The Devil and the River (25 page)

It was ten after five by the time Gaines pulled up in front of the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Office on Bayonard Street. Against a broken-yolk sunset, the office was lit up bright and bold like Fenway Park. Beside it was an expanse of waste ground, across it a collection of rusted machinery—large, awkward insects now weakened by time and weather, unable to resist the wild suffocation of vines scrawled all around them like indecipherable calligraphy. A yappy, discourteous dog chained to a tractor tire argued with Gaines as he crossed from his car to the main entrance.

Sheriff Dennis Young was not the man Gaines expected. Had Gaines been asked what he expected, he wouldn’t have been precise, but Young was not it. Maybe he expected some kind of old-school Huey Long character, one of those who figured the world should solely be plantations, all of them run as fiefdoms by people such as himself. To Gaines, Young looked like the sort of person who’d never had friends, more than likely never would. Not meanness, but wound up so tight that no one would ever get under his skin. Most people believed there was room enough in their lives for a host of visitors and a handful of permanents. The impression Young gave was that there was room enough for himself and himself alone. Aloneness was not necessarily loneliness, but as far as quality of life was concerned, it seemed to Gaines that such an existence was a handful of small change instead of a fistful of bills.

Sheriff Dennis Young, the better part of sixty, a good head taller than Gaines, looked directly at Gaines as Gaines entered the room. Young’s expression was almost a threat, but his eyes seemed to carry a weight of sadness. Looked like a man who not only remembered the past, but longed to live there. He reminded Gaines of the hardfaced, bitter police veteran with whom he’d first been partnered. That man, the first day they met, had shook Gaines’s hand roughly, slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Well, hell, son, let’s get you out there and see if we can’t get you shot at or blown to kingdom come, eh?”

“Do for you?” Young asked.

“I’m Sheriff John Gaines, Breed County, Mississippi—”

“I know who you is, son. ’Parently, one of your people called here and said you was on the way. Who you is ain’t what I asked.”

“I’m here about Matthias Wade.”

Young slowed down then. Had Gaines not been as intent, had he not been so aware of Young’s every move, he perhaps would not have noticed it. There was a definite and tangible shift in atmosphere in that room.

“He’s been around and about again, has he?”

“Yes, sir, he has.”

Young smiled knowingly. He seemed to relax a mite, barely noticeable, but relax he did.

“He was always one for getting on and about into other folks’ business.”

“He’s getting involved over in Breed County,” Gaines said.

“Tell me what he’s been saying.”

“Not what he says, but what he’s done. I had a guy called Michael Webster on a possible first-degree. World War Two veteran, crazy as a shithouse rat. Looks like he strangled a teenage girl down there a while back, and there was a fuck-up with a warrant and he was given bail. Wade came down and paid up the bail and took him away just three or four hours ago. Paid all of five thousand dollars.”

“Did he, now?”

“Yes, Sheriff, he did.”

Young nodded, and then he smiled. “The name’s Dennis, son, just Dennis. After all, we is family, is we not?”

Gaines nodded respectfully. Maybe Young wasn’t so impregnable after all.

“And you have a question for me, right?” Young prompted. “And I’m wonderin’ if it has something to do with what happened back here in sixty-eight.”

“That’s right,” Gaines said.

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing much. Word has it that some girls were killed.”

Young smiled resignedly. “Oh, there is more than a word, my friend. We think he killed two little girls. Personally, I would stake my life on it. But it don’t seem my life has a great deal of weight against the lack of evidence. What actually happened back then, and what we think happened, well, that’s where the disagreements start, and to this day they have not ended. All we got right now is Matthias Wade walking the streets a free man, two little girls dead, and not an ounce of justice to share between them.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I can tell you what I know,” Young said. “Two girls, one ten, the other twelve, found strangled . . . left in a shack someplace out in the middle of no place special. Only thing that linked them to the Wades was that both girls were daughters of Wade-family employees. That was the thing, you see? It was such a fragile link, and there was nothing substantive we could use to bring Matthias Wade in. He was—what?—maybe thirty-five years old at the time. He wasn’t some clueless punk. He was a smart man, Sheriff Gaines, and more than likely still is.”

“So what made you think he was responsible for the killings?”

“Some people you think are bad,” Young said. “But there’s some people you
know
are bad. He’s one of them. Can smell his kind from a mile and a half away. Pompous asshole, telling us what we can and can’t say to him. Son of a bitch. I know he killed those girls. I had him in here for two hours, and he talked himself around the countryside, saying how he didn’t know squat about nothin’, but I could read it in his eyes and the dark sack of shadows he has in place of a soul.”

Young shook his head and sighed. “God didn’t make many of them like that, but the ones he did make are awful bad.” He paused to light a cigarette. “So tell me what you got over there in Breed.” He leaned forward, his eyes all fired up bright with interest.

“Girl of sixteen years old, found buried in a riverbank. She’d been there for twenty years. Was a disappearance back in fifty-four, only come to light now, so to speak. Had her heart cut out, in her chest a wicker basket with a snake inside. She’d been strangled and then butchered postmortem.”

“Jesus Christ almighty,” Young said, and he whistled through his teeth. “What the hell kind of madness is that?”

“What happened to the two girls here?” Gaines asked.

“I can show you the files, my friend. You can look at the pictures, too. However, sounds like we had ourselves a church picnic compared to what you’re dealing with.”

“There are others who think that Wade was responsible for the deaths of these two girls?”

“I am not alone in my conviction, Sheriff. Whole heap of people don’t see it could have been any other way. Wade is the baddest kind of son of a bitch I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with.” Young shook his head. “Most folks is simple. Even the crooks and the crazies. You know what they’re gonna say before they even set themselves down to the table. That’s the thing that makes most of this job pretty straightforward. Someone gets killed around here, well, there’s pretty much gonna be only two or three that coulda done it. Even with the housebreaking an’ all that, you get some folks’ place robbed, and a day later you got some dumbass son of a bitch tryin’ to sell their shit in a bar three blocks from home. It ain’t complicated because most people ain’t complicated. But then there’s others. Others who is intricate. Others who are a different kind of animal altogether. You just can’t predict what they’re thinking, nor what will pass their lips. And even when they do say it, well, it’s just as likely gonna mean something different than how it sounds. Wade is a devious creature. He don’t pretty much say nothin’ ’cept if it’s a lie. Easiest way to know if he’s lying is to look see if his lips are moving. If his lips are moving, he’s delivering up some kind of bullshit, and that’s a fact. Those girls of ours, Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick, went missing within three days of each other back in January of sixty-eight. They were both found together less than a week after Dorothy disappeared . . . Well, you can read the files and look at the pictures, and then you can tell me what kind of human being it is that can strangle little kids like that.”

“And Wade was your only suspect?”

“Only suspect then, only suspect now. He was local, you see. Ran a whole heap of companies down around these parts, and after it happened, he got real busy quieting everyone down about it, newspapers suddenly deciding they weren’t going to run the story and this sort of thing. And here we are six years down the line, and the likelihood of proving anything against him grows more impossible with every passing day. He has connections, you see? He has family down here, and the Wades are a family that will do whatever it takes not to have their name sullied by the taint of such things.”

“I didn’t get it at first, but these are
the
Wades, aren’t they?”

“Only ones I know. More money than is decent. Sugar and cotton and crawfish and rice and soybeans and whatever the hell else they fancy. You look under the porch of a Wade house and you find everyone from the bank owners and the real estate folks to the governor hiding there. That family’s been backhanding support to pretty much every political official that suits their business for five generations.”

“And there was a picture album in Webster’s room. Photographs of Webster with Wade and our victim, a girl called Nancy Denton. There are pictures of the other Wade kids, as well. And there was another girl that Webster mentioned, a girl called Maryanne?”

Young shook his head. “Can’t help you there, son.”

“So the question now is how come Matthias Wade would pay five grand to bail Webster out. Is he helping out an old friend, or . . .” Gaines stopped and looked at Young.

“That’s a question beggin’ for an answer,” Young said. “But if I know Matthias Wade, you’ll wind up askin’ yourself a load more questions that don’t belong, and you’ll still walk away with nothing.”

“You think I could take a look at those files?”

“Sure you can, son.” Young leaned forward and lifted the phone. “Marcie, Get me them files on Mayhew and McCormick, would you? Bring ’em on in here for me.”

Young set down the receiver. He lit another cigarette and smoked it in silence. It was no more than a minute before Marcie came in bearing an armful of dossiers.

She put them on Young’s desk, backed up, and left the room.

There was no similarity in appearance between either girl and the other, or either girl and Nancy Denton. Young slid out the pictures one by one, and there was nothing that needed to be explained.

Both girls had been strangled. Bruising was evident around the base of their throats.

The more Gaines looked at the pictures, the more he noticed a strangeness around the eyes.

“Eyebrows,” Young said quietly. “We think they were blindfolded with a heavy adhesive tape, and when the tape was removed, most of the eyebrow came with it.”

Gaines looked at the rest of the pictures. He wanted to feel so much. He wanted to be shocked, enraged, upset, but he was not. Had he not seen what had been done to Nancy Denton, had he not been still submerged beneath the weight of conscience for his procedural omission, he might have been objective enough to suffer the expected emotions. But he was not. He had seen it all, if not here, then in war, and he just felt numb.

“And there really was nothing of any substance, evidence-wise, against Matthias Wade?” Gaines asked.

“No, nothing at all. Circumstantial stuff. The fact that both girls were daughters of Wade-family employees. Tire tracks near the bodies that were produced by the same brand of tires as could be found on one of Wade’s many cars. It was a brief ‘Yes, you did,’ ‘No, I didn’t’ back and forth, and then Wade got some heavyweight legal counsel in from Jackson, and that was the end of that. He was cooperative, polite, didn’t give us any trouble, answered every question we asked him, gave us nothing to hang anything on, and then he upped and left without so much as a fingerprint to follow up on.”

“But you really believe he did it,” Gaines said. “You
really
believe he murdered these two girls.”

“I don’t believe anything, son. I
know
it. Either he strangled those girls with his own hands, or he was accomplice to it. Whichever way it went down, he knows what happened back then, and he ain’t sayin’ a word.”

“Well, he’s gotten himself involved with another dead girl now,” Gaines said.

“Sure as hell looks that way,” Young said. “And if you can nail him for that, then I would owe you a mountain of gratitude. Nothin’ would give me greater pleasure than to see that son of a bitch brought to justice for something.”

Gaines was quiet for a time, his attention still fixed on the display of pictures before him. “Would it be okay if I just sat somewhere for a while and made some notes about these cases?” he asked.

Young started to get up. “You just take whatever notes you like, son. In fact, you can take those files with you, back on up to Whytesburg. If you’re gonna be followin’ up on this, then better to have the original documents and pictures and whatnot. When you’re done, you bring ’em on back here, okay?”

“That’s very much appreciated.”

“What’ll be more appreciated is seein’ that bastard pay for what he’s done.”

“I won’t be long,” Gaines said.

“You have all the time you need. I got a bunch of things to do. You let Marcie know if you need any help.”

Young headed for the door, paused to grip Gaines’s shoulder. “Good luck, son. Not that I believe in luck, but good luck anyway. Wade is a devious son of a bitch, like I said, and he’s got more money than Croesus behind him. Maybe you’re gonna see something I didn’t and get him this time. Whatever the hell we think he’s been doing, I can guarantee he’s been doing a lot worse. That’s the nature of this one. Too much money, too much time on his hands, and the devil makes plenty of work for idle hands, as they say.”

“I appreciate your time, Sheriff,” Gaines said.

“No problem. If you need more of it, you just let me know.”

Young left the room.

Gaines sat there for a while, and then he started in on the first murder. Anna-Louise Mayhew, all of ten years old, left to visit with a girlfriend on the morning on Wednesday, January 3, 1968, found eight days later in St. Mary Parish, strangled and cast aside like an unwanted rag doll.