The Last Death of Jack Harbin (15 page)

“I expect Landau's will do what it takes.”

“I'm sure you're right. Thank you for your time.”

“Good luck to you,” he says, although he really means good riddance.

At the door I pause. “One more thing. Is there anybody who can verify where you were the night Jack died?”

It takes a second for the question to sink in. “You son of a bitch. Are you accusing me of killing my own brother?” He moves toward me so fast he almost trips over his feet, and grabs hold of a chair to right himself.

I hold up my hand to stop him. “I'm not accusing you of anything. In a murder investigation everybody is suspect until they can be ruled out. Seems to me you had a lot to gain from your brother's death. I'd be a fool not to question what you told me.”

Coach Eldridge's wife, Linda, comes to the door wiping her hands on her apron. She's got a friendly smile. “Hello, Samuel, what brings you over here?”

“I need to ask Boone about something.”

“He's out in the garage. Let me call him in.”

“I'll just go on out there. It won't take but a minute.”

The garage has no room for a car. The floor is mostly taken up with sports equipment, some beyond repair. The rest of the area is crammed with cardboard boxes, broken furniture, and the usual house upkeep paraphernalia, like cans of leftover paint, a lawn mower, gardening tools, and sacks of cement and potting soil. There's a rusted out heap of a car sitting in the driveway. Eldridge will have another flashy car before long, though, now that he sold the Harley.

Eldridge is staring at a shelf of paint cans. His left hand is on his hip, his right arm in a sling.

Linda calls from the kitchen door. “Boone, Samuel Craddock is here to see you.”

Eldridge turns around. Sporting a black eye, his face, mottled with purple and yellow bruises, is dripping with sweat. It's about a hundred degrees in here. Eldridge played football for SMU, and has the physique of a ballplayer gone to seed—big hands, tree stump legs, thick neck, and a big gut. His short brown hair is shot through with gray.

His wife is an accountant for a construction outfit over in Bobtail, which is good because the coach in a small town doesn't have much of a salary. Even with their two paychecks, there's something shabby about the house.

“Boone, I heard about those guys jumping you,” I say. Since he can't shake hands, I clap my hand on his left shoulder. He winces, so that shoulder must be bruised as well. “If you can spare the time, I'd like to ask you a couple of things.”

He looks surprised, but says, “Let's go inside. It's too hot out here.” As we pass through the kitchen, he says, “Linda, I can't figure out which can has the trim paint in it. See if you can find the receipt. Maybe it'll tell what the color is.”

Eldridge leads me into the family room. His teenage daughter is bent over the computer doing homework, and is happy to oblige him when he says she can leave it for later. I watch her leave, carrying the computer with her, and suddenly I remember what it was that I thought was off when I was at Lurleen's the day Jack died. I need an explanation for it, and hope the explanation is a good one. I stick it in the back of my mind to take up with her.

After Eldridge's daughter is gone, I point to his arm. “You have any idea who did that to you?”

He scratches his head with his free hand. “I didn't see a thing. I expect it has to do with losing to Bobtail.”

“Has Jarrett Creek's finest made any move to find out who did it? It's an awful thing when a football game leads to violence like that.”

“I told James Harley to leave it alone. It just stirs people up. Nothing was broken. I'll be okay. Now what can I do for you?”

I tell him I'm investigating Jack's death.

He nods, like he's impatient to get on with it. “I heard that. I don't know what you think I might help you with, but shoot.”

I tell him about the two men I saw in the stands at the football game. “Somebody said they thought they could be scouting the team. You know anything about it?”

His expression is uneasy, and I wonder if something is going on under the radar with one of his players. “If that's who they were, they didn't come talk to me.”

“Would that be unusual?”

“It's protocol for scouts to identify themselves to the coach, but it's not unheard of for colleges to send scouts around without letting on, especially this early in the season.”

“You got any players you think are especially worth looking at?”

Eldridge keeps shifting in his seat. I expect his injuries still give him pain, despite his downplaying them. But people say he doesn't like being put on the spot, the way he was after the loss to Bobtail. “I don't like to say it; it's just a rumor. But Dilly Bolton's dad has been talking him up a good bit. Maybe he contacted somebody. That's illegal, but it doesn't keep people from sneaking behind my back and trying to get a leg up with the scouts.”

Dilly Bolton is one of the team's two black players. He's a senior, and I've never noticed him being anything special, but his daddy, Jess, has high ambitions for him. Jess hangs out with Gabe LoPresto a good bit, so I expect if he'd talked a college into sending someone to take a look, Gabe would have known about it.

“It seemed to me they were concentrating on the team. But can you think of any other reason for those fellows to be there?”

“How would I know?”

Linda comes back in with the receipt, happy to tell Eldridge she has found the name of the paint. Eldridge, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be all that thrilled. I don't see how he's going to do much painting, anyway, until his arm gets better.

He sees me to the door. “By the way,” I tell him, “the medical examiner has released Jack's body, so I expect the funeral will be early next week.”

“Well, that'll be an end to it,” Eldridge says.

“There won't be a real end to it until whoever killed him is brought to justice,” I say.

Eldridge cocks his head. “You really think you're ever going to find out who did it?”

“I'm sure going to try.”

In the evening I phone those who should know right away that Jack's body has been released, not trusting Curtis to have the common decency to call them. Lurleen and Walter Dunn are stoic at the news, but Marybeth and Taylor cry. I offer to go spend the evening with Marybeth, but she surprises me by saying she's going to come to Jarrett Creek and wait at the funeral home for the body's arrival.

“You know, they'll need to fix him up before you can see him.”

“I know that. But I want to be there when he comes home.”

When I call Woody, I mention what Marybeth plans to do, and he says he'll go sit with her.

Loretta calls me Saturday night to remind me that we have plans to go to a fiddle contest in Georgetown tomorrow morning. It's one of the few things she'll miss church for. My wife, Jeanne, never cared for country music, but I don't mind it.

I'm up and out early. I walk to Loretta's place because we're going in her car instead of my pickup.

“You're wearing that ratty old hat?” She poses it as a question, but what she means is, “You're not wearing that ratty old hat!”

“It keeps the sun off.”

She hears in my voice that my hat is not open for discussion and says no more, but makes do with a good, solid rolling of her eyes.

We make the drive in a couple of hours, arriving in plenty of time to grab good seats in the folding chairs set up in the American Legion Hall. By the time the fiddlers and their backup players start tuning up, just about every seat is taken.

We've been to a few fiddle contests this year. Loretta is prim in most ways, but she loves fiddle music, and she taps her foot and bobs her head along with the tunes. I believe if there was dancing, I wouldn't be able to keep her off the floor. But these contests are serious business. No dancing.

There's a sizable amount of money at stake for such a small town event, and the performers look as nervous as if they were on
American Idol
. Musicians have come here from as far away as Amarillo, and they're primed to do their best. I enjoy myself and the morning passes quickly.

For lunch, they've set up a barbecue pit, and there's potato salad and coleslaw and beans to go with ribs and chicken. The only problem is that after eating too much, Loretta and I have trouble staying awake. I go back for coffee a couple of times.

On the way home, Loretta and I have a lively argument about whether the right person won. I was taken with an old boy who looked to have played fiddle his whole life. But Loretta was on the side of a little girl about fifteen who swept the judges off their seats. And she won, so Loretta has that to bolster her argument.

When I walk back to my house about nine thirty, I'm surprised to see someone sitting on my front porch in the shadows. I am halfway up the walk to the house when he stands up.

“Who's there?” I call out.

“It's me, Mr. Craddock.”

“Woody? What are you up to?”

“Just thought we could talk a little bit.”

“Let me get the house open.”

Sometimes I wish I was forty again, when I didn't have any trouble extending my day. Now I'd like to tell Woody that whatever he wants to talk about will keep until tomorrow. But when I get closer, I can smell alcohol coming off him, and I know now is the time to talk. His tongue will be loose, and by tomorrow he may think better of whatever he has to say tonight.

“I'll make us some coffee,” I say. “And I've got a little brandy we can throw in.”

We take our coffee and brandy back out on the porch and sit in the dark. I'd like to turn on the light so I can see Woody's face, but he asks me to leave it off.

In high school, Woody and Jack were undisputed kings of their class: handsome, athletic, and with just enough devilment in them to make them popular. Their names were spoken together, as if they were one unit. But now I'm wondering which was the leader and which the sidekick. I do recall a certain hesitation in Jack. When Woody got hurt on the football field, he'd bounce back up. Even if he was limping, no way he'd let the coach take him out of the game. Jack was different. He made more of a show of being hurt—dragging himself off the field, only to come back out to cheers a few plays later. What did that say about the two of them?

Although he said he wanted to talk, Woody is quiet at first, so I make some general comments about the fiddle contest. Finally I run out of small talk. “Did you go over to the funeral home and wait with Marybeth yesterday afternoon?”

“Yes, they brought the body in about five o'clock. Lurleen was there, too.”

“So she and Marybeth had a chance to spend some time together.”

“It was real good for the two of them.” His chair creaks as he hunches forward. “I understand you're going to investigate who killed Jack.”

“That's right.”

“I want you to get that son of a bitch.” His voice has a hitch in it.

“Maybe you know something that would help me out.”

He sighs. “I wish I did.”

“I understand you and Jack buried the hatchet.”

“We made some headway in that direction.”

“Tell me about it.”

He takes something from his shirt pocket, and I hear the rustle of paper and realize he's taking a pinch of tobacco to put in his mouth. “Not much to tell. I went over to Walter Dunn's motorcycle shop and asked him to act as a go-between and he brought me over to Jack's. He talked to Jack for a while and eventually Jack said he'd give me a few minutes.” Woody gets up and goes over to the edge of the porch and spits the tobacco juice over the side. He doesn't sit back down, just stands looking out at the dark. “Like he was granting me an audience.”

“What was he so mad at you for?”

“He blamed me for him going into the army.”

That same old line. “That's ridiculous. You both signed up at the same time. I doubt you held him down while he signed the papers.”

I see a movement of his head. “You have to understand how it was. We had it in mind to be in the service together. Stupid. Now I know there's a good chance we might never have been deployed together. But we figured it would be like an extension of being on the football field. Having each other's backs.”

“So when you weren't accepted, he was upset. But I still don't understand why he'd blame you all these years. It wasn't like you planned it.”

“But I could have prevented it.”

“I don't see how.”

He comes over and pours himself more brandy and sits back down. “You remember when I shot him in the foot?”

“Of course I do. I thought . . .” I thought wrong. I had assumed there was some altercation having to do with Taylor. An easy assumption, and now I realize how wrong I was. There was never any reason for me to dig any deeper—until now.

“I was supposed to do enough damage so he'd be unfit for duty. I was supposed to shoot him in the ankle. Somewhere that it would be hard to fix. But I just couldn't do it. At the last second I pulled up and hit him in the foot.”

I'd heard of people doing that during the Vietnam War, on both sides. Wounding themselves so they couldn't be drafted. “I should have guessed.”

“You were with me when the nurse came out and said his foot was going to be fine.”

“I remember.”

“I had a premonition that I'd just about killed Jack.”

I recall the look on Woody's face. Maybe he did think he was seeing the future. I can imagine Jack's bitterness at what happened to him in the war, after Woody couldn't go through with the plan. “Seems like he could have done it himself if he was so all-fired determined to keep himself out of the service.”

“He was too scared to do it himself. When he asked me to do it, he cried. I think that's why he couldn't stand to be around me. He couldn't get over my seeing him that way.”

Woody's right: it would have eaten at Jack for Woody to know that he wasn't a war hero. Just a guy who tried to get out of going to war.

“So what did you two talk about when he finally saw you?”

“I didn't mention the past. I just told him that I missed his friendship and that if he'd let me take care of him, I would.”

“Was that before or after he and Lurleen decided to get married?”

“After. Surprised the hell out of me. I told him I was really happy for him, and that even if I couldn't take care of him, I'd like us to bury the hatchet. He said he'd think about it.”

“And that's the last you saw of him?”

“Yes sir, the last time. Goddamn! All those years we wasted.”

We're quiet for a few minutes. He pours more brandy, and I sip my coffee. “Let me ask you something. Jack went missing after he was injured. You ever hear anything about that?”

“Taylor's the one to ask about it.” He sounds angry.

“Taylor? But you two were married then. You would have known, too.”

“You need to ask her.” He gets up and shoves his hands in his pockets. “I should go. I just came over here because I needed to talk to somebody. And you're the only person besides Taylor who knew I shot Jack. So you know how bad it all turned out.”

“Taylor knew, too? The whole story?”

“Yeah.” He heaves a deep sigh. “I wish to hell I'd done what Jack wanted me to do.”

“It was a lot to ask.”

“No!” The word explodes into the air. “We were like brothers. Better than brothers. I failed him. And I don't want anyone to fail him again. I want you to find out who killed him.” He tosses back the last of his brandy and takes off down the steps.

I sit there for a while longer, and my thoughts are dark. Even if I find out who killed Jack, which I have every intention of doing, it isn't going to heal Woody's wounds. Those years are gone. I think about the void between Jack and his real brother, Curtis. Jack had a better brother in Woody, and he rejected him. You'd think Jack would have found comfort in old friends. It's terrible what the need to save face will do to people.

Finally I get up and stretch out my leg. It doesn't do any good to brood over it. My job is to find out who ended Jack's life. I can't fix any more than that.