Into the Web (16 page)

“Porterfield knew I worked at the drugstore just down the block from his office,” I said. “He could have come by, asked me anything. Even taken me in for questioning like he did Lila.”

“Yes, he could have.”

“But he went up to Waylord instead.”

“That’s right,” Doc Poole said. “And he never bothered
talking to you because Lila told him that you were with her, and so you couldn’t have had anything to do with the murders. I didn’t mean to stir this whole thing up again, Roy. It was just this business of Sheriff Porterfield saying that Archie hadn’t done it alone has always bothered me. But the sheriff couldn’t have thought you had anything to do with it, if that’s what you’re thinking, Roy. Not after talking to Lila.” He offered the placebo of a smile. “So, there’s really no mystery, is there?”

“No,” I answered, although I knew that at least one mystery remained: for if Lila had told Sheriff Porterfield I was with her at the time of the murders, she’d lied.

Why?

My father was sitting in his bed, shirtless, his back pressed up against the headboard, his gaze fixed on the flickering television screen.

“Doc Poole says you don’t want any more visits,” I said as I walked into the room.

“That’s right.”

“And no more medicine either.”

He nodded, his attention still riveted to the television. “That’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to them bugs.”

With that, he fell silent, pretending to be entirely engaged in a rerun of
I Love Lucy
, though I could tell that something was playing in his mind.

I lowered myself into the chair beside his bed. “Doc Poole mentioned something about the murders. He said Sheriff Porterfield believed that Archie didn’t tell the whole story about what happened that night. Did you ever doubt that Archie told the whole story, Dad?”

“No,” my father answered. He shifted about, one hand scratching at the other. “Because of the way he done it. I mean, to Horace Kellogg.”

I knew what he meant. The Kelloggs had been shot repeatedly. Even so, it had never struck me that the manner of the shooting could have served as evidence against my brother, though at that moment I realized that it had done precisely that in my father’s mind.

“It reminded me of Scooter,” my father added. “What Archie done to Horace Kellogg. Blowing off parts of him one at a time. Figured he must have been mighty mad at him. ’Cause of the way he was treating that daughter of his. Calling her dirty names.” He paused a moment, then spit out a final line, his words laced with ire. “Hitting her.”

Like Henry Warren hit Deidre, I thought.

“Archie told you that?” I asked.

“Told me that night,” my father said. “Said he was going to rescue Horace Kellogg’s daughter. Next thing I seen, he was heading out to his car, buttoning that old checkered jacket of his.”

“Rescue her,” I repeated, remembering how lost and frightened Archie had looked when I’d come upon him later that same night.

“Figured he might do it too,” my father said. “Just run off with that girl and them two make a life somewhere Horace Kellogg couldn’t get a hold of them.”

I shook my head. “They could never have done that.”

“No, probably not,” my father said with a sigh. “Not with Horace Kellogg in the picture. Gun-thug that he was.”

“Gun-thug? Horace Kellogg was a banker, Dad.”

“He was a gun-thug before that. And gun-thugs don’t never change. Ain’t but one thing they understand.”

A terrible possibility crossed my mind. “Did you tell Archie to take a gun with him to the Kelloggs’ that night?”

My father looked at me sternly. “I didn’t tell Archie nothing.”

“So he just took it? That old thirty-eight of yours. He just took it on his own?”

“Archie never done nothing on his own. I figured it must have been Horace Kellogg’s daughter that told him to bring a gun with him.”

In my mind I saw Gloria standing beside my brother as they had at Potter’s store that night, snow falling in a white veil all around them, an icy wind ripping at her hair, her eyes frantic, desperate, her small hands jerking at my brother’s checkered jacket.

We sat in silence for a long time, my mind replaying all I’d never been able to forget about that distant, murderous night, all the questions Porterfield might have asked:
Did you see Archie that night? What did he say to you? What did you say to him? What did he want you to do? Did you do it?

“Sheriff Porterfield did some asking around,” I said finally. “Because he didn’t believe Archie’s confession.”

My father gave a little snort. “I ain’t interested in nothing Wallace Porterfield ever done.”

“Evidently he thought someone else must have been involved in the murders.”

My father returned his gaze to the television. “Sounds like Porterfield was just playing with people,” my father said. “Messing with their minds.”

“Did he ever speak to you?”

“No.”

“He spoke to Lila. Doc Poole told me that. He said he went up to Waylord the morning after the murders and took Lila in for questioning.”

My father’s gaze swept back to me. “And Lila never said nothing to you about it?”

“No, never,” I said. “And Porterfield never talked to me at all.”

A dark fire lit my father’s eyes. “He was after you though, Roy,” he said with a sudden terrible certainty. “That’s why he talked to Lila. ’Cause he was wanting to put them murders on you too.”

I saw Archie’s car beside the hedge that bordered the Kellogg house, his face peering at mine, his voice pleading,
Will you go with me, Roy?

“There’s no evidence that he was trying to pin anything on me, Dad.” I said, now wanting merely to close a subject that had abruptly turned down a forbidden corner.

“No? Then how come he drove all the way up to Waylord and talked to Lila? He sure didn’t think she had nothing to do with killing nobody. It must have been you he was after. It don’t make you mad, him doing that?”

“After all these years? No, it doesn’t make me mad.”

“So you ain’t gonna do nothing about it?”

“What difference would any of that make now?”

“You ain’t gonna do nothing?”

“No.”

He stared at me a moment, then said, “Suit yourself,” and returned his eyes to the television.

Suit yourself.

Those had always been the words he’d used when he’d had enough of me.

I’m going to stay in California.

Suit yourself.

Never marry.

Suit yourself.

No kids.

Suit yourself.

“It’s all too far back, Dad. It wouldn’t make any difference what I found out.”

My father held his gaze on the television, his eyes yellow and watery. “Suit yourself.”

With that, he grasped the ball bat beside his bed, brought himself to his feet, and trudged into the bathroom, leaving me alone beside his cluttered bed.

I waited for him to return, but he never did, so after a time I rose and headed for my room. On the way I saw him in the kitchen, standing beside the refrigerator, gently holding the jar of bugs as if he preferred their company to mine.

Chapter Sixteen

M
ost of us make them suddenly, our most fateful choices, but those who stop to think things through rarely make any better ones. All that night, as I tossed on my bed, I reasoned that there was no point in “getting mad,” no point in finding out why, twenty years before, Wallace Porterfield had thought or done anything, and certainly no reason to believe that whatever he’d thought or done could possibly matter to me now. Surely, the best argument was to let sleeping dogs lie.

But there are certain questions that we avoid at our peril, certain things that if we do not know them will forever hold our lives in thrall. That’s why adopted children so often leave those who kept them to search for those who let them go. It’s easy to live without knowing the history of the universe, but hard to live without knowing the history of yourself.

“Hey, Roy,” Lonnie said with a wide smile when I entered his office the next morning. “You looking for another case to work on, or is this just a social call?”

“Well, actually, I
am
looking into another case.”

“Oh yeah, which one?”

“Archie’s,” I said. “I’d like to take a look at whatever file you have on his case.”

“You mean the murders?” Lonnie asked unbelievingly. “That file’s nearly twenty years old, Roy. You got a reason for wanting to see it?”

“Yes, I do,” I told him. “Something Doc Poole mentioned when he looked in on my father last night.”

Lonnie gave a chuckle. “What would Doc Poole know about that case?”

“Well, it was actually something your father told him,” I answered. “That he believed that Archie hadn’t told the truth about the murders.”

Lonnie offered a quick laugh. “Roy, you know as well as I do that Archie sat right in this office and told my daddy the whole story.”

Standing before Lonnie’s desk, looking into his eyes, I knew how frightened my brother must have been as he’d faced the far more menacing figure of Wallace Porterfield. He’d been a teenage boy from a family of no standing, easily confused, easily led, charged with the murder of a banker and his wife. How small and helpless he must have felt, something Wallace Porterfield could scrape from the bottom of his glossy boots and be done with.

“A story maybe,” I told Porterfield’s son. “But evidently not one your father wholeheartedly believed.”

“Of course Daddy believed it,” Lonnie said emphatically. “He was probably just trying to get old Doc Poole’s goat.”

“Well, he succeeded at that,” I said dryly.

Lonnie leaned forward. “Archie confessed to the whole thing. And he never denied it. Those are the facts.”

“Then why didn’t your father accept them? Why did he go up to Waylord and talk to Lila Cutler?”

That Wallace Porterfield had done precisely that did not appear to surprise his only son. “A lawman has to look into lots of things, Roy. Especially in a murder case.”

When I gave no response to this, Lonnie added, “You know, Roy, I’ve never put a man in jail that really, deep down, thought he deserved to be there. Thieves caught redhanded. Rapists. In their own minds they’re always innocent. Somehow they screw it all around in their heads, and lo and behold, they come up clean. It’s the way they think, criminals. The thing about Archie is that he wasn’t a criminal. He just got caught up in something. Girls and all. Running off. But he wasn’t a criminal. Didn’t think like a criminal. When he got caught, he owned up to what he’d done. Not like a criminal, denying everything no matter how much evidence you have. Archie told the truth flat out.”

When I continued to stare at Lonnie silently, his voice turned grave. “You’re set on this, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

He chuckled dryly. “Okay, Roy,” he said. “I’ll see that you get that file.”

I waited.

“I don’t mean right now.” Lonnie eased himself back in his chair. “Those files are over at my daddy’s house. He keeps them in his garage.”

“Those are county files, Lonnie. They don’t belong to your father.”

“ ’course not,” Lonnie said. “He’s just storing them, that’s all.”

“Well, I’d like to see the file on Archie as soon as possible.”

He heard the threat in my voice, the fact that if I didn’t get access to Archie’s file right away, I might just make a call to the state capital, raise the legal issue of why official state records were currently being stored on the property of a man who no longer had authority over them.

“Okay, Roy, if you’re sure.”

I had never been more sure of anything in my life.

Wallace Porterfield came out of his house as I brought my car to a halt beside the shimmering black Lincoln that sat luxuriously in his driveway. He was dressed in black pants and a white short-sleeve shirt, and he descended the stairs with surprising speed, still powerful in his old age, with muscular arms and legs, a charging bull of a man.

“Lonnie says you want to see that file on the Kellogg murders,” he said.

“That’s right.”

He came toward me with the wide, striding gait I remembered from the night he’d led me from Archie’s cell for the last time, both of us passing Doc Poole on the way.

Once we’d gone through the thick door that separated the sheriff’s office from the short block of cells, he’d stepped aside to let me by, saying only that I was a “lucky boy.” In what way, I wondered now, had Porter-field thought me lucky?

“That file’s stuck in with a lot of other stuff.” He waved me forward, his gigantic hand floating like a huge brown raptor in the summer air. “This way.”

I followed him across the lawn much as I’d followed him out of my brother’s cell and down the long corridor to the office all those years before. Of all the men I’d ever seen, he appeared the least weakened by his great age, not at all the withered scarecrow my father had become.

At the garage he bent forward and drew up the door.

“The stuff’s not in any particular order,” he warned as he stepped into its darkened interior. “You’ll just have to go through it.”

He yanked a string. A naked lightbulb revealed a wall of cardboard boxes, each with a date scrawled in black ink.

“You can narrow it down by the year, at least,” Porter-field told me. “It’s all sorted by the year.” He squinted at the boxes. “It was about twenty years ago, wasn’t it? When your brother killed ’em?” His ancient eyes drifted toward me. “And you went off to college about that same time.”

“Just a week or so later,” I answered, remembering
Porterfield’s words, struck by how true they’d been, the fact that the old sheriff really did know everything, the dark recesses of his kingdom.

Porterfield’s eyes swept back into the shadowy interior of the garage. “Well, there they are, the records. How long will you need? An hour, something like that?”

“It shouldn’t take long, once I find the file.”

I expected him to turn, go back to the house, but instead he continued to stand before me, his great head slumped forward, the dark eyes bearing down upon me.