Into the Web (18 page)

Porterfield seemed pleased that the tale was still being recounted. Then another thought appeared to enter his mind, crowding all thought of my father and that lesson in brutality entirely from his brain. “Find anything in that file you wanted to look at?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

He caught the steely tone in my voice, but it meant nothing to him, all bravado the same, equally empty, all men the same, but half of him.

“What’s that?”

“I noticed you’ve got Archie’s statement and Gloria’s, but one statement’s missing. The one you took from Lila Cutler.”

“Why would I have a statement from her?”

“Because you took her in for questioning. So I was just wondering where her statement is.”

“I probably didn’t write one up,” Porterfield answered, sounding weary of being confronted with such a tedious and inconsequential matter.

Even so, I pressed him. “Which would have been unusual for you.”

His eyes turned cold. “You got any other questions, son?”

“Well, actually, I do. I was wondering where that second person went. The one who came with Archie. You never told me who you thought it was.”

“There’s no way of knowing that,” Porterfield answered.

“But you must have a theory?”

“My theory is that whoever came with your brother that night didn’t want to get caught the way your brother did. And so this second person up and left.”

“Left for where?”

“Well, let me see,” Porterfield said, broadly pretending to speculate on the matter. “Left for home, I guess. Left for wherever he’d come from. Through the woods maybe. That’s where you live, right? Over around Cantwell?”

“Yes.”

“That’s less than a mile from the Kellogg house as the crow flies, wouldn’t you say?”

“Probably.”

“So this second person could have gone on foot. Whoever it was that came with your brother in that old car of his could have gone right through the woods, and there wouldn’t have been no sign of it. Snow would have covered his tracks by full daylight.”

“So I guess you’ll never know who it was,” I told him.

“I guess not,” he said, growing impatient again. “Come on out of there now, I got things to do.”

I stepped out of the garage, watched as he closed and locked the door.

“I still have a few questions,” I said. “About the investigation.”

He seemed barely to hear me, or to care so little about what I’d said that he felt no need to respond.

“About what Archie told you when you talked to him.”

Porterfield lumbered back toward his house, throwing words over his shoulder. “Who cares what that boy told me? It wasn’t the truth anyway. Except in patches.” He stopped, turned, and looked me dead in the eye. “He left things out, you know. Said he didn’t see a living soul after he got to the house that night.” He waited for me to respond, or perhaps only to squirm beneath his accusatory gaze. “But he saw you, didn’t he, Roy?”

“Yes, he did.”

As if satisfied with my answer, Porterfield turned and headed toward his car, his great bulk casting a black stain over the ground beside him. “Saw you, but didn’t tell me a thing about it.”

“I pulled up just across the road from him,” I said, walking quickly in order to keep at his side.

“I know you did.” Porterfield’s eyes were on the Lincoln now, staring at it intently, as if looking for a smudge on its shiny exterior.

“And if you’d ever asked me about it, I’d have told you so.”

“Maybe you would have. But your brother didn’t. That’s the point.”

“He was trying to protect me. Trying to make sure I didn’t get … that I wouldn’t be a suspect.”

“I knew he was protecting somebody,” Porterfield said. “Knew all the time that he wasn’t dealing with me straight.”

We reached his car.

Porterfield grabbed the door handle but didn’t open it.

“But there wasn’t any need to press him on it,” he told me. “Because I already knew that you never got out of your car. So whether you were there or not, it didn’t matter to me as far as those killings were concerned. You never got out of your car. End of story.”

“How do you know I never got out of my car?” I persisted.

“ ’Cause I got spies everywhere, son,” Porterfield said as he jerked the handle and yanked open the car door. “I got eyes in the clouds. Step back now, I got to go.” He began to roll up the window.

Eyes in the clouds
, I thought, watching him drop into his big black Lincoln, half believing that he did possess such vast malignant powers.

“How did you know I didn’t get out of my car that night?” I asked.

“What difference does it make, long as I knew it wasn’t you that came with your brother over to Horace Kellogg’s house. Who it was that did come with him, that’s what I wanted to know. But he never broke on that, your brother. Never told me who it was.” He began to roll up the window. “Step back, now, I got to go.”

I put my hand on the glass. “You think it was my father.”

The window stopped its upward glide, but Porter-field didn’t answer, and in that interval I saw Archie lean
toward the passenger door of the old Ford rather than scoot over to it, lean far over whatever blocked his way, something in the front seat, I imagined suddenly, hunched down, hidden.

“Son, is that something you really want to know?” An unmistakable hint of warning crawled into Porterfield’s voice, a sense of someone who already knew what lay in wait behind the unopened door.

“Of course it is.”

“Well, why don’t you figure it out for yourself, then. You like playing cop, don’t you? Figure it out. It’s not that hard.”

“Why don’t you just tell me,” I demanded.

Porterfield’s eyes glowed. “Whose gun was it? The one I found next to your brother?”

I saw the pistol pass from my father’s hand to Archie’s on the morning he’d forced him to kill Scooter, felt something deep inside myself first shudder, then grow cold. “It was my father’s gun,” I said.

“Yep, it was,” Porterfield agreed quietly. “And his fingerprints were probably all over it. But what would that prove? It was his gun, ’course it would have his fingerprints on it. But you don’t just get evidence from guns and such. They’s always a man that’s part of it, that has to go with it.”

I could see something curling around in Porterfield’s mind, a small black snake.

“So I asked myself,” he added, “who would have had the gumption to do such a thing? And a reason to do it? A reason to get back at Horace, shoot him the way he was shot. Who would have hated Horace that much?”

I stared at him, puzzled.

“Your daddy never told you about Horace?”

“He said he was a gun-thug.”

“He was a deputy is what he was,” Porterfield said. “Worked for me as a deputy for quite a few years. Came with me up to Waylord when I had business there. People to straighten out. People that had got above themselves. People that needed to be taught a lesson. People like your daddy.”

I saw the dark men who’d closed in on my father by the candy counter of the Waylord company store.

“Kellogg helped you,” I said. “With that … lesson?”

Porterfield grinned. “He wasn’t much older than your daddy was, but Horace sure did his share.”

The one thing I would not let myself do at that moment was collapse under the great weight of what Porterfield had just revealed.

“But you never even talked to my father,” I said. “You never even questioned him about whether he was—”

“Why should I?” Porterfield blurted out. He regarded me as if I were a small child stupidly fending off an enormous dragon. “Jesse Slater wouldn’t have said anything to me. Not like that whining brother of yours. Sputtering and crying. Jesse wouldn’t have broken down like that. Never. Got too much gumption.” He shrugged. “I figured that in the end, I’d get it out of your brother, but once he was dead there was nothing I could do but drop the whole thing, just let your daddy go. Pride, that was your daddy’s downfall. Too much pride for a little shit Waylord boy.” He cackled dryly. “But like I said, I knew it couldn’t have been you shooting that gun. Because you don’t have your daddy’s gumption.”

He hit the button inside the car and turned toward the wheel as the darkly tinted window glided into place.

During the next few minutes I learned just how swiftly and completely denial can block the mind’s communication with the heart. For as I watched Porterfield back out of the driveway of his house, my own mind furiously blocked me from any serious consideration of the terrible suspicion the old sheriff had voiced about my father.

And so, during the next few seconds I went over everything about that murderous night but the possibility that my father could have had anything to do with it.

Methodically, meticulously, I relived every detail of it again, so that I saw myself behind the wheel of the Chevy, heading up to Waylord at just before six that evening, gray clouds already hanging low and dark overhead, feeling again the cold drizzle they released as I came to a halt in Lila’s drive.

Lila had come out immediately, dashing happily across the bare yard, wrapped in a dark red coat, a clear plastic rain hat around her hair. Bursts of mist came from her mouth as she leapt into my car, snuggling up against me, smiling, pretending to shiver,
Brrrr.

We’d headed back down to the valley, talking all the way, full of the brilliant future we’d begun to imagine for ourselves, that I’d go to college, get my degree, then return and marry her. I’d get a teaching job and then she’d go to college too. We’d raise a family. The future had never looked brighter than on that snowy night.

The more immediate plan was far more achievable,
of course: a double date no different from the many others we’d had in the past.

Archie was pacing back and forth when Lila and I pulled into the driveway that evening. He looked stricken and confused, the way he always did when things began to overwhelm him.

“We can’t pick up Gloria at her house,” he said as he threw himself into the backseat of my car. “She had a big fight with her daddy and ran over to Potter’s Grocery.”

The first scattered flakes of snow began to fall as we pulled up to Potter’s Grocery. Gloria was waiting anxiously behind its misty front window, her expression hardly less stricken than Archie’s.

Her tone was grave as she slid into the backseat. “I don’t know what Daddy’s going to do, Archie.”

Archie drew her beneath his arm. “Maybe we’ll just run off, then,” he said.

We decided to go to the movie house in Kingdom City. Once there, Gloria and Archie went directly to the counter to buy popcorn, leaving Lila and me at the front of the theater.

“He’ll do it, you know,” Lila told me. “He’ll run off with Gloria.”

“They wouldn’t get very far, Lila.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lila said darkly. “Gloria’s underage. Her father could call the sheriff and have him arrested.”

I glanced over to the concession stand, watched as Archie paid for a bag of popcorn, then handed it to Gloria.

“He wouldn’t try to take Gloria away,” I told Lila
confidently. “Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t know how to do it.”

I was still holding firmly to that conviction when the movie ended two hours later. We drove Gloria back to her house, where she and Archie stood briefly at the end of the driveway, hidden behind the hedge.

“Gloria’s really upset,” Archie said, when he got back in the car. “She thinks her daddy’s gonna beat her up.”

Lila’s eyes shot back toward my brother. “Be careful, Archie, please. Be really careful.”

The snow had thickened by the time we reached the house. For a moment, Archie remained in the backseat of the car as if in dread of what the night might bring were he left to his own devices.

“It’s going to work out, Archie,” I assured him. “We’ll talk it all through when I get back.”

He nodded reluctantly, and got out of the car, moved halfway up the driveway, then stopped as if by a black wall.

“Go talk to him,” Lila urged me. “He’s lost without you.”

I did as she asked, got out of the car and walked over to my brother.

“Everything’s going to work out,” I promised him. “Believe me, Arch, everything’s going to work out.”

“What if I was to do it, Roy? We could go to—”

“Listen, just go inside and stay there.” I smiled. “We’ll talk it over in the morning.”

Archie did not smile back. “Her daddy’s hurting her real bad, the things he’s saying to her. It’s not right, Roy, Calling her names. Hurting her like that. Threatening her.”

I placed my hand on his shoulder, a little annoyed. “Archie, do what I told you. Go inside. In the morning, we’ll talk it over. There’s nothing you can do tonight anyway.”

He nodded slowly, heavily, in that ponderous way of his. “Okay, Roy …” A small, tentative smile broke over his face. “Thanks.”

“Are we clear on this, then?”

“Yeah, we’re clear.”

“Good,” I said, then glanced toward the house and saw my father standing in the lighted window. He was watching us, his eyes like two cold lights shining through the snow.

“Go on inside now,” I told my brother.

“Yeah, right,” Archie said, and stepped away.

I darted back to the Chevy, expecting to see Archie already lumbering up the stairs and into the house. But he was still standing only a few feet from where I’d left him, as deep in thought as was possible for him, struggling to find a way out of his confusion.

“He’ll be all right,” I told Lila as I turned the ignition.

Lila’s eyes bored into my brother, “It won’t end here,” she murmured.

She had never spoken more truly, it struck me now, as I watched Wallace Porterfield’s car move down the long road that fronted his house. For it never had.

H
e was on the front porch when I pulled into the driveway a few minutes later, his body tilted back in a spindly chair, his bare feet pressed down upon the un-painted wooden slats, a gaunt figure I could scarcely envision as the raging, vengeful man Wallace Porterfield had conjured up.

And yet, I knew that age and illness are deceptive, that old killers must surely look like all old men, infirm and vaguely sorrowful. And so it was a younger, stronger man I made myself imagine as I studied him through the windshield, a man who’d sputtered madly as he’d loaded the pistol, his mind ablaze with what Horace Kellogg had done to him so many years before, all life suddenly reduced to a score he had to settle.