Wherever There Is Light (46 page)

Julian said, “And Bobby shot Hurleigh before you were ready to go?”

“The night before. And Hurleigh don't die. I seen him out to the Wakefields'. I check on it Wednesdays and Saturdays, and Hurleigh be askin' me and other folks they seen Bobby.”

Julian said, “Bobby says there were two other men at the house.”

“Don't know 'em.”

Eddie, who had been gazing at his loafers while Lucinda spoke, looked up, and Julian saw a flicker of rage in his eyes that had nothing to do with the moonshine. “And nobody's looking for Kendall?”

“Mister, you a northern boy, and you be hearin' 'bout all them new laws they got make us equal. But whites down heah like them Scales brothers, they ain't hearin' that good. So even when a highfalutin colored girl like Kendall disappear, she stay disappeared, and if'n you colored, you best not ask nobody nothin', or you disappear too.”

Julian said, “Eddie and I'll ask them.”

Lucinda puffed on her corncob. “The Lord won't forgive me none foah this, but I hopes you send them crackers to hell.”

I
n the morning, Eddie and Julian left the car by the commons in Lovewood, across from Scales Antiques, and as nonchalantly as tourists, ambled down the white-pebbled alley and cased the rear of the store. The wood-frame garage, with the apartment above where Hurleigh had lived and which Looney and Gooney had torched, had been rebuilt out of cement blocks, indicating that Jarvis wasn't impervious to the lessons of experience.

Scales Antiques wouldn't open for an hour, and they waited on a bench in the commons.

Eddie said, “Did I ever tell you about my father?”

“Only that he died before you were born.”

“His name was Edward. He had a bum ticker—from rheumatic fever. Didn't have the endurance for laying track. So he worked as a handyman. For the Hooper family in West Orange. One of those palaces in Llewellyn Park.”

“Thomas Edison had an estate in Llewellyn Park.”

“Next to the Hoopers. An ancestor of theirs used to sell George Washington his underwear or something, and the Hoopers were famous for their July Fourth shindigs. The day before the shindig, my father's planting saplings. It's a hundred degrees out. He gets dizzy and's taking a break when Mrs. Hopper comes out and yells at him to get busy or get another job. Ma's pregnant with me, he can't lose the dough, so he goes to work. He doesn't make it home for supper. Ma ain't happy, but he had a habit of holing up at a bar in Vailsburg, except by morning he ain't home, and Ma's scared. She checks the bar. He ain't been there. Maybe he's at the Hoopers. Three buses for her to get from Newark to Llewellyn Park. They got those gates at the entrance, and the guard doesn't let her in but calls the house. And the missus gives him a message. My father's fired. He didn't finish planting the trees.”

Eddie dragged on his Camel. “Two days later, a cop comes to give Ma the news. My father was in a toolshed on the Hooper property. He went there to rest and died.”

Eddie crushed his cigarette under his loafer. “I'm listening to Lucinda, all I can think about is Mrs. Hooper reaming out my father, and him dying in that shed. You wanna ask the mayor and Hurleigh about Kendall, that's jake with me. If she happens to be somewhere—”

“You don't sound too optimistic.”

“Optimistic's against my religion.”

“Catholics aren't optimistic?”

“Only if they behaved themselves and the undertaker's prettying them up for the dance. But if the mayor and Hurleigh got nothing to say, they're going in the ground. I ain't never been able to do a lot. But I can stop those bums from chasing Bobby, and maybe make things a little easier for Lucinda and those folks in the shacks.”

A black-and-white Lovewood Police car came down Main Street and turned into the alley.

“Here's your chance,” Julian said.

Jarvis and Hurleigh were behind the counter and facing away from the door when Julian flipped over the Open sign to Closed. The mayor turned as Julian came toward him, and Julian saw the shock of recognition in his eyes. Most of Jarvis's flattop was gone, but his face was still all sharp edges.

“It's ready, Jarvis,” Hurleigh said. He had been attaching a nasal hose to an oxygen cylinder. In his bluish-gray uniform, Hurleigh seemed paler than Julian recalled, and his blond hair and patchy beard were silvered. Hurleigh didn't recognize Julian.

“You don't know this fella?” Jarvis said, and Julian heard the wheeze of emphysema as he spoke. “The day that boy went upside your head on the beach?”

Hurleigh sneered, showing off his buck teeth. “I allow that coon learnt to be sorry for strikin' a white man.”

Julian said, “His name was Derrick Larkin.”

The mayor was smiling as Hurleigh, with his hand on his revolver, sauntered around the counter. “I might could make y'all sorry now.”

“Remember my friend?” asked Julian. “The one with the red hair?”

The question hadn't stopped Hurleigh. It was the Nambu—which resembled a slimmer version of a Luger—that Eddie was pressing against the base of his skull.

Eddie, plucking the revolver from Hurleigh's holster, said, “That lock you got back there ain't for shit.”

Hurleigh said, “Boy, you messin' with a officer of the law.”

At the crack of the gunshot, the mayor and his brother flinched. Eddie had fired past Hurleigh into a barrel of stuffed baby alligators.

Eddie said, “Sit on the floor or the next shot goes in your noggin.”

Hurleigh sat, and Julian said, “Where's Kendall Wakefield?”

Hurleigh said, “I tolt you, Jarvis, I—”

The mayor said, “Quiet, boy.”

“Secret's out,” Julian said to the mayor. “I got the record of sale from the recorder's office, and a lawyer tracking down everyone involved. Kendall's son saw you, Hurleigh, and the two others with you. I'll dig them up, and when I get done with them, somebody'll talk. You cared about your father's land, the others care about money. They won't die for money.”

Hurleigh said, “If'n I catch that pissant Sambo done shot me, he dead.”

Eddie smacked the side of Hurleigh's head with the butt of his revolver. Crying out, Hurleigh fell on his side, moaning. Eddie removed the cuffs from Hurleigh's duty belt and locked them on his wrists.

Julian said, “Jarvis, you're old and sick. Who you gonna leave the land to? Your wife?”

Hurleigh whined, “The bitch done lef' him. Her and them two brats in California. The land go to me, ain't that how you done, Jarvis?”

The mayor said, “Hurleigh, you dumber than a sack of rocks.”

Julian nodded at Eddie, who yanked Hurleigh up to his feet and shoved him toward the back door. Julian withdrew his pistol from under his sport jacket.

Julian said, “First choice. If Kendall's alive, you live and keep some land.”

“And Hurleigh?”

“Didn't think you cared.”

“I don't.”

“Good. He threatened Kendall's son, and I doubt Eddie cared for that.”

“Second choice?”

Julian raised the Nambu and retracted the cocking knob. “Friend of mine—the one who set your garage on fire—gave me a map with some swamps marked on it.”

Jarvis wheezed, “She's alive.”

Julian, relief flooding through him, lowered the Nambu.

Jarvis said, “Ain't done it for money. I ain't collected a cent from the sharecroppers. But I kept seein' a glittery, whorehouse hotel where my daddy's farm used to be.”

“You got the papers for the deal?”

“Back in the office.”

“We'll get them on the way out.”

“Wasn't intending to hurt no one. I just . . . Did you ever want somethin' so bad it take over every waking moment of your damn life?”

“Yeah. Kendall Wakefield.”

J
ulian and Jarvis got into the back of the Impala. Eddie was at the wheel. The police car was gone. So was Hurleigh.

Heading west out of Lovewood, Eddie said, “Hurleigh gave me the lowdown. They had this Dr. Evarts, a headshrinker, declare Kendall incompetent. Then a judge, Evarts's cousin, assigned a lawyer—another Evarts cousin—to handle her affairs. The lawyer's the one sold the land to Scales. Jarvis had to pay these characters fifty grand. The doctor got twenty-five.”

Jarvis was breathing heavily. “I paid that young woman fair.”

Julian, going through the survey, deed, and appraisal in the envelope, said, “Except if she'd sold to developers. They'd've paid more.”

“Them crooks maybe might. But Miz Wakefield done told me herself: Lovewood College had almost two million in debt, every dollar secured by Wakefield property. And with them civil rights laws and guvment loans, colored kids be enrollin' in the white schools. But she wouldn't sell. Say she felt like she was betraying her mama and granddaddy. I say, ‘Miz Wakefield, the banks takin' it one way or t'other, and the only difference between a banker and a ignorant, no-account thief is a banker can write his name.' “

Eddie was driving on a paved, two-lane road through an area of the state Julian hadn't seen before—green countryside of marshes and cypress trees.

“So you helped her,” Julian said, controlling his anger.

Before Jarvis could answer, Eddie said, “Then threw her in a mental hospital.”

Jarvis was wheezing up a storm. “Mental hospital's a damn lie. It's Shady Isle Rest Home. Dr. Evarts has the patients exercisin' and eatin' good. It wasn't gon' be but another month. Lawyer say after a year, it harder to reverse the deal in court.”

Reaching back with Hurleigh's handcuffs dangling from his fingers, Eddie said, “We gotta stop.”

Julian cuffed Jarvis's hands behind him while Eddie glanced at Looney's road map and veered off through saw grass toward a pole with a triangular white sign that warned, in bold red letters, Danger: Keep Out! Below the warning was a picture of a green alligator, his jaws open wide enough to chomp on an elephant.

As Eddie killed the engine, Jarvis wheezed, “What—what y'all gon' do?”

“Stop talking,” Julian said, getting out of the Impala.

Eddie unlocked the trunk. Hurleigh was lying on his side, cocooned in a paint-splattered tarp. Julian moved the tarp aside. Hurleigh had two blood-rimmed bullet holes below his police badge, and Julian unpinned the badge and stuck it in his wallet. Eddie grabbed the upper half of Hurleigh, Julian the bottom, and they carried him to the water and heaved him off the tarp, quickly backing up because fifty yards away three alligators, who had been sunning themselves on logs, slipped into the water as if someone were ringing a dinner bell.

Walking to the car, Julian asked, “How much longer till Shady Isle?”

“Five minutes tops.”

Julian pulled Jarvis out of the back and pushed him into the trunk.

Shady Isle Rest Home, a U-shaped building of eggshell-colored stucco, was surrounded by a moat and across a bowed wooden bridge with an arm gate. A security guard, in a black uniform and billed cap that reminded Julian of the SS, asked Eddie to state his business.

Julian flashed Hurleigh's badge. “I'm here to see Dr. Evarts. Can you tell me where his office is?”

“Second floor. Center wing.”

Eddie parked in the lot across from the entrance.

“Don't let that prick suffocate,” Julian said.

Patients and visitors were sitting on the dowdy couches in the lobby, the patients groggy and wearing light-blue robes. Upstairs, music as triumphant as a John Philip Sousa march was blasting through the door of Dr. Evarts's office. No secretary was in the anteroom, but Julian saw a man in a seersucker suit standing in the inner office, next to a desk with a portable record player on it, and waggling a flyswatter as if conducting the Marine Band. He was short and pallid with the idiotic, gleeful countenance of someone easily amused. When he saw Julian, he put the flyswatter on the desk and lifted the needle off the record. “Yes?”