The Devil and the River (52 page)

“Good enough,” Ross said. “I’ll make some calls, see where he is.”

Gaines turned to Hagen. “You go on back to the office. Say nothing on this. Soon as I know where we’re at, I’ll get word to you.”

“And me?” Eddie Holland asked.

“Looks like you’re the fifth wheel, Ed,” Gaines said. “Don’t think it’ll suit to have all three of us arrive unannounced at Marvin Wallace’s house.”

“Suits me,” Holland said. “Got some things I need to do anyway. I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Appreciated.”

Ross came back to the kitchen from the hallway. “He’s in his office up in Purvis,” he said. “He’s not in court today, according to his secretary. We have an appointment with him at three.”

“We’re outta here, then,” Gaines said.

“Get him on a hook and make him wriggle,” was Holland’s parting comment.

Gaines didn’t reply. He didn’t think that the conversation with Judge Marvin Wallace would be anything like the conversation with Dolores Henderson. Wallace was a state-appointed legal authority, a man of considerable standing and reputation, and he had a great deal of friends. This was not going to be a turkey shoot, not at all. This was where any possibility of keeping their investigation under wraps was going to be blown into shreds.

Now there would be nowhere to hide from the influence and connections of Matthias Wade. Maybe Gaines would wake to find Leon Devereaux standing over his bed, asking if he please couldn’t have his knife back as there was urgent work needing to be done.

F
or a child of eleven, Kenny Sawyer was pretty damned smart.

Already he understood that when it came to life, what you deserved and what you got were never the same thing.

Kenny’s mother, Janette, was only thirty-seven, yet already exhausted with disappointments. She’d become the sort of person who figured that hope was merely there to remind you of all those things you’d yet failed to do.

At twenty-five, she’d married a man of forty, name of Ray Sawyer, and they’d rented a place in Lucedale. Ray had already been married, already had two sons—Dale and Stephen, fourteen and seventeen respectively. Ray had been widowed by a wife who committed suicide. Why she’d committed suicide, well, Kenny didn’t know, and it never seemed right to raise the subject.

A year into the marriage, Janette Sawyer was pregnant, and the result was Kenny, born in 1963.

Six years later, having contracted an aggressive cancer, Ray went from fit and well to dead in less than three months. There were pictures of him toward the end, a shadow of his former self, his clothes hanging off of him like there was room enough inside for two or three more folk of about the same stature. Kenny could barely remember his father, and his ma spoke of him rarely. Only thing that remained of Ray Sawyer’s memory was the house that he and Janette had taken. Janette had taken up with a string of men in the subsequent five years, some of them good, most of them not.

Both Dale and Stephen had shipped out pretty much as soon as their father was buried. How and why they felt no burden of responsibility for their stepmother was a mystery to Kenny. Kenny had felt that burden, and so he’d stuck around. That he’d been six years old at the time did play a part in his decision, for sure, but he liked to believe that if he’d wanted to, well, he could have up and left just like Dale and Stephen.

Kenny did not appreciate all the angles, but he was sure of one thing: What you deserved and what you got were not the same thing. Not ever.

The absence of a father was never that prevalent in Kenny’s mind. Folks asked him about it, and he said that what you never had you couldn’t miss. The kids didn’t really understand that sentiment; the adults were impressed with his philosophical attitude, and they favored him for his seeming honesty and sensitivity. He was an artistic boy, loved to draw and paint and make clay models, and there were those who believed he might be one of those who made it out.

“He could be an architect, a painter, a designer, or something,” the art teacher once told Janette Sawyer at a parent–teacher conference. “He certainly has a talent, Mrs. Sawyer, and I am sure he will do well.”

If Janette had possessed the energy to be proud, she might well have been. But she did not. She did not possess the energy for a great many things these days. She was not yet forty, and yet she felt as old as her own mother.
Drained
was the word she used. “I feel utterly drained, Kenny,” she would say. “Make yourself some soup and crackers. I’ll do some proper dinner later.” But mostly there was no
later
, and Kenny would take a couple of quarters from her purse and go get fried chicken.

It was on one of the fried chicken expeditions that he first met Leon Devereaux. Not a great deal more than a year earlier, he’d walked on up to the diner on Gorman Road, started back with the greasy paper bag, in it two wings, two legs, a tub of slaw, in his other hand a cup of root beer, and a black pickup had slowed alongside him and come to a stop.

Kenny Sawyer was not a suspicious child. He was young enough to take people at face value, to trust them until they gave him a reason not to, and yet old enough to consider he could take care of himself. Perhaps life had dealt him a mediocre hand, but it was with a mediocre hand that the best bluffs were undertaken.

“Got there?” a voice said.

Kenny stopped and turned left. “Chicken.”

“Where d’you get that?”

“Diner.”

A face then appeared at the window, the arm on the edge of the door, said arm scattered with jailhouse tats, the man’s hair closely shorn, a tooth missing on the left side of his crooked smile. But to Kenny it seemed like a good smile, an honest smile, and there was something about the man that seemed of decent humor.

“Back there?”

“Sure, back there. Half a mile, no more.”

“And it’s good chicken, you say?”

“Good enough,” Kenny said.

“You don’t get no supper at home?”

“Some.”

“But not today.”

“No, sir, not today.”

“Sir? What you done call me sir for?”

Kenny frowned. “Politeness, sir.”

“Well, shee-it, kid. I don’t recall that there’s ever been a time someone called me sir.”

“Well, maybe you ain’t knowed a great deal of polite folks.”

“I’m thinkin’ that may be the case. I think maybe you just hit the nail damn square on the head right there, son.”

“Maybe so,” Kenny said, and thought about his chicken getting cold.

“So that chicken is good, then, you say.”

“You wanna try some?” Kenny asked, and he took a step toward the pickup and held up the greasy paper bag.

“You’d let me have some of that there chicken you got in the bag?”

“Sure. Not all of it, mind, but you could maybe have a wing and see if it was good, and if you wanted more, you could drive right on down there and get yourself some.”

The man paused, tilted his head to one side, and looked at Kenny Sawyer like this was something altogether different.

“You’re a good kid, you know that?”

Kenny looked back at Leon like this was something altogether different for him, too.

“So, you want some?”

“Sure, kid. Let me have a wing there and we’ll see how it is.”

They agreed the chicken was good, not the best either of them had ever had, but fit for purpose.

“Where do you live, son?” Leon asked.

“Back a ways there, over beyond the clear-cut.”

“With your ma and pa?”

“Just my ma.”

“Your pa done run off?”

“Nope, he died.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yup.”

“You got brothers and sisters?”

“Two stepbrothers, Dale and Stephen, but they lit out when our pa died.”

“So they wasn’t your ma’s boys?”

“No, sir. They come with the package.”

Leon laughed. “Yes, indeedy, you’re a good kid, and you’re smart, too. Bet you there ain’t a great deal of people who can get past you.”

“I’d like to think not.”

“So, I’m gonna go down to that diner there and get myself some of that chicken. You wanna come?”

“Why for?”

“No reason. Just for company.”

“Ain’t s’posed to go no place with strangers.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Kenny.”

“Well, Kenny, my name is Leon, and I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.”

“Well, seein’ as how we’s on first-name terms, and seein’ as how we already shared some dinner there, looks like we ain’t strangers no more, wouldn’t you say?”

“I guess.”

“Well, hop on up here and show me where this diner is, and then once we’ve eaten, I can give you a ride back home.”

Kenny hesitated for no more than a second, and then he went on up in the passenger seat and gave directions. Not that there were a great many directions to give, but he gave them anyway.

Seemed that there may have been some odious and disreputable reason for Leon Devereaux’s initial exchange with Kenny Sawyer, but then again, maybe there wasn’t. Maybe he was just looking for company, and Kenny Sawyer was there to provide it. Whatever the deal had been, the deal was now something different. Leon Devereaux went on into the diner and bought more chicken. He got French fries and a cup of ketchup and cookies that were still warm from the oven. The cookies were for Kenny. They ate together, right there in the cab of that pickup, and they didn’t talk a great deal. When they were done, Leon was good to his word and he drove Kenny home.

“You know the trailers parked up over yonder?”

“The ones where that crazy dog is at?” Kenny asked.

“That’s the ones.”

“Yes, I do, sir.”

“Well, that’s where I live. You ever want some company, you come on by there. And don’t mind the dog. That’s General Patton. He’s always chained up secure, and he ain’t half as mad as he sounds. He just does it to show off.”

“You want me to bring chicken?”

“Sure, son. You bring some chicken if you like.”

“Okay,” Kenny said.

“Well, okay,” Leon replied.

And so it had become a friendship of sorts, Kenny Sawyer taking the long way back from school to see if Leon’s pickup was out at the trailers, and—if so—heading for the diner, getting chicken for them both, and then walking back.

Most often Leon was not there, and so their meetings were few and far between. But when they did meet, they picked up the conversations where they’d left off—baseball, comic books, church, what was best to eat, girlfriends, the benefits of cats versus dogs or vice versa, other such things. Leon showed Kenny lumberjack fighting, taught him a few slick moves— how to throw a punch and make it matter—and Kenny never asked where Leon had been for the past week or so, and Leon never ventured an explanation for his absences.

And so it was, late afternoon of Monday, August 5th, that Kenny Sawyer came back from school and checked to see if Leon’s pickup was home. It was not, hadn’t been for near on two weeks, but this time there was something strange. General Patton was there, unchained, running back and forth between the trailers and barking like a crazy son of a bitch. Kenny called him, and General Patton came running, near bowled him over with enthusiasm to see a familiar face.

“What’s up, boy?” Kenny asked him. “Where’s your pa, eh? Where’s Leon at? What you doin’ here by yourself?”

Each day Kenny had been down this way, he had seen the trailers but no pickup and no dog. This didn’t make sense. No sense at all. Couldn’t understand how Leon was absent but the General was here, untethered, running loose.

Kenny went on up to the big trailer, the one where he and Leon would sit and talk and eat chicken. He knocked, waited, figured that maybe Leon was in there with a girl again like he’d been a couple of times before. But Leon was not here. Of course he wasn’t. How the hell had he got here without the truck? Maybe he’d broken down someplace and had taken to walking back, had let the General run on ahead. A handful of minutes and he’d be turning the corner and asking where the chicken was at.

Kenny headed for the smaller trailer, the one where Leon slept.

He knocked again, knew he wouldn’t get an answer, and reached up to open the door.

Five minutes later, stopping once again to heave violently at the side of the road, Kenny Sawyer could still smell Leon Devereaux’s decaying corpse, still see just the one eye staring back at him. The other eye had been shot right through, left a hole the size of a quarter and then some, and whatever meatballs and tomato sauce had been inside that skull of his was decorating the wall above his head.

He’d been shot right there in his bed, had perhaps leaned up to see who was coming through the door, and taken a bullet right through the eye.

By the time he reached home, Kenny could hardly breathe, let alone speak. It was a while before Janette Sawyer appreciated the full import of what had happened, a while after that before she reached the Sheriff’s Office. Gradney himself went out to those trailers and saw what Kenny Sawyer had seen, and once he had the scene under control, once photographs had been taken, once the coroner had been called, Gradney took it upon himself to try to understand why an eleven-year-old kid would have a friend like Leon Devereaux. Gradney also knew that what you deserved and what you got were not the same thing, and that applied to friends as well. Kenny explained what he could, and then Gradney sat with Janette Sawyer and tried to get her to see that keeping an eye on who her son was spending time with might be a wise investment of her attention. After the Sawyers had left, Gradney called the dog pound, told them he had a mutt that needed collecting. Once the dog was gone, only then did he think to check the other trailer. He saw what Gaines had seen in the bathtub, and he was disturbed beyond measure. He did not know what Leon Devereaux had been doing, but he wondered whether Kenny Sawyer might have been the next intended recipient of whatever it was. Lastly, Gradney made a call to the Breed County Sheriff’s Office. He didn’t reach Gaines, but Hagen. He explained what had happened, that Leon Devereaux had been found dead in his trailer by a child.

“A child?” Hagen asked, incredulous.