What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (8 page)

“It’s political bullshit’s what it is. Nobody else would take it, and for damn good reason.”

“The body had been there a while, you said.”

“Been there alive for some time before he was there dead, and that was three, four days.”

“The stake had been driven in there?”

“No way. Where he lay’d be my guess. Someone mopped up as best he could. Lot of blood trace still. The bedding was rolled. Makes me think maybe he’d come back, laid down to rest thinking he’d go back out.”

“So the body got moved.”

“Absolutely. Some point after the stake went in—dead or almost, really no way to tell—he got wired to that trellis.” “Blood and skin under his nails?”

“Looked to be. Could just be dirt, grease.”

“Maybe that’ll give us something. I assume State’ll do blood typing, run the DNA?”

“Blood, yes. Anything heavier’n that gets shipped out to Little Rock or Memphis, one of the big labs.”

“You’re saying be patient.”

“Be very patient.”

“Nothing else?”

I looked around the room in turn. Bates shook his head, as did Don Lee.

“One thing I have been thinking on,” Doc said.

“Okay.”

“This man’s been out there, on the street, a while.”

“Three, four months at least. Probably a lot longer.”

“So how’s it come about he has soft hands?”

Chapter Twelve

FOR YEARS IT WAS KNOWN
around the department as the Monkey Ward caper.

We got tagged midday one Saturday. Dispatch was sending out a black-and-white, but the Lieutenant wanted detectives to rendezvous. Half a dozen calls had come in about whatever the hell was going on out there.

It was one of those new developments north of Poplar near East High School, reclaimed land where long-boardedup storefronts, restaurants and thrift shops were being leveled to create innercity suburbs, row upon row of sweet little perfect houses each with its own sweet front and rear lawn.

When we pulled up, one of the guys had a hedge trimmer, the other one a posthole digger. Took us some time to sort out they were in each other’s yards. They’d gone from insults across the fence to a swinging match, and when that did neither of them much good, they’d opted for technical support. One was busily defoliating every bush and small tree on his neighbor’s lawn, including plants in window boxes. The other was busily making the next yard look like a convention of moles had just let out.

The uniforms had just about talked them down by the time we got there. These guys had been riding together for fifteen, sixteen years; everyone in the department knew them. Tall one was Greaser, named for the hair tonic he must have bought in quart jars. Short one was Boots, for the zip-up imported footwear always polished to a high shine. Light reflected off Greaser’s hair or Boots’s boots could blind you.

Boots had Mr. Ditch Witch, Greaser had Hedge Man. They’d persuaded them to lay down the appliances and were bringing them together as we arrived. Close-up disputes like that, it’s always a kind of square dance, swing them apart, bring them together, open it up again. As we climbed out of the car, the two had just shaken hands and were talking. Next thing we knew, they’d grabbed up a garden hoe and a leaf rake and were going after one another again, Robin and Little John with quarterstaffs on that narrow bridge. Should have been on riding mowers, galloping towards one another, lances at ready.

Randy looked across the top of the car shaking his head and said he knew all along it was gonna be one of those days. About that time the hoe caught Greaser hard on the side of the head. He’d moved in to intercede, baton high to protect himself, then half-turned to check on the other guy’s position. Went down like a burnt match.

“You see that?” Randy said later. “Hair didn’t move at all. What
is
that shit he puts on it?”

The citizen let the blade of the hoe fall to the ground, handle in his hand. Jesus, what had he done. But the one with the rake was still charging toward him, teeth aloft like a giant bird claw. Then his left foot stepped over a garden hose, we saw Boots run between them, suddenly Boots was behind the guy, still had hold of the hose, now he was pulling it tight—and the guy slammed to the ground.

Randy stood shaking his head. “Sure hope he don’t aim to hog-tie him, too.”

“I’ll call it in,” I said.

Doctors stitched it as best they could, but the hoe had opened it up even better, and Greaser wound up with scar that ran an inch and a half or so down his forehead over the left eye. He took to pasting a lock of hair in place over it.

“Missiles take out civilization as we know it,” Randy said, “that hair of his’ll still be perfect.”

Chapter Thirteen

WEDNESDAY HAD GONE BY,
that was the day Bates came and collected me and the night I stayed at Val’s, then Thursday, when I’d interviewed the two kids and Doc Old-ham. Now it was Friday. I’d slept on the office couch, awake at 10:35, 11:13, 2:09, 3:30, 5:18, 6:10. (Ah, the digital life. Never any doubt where you stand.) From time to time the radio crackled. The faucet in the bathroom had an on-again, off-again drip. Now someone was hammering boards in place over the windows.

No, someone’s knocking at the door. And Don Lee is heading that way. Coffee burps and burbles in the maker, aroma spreading insidiously through the room like an oil spill. I’m fascinated by the fact that the door to the sheriff ’s office is locked. One of those weird things in life that seems to be the setup for a punch line you never quite get to.

A woman came in as I struggled up from the couch. She wore a tailored, narrow-waisted business suit the like of which don’t seem to be around much anymore. The suit was green. So were her eyes. They went from Don Lee to me and back. Obviously she wondered if I shouldn’t be in one of the cells, instead of out here.

“Sheriff Bates?”

Behind her soft urban lilt was a hill-country accent, East Virginia maybe. Getting along in years, and it hadn’t stuck its head up to look around for a time, but it was still there. Don Lee said who he was and asked if he could help her.

“Sarah Hazelwood.” She held out her hand to shake his, not something you saw a lot with women in this part of the country even now. “From St. Louis.”

“Not originally, though,” I put in, God knows why. I’d escaped the couch’s hold by then. Her eyes met mine at a level. That was a harder hold.

“We’re from where we choose to be. And what we choose to be.”

Turning back to Don Lee, she went on.

“I’m looking for my brother. He . . . dropped out, I suppose is the right word—disappeared—almost a year ago.”

“From St. Louis.”

“Fort Smith. He lives . . . lived . . . at home, with our father. And this isn’t the first time he managed to go missing, by any means. But always, before, he’d turn up again in a week or two. We’d get a call from an ER in Clarksdale or West Memphis, or from the police down in Vicksburg, and go fetch him.”

“And now you think he’s here?” Me again.

Again, those eyes level with my own: “You are . . . ?”

Don Lee introduced us, explaining my function as consultant. That word just kind of hung there in midair, letters malformed, dripping paint.

“We’ve reason to believe he may be.”

Don Lee had poured his own and was adding in sugar before it occurred to him. “Like some coffee, Miss Hazel-wood?”

“No, but thank you.”

“And your reason is?” I said. “For believing he’s here, I mean.”

“I work as a paralegal, for the firm of Scott and Waldrop. We handle estates, trust funds, endowments. That sort of thing.”

“Good work if you can get it,” I said, with little idea why I was baiting this woman.

“The firm has nine attorneys, Mr. Turner. Two by choice work full-time at immigration, wrongful termination, civil-rights issues. Mostly pro bono.”

“I apologize. Sometimes I get up in the morning and find I’ve gone to bed with this absolute jerk.”

“How does the jerk feel about it?” After a moment she added: “I accept your apology.”

Don Lee cleared his throat. “You’ve come all the way from St. Louis?”

“I flew into Memphis yesterday afternoon. We drove up from Fort Smith this morning.”

“We?”

A black woman wearing a full-length dress slit on both sides to the upper thigh stepped through the door and stood there blinking. Earth colors, print, vaguely African. “Sorry to interrupt, but Dad’s not doing so well out here.” Clipped short, her hair directed attention to the long, graceful curve of her neck, high cheekbones, shapely head. The dress was sleeveless, showing well-developed shoulders and biceps.

Moments later, the second woman—Adrienne, as I was soon to learn—pushed a wheelchair through the door Miss Hazelwood held open. In it sat a man with what looked to be a military brush cut. Ever seen a porch whose supports on one side have been kicked out? That’s what he reminded me of. Everything on the right side, from forehead down through mouth to foot, sagged. That much closer to the earth we all wind up in.

“Daddy, this is Deputy Sheriff Don Lee. And Mr. Turner. Memphis police, I think.”

Adrienne rolled the chair into a corner away from the heat of morning light.

“This okay, Mr. H?”

He turned his head to nod and smile at her. The right side of his face gave the impression of trying to stay in place, moving half a beat behind, even as the left side turned. Same with the smile. Left side voted yes, right side abstained.

Adrienne and Sarah Hazelwood exchanged gazes filled with wordless information.

“In St. Louis,” Miss Hazelwood said, “at Scott and Wal-drop, we handle a lot of legal work for the county. Mostly it’s clerical, routine. Getting papers filed on time, filling in forms. But we also represented Sheriff Lansdale in a wrongful-death suit last year when a sixteen-year-old died of asthma while being held in his jail.”

“Black?” I glanced at Adrienne. No reaction.

Miss Hazelwood nodded. “We’ve maintained something of a special relationship since then. Dave Strong heads up Information Services. Created and pretty much runs the computer system and database single-handed. He’s my contact there.”

“You hitched a ride on the information superhighway,” I said.

This time she almost smiled.

“Two days ago, according to parameters he’d set, his computer flagged a bulletin. An unidentified murder victim whose description matched my brother’s. Dave pulled down prints, and they matched too.”

“I sent the bulletin,” Don Lee said. “We put prints out on the wire, too, but nothing came back.”

“We have a set taken on one of Carl’s admissions to a psychiatric hospital, expressly for the hospital’s own use, never broadcast. Sheriff Lansdale’s people compared them for us.”

Later, in the back room of Dunne’s Funeral Parlor, which doubled as morgue, standing beside her father with one hand lightly on his shoulder, Sarah Hazelwood said, “Yes. That’s Carl,” and looked—not quickly or nervously but cautiously—from Adrienne to her father. Everyone bearing up as well as could be expected. Better, actually, given the circumstances.

“So there’s one of us poor bastards put to rest, at least,” Doc Oldham said. He sipped coffee, then, frowning, sniffed the mug. It bore the photo of a man’s face that, when hot liquid got poured in, by degrees became a skull. “Damn milk went south at least a day ago. I wanted butter-milk, I’d of ordered up cornbread to go with it.”

“They said back home he’d sit out on the porch half the morning waiting for the mail to come.”

“So you were right,” Bates said. “About him thinking he was a postman. Wouldn’t think he’d be likely to be getting much mail.”

“But he
could
have. That’s what it was all about. Anticipation, promise. Like the world’s holding its breath, and for just that one moment anything can happen, anything’s possible.”

“Doesn’t sound like his life was exactly awash with possible.”

“Okay, okay. Business you had here is over,” Doc Oldham suddenly announced. “Anybody alive, able to move, you’re out of here—now. Dead folk and me’ve got work to do.”

Chapter Fourteen

RANDY WAS
the funniest man I ever knew. Back there at first, all those “hair’ll last long as roaches and cigarette butts” remarks, I tried to keep up with him, even managed to do so for a while, but it flat wore me out. Before Randy came along, I’d had a clutch of temporary partners, among them Gardner, who died in a cheap motel listening to a prostitute’s sad tale, and Bill, who I think may have said thirty words to me the whole time, twenty of those the day he cold-cocked Sammy Lee Davis when we found all those kids left alone; then I’d worked by myself again for a while. Randy was supposed to be temporary, too. Maybe the desk jockeys forgot where they put him, or maybe after Randy and I’d been together a few weeks they just up and decided what the hell, it ain’t broke. . . .

Boy was Jewish, God help him, problematic those days outside the shelter of owning, say, a jewelry or furniture store, but not even God proved much help to other cops who decided to make it an issue. They’d find themselves with new nicknames they couldn’t shake off, enough jokes at their expense to bury them alive.