Cypress Grove (2 page)

“Close enough.”

“Then you know how it is.”

We were in his Jeep, heading back towards town. Dirt roads pitted as a teenager’s face. Now we turned out of the trees onto worn blacktop. The radio mounted beneath his dash crackled.

“Weekends, we break up bar fights, haul in drunk drivers. Maybe kids pay someone to buy them a case of beer and party till they get to be a nuisance, or some guy down on his luck climbs in a window and comes back out with a pillowcase full of flatware, prescription drugs, a laptop or TV. Not like there’s much anywhere he can
go
with it. Once in a blue moon a husband slaps his wife down once too often, gets a butcher knife planted in his shoulder or a frypan laid up alongside his head.”

The radio crackled again. Didn’t sound to me any different from previous crackles, but Bates picked up the mike. “I’m on my way in.”

“Ten-four.” Guy at the other end loved those vowels, rolled them around in his mouth like marbles.

Bates hung the mike back on its stirrup.

“Don Lee. You’ll be meeting him here shortly. Eager to get home to his six-pack and his new wife, most likely in that order. What time’s it got to be, anyway?”

“Little after eight.”

“My month to cover nights. Natural order of things, Don Lee’d be gone hours ago. Lisa’d have had his meat and potatoes on the table, he’d be on the couch and his second beer while she washed up. But long as I’m out of pocket, he’s stuck there.”

Bates hauled the jeep hard right and we skidded out onto what passes for a highway around here, picking up speed. Almost immediately, though, he geared down, braked.

“You need help there, Ida?”

A saddle-oxford Buick, cream over blue, vintage circa ’48, sat steaming in the right lane. An elderly woman all in white, vintage a couple of decades prior, stood alongside. She wore a hat that made you want to hide Easter eggs in it.

“Course not. Just have to let it cool down, same as always.”

“I figured. You say hi to Karl for me, now.”

“I’ll say it. What he hears . . .”

A mile or so further along, the sheriff said, “Back in Memphis you had the highest clearance rate on homicides of anyone on the force.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“I’m not in a habit of drafting help. Tend to be cautious about it.”

“Then you know it wasn’t me, it was us. What part wasn’t plain luck owes mostly to my partner. I’d be jumping hoops of intuition, flying high. Meanwhile he was back down there on the ground thinking things methodically through.”

“That would be Randy—right?”

I nodded.

“Like I said, I’m in over my head. Expertise, luck, intuition—we’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

We came in from the north, onto deserted streets. Pop. 1280, a sign said. Passed Jay’s Diner with its scatter of cars and trucks outside, drugstore and hardware store gone dark, A&P, Dollar Store, Baptist church, Gulf station. Pulled in behind city hall. One-story prefab painted gray. Probably took them all of a week to put it up, and it’d be there forever, long as the glue held. The paint job was recent and hurried, with a light frosting of gray on bushes alongside. A single black-and-white sat nosed in close outside. Inside, a rangy man in polyester doing its best to look like khaki sat nosed close to the desk. On it were a radio, a ten-year-old Apple computer and a stack of magazines, one of which he was paging through. He looked up as we came in. Wet brown eyes that reminded me of spaniels, ruddy face narrow and shallow like a shovel, thin hair. Something electric about him, though. Sparks and small connections jumping around in there unremarked.

“Anything going on?” Bates said.

“‘Bout what you’d expect. Couple of minor accidents at getting-off time. Old Lady Siler reported her purse stolen, then remembered she’d locked it in the trunk of her car. I ran the spare key out, as usual. Jimmy Allen showed up at his wife’s house around dark and started pounding on the door. Then he tried to steal the car. When I got there, he had two wires pulled down out of the radio, trying to hotwire them.”

“Been at it for an hour or more, if I know Jimmy.”

“Prob’ly so.”

“He in back?”

“Out flat.”

“This goes on, Jimmy might as well just start having his mail delivered here.”

Bates walked over and closed three of the four light switches on the panel by the door. Much of the room fell gray, leaving us and desk in a pool of dim light outside which shadows jumped and slid.

“Don Lee, this’s Mr. Turner.”

The deputy held out a hard, lean hand and I took it. A good handshake, no show to it, just what it was. Like the man, I suspected.

“Pleased to have you, Detective.”

“Just Turner. I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”

“Hope you’re not telling us you forget how,” Bates said.

“No. What happens is, you stop believing it matters.”

“And does it?” This from Don Lee.

“Does it matter, or does it stop?”

“There’s a difference?”

In that instant I knew I liked him. Liked them both. All I’d wanted was to be left alone, and I’d taken giant steps to ensure that. Rarely strayed far from the cabin, had goods delivered monthly. The last thing I’d wanted was ever again to be part of an investigation, to have to go rummaging through other people’s lives, messes and misdemeanors, other people’s madnesses, other people’s minds.

“Why don’t you fill me in?” I said.

“You’n go on home,” Bates told his deputy. “Appreciate your holding down the fort. Dinner must be getting colder by the minute.”

“All the same to you, I’d as soon stay,” Don Lee said.

Suddenly around the station house everyone knew who I was. Older cops who’d pointedly ignored me before, smelling as they often did of sweat socks, stale bourbon or beer, aftershave and last night’s whore, now nodded to me in the locker room. Two shifts in a row I got put in a squad that didn’t haul hard left or need new tires and assigned uptown. Really knew I was some kind of made man the day Fishbelly Joe, the blind albino who’d run a hot dog stand outside the station house as long as anyone could remember, refused my money.

Then one Monday afternoon as I reported for the 3-11, word surfaced from the Captain. Come see him.

“I think it’s a mistake, Turner,” he said. “You’re not ready for it. But you’re bumped to detective.”

I’d been a cop, what, two or three months at that point? Most of the men I worked with were ten, twenty years older, and most of them had packed their lives into the work. Little wonder they’d been reluctant to accept me, and only began to do so, haltingly, now.

Did I for even a moment recognize this as a repeat of what happened in the service? No. (But how could I not have?) There I’d passed from basic training to special forces in a matter of weeks, as in one of those TV shows where events stumble over one another trying to get past. I’m a quick study, have a quirky mind that gets on to things instantly. While others are still floundering and doing belly flops, I’m walking around, looking good—but my understanding never extends far beneath the surface.

At that time, remember, I had little enough training to speak of, and almost no experience. And the fact that Nabors and I had violated procedure was something I just couldn’t get my head around. That went on every moment of every shift of every day, sure. No one did things by the book. You cut corners, jury-rigged, improvised, faked it, got by. But few of those shortcuts ended up with a fatal shooting and a seasoned officer going down. I kept ticking off the mistakes in my head.

We were supposed to stay together at all times. We should both have responded.

When I began to suspect that something had gone badly south, I’d started in without calling for backup.

I’d failed to follow my senior partner’s orders.

Then, failing also to identify myself or fire a warning shot (which back then, before
Garner v. Tennessee,
remained policy), I’d shot a man dead.

Interestingly enough, few questions got asked outside my own head, and none of this ever came up for any sort of review. But right after gypsies and sailors, cops are the most superstitious folk alive, and while I was newly on the list of good guys, looked up to in some weird, abstract fashion, the whole thing stayed weird: no one wanted to partner with me.

So for a time, in direct violation of department policy, I rode by myself in the best cars the department had to offer. Ranked detective, I still spent most of my shift on routine calls.

What happened next I’m still not clear on, but somewhere (arbitrarily, I assume, from my experience with bureaucracies pre and post) a decision was made, and I started finding myself beside guys no one else would put up with. Likes attracting? Or maybe they were there as department brass’s last, desperate effort to shake them out of the tree. We’re talking rookies too dumb for Gilligan’s island here, lawmen Andy wouldn’t let have
one
bullet, bullies fresh off the schoolyard, lumbering southern gentlemen who stood when ladies and elders entered the room but had screenings of
Shane
and
The Ox-Bow Incident
playing continuously in their heads.

Then one morning I looked to the right, or so it seemed, and Gardner was sitting there. We’d just come off an unwarranted noise call, I’d let him handle it, and the boy’d done good.

What you got to do is put on their lives, way you do a robe or an old shirt, he told me. You stand outside looking, no way you can see in, no way they’re gonna trust you.

That what they teach you these days?

Right after the choke hold, he said.

We’d been riding together three or four months by then. Why was he any different from the others? I’m not sure he was. Could have been me: maybe I’d just come around to the point where I was ready to start forging connections again. Or maybe it was just that the son of a bitch wouldn’t give up. I’d done everything I could do to ignore him, frustrate him, demean him, and he just sat there sipping coffee and smiling, asking what I wanted for lunch. While I was busily turning into Nabors.

Like myself, Gardner came up from the backlands. But whereas I loved cities and needed them, or thought I did, he’d never caught on to city ways. Part of him would always be walking down some dirt road along train tracks, stopping by the bait shop for a cold drink. He was a good, simple man.

One morning over coffee Gardner told me he was quitting. His girl back home had written to tell him she was pregnant. He went, found out soon enough that she wasn’t pregnant at all, only lonely, and shortly after turned up in Memphis again. Teamed with someone else now, but we kept in touch. After that, his heart never quite let him get back into the job. Riding alone one night, he answered a disturbance call at a motel, an altercation between a prostitute named L’il Sal and her client. All of us knew L’il Sal. She’d turn black to white and charm the sun down if it gave her points. Either Gardner had forgotten L’il Sal or didn’t care. He was listening to her story when the John came up behind and slit his throat with a buck knife.

“That had to make you feel better.”

“You bet it did. We still get breakfast, Thelma?” he said to the waitress who’d dropped off coffees, gone about her business and now ambled back around to us. She wore badly pilled gray polyester slacks, a black sweater hanging down almost to her knees in front and hiked over her butt behind. Hair pinned up in a loose swirl from which strands had escaped and hung out like insect legs.

“You see there on the menu where it says breakfast twenty-four hours a day, Lonnie?”

“You’re not open twenty-four hours a day, Thelma.”

“Not much gets by you, does it? Must be what keeps down the criminal element hereabouts, why the good people of this town keep reelecting you.”

“What’s good?”

“Nothing. But you can eat most of it.”

I found myself wondering how many times they’d been through this routine.

“What are you doing asking me anyway? We both know what you’re gonna have. Three eggs over easy, grits, ham. You’re done, some of these other folk might appreciate getting the chance to order.”

“Got it by yourself, huh?”

“Yeah. You want anything besides coffee, Don Lee?”

“Coffee’ll do me,” he said.

“New girl supposed to be here, worked half a shift yesterday. Guess she decided maybe this wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life after all. Her loss. God knows there’s rewards. Toast?”

Sheriff Bates nodded.

“You know what, I’ll have an order of toast, too,” Don Lee said.

“Been most of an hour since the boy ate,” Bates said.

“And what can I get you, sir?”

I ordered a club sandwich on wheat without mayo and a salad, no dressing. The coffee was actually very good. For a long time I’d never order coffee in restaurants. I liked it the way we used to fix it back home, throwing a handful of coffee into boiling water. Nothing else ever seemed worth bothering with. Then coffeehouses started sprouting everywhere. I didn’t much care for their little ribbon-tied bundles of gourmet this and that, trinkets and dumb posters, but they brought coffee in America to a new level.

“What do you want to know?” Bates said.

“Usually I find it doesn’t much matter what I want to know, I just get what people want to tell me. So I go with that.” I looked around. A dozen or so people were in the diner, most of them sitting alone over plates of chicken-fried steaks, burgers, spaghetti. Three middle-aged women at a back table laughing too loudly and looking about furtively to see if anyone noticed. “It’s been a while, as I said. But as I recall, we generally started with a body.”

“And while we do things our own way up here, we don’t do them
that
differently.” Bates smiled. “Don Lee was on duty that night.”

Caught by surprise, the deputy said, “Right,” then took a sip of coffee to gather himself. “Call came in a little after twelve, which is when the bars close ’round here—”

“What day was it?”

“Beg pardon?”

“I’m assuming it had to be a weekday, that bars don’t close at twelve on weekends even ’round here.”

“Right. It was a Monday.”

“Back in Memphis everyone called Monday the day nothing ever happens.”

“Hard to tell it from any other day ’round here.”

“You were on by yourself, right? There’re only the two of you?”

“Lonnie and me, right. We have someone on dispatch, on the radio that is, eight to four every day. Lonnie’s daughter, mostly, or else Danny Lambert. He was sheriff close to twenty years before retiring. And we get lots of part-time help with answering phones, filing, all that, from Smith High. Secretarial classes looking for . . . what do they call them?”

“Practicums,” Bates said.

“Right.”

“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to come on like some kind of asshole here.” Maybe I was bearing down too hard. “You two’ve worked together a while, you have a pace of your own. So does the town. Out of habit, experience, just because I’m who I am, I’m inclined to go about this a certain way. But it’s your investigation—yours all the way. I’m a ride-along.”

“Appreciate your saying that,” Bates said. “But we’d be more than one kind of fool not to accept the very assistance we asked for.”

“Okay. . . . So how’d the call come?” I asked.

Don Lee answered. “Kids phoned it in, out there looking for a place to park. They’ll go out to a block of new houses—every few years developers put these up, but no one ever seems to move into them—and they’ll back in a driveway like they belong there. Girl stops with bra at half-mast. What’s wrong? Seth says. Seth McEvoy. Quarterback with the high school team, plays clarinet, honor student. What
is
that? Sarah says. Sarah Perkins, her family runs the local dollar store. Sarah herself’s a few steps off to the side of most of us, I guess. At any rate, she points.”

Our food came. Thelma dealt plates off an extended arm, stepped away and came back with a tray holding A-1 steak sauce, Tabasco, ketchup, Worcestershire. Seeing it, I had a rush of recognition. If we ordered iced tea, she’d ask sweetened or unsweetened.

“Y’all set, then?”

“Looks great, Thelma. Thanks.”

“What she was pointing to was what looked like a scarecrow standing there at the side of the carport. Sarah says it moved—that was why she noticed. Doc Oldham says no way, the body’d been dead four, five days. So we figure something else moved.”

“Field mice, most likely,” Bates said. “We build subdivisions where they used to live, the mice don’t know they’re supposed to leave.”

“Especially if provisions keep getting shipped in,” I said.

“Right. Seth gets out of the car and goes over to look. Male, mid- to late forties, Doc figures. He’s wearing two or three shirts, a pair of Wranglers so old the rivets are worn away. Been homesteading under the carport for a while from the look of it. Had a bedroll there, couple of sacks of belongings, an old backpack with one strap.”

“He’d been chewed on some. Eyes and tongue, mostly.”

“Postmortem?”

Don Lee nodded.

“Cause of death?”

“The developer had finished up the subdivision in a hurry and moved on. Yards still had these stakes set out in them, eighteen inches long, sharpened at one end. Someone pulled up one of those and drove it into his chest. Someone’s seen one too many vampire movies, Doc said.”

“That’s not gonna be easy,” Bates said. “Takes some industry.”

“Broken fingernails,” Don Lee went on, “maybe from the struggle, maybe from before, hard to say. Splinters in his palms. Tried to pull the stake out, we figure.”

“Or keep it from going in.”

“We found him pinned against some latticework, trellis kind of thing. Arms crossed above his head, wrists turned out. He’d been fastened up there with picture wire.”

“So the body was repositioned once he was dead.”

“Way it looks. Doc said the stake missed his heart but nipped the vena cava.”

“Meaning it took him a while to die. . . . Understand that I don’t mean any disrespect here, but what facilities do you have for processing a crime scene?”

“State issues us kits. Back when I started, I got sent up to the capital for a couple of months, passed along what I could remember. Don Lee’s studied up some on his own. We did the best we could. But like I told you up front, we’re in over our heads here.”

“I went back through the manual, did it all by the numbers,” Don Lee told me. “Multiple photographs of the scene and the body. Bagged clothes and belongings, including a notebook—kind of a diary, I guess. Cellotaped a half-footprint I found at the edge of the carport. Took scrapings, blood samples.”

I looked at Bates. He shrugged. “What can I say? Me, I blundered into this. He’s meant for it.”

“Thing is,” Don Lee said, “I can go on scraping, photographing and logging stuff in till kingdom come, but I still just have a bunch of bags with labels on them. All potatoes, no meat.”

“Where’s the forensics kit now?”

“Back at the station.”

“You don’t usually send them through to State?”

“No
usually
to it,” Bates said. “Never had occasion to use one of the things before. Fact is, we weren’t even sure where we’d put them.”

“State said seal it, they’d pick it up when they got here.”

“No identification on the body, I’m assuming.”

Binaural nods.

“And when you canvassed, showing a photo, no one knew him, no one had seen him. Just another of America’s invisible men.”

Yep.

I’d finished my salad and sandwich and drunk three or four cups of coffee—Thelma kept creeping up and refilling. Altogether too fine a waitress. Don Lee’s toast was crumbs on a plate and four empty jam containers with tops skinned back. Clots of yolk and a pool of runny ketchup competed on the sheriff’s plate.

“What I have to ask is why you’re pursuing this at all. You’ve got a good town here. Clean, self-contained. Obviously this guy’s from outside, no one’s visible father, no visible mother’s son. Not a single city or PD I know, whatever size, would spend an hour on this. They’d write the report, skip it over the water into the files, move right along.”

“Well, they’d be used to it, of course. We’re not.” Bates looked to the door, where an attractive, thirtyish woman in gray suit and lacy off-white blouse stood looking back. “Tell me that’s not our State guy.”

“That’s not our State guy,” Don Lee said.

“You know damn well it is.”

As though to confirm, she strode towards us.

“We don’t trip over bodies too often ’round here,” Don Lee said.

“And when we do”—this from Bates—“they don’t usually have the mayor’s mail in their pocket.”