All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (41 page)

"Not likely. I firmly believe, now that fate has dealt a hand or two his way, Tyrone's changed his strategy. Champ is home, and in a vulnerable position, and those two sure as hell have figured out a way to take advantage of him."

"Those two?" Jackson said, startled. "You're including Nhora?"

"Yes, sir!" Wilkes smacked the table top with the flat of his hand for emphasis, spilling some of Jackson's coffee. "She's been without a husband for more than two years. Why's that? She's young, healthy, and plenty of men have found her beautiful. But in all this time nobody's seen her with an eligible man. That nigger's always had himself quite a reputation with the ladies, married and unmarried. It doesn't require a great deal of imagination to know what's goin' on at Dasharoons these days."

"I doubt that Nhora and Tyrone are having an affair. They're—friends, that's all. What could he gain? You said yourself that Nhora can't inherit Dasharoons."

"She could if Champ would just sign his name to a piece of paper handin' it all over to her. Then Tyrone, who's got her wrapped around his little finger, would have what he wants. The last legitimate Bradwin out of the way. And he wouldn't have to worry about wakin' up some night to find his nuts nailed to the top of a burnin' cross."

Wilkes waved more cold beer his way, a brace of foam big bottles this time.

"You see, I don't trust the woman. Never trusted her worth a damn. It was always instinct, though; nothin' I could lay a good solid bet on."

"You simply resented her for marrying into the family. You felt she was all wrong for Boss."

"He paid for his good times. She got that old pecker of his uppity again. So maybe it was worth one-eighth of that good black-bottom land. I don't like coincidence, I suppose. Who the hell is she? Where did she come from? Off a goddam boat. She marries Boss, then a year later Boss and Clipper are both dead, and Champ goes against all good advices by puttin' her in charge out there at Dasharoons, while he fights the war."

"By all accounts she's done an excellent job."

Wilkes sourly considered Jackson's defense of Nhora, and pulled on a beer. "Dasharoons can damn near run itself. But you're right, she's made it her business to learn the business. She just ain't been so shrewd about the company she keeps. And now she's made a mistake, and maybe I'll find out why all this time I haven't trusted her."

"What kind of mistake?"

Wilkes smiled good-humoredly, but his eyes were cold. "I could be makin' just as big a mistake trustin' you too much. You only got off a train night before last, yourself."

"Nonetheless I have access to Champ, and you don't. You need my help, I may be the only one who can help you now. Provided there is some sort of conspiracy afoot."

"That says it all."

"What about Nhora?"

"Stuck on her a little bit yourself, it seems."

"She's kind and lonely and frightened by the disastrous fortunes of the Bradwins. As baffled as you or I. Shall we get on with it?"

"Okay. Day before yesterday, about nine-thirty in the mornin', Nhora called me at home. She was cryin'. Couldn't get any sense out of her right off. Then she told me about Nancy. Asked me—no, she
begged
me to go up to Kezar County and claim the body. That's a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I left right away."

"Why do you suppose Nhora didn't want to go?"

Wilkes gulped beer and gave him a look of seething satisfaction. "No good for that kind of thing, I guess. Or maybe she was too tired to make the trip again."

Jackson was properly astonished. "What do you mean, again?"

"She was there the night before, sometime after midnight."

"How do you know that?"

"Some Bradwins twice removed live up Kezar way. They spotted her drivin' through, in that little Chevrolet car of hers."

"They must be mistaken."

"If you see her once, you remember her. She's that kind of woman."

"What would she have been doing in Kezar County?"

"Lookin' for Nancy."

"Well, then, if she found Nancy, surely she would have said something—"

"Found her dead, maybe."

"And drove all the way back to Dasharoons, in the dead of night, without having notified the authorities? That doesn't make sense."

"Some folks regard her as bein' a little
strange
," Wilkes said deliberately. "Have all along."

"Oh, I see. Well, why don't you just
ask
Nhora if she was in Kezar County. No sense in prolonging the mystery, if there is one."

"She might have good reasons for denyin' to me she ever went there."

Jackson felt his face stiffening from outrage. "Is that an accusation?"

"I'm purely speculating." He lifted his big head back, closing his eyes, letting the beer gush down his throat.

"This is something that does want clearing up," Jackson admitted, after taking time to think. "If you consider the eyewitnesses dependable."

"I do. Another reason why I wanted to chat with you this mornin'. You appear to have her confidence. And I surely don't. Lose your appetite?"

"I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm worried about what Nhora may have to say on her behalf."

Wilkes hit his dead leg with a fist, feeling nothing except, perhaps, the repetitious shock of psychic pain. "If she and that nigger are in cahoots,
anything
could happen. Murder."

"Preposterous. You may despise Nhora, but you can't seriously believe—"

"She wouldn't be the first white woman to lose her dignity, and her common sense, because of a handsome buck. Who knows what kind of hold he has on her?" Wilkes tested his logic silently; then, with a twist of his mouth as if he were about to spit, rejected it. "No. She's probably not capable of murder. But he is." He gestured at his crutches. "I'm a cripple and there's no damn earthly reason for it! Unless somebody fixed me up on purpose. I've run into the nigger a few times since this happened. He's polite, he smiles, but it's the smile of a man who knows more than he chooses to tell. Like he could do worse to me, if he really wanted to.

"Let me explain what I was up to the night I lost the use of my leg. I always have liked my liquor, although I been on it heavier than I should this past year. Anyway, I was drivin' home late at night from Judge Walker T. Murry's stag party at his fishin' camp. And I was okay to drive long as I had the road to myself but not feelin' any pain, you understand. I missed the turn at my gate in the dark—I'll do that cold sober sometimes—and the car slipped a little catty-corner into the drainage ditch. No way to get it out without the tractor, and I didn't feel like walkin' the three hundred yards to the house. I figured I'd have a nap there in the car, then go on up to my own bed. It was a warm night, so I laid down across the seat and corked right off.

"Don't know what it was woke me up. A dog, a train whistle. A hoot owl. Still dark. But the door on the driver's side of my Caddy was open, and I was hangin' half out of the car. I heard footsteps, like somebody runnin' away down the road but tryin' to be quiet about it. I sat up. Tears in my eyes. Head goin' round and I around. Puke comin' up. I might've seen a man, just a split-second's worth, runnin' where there was a trace of sky light between the dark pine trees. I leaned out and puked, then fell back down on the seat and passed out. Next thing I knew, it was past dawn. I got out of the car to piss and my left leg wouldn't hold me. No feeling. It was already a goner."

Wilkes wiped beer foam from his lips and said, with beseeching clarity, as if he were asking mercy of a hanging judge, "You have any notion of what a man could do to take away a leg like that?"

"Yes, I'm afraid I do. The sciatic nerve sheath could be dissolved by chemical means. An injection of paraldehyde in the right place would accomplish it. But one must know just where to insert the syringe."

"How could Tyrone find out about that?"

"A doctor or trained nurse would have to show him how to do it."

Wilkes looked out the window. "They're buryin' Old Lamb today. I never trusted that old bastard. Too much education. I don't know what kind of a doctor he was, but sometimes he got the idea he was a nigger lawyer too."

He paused, flinching as the windshield of an auto making a turn in the street caught the sun and hurled dazzling white light at his face, unexpected and as nerve-racking as a scream of fear. Wilkes ducked and looked oddly chastened, cleansed of his anger.

He said slowly, sounding depressed, "Sheriff doesn't know how Old Lamb died. Some scare talk this mornin'. The supernatural. Niggers love ghost stories, don't they? I hear you were out there. Any ideas?"

"He was as badly mangled as if he'd stood in front of a train. His genitals were—ripped away. Missing."

"Like some kind of animal got to him? Pack of wild dogs, maybe. There's a few wildcats left in the swamps." He dismissed his own explanations with an irritable grimace and wrapped his hand around the remaining bottle of beer. Three quick ones had slowed him a little; his drawl had become charmingly difficult to comprehend. "I was
they-uh
when Boss got hacked to
day-eth
. Clipper with that sword. A madman. Chapel fallin' to pieces. No rhyme or reason to it. I don't know, maybe we're up against more than the two of us can handle. Champ's just about helpless right now. If you're a man of integrity, and I think I can still rely on my good judgment in such matters, then I know you'll take good
cay-uh
him. When you want me to get in touch with the army?"

"Tomorrow; let Champ rest another day. I'll discuss the case with the surgeon-general if possible, have him speedily removed to a good hospital."

"Where Nhora and the nigger can't get their hands on him. They had time alone with Champ so far?"

"Nhora was with him for a while last night. But I'm still unconvinced that you have anything to worry about where Nhora is concerned." He was impatient to be gone, on his feet abruptly before he finished speaking.

"Just be careful," the lawyer said broodingly. "Between now and tomorrow noon I think I ought to visit with Champ. My observations might come in handy later on, in a court of law."

Jackson saw the wisdom in that. "Why don't you come to the house in the morning, about nine?"

"The Good Lord willin' and the creeks don't rise."

Wilkes wouldn't let Jackson pay for his largely uneaten breakfast. He was off to the bathroom on his crutches when Jackson left the café.

T
en-forty in the morning. War Time. The sun not high yet, but the temperature, according to the car radio, was heading for a fierce one hundred. Negroes worked in bonnets and straw hats, chopping cotton in the mammoth level fields along the straight road through Dashiroons. Dun fields, row upon row cracked and bleeding, dense white bleed of bolls. Osage orange trees and shade rushing over him, blips of dark too quick for comfort, and out again into the vivid blue, car racing but not fast enough to out-distance the horsemen of the nerves. Heat had him by the throat; his damaged chin and head were throbbing, his shirt stuck to his ribs and back.

The house, in contrast to the wide-open road, was cool as well as bright in every corner. Hackaliah was coming down the stairs as Jackson crossed the foyer.

"Where is Nhora?"

"She gone out riding, half hour ago."

Jackson paused in his dash up the stairs. "She's all right, then."

"Yasuh. Champ, he ask to be moved from the playroom."

"Moved where?" Jackson was amazed that he was even conscious; he had loaded Champ with phenobarbital.

"To Boss's room." Hackaliah studied Jackson from two steps down, eyes expressionless; but a blood vessel throbbed nervously near the top of his bald head. "I didn't know if it be right or wrong to move him. Sometimes, when they was children, and bad afraid of the dark, Boss let the boys come into his bed. It was a comfort, I know. So Bull Pete and me, we carried him downstairs."

"What did Nhora say about that?"

"She was gone already," Hackaliah said, a shade indifferently.

"Show me where he is, please."

Boss Bradwin's room, at the opposite end of the hall from his own room and next to Nhora's, was a tastefully furnished museum dominated by a four-masted bed with enough unsinkable oak to sail it across an ocean. There were works of art from every continent; rare books under lock and key; glass cases filled with medals, scrolls and other awards; photographs of Boss with all the presidents from a dour, paunchy Teddy Roosevelt to FDR in his prime. The room was elegant, rich and explained too much about Boss at a glance. Perhaps everything. His ego was deafening after two years in the grave. But Champ, easily overlooked in the bed, was as deeply asleep as Jackson had seen him. He took Champ's pulse, thinking of Nhora in this same bed, tumbling with the rugged, doting old man; he felt sick with longing and apprehension. Aunt Clary Gene, hollow-eyed, kept her vigil, and Bull Pete was parked in a chair just the other side of the door.

Serenity, for now.

But there was trouble, too, in this room, Jackson didn't know just what. Champ had struggled back to his beginnings; what comfort was there to be found in the cold flash of medals, the cant of sabers and big-bore guns? He lay burnt-out, frail, of unsound mind, forever dominated by the tragedy of a murdered man, easy prey for the bumptious spirit still shadowing the outer edge of his domain . . . It was a haunting truth, too close to the flashpoint of Jackson's own existence, the unthinkable crisis of his narrowed-down life; he had to breathe and be free a little while longer. Desperation drove Jackson from the house and to the stables, in search of Nhora's green and willing eyes.