Phantom Nights (28 page)

"Mally told you? Told you what?"

Alex wrote one word.
Key
.

"What key? When did she tell you to look for it?"

Alex studied the porch beams overhead and shrugged. "Where was this key supposed to be?"

Another word.
Kitchen
.

"Mally had a key that meant something, and she wanted somebody else to know about it just in case? That meant—what? She was afraid—but she didn't say a word to you, what the key was for? Padlock? Lockbox? Bus-station locker?"

Alex shook his head unhappily.

"What do you
think
it was for? Come on, Alex."

This time Alex printed two letters, then handed the pad facedown to Bobby so Francie couldn't catch a glimpse of them. Then Alex made a gesture of dismissal, a curt
that's all
motion with his hands.

Bobby knew the letters on the pad were probably initials. He tore the sheet of paper off, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. Alex glanced up and met Francie's eyes again. Smiled in a troubled way. He stretched out again in the hammock with his back to Bobby.

"Okay, pardner. I understand. See you tomorrow at the funeral. Better come by the house first thing and get a suit of clothes to wear."

Francie walked with Bobby to the front door. Not taking her eyes off him.

"Is this something real bad, sheriff?"

"I believe it is, Francie."

"Will Alex be all right?"

"Yes."

"But you can't be sure."

"I've always taken the best care of him I know how, Francie."

"You just look so worried."

She went outside with him to the flagstone veranda. Bobby pausing to look over the hilltop property. Mostly open pasture with white fencing, isolated lightning-scarred old trees. But no trees near the house. He wondered if anyone had followed his brother here after the fire. There was a colored family in the caretaker's house well out back, but at fourteen Francie was the oldest at home in the main house. He decided to put a dep in a prowler at the Swifts' gate for the rest of the night, not saying anything to Francie about the arrangement.

"There are things going on, it's a matter of the law, I can't tell you about."

She nodded. "Maybe you could set me straight about something?"

"What's that, darlin'?"

"Alex's voice. A lot of the kids say he doesn't talk because he wants everybody to feel sorry."

"It was diphtheria, Francie."

"Oh."

"With a lot of effort, maybe he could get out a few words. Maybe you'd halfway understand him. But we don't know for certain, and no doctor has been able to tell us."

"I just hate to think—"

"It's part of his life now. Not getting over it, but getting on in spite of bad odds. What we all need to do to ever amount to anything." He started down the steps to the gravel drive and his station wagon, then turned. "Francie?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Alex saved a man's life tonight. That house was an inferno before either of them had a hope of getting out. This was told to me by Dr. Valjean, Mally Shaw's father, who was in the house sorting her effects. Alex needed to chop a hole in the kitchen floor and pull Dr. Valjean out of there before the roof fell in. I wanted you to know that."

"Thank you. I'm glad you told me. He probably wouldn't have let me know." Francie regarded him gravely, eyes blue punctuation in the open book of her youth. "I'm going to sit up with Alex a little while longer. In case he needs anything. His hand really pains him, but he won't admit it. You know, he's strong in his own way. Even if nobody but us sees it yet."

B
efore calling it quits for the night, Bobby drove to the remains of Mally Shaw's house, his second visit in two hours. About an acre of brush and small trees had burned around the concrete-block foundation. A layer of smoke hovered in the windless night. One fire truck remained handy while the last pieces of blackened, smouldering wood were axed and doused.

He didn't get out of the Packard but slid the seat back and relaxed, smoked a cigarette and listened to the last half hour of Dewey Phillips on WHBQ Memphis.
Red, Hot and Blue
. "Tomorrow's forecast is for high winds, followed by high skirts, followed by Phillips." What a character. And the music was good rhythm and blues. When Phillips went off the air, Bobby dialed aimlessly around the clear channel stations. New Orleans, Del Rio, Texas. A radio evangelist worked his unseen flock like a pickpocket works a carnival lot. Bobby thinking about the possible significance of the key Alex had tried hard to find. According to Ramses, Alex was unscrewing lids from Ball jars of preserved beans or tomatoes in the kitchen when a person or persons unknown—get back to that later. Bobby pictured a small key pressed into a half-inch round of warm paraffin before Mally had sealed one of those jars. Safe there. Vital to Mally that the key be safeguarded. Maybe she had managed to put by a small fortune in money somehow, or possessed a valuable heirloom. Bobby didn't think so, given the circumstances that had immediately followed Priest Howard's death and burial.

Priest Howard
, Bobby thought with a jolt of lawman's intuition that felt exactly right to him. Who had that old man been able to trust in his dying days except his lawyer, and him not overly much; and Mally Shaw, who spent nearly every day at his bedside with the deft hands, the centeredness, that conviction of calling the best caregivers had; man could fall in love with a woman like that, never mind his age or the insufficiencies of the flesh. Suppose Priest had a secret to deal with, a secret that might lay waste the future of the unloved son? A secret under lock and key but also slyly on his tongue at an unguarded moment with a woman kinder to him than any of his wives had been.

And Leland knew, or suspected, his pitiless father's intentions. On the night Priest Howard was barely settled into his newly refurbished mausoleum, Leland came calling on Mally Shaw. Could have been a coincidence, and sexual favor was all he had on his mind. Sex with certain safety; what could Mally do?

Had his fun, but then . . . he took Mally away after. If he knew about the existence of the key and what it might bring to light, obviously it was causing him great anxiety. What if Mally already knew exactly what was in the hand his father had dealt him before dying? If she hadn't given the key to Leland, he required time to work on her. No call to damage other than her spirit. Best accomplish a breakdown in her resolve by handing her over to a couple of good old boys for a week of sport in the backwoods, then pay her some money and show her to the westbound bus.

But something went wrong; Mally died, and Bobby knew where it had happened.

As for the possibility of a key . . .

Bobby looked through his dusty windshield at the black crust of a house still wisping smoke, thinking of jars exploding in the intense heat.

No rain forecast. But by morning it should be possible to start raking through the coals, sifting the ashes.

Unlikely a key would be found. If one did show up, probably couldn't be determined what lock the key was meant for.

The firebombing might have been designed for this purpose. Mally wouldn't reveal to him where she'd hidden the key, so burn her house down. She wouldn't be needing it any longer. And another plus for Leland Howard, who so far had survived his late father's animus, dodged a wrongful-death charge, and was up twelve points in the weekend polls. Bound for glory with a grin and a hi-yo wave of his hand.

But Alex Gambier could be a charred mummy in a rubber sheet right now, because Leland Howard couldn't get enough of covering his tracks.

There were those things you had to get on with
, Bobby thought, not without a taste of fear on the back of his tongue. In spite of bad odds. He yearned to see the face of his wife on her pillow and his infant son by moonlight in his crib.

Also he could use a beer.

He put his station wagon in gear and drove home.

Dog-Eared Deuce

Ghosts Don't Dream

Robert Mitchum Did It

T
he funeral service for Mally Show, eleven o'clock Tuesday morning at Little Grove Holiness Church, was well attended: friends and relatives of the deceased plus a few older souls who had barely known Mally but had time on their hands and always enjoyed a good funeral when one was in the neighborhood.

Various artistically minded parishioners, a few of whom had a little talent, had painted so many Biblical scenes on the church windows that the sun barely penetrated the sanctuary. Mally's coffin was of necessity closed, banked on all sides by floral tributes. Bobby and Cecily Gambier sat with Ramses Valjean, who stoically endured a Bible reading, a hymn, a soprano solo by Ike and Zerah Thurmond's middle girl Jadie, and two eulogies, the last delivered so sorrowfully by Mally's erstwhile suitor, Mr. Poke Chop Burdett, while he strummed his banjo that almost no one could understand what he was saying; but his grief was powerfully eloquent, and tears were falling everywhere in the one hundred and twenty-seat church. Ramses remained dry-eyed, but he was tense, perspiring and coming up on time for his second morphine fix of the day.

Alex Gambier, to Bobby's thinking, was neglectfully absent from the funeral, although he allowed it was possible Alex preferred keeping his distance somewhere outside. Not contrary but protective of his own feelings. While Mally's coffin was carried to the prepared site at the foot of her husband William's greened-over resting place, Bobby looked around but couldn't spot Alex.
Contrary after all, but put it down to anger
, Bobby thought.

After a fast graveside ceremony, mesh curtains were lowered on all sides of the canopy, and there the coffin would remain until the shovelers came to put Mally under in the cool of the evening. On the road, Bobby beckoned to Eddie Paradise Galphin, who had kept some distance from the proceedings. Bobby, Eddie, and Ramses had a heads-together conversation. Eddie nodding and nodding and trying not to look as if he'd just been offered a journalistic nugget of pure gold.

Bobby went back to work, and Ramses returned to the house on West Hatchie to lie down for a while in a cocoon of morphine.

O
ne-ten in the afternoon.

Jim Giles sat in his pickup truck with the windows down to benefit from a mild cross-breeze and read the funnies from Sunday's
Memphis Commercial Appeal
while he enjoyed a chew from a luxury plug of tobacco. He used a Hopalong Cassidy glass with a chipped rim he'd found in a trash basket for a spit container. Kept an eye on the courthouse square and the black-marble facade of Dunkel's Department Store. The boy whom he had spotted right here yesterday and who ought to have burned to death in Mally Shaw's house last night was in Dunkel's with his girlfriend. Except for a bandaged hand apparently none the worse for his experience.

The boy's reappearance had given Giles, a man with little imagination, a decidedly creepy feeling to complicate his slowly simmering sense of anger and dismay that nothing seemed to be going quite as it should. Leland Howard had forbade him to get rid of the Catahoula hounds when Giles's instinct demanded they should do just that. Leland had sounded mentally out of kilter, more than a little spooked during their most recent cryptic telephone conversation. Trying to explain something woefully prophetic he'd heard from a fortune-telling hillbilly woman. Giles's opinion was that Mr. Howard needed to stay the hell away from the women for at least a week. But he just had to have that pussy after a long, hard day on the stump getting all worked up by his own rhetoric. Keep up his present pace with all that was worrying him, the day after the primary he would need a straitjacket and a cold hosing down to straighten him out.

Good or bad, Jim Giles dutifully reported the news as it happened. But it was up to him to make sure his next report would put all of Mr. Howard's worries to rest.

Matter of time and place
, Giles reflected, putting down the funny papers to stare at a damned boat-tailed bird taking a shit on the hood of his truck. He was a careful but decisive man. A kid who escaped the firebombing of a tinderbox house was worthy of some respect. But another opportunity would present itself. Thereafter the boy would be dead, and there would be no way to trace his death back to Jim Giles, the Senator-elect's man.

He tapped his horn, but the insolent bird refused to fly away. Another little thing not going right today. In another, more private place he would have taken down the double-barreled shotgun from the rack behind him and blown the bird into a bloody wad of feathers.

Giles spat brown juice into the Hopalong Cassidy glass and felt his pulse rate picking up. He had little or no tolerance for things that made him angry.

A
fter deciding on and charging a pair of dress-up white sandals in the women's department of Durikel's, Francie Swift located Alex one aisle over wearing the new shirt and moccasins he'd bought and also charged, to Bobby's account. He was looking raptly at an embroidered peasant blouse and denim skirt ensemble on a store dummy.