the talking’s all done, Henry Quinn,” he said, perhaps as some kind of in-joke, for Riggs was laconic at the best of times. In the main he was quiet, watchful, an expression on his face like he knew that what he wanted to hear would never be said. “Talkin’ is all used up, and you gotta go do whatever you’re gonna do with this life of yours.”
Riggs was a hard man with a hard history, not yet fifty years old and already twenty-plus years of jail behind him. A few more years and he’d have seen half his life through bars. Henry Quinn would leave, someone else would take his place, and they in turn would see freedom before Evan Riggs. How many cellmates Riggs had seen, he’d never said. Of his own thoughts and feelings, he ventured little at all. Maybe that was West Texas; maybe that was just Riggs’s way. Many was the time Henry Quinn had wondered why Riggs tolerated his chatter. There were a million ways to die; perhaps loneliness was the worst. Maybe that was all there was to it: someone’s voice—anyone’s—was better than silence. For Quinn himself, the silence had grown exhausting within a week of his arrival, for in the spaces between sounds, his mind nagged and tugged at everything for some kind of explanation for his situation. There was none. That was—at last—the conclusion. Sometimes life, fate, God—whoever or whatever—just dealt you a hand that left you wondering if you should scratch your watch or wind your balls.
“Can hear the man comin’ to get you,” Riggs said.
Quinn heard footsteps then, out along the gantry, down the steps, and onto the landing, that all-too-familiar ring of heels on metal, the first night like some surreal death knell, the last like some liberty bell beckoning one and all from deep beneath the ground. The battle was done. The war was over.
“Evan—” Henry started, but Evan raised his hand and silenced him.
“We ain’t doin’ none of that goodbye shit, Henry. I’ve listened to you for the better part of three years, and I don’t have a mind to hear much else. Have to say I’m lookin’ forward to a little peace and quiet.”
“I just wanted to say thank you—”
“Just need you to find my daughter and give her that letter, kid. You do that for me, and I’ll still owe you beyond anything I might have done for you.”
“I gave you my word, Evan. I’ll find her and give her the letter.”
“I know you will, kid. I know you will.”
Henry turned as a warder appeared on the other side of the cell bars.
“You lover boys done finished your kissin’ and whatever?”
Evan winked at the screw, gave him a wry smile. “Oh, there’s plenty more left for you, Mr. Delaney, sir. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that.”
“You are such an asshole, Riggs. Of a mind to come on in there and—”
Henry Quinn stood in such a way as to block Delaney’s view of Riggs.
“Ready, boss,” Quinn said.
“Hell, you done wastin’ your time in here talkin’ to this crazy old fuck, I’ll never know,” Delaney said. “Anyways, you’s all done and dusted now. Reckon we’ll be seein’ you again real soon, though. I guess Riggs’ll have found himself another pretty little bird by then.”
“Oh, hell no,” Riggs said. “Savin’ myself all up for you, Mr. Delaney, sir.”
Delaney disregarded the comment, turned left, and barked, “Open up seventeen! Man goin’ out!”
There was a wave of catcalls, whistles, and hollers from the block. Toilet rolls came sailing over the gantries and landings like inauguration-day ticker tape. Men hammered dents into coffee cups against cell bars.
Henry Quinn felt a firm hand grip his shoulder, and without turning around, he placed his hand over Riggs’s and held it for just a second.
“Remember how I told you, kid. Eyes and ears open, mouth shut. Pretty much no one out there who ain’t lookin’ for some way to fuck you. And when you get to hell, you keep an eye out for me. I’ll be waitin’ there someplace with a bottle.”
Quinn merely nodded. He could not turn and face the man. He did not want Riggs to see the tears welling in his eyes.
Some people—a rare handful—left their fingerprints on your soul.
Processing took four hours. There was a lot of waiting and clock-watching, but Henry Quinn was used to it. Seated on a hard plastic chair in an antiseptically clean corridor that still somehow managed to smell of regret, Henry looked at his hands for a while. Where once there were calluses from playing guitar, there were now calluses from hefting pick and shovel and hammer, from breaking rocks and throwing rocks and piling rocks together. It would be a good while before he could play like he had before.
He had to go see his ma in San Angelo. He was torn six ways to Sunday. Last time she visited, he’d asked her not to come again. That had been more than a year ago. She was crazy-talking, like,
We are the same, aren’t we? Sometimes I feel like my mind is so small I’m nothing more than a prisoner inside … Other times my mind is so big I could walk for years and never see the boundaries.
Not what she said, but how she said it. As if she were talking to more than one person when there was no one but Henry in front of her. One of the wardens asked Henry if she was okay. Henry said she was fine, just tired from the journey, a little stressed maybe. Henry knew she was drinking. Not for thirst but for medicine, and that kind of medicine caused its own panoply of ailments, the cure for which was just more liquor.
So Henry thought about his mother and pretty soon reckoned he didn’t know what to think, and thus he tried to think of something else.
And then he splayed his fingers and looked through the spaces at the black-and-white tiled floor beneath his feet, a checkerboard he had cleaned so many times he knew it intimately.
Had to collect his guitar, his gear, his pickup truck, and then head southwest toward the Mexican border, find a town called Calvary. Evan Riggs’s estranged brother, Carson, was sheriff down there, and from what Evan had told him, Carson had been—to all intents and purposes—the legal guardian of Evan’s daughter after Evan had been jailed. Once Quinn found her, once he’d fulfilled his promise and delivered the letter, then he was on his own. That promise to Riggs meant a great deal, as much as any word he’d ever given, and Henry Quinn knew he’d be damned if he didn’t fulfill it.
Evan Riggs—a man to whom Henry had spoken endlessly, a man who’d patiently listened to everything that Henry had uttered, a man who’d somehow become a seemingly limitless well for all that Henry Quinn had to say—remained an enigma to Henry still.
Evan Riggs would die right there in Reeves County Prison. The only other possibility was a prison transfer, and that meant dying somewhere else that looked just the same.
Life. No hope of parole. Life that meant
life
. And all for nothing.
I told them I didn’t remember what happened, and I didn’t. They don’t wanna hear that, however. A man who doesn’t remember must be a man with something to hide. Like I always say, a clear conscience is nothing more than a bad memory. Doesn’t stop me knowing in my bones that I killed that man. And for what?
Some said that Evan Riggs didn’t get the chair because he was a country singer with a long-playing record to his name. Others said that it was because he’d done two years in the military, ’43 to ’45, just like Governor Robert Allan Shivers, Angelina County-born, Austin alma mater, a man who liked that old-timey a-pickin’ and a-singin’ as much as the next conservative Democrat. Army men respected army men, and that had been enough to keep him alive.
Some said that Evan Riggs didn’t see death row because there was a ghost of doubt in the back of everyone’s mind that he was, in fact, the one who beat that man to death in a cheap motel in Austin in July of 1950.
Whys and wherefores aside, Governor Shivers signed the paper; Riggs went to Reeves County Farm Prison for life without parole. The dead guy, some slick Charlie who went by the name of Forrest Wetherby, was simply consigned to history.
Riggs was hauled semiconscious from his own motel room, still reeking of rotgut. Said he remembered nothing at all—not the man he’d supposedly killed, not the hollering, not the fistfight. Had no explanation for the blood on his knuckles or the rips in his clothes. He did know one thing, however. He knew he was a drunk, and not a good one, that he possessed the capability and capacity to kill a man. He’d done army time. He’d seen conflict in Europe. Train a man to kill and it’s only a matter of time before he ups and does it.
Riggs pled no contest, accepted the first lawyer the Public Defender’s Office afforded him, reconciled himself to the three Moirai, those fateful Greek characters who spun the threads that connected every event of one’s life from start to finish. The Moirai did not treat him well, but they could have treated him worse. Governor Shivers intervened, and Riggs didn’t tap-dance on linoleum while the state boiled his brains.
Those who knew Evan Riggs wondered why he didn’t fight a better fight. Some said he must be a Bible-reading man, that whatever avoidance he may have engineered on earth would only catch him later. Better to take the punishment now, be done and dusted within his own lifetime than look forward to an eternity of damnation in the hereafter. Some said a man may be guilty of something else entirely, that God finds a way to bring justice to a sinner, and there was no lack of evidence of Riggs’s drinking and womanizing and wanton lifestyle. After all, weren’t the very songs on that long-playing record of his about one and the same thing? Hell, even the name of the record—
The Whiskey Poet—
said all that needed to be said about Riggs’s source of inspiration. “Lord, I Done So Wrong.” “This Cheating Heart.” “I’ll Try and Be a Better Man.” Take those pretty tunes away and you may as well have called it a confession.
People were always of a mind to think what they wanted, and there was often no relationship between that and the truth.
Such were Evan Riggs’s circumstances, and however many times he might have tried to rewind his life, it would not be rewound. Hindsight was as close as anyone could ever get to living things differently, but hindsight was nothing more than a ghost of what might have been with a promise of nothing new.
Henry Quinn and Evan Riggs had been drawn together, it seemed—by design, by default, by destiny, who knew? They crossed paths, like stray dogs looking for a home that never was and never would be. The dynamics and circumstances that brought them together were similar, if only that there had been liquor and a long night and a jail term at the end.
As for Henry, he saw the capacity in Riggs to kill, certainly the capacity to fight like a cornered hound. Had he been pressed for an opinion, he would have said that Riggs did kill that man in Austin, and even though he claimed his memory was blank to the event, he’d seen it writ large on his heart. The internal truths are the ones that can never be truly buried.
If Evan Riggs’s life had been changed by a fistfight, then Henry’s had been changed by a bullet. The bullet that had changed Henry’s life was the very same one that near-fatally wounded Sally O’Brien. Irony being what it was, that .38-caliber slug had not been intended for her. In fact, it hadn’t been intended for anyone at all.