No Way Home (8 page)

“No one will ever discourage man from violence, Mrs. Jackson, for it’s the easiest reaction. If we could commit murder by simply willing it, people would be falling dead all over the world, which would be depopulated within a year.”

“Goodness, I’d better not argue with a professional policeman,” she said and idly rumpled her husband’s hair, exposing the bald spot. “But I can tell you one thing right here and now, Lieutenant. Matthew MacGregor’s not your man.”

Bakinowski’s eyes strayed in their deep sockets. “How do you know that?”

She smiled. “A woman knows.”

• • •

Sitting at his desk, James Morgan perused an old report, one he knew almost word for word, and after all these years the words still gnawed at him. The victim was a twenty-three-year-old woman whose marriage had eviscerated her emotionally and spiritually. Morgan knew this because his predecessor, Chief Carr, had found her diary hidden in a box of sanitary napkins, the only place her husband might not have looked. The diary was confiscated for evidence but no longer existed, destroyed perhaps when the old chief was cleaning out his desk. Morgan slipped the report back into its dog-eared and discolored folder. The typewritten name on the tab was Rayball.

The year he had become a policeman was the year Eunice Rayball died under questionable circumstances. The morning Papa reported her missing he said he didn’t want her back, good riddance to her, and ranted about infidelities, which were figments of his mind, rabid with jealousy from the day he married her. Morgan and Eugene Avery, wearing rubbers over their police shoes, found her facedown in a foot of murky swamp water, where she had lain three nights and three days no more than fifty yards from the house.

Everybody suspected foul play, but nobody could prove it. Chief Carr, questioning Papa relentlessly, got nowhere and called in the top investigator from the district attorney’s office to take over the interrogation. The investigator, a former federal agent, sat on a corner of Chief Carr’s desk and activated a tape recorder. Papa sat righteous and close-mouthed in a wooden chair.

“Said she was goin’ for a walk, that’s all I know.”

“Good God, Mr. Rayball, at that hour of the night?”

“She wanted the air.”

“And you say your sons were asleep at the time.”

“The young one might not be mine.”

“I’ve met him, Mr. Rayball. The little tyke certainly looks like you.”

“That don’t mean nothin’. Some of my jism might’ve got mixed in with the other fella’s.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“I know how it works.”

“What did you think when your wife didn’t come back?”

“Figured she met somebody on the road.”

“But she didn’t go onto the road. She went into the swamp.”

“How was I to know that?”

“Give me the names of some of these other fellows.”

“I don’t know no names. She was too careful for that.”

“Look at me, Mr. Rayball. Look at me closely and listen. It’s been pretty well established you were the only man in her life.”

“I know better.”

“Why are you smiling, Mr. Rayball? Is this a game to you?”

“It ain’t
nothin’
to me.”

An hour later they let him go and watched him strut arrogantly out of the chief’s office. The investigator, with a grimace, switched off the tape recorder. “The guy stands five-foot-five and talks six-foot-eight.”

Chief Carr said, “He’s not a whole dollar.”

“One thing’s for sure, he’s got a twisted thing about women.”

“No bruises on the body except what you’d expect from a fall,” Chief Carr said, mostly to himself.

The investigator shot a look at Morgan, who stood obediently near the door with his cap in his hand. “What are your thoughts, Officer?”

“He killed her,” Morgan said without hesitation.

Chief Carr settled in deeper behind his desk. “We all know that, Jimmy.”

The reluctant ruling, convincing no one, was that Eunice Rayball, perhaps distraught, left her home in the night, traversed uncertain ground, tripped and fell, and died by accidental drowning.

Morgan never forgot the look of her when he raised her from the water, and he never forgot the weight of her hair when it slopped over his sleeve. Nor did he forget how he and Eugene Avery, after averting their heads, argued over who would stay with the body while the other radioed the station.

“Why does anyone have to stay?” Eugene asked.

“She’s been alone here enough,” Morgan replied.

Eugene, whose seniority was greater by a month, left him standing there. He remembered how the sun shot rays through the sharp angles of a swamp maple and irradiated Eunice Ray ball’s remains.

Later, when Chief Carr was battling cancer and planning to retire, he said to Morgan, “It’s not your triumphs you remember, Jimmy, but your failures. Not the rights you did, but the wrongs. That’s the way it goes for most of us. Life’s final injustice.”

“I don’t know any wrongs you did, Chief.”

“I did a big wrong, Jimmy. I let Rayball walk.”

“You didn’t have a choice.”

“If I was a different kind of fella, I’d have taken him into the woods and beaten the truth out of him.”

• • •

Arlene Bowman lay supine on the padded table, and the masseur, a huge, unsmiling bald man with remarkable hands, took the stress from her shoulders but not the edge from her mood. Her dark eyes half shut, she said, “Take the towel off, Pierre, and tell me what you think of my ass.”

“I’ve seen it before, Mrs. Bowman. It’s OK.”

“Don’t you want to see it again?”

“I see posteriors all day, especially ones that aren’t OK.”

“Mostly women’s?”

“Half and half,” he said, his sure fingers working the cords in the back of her slender neck.

“Do you know the Pooles?”

“I do Mr. Poole at the club. I’ve never met Mrs. Poole.”

“She could use you. Though of course you know, Pierre, it’s illegal in this state for a masseur to do a woman.”

“We won’t tell, will we, Mrs. Bowman?”

“Probably not, but I should warn you that I’m a terribly vengeful sort. My husband is even worse.”

His fingers rode up her nape, into her black hair where the curl began. “Your husband has complete trust in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?” With knowing thumbs he kneaded the bone behind each ear.

“Christ, that’s good,” she murmured. “Do other women confide in you, reveal their fantasies, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty in bed with them at the same time?”

“Usually they just relax and enjoy. You don’t ever relax, Mrs. Bowman.”

“That’s because I don’t want my juices ever to ebb, my skin to sag. I don’t want ever to die.”

“You can delay practically anything, Mrs. Bowman, but death has the edge. It has time on its side.” With outstretched fingers, his hands swept down on her shapely back and found the right muscles to move. “How’s this?”

“Wonderful,” she whispered, luxuriating under his care. Then she lifted her head and glanced over the curve of her shoulder. “Impossible to tell your age, you don’t have a line in your face. How old are you?”

“Sixty-four.”

“And what’s your real name? It can’t be Pierre.”

“Dennis,” he said. He removed the towel from her and stepped back.

“Well?”

“You’re in perfect shape, Mrs. Bowman.”

• • •

Ignoring the perfume of skunk, Chief Morgan reached furtively out of the car window and opened the mailbox. Among a few flyers was a thick ordinary envelope addressed to Papa Rayball, with an extra stamp to carry the weight. The envelope looked as if it had been worn in someone’s back pocket before being mailed. No return address was given, but the postmark, partially blurred, read Florida, which told Morgan who the sender was.

He drove around the corpse of the skunk and turned sharply. The car clawed its way over ruts in the gravel drive and came to a rest beside Papa’s battered pickup. The air rang with insects. The sun struck the pines and seemed to give each needle individuality. Climbing out, Morgan looked toward the house, but Papa’s voice echoed from another direction.

“You want somethin’?”

Papa was working beside the shed on an old three-speed bicycle, his tools scattered near his feet. The bicycle was upside down. He spun a wheel. Approaching him, Morgan said, “I brought your mail.”

Papa’s arms hung short, and his face went small, to the point that he looked like a bird of prey. “Against the law to go into the box.”

“Thought I was doing you a favor.”

“You ain’t never done my family no favors and ain’t likely you will.” He took the mail without looking at it and jammed it into a back pocket of his rumpled pants, which once may have been part of a suit, though Morgan could not remember ever seeing him in one, not even at Eunice Rayball’s funeral long ago. “You here about the old thing, or is it somethin’ new?”

“The old thing is history,” Morgan said.

“But it’s still on your mind, ain’t it? All these years nosin’ ‘round ain’t got you nothin’.” The tone of voice was pugnacious, and the small eyes, blue like the flame of a welder’s torch, were shrewd and arrogant. “You and the old chief smirched my reputation.”

“We were doing our jobs.”

“If I believed in lawyers I’d’ve sued and be sittin’ pretty now.”

Summer sounds from the swamp competed in intensity. Cicadas were the loudest. Morgan said, “Where’s Junior?”

“Don’t know, off somewhere.” Papa spun the wheel again. “You here about what he did that time at the school? MacGregor had no call treatin’ him like he did.”

“Officer MacGregor could’ve arrested him, probably should’ve.”

“What good would that’ve done? Boy Junior’s age got no authority over his pecker.”

“He’s no boy, he’s in his twenties.”

“But he ain’t bright, so why make more of a fool of him? I know why MacGregor did it. He thinks he’s you.”

High in the pines the sudden squawk of a crow sounded like the dissonant hooting of a toy horn. On the ground a dry leaf flipped itself over like a live thing. “Tell Junior I need to talk to him soon as possible.”

“What are you blamin’ him for now?” Papa snatched up a small socket wrench and looked for nuts to tighten. Swiveling the rod of the kickstand, he wrenched one that did not need it. “He ain’t competent to be questioned. He could say anything, think it’s true.”

“Straight answers won’t hurt him.”

“You ain’t told me what it’s about yet.”

Morgan turned and, treading over flat weeds, returned to his car, where black flies sketched the air. A breeze brought him the smell of fern and a taste of the swamp. With a deliberate turn, he looked back at Papa. “Can he handle a rifle?”

“You know well as anybody I learned both my boys young. Clement, time he was ten, could shoot the eye out of a squirrel.”

“How about Junior?”

Papa’s gnarled face twitched, then was still. “You’re trying to put things in my mind don’t belong there.”

“You got a rifle in the house?”

“Old one that won’t work. You wanna look at it?”

Morgan climbed into the car and peered out the open window. “That’s not the one I want.”

“You wanna look up my ass?” Papa shouted. “Maybe you’ll find it there.”

Averting his head, Morgan radioed Meg O’Brien and asked what was doing. Nothing much. Selectman Jackson had phoned, no message. Her voice clawed through static. She was worried about Matt MacGregor. “You don’t have to be,” he told her. She was alone in the station, she said. Bertha Skagg, her relief, whose ankles tended to swell, had called in sick. “I’ll be there shortly,” he said.

“Where are you?” she asked with an edge.

“In the woods,” he replied and switched off, for Papa had come to the car with a soft grunt and was staring in with the crack of a smile. Morgan twisted the ignition key. The motor sulked, then caught. “Something to tell me, Papa?”

“We oughta be more partial to each other, you and me. We both lost a woman.”

“You were never good to yours.”

“You gonna hold that against me all my life?”

“Only what happened to her.”

Papa’s blue eyes blazed, his face caught fire, and his head lolled as if mere threads kept him sane. “You don’t know I did it. You don’t know anybody did it.”

“I know she didn’t do it herself,” Morgan said and shifted the car easily into reverse. “Same as I know God didn’t strike down Flo and Earl Lapham.”

• • •

“Go home,” he told Meg O’Brien, and she did, but returned shortly to her post with two chicken sandwiches, one for him, which he accepted gratefully. Since his breakfast with Bakinowski he had put nothing in his stomach except a Milky Way. The call came while he was sitting at his desk. Meg, perversely, put it through without asking whether he wanted to take it. Christine Poole’s voice was the coldest he had ever heard it.

“Have you mentioned me to Arlene Bowman?”

“Of course not.” His sandwich went tasteless. “Why would I?”

“She knows about us. So does that woman working for you. How many others know, James?”

“None that I know of,” he said, with no wish to speculate, for the town was full of eyes.

“This is humiliating.”

“I never meant that to happen.”

“But it has!” Anger and anxiety disfigured her voice. “Good God, what if my husband finds out? What do you think that will do to him? And how can I look him in the face, James?”

He was slow in responding, too slow, and abruptly the line went dead. Presently Meg appeared in the door and stood with formal rigor, her rupture of pony teeth showing. With customary forwardness she said, “When are you going to learn?”

“When are you going to quit listening in?”

“When are you going to stop fooling around in the Heights? There are solid unattached town women who’ve had their eyes on you for years. Want me to name a couple?”

“I had a marriage, Meg. Another won’t take the place of it.”

“Afraid to love and lose again, aren’t you, Jim?” Only during intimate moments did she forsake his title for his name. They had known each other all their lives. In the several years after his wife’s death, when he had shut himself off from any romantic life, she had occasionally invited him to her house for a light supper, always a chore for him. Their common ground was here at the station. Here she could speak her mind, and he could use his authority to shut her up.