Into the Web (17 page)

“Lonnie said old Doc Poole set your bowels to blubbering,” he said. “Got you all shook up about things.”

“Not exactly shook up. He just mentioned that you didn’t buy Archie’s story.”

“Well, I guess I should have just kept my big mouth shut, then,” Sheriff Porterfield said with a grim smile. “Especially knowing what a big mouth Doc Poole’s got. He’s sort of a gossip, you know. Talking through his hat all the time. Believes anything he’s told. Lucky he was born with a dick instead of a pussy, or he’d have been knocked up all the time.” He laughed, then sucked his laughter back in when he saw that I hadn’t joined him in it. “You came by the jail that last night. Walked you out, I remember that.”

“You have a powerful memory, Sheriff.”

“Fair enough.”

“The night Archie died, you said I was lucky. As I was leaving your office. That I was lucky.”

Porterfield stared at me, his face unreadable as a granite slab.

“In what way did you think I was lucky, Sheriff?”

“That you’d stayed out of trouble, I guess,” he said. “Not like that brother of yours.”

But the true answer flickered instantly in his eyes, so that I knew the one he gave me was a lie.

“She was above him, but he didn’t pay that any mind. That’s what fucked him up.” Once again the dark eyes tried to squeeze me into something small. “You had more sense. Stayed with your kind. That girl in Waylord. Lila Cutler. The one you was dating back then. Fact is, your brother should have taken a page from your book. Dipped his pen in some Waylord girl, not in Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

“How do you know I dipped my pen in anybody?”

His dry chuckle rattled between us. “Anybody dates a Waylord girl’s bound to get a little.”

“They’re never fresh, you mean.” I said it coldly.

Rather than answer, Porterfield said, “Problem is, that brother of yours got stuck on a valley girl.” Again his laughter jangled. “Got himself all fucked up over a girl that wasn’t even that pretty. Not like that one of yours.”

Then I knew what Porterfield had meant about my being lucky. It was that I’d been lucky to have Lila Cutler, known the pleasure of a body that must have seemed to him, in the grim throes of middle age, impossibly sweet and young.

“You talked to Lila. The day after the murders,” I said.

Something moved behind his eyes, silent as a shadow.

“Why didn’t you ever talk to me?” I asked.

He shrugged indifferently, neither curious about nor alarmed by the question.

“Was it because Lila cleared me?” I asked. “Told you that I was with her at the time of the murders?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered to me what that girl said. Where you was. I wouldn’t of cared.”

“But you told Doc Poole that you thought someone else was involved in the murders.”

“Doc Poole again.” There was a cold edge in the old man’s voice. “That old bastard ought to keep his pie-hole shut.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“Sure did. Still believe it too.”

“Then why didn’t you ever question me about it?”

He released a small, sneering chuckle. “Because a man has to have some fight in him to kill two people. Some gumption.” A smile slithered onto his lips. “And the way I heard it, you didn’t even fight back when that pretty little girlfriend of yours got insulted.”

His son’s voice pierced the air,
Waylord girls ain’t never fresh.

“But you thought that Archie had the ‘gumption’ for it?”

Porterfield peered at me as if, using his eyes alone, he could burn holes in my soul. “I’m sure that somebody came along with him that night,” he answered. “Went into the house with him too. Maybe even did the shooting. There was two sets of footprints in the snow. It was melting fast, that snow, ’Cause the sun was up and it was getting mighty warm. But I saw them just the same. One set of footprints went back and forth from the driver’s side of your brother’s car to the house. But the other one went back and forth from the passenger side of that car. So somebody was in the car with your brother, and got out of that car, and walked up to that house with him.
And that somebody come back and set with him, I guess, in that car.”

“So where was this second person when you arrested Archie?”

He smiled. “Just take a look at that stuff you’re wanting to see so much. Everything’s there. Everything that had anything to do with the murders. Even that gun your brother did it with.” He looked at me pointedly. “You’d recognize it, wouldn’t you? That old thirty-eight? Found it on the seat right next to your brother. Figured he was thinking about putting an end to himself right there. There was one bullet left, you know. Figured he’d saved it for himself. But he found another way, didn’t he?”

In my mind I saw my brother hanging from the black bars, the jailhouse bedsheet twisted into a noose. I stayed silent.

“Take a good long look in that file,” Porterfield said. “At that old gun too.” There was a grim challenge in his voice, like someone coaxing a child to open a box where, as he already knew, a viper lay coiled. “Take a real close look at all that stuff.”

“I intend to,” I said stiffly.

Porterfield smiled but said nothing else. Instead, he turned and headed back toward the house, his tread heavy with age and dreadful experience, moving like an old mastodon toward his granite cave, still so huge he seemed almost to shake the earth as he moved away.

Chapter Seventeen

I
found the file on the murders a few minutes later, a file so slender it could be contained in a single nine-by-twelve envelope, the word
KELLOGG
scrawled in smudged ink in the left corner. Porterfield’s initial report lay inside, along with Archie’s confession and Gloria’s statement.

The first thing I noticed as I read through the file was that there’d been no call summoning Wallace Porter-field to the Kellogg house that night. He’d simply descended upon it from out of the snowy darkness.

The time was 5:14
A.M.
, a very strange time indeed for the sheriff to have seen what he claimed he saw as he made his early-morning rounds, first patrolling back and forth along the deserted, snowbound streets of Kingdom City before extending his vigilance northward, along County Road.

As he’d neared the mailbox at the end of the driveway
at 1411, his statement said, he’d noticed an old Ford parked beside the tall hedge that bordered the grounds of Horace Kellogg’s home.

The house itself was ablaze with lights so that it shone out of the blackness, a circumstance Porterfield found suspicious given the hour and his longtime familiarity with the routine of his old friend; the fact, as he carefully noted in his report, was that Horace and Lavenia Kellogg were both “early-to-bed types.”

Even so, it was less the lighted house that attracted Porterfield’s attention than the car he saw parked beside the hedge.

And so he’d pulled up behind the Ford rather than turning into the Kelloggs’ driveway. Getting out of his cruiser, he’d peered at a figure who sat motionless behind the wheel in the car’s unlighted interior.

According to Porterfield’s report, Archie made no attempt to conceal what had happened inside Horace Kellogg’s house moments before. Instead, he’d straightened himself abruptly when Porterfield neared him, like a frightened little boy before a demanding teacher, and said in a broken voice I could easily imagine, “Didn’t mean to, Sheriff. Didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Porterfield had scrawled only a few sketchy notes about the conversation he’d had with my brother during the next few seconds, but it was not hard for me to reconstruct the old sheriff’s authoritative questions, nor Archie’s fearful responses:

What are you taking about, son? So fast.

You’re Archie Slater, right. Been dating Horace’s girl?

In there. They’re in there.

“In there” Sheriff Porterfield had found first Lavenia Kellogg sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, facedown, one arm still clawing upward, hand on the second step, her legs spread apart, her shattered eyeglasses resting between them.

As any other lawman would have done, Wallace Porterfield immediately abandoned any further search of the house, rushed back down the snow-covered drive to where Archie still waited behind the wheel of his car, and confronted him with what he’d just found.

Did you do this, boy?

Didn’t mean for her to see it.

Wallace Porterfield had needed nothing more but had instantly handcuffed Archie to the steering wheel of his car, then fired his next question:

Is Gloria dead too?

No.

How about Horace?

I didn’t mean for her to see it.

He’d found Gloria in her upstairs bedroom, curled like a fetus in the womb within the covers of her bed, sobbing, utterly incoherent, so that Porterfield had made no attempt to question her, but had called Doc Poole instead, then returned downstairs. There he
found Horace Kellogg crouched in a corner of his den, his back pressed up against its wood-paneled wall, body bent forward, his hair touching the blood-soaked carpet beneath his shattered head.

A cheap thirty-eight with a brown wooden handle lay a few feet from Horace. Porterfield returned to Archie and only then noticed the old gun that rested on the seat beside him. He seized it immediately.

Is this yours, son?

I took it from my daddy.

Your daddy? Jesse Slater?

Yes, sir.

In my mind I could see the old sheriff turn, notice for the first time the physical detail he’d later described in his report, that there was a second set of tracks in the snow which led from the Ford to the Kellogg house, then back down to the car. They could not have been Archie’s-they emerged from the passenger side of the truck, then wound upward, through the snowdrifts to the front door of the house.

Someone else
, I thought, the very knowledge that must have sounded in Porterfield’s mind at that moment convinced him in an instant that Archie had brought someone with him, someone who’d helped him murder Horace and Lavenia Kellogg.

The interrogation that followed was hardly surprising:

Who else was involved in this, son?

Nobody.

You sure?

Yes, sir.

You shot Horace Kellogg?

Yes, sir, I did.

Just you?

Nobody else had nothing to do with it.

So you killed them both?

So fast.

He’d taken Archie to jail in Kingdom City, then, according to his report, returned to the Kellogg house to find Gloria sedated, sleeping deeply, Doc Poole in a chair beside her bed. He’d left the two as he’d found them, then gone downstairs and examined the bodies.

It was at that point he’d noticed Horace Kellogg’s other wounds, one in the arm, one in the knee, a finger on the right hand blown away, the lobe of the left ear shot off, a bloodstained hole in his blue shirt just below the third button, all this indicating that Horace Kellogg had not only been murdered but murdered with callous cruelty, “taken out in pieces,” as Porterfield had written in his report.

Two days later Doc Poole’s autopsy reached the same conclusion, one that fit perfectly with the description Gloria Kellogg had, by then, given of her parents’ murders, and which Sheriff Porterfield duly appended to his report.

In her statement Gloria described most of the events leading up to the killings, everything from her first meeting with Archie to their last date. She detailed the argument she’d had with her father on the night of the murders, how she’d fled the house, and found her way to Potter’s store. She’d called Archie from there, a call
that had been “picked up,” as she put it, by my father, who’d handed the phone over to Archie.

She’d waited at Potter’s store until Archie arrived, along with Lila and me. The four of us had gone to the movies in Kingdom City, then she’d been dropped off once again at Potter’s. In the frigid darkness of that country store, Gloria said, Archie had declared that he would come and get her at first light. He would honk his horn once as he approached the house, then turn off the headlights and drift the rest of the way, coming to a halt behind the wall of shrubs that stood at the driveway.

At just after five A.M. she’d heard the horn and slipped to the window of her upstairs room. From there she’d seen the roof of Archie’s car behind the hedge. She’d hastily finished packing the suitcase for the elopement and headed for the door.

Before she’d reached it she heard the doorbell, then her mother say “Dear God,” then a shot. This was followed by other shots, shots that had frozen her in place, stunned and mute, until the last echo died away.

She had no idea what Archie had done after that, she claimed, though she believed he must have remained in the house for a time. Finally she’d heard the front door open and assumed that he’d left, headed for his car, as she supposed, although she’d never heard it pull away.

For good reason, since the old Ford had still been parked beside the hedge at 5:14, when Sheriff Porterfield pulled up behind it, and found Archie.

I turned to the photographs Porterfield included in the file. Looking at them, I couldn’t imagine such capacity for destruction in my brother’s makeup, could not fit my brother’s fingers around the wooden handle of the
pistol Porterfield had found, and which, without doubt, had been brought with him from my father’s house.