Phantom Nights (24 page)

Bobby walked up to within one foot of Eddie, causing him to scoot up straight against the side of his car.

"You still yearning to get to Chicago, Eddie?"

"Well, I—"

"I can arrange it for you. Overnight to Chicago, naked as the day you were born, in an Illinois Central reefer. Ever seen a man with eyeballs froze solid, Eddie?"

"No sir."

"Not to mention his dick?"

"Oh-oh."

"Lindell Jones is lying dead in a ditch out by Lovett Plantation. There's a story for you. No story here."

"Yes, sir."

W
hen Eddie Paradise Galphin's roadster had disappeared on the highway Ramses said, "An interesting exercise in public relations."

"They have to believe you'll do exactly what you say you'll do. The more inventive I am thinking up punishment, the quicker it turns into folklore. I never have hit a colored man with a nightstick. Just doesn't make an impression. White man, nightstick's always best."

"And that impressive revolver you carry?"

"It's a .44. I'm plenty good on the range, but I've never shot a man and hope I never have to."

Inside the house they found that the electricity was off. Bobby traced the problem to its source on the highway and radioed for a utility truck.

When he returned to the house, Ramses Valjean was standing by the windows in the front room where the light was good, reading a page from one of Alex's notebooks.

"What have you got there?" Bobby said, although it was a familiar type of notebook, and he had a hunch.

"A short story your brother wrote when he was in the fifth grade. I wonder how Mally happened to—"

"If it was here then Alex gave it to her."

Ramses closed the notebook. "They knew each other?"

Bobby shrugged. "Not long. Mally did him a good turn when he spilled off his bike around here. Cleaned him up, put some iodine on his cuts." Ramses didn't say anything. "Alex was in some trouble at the house that turned out not to be his doing. He might have come over looking for some sympathy from Mally. She was one hell of a fine woman, always nursing somebody I guess."

"Yes, she was like that. A sweetness in her nature that couldn't have come from either of us. But wildflowers stubbornly will appear, even on stony ground."

"I called for a lineman; power will be back on directly. I need to go to work."

"Of course."

"You're kind of isolated here. I didn't notice a phone line to the house. But Mallard's store is only a short walk going back toward town. There's a pay phone. You need a ride somewhere, call and I'll come myself or send a deputy for you."

"I only need to go by Godsong and Wundall's to make final arrangements for tomorrow."

"Staying here tonight?"

"I'm sure I can make myself comfortable. While I bring myself up to date on Mally's affairs. I suppose I could find this out myself, but you might be able to tell me. Did she have a lover?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Before you leave, why don't you have a look in the bedroom?"

Bobby walked down the hall to Mally's bedroom, stood in the doorway for a few moments, then went inside and raised the window shade all the way to get a better look at the condition of her bed. He returned to the living room.

"Somebody played rough with her. Or there could've been—"

"No. I don't think it was more than one man. Judging from the condition of the soft tissues of her vulva and vagina, there can be only one conclusion: Mally was forced, perhaps repeatedly. There also were small hemorrhages of blood vessels of the inner thighs: fingertip bruises, as if he held her thighs well apart while he raped her. He has large hands, by the way. The rape, or rapes, occurred well before the dogs got hold of her."

"You examined Mally's—"

Ramses said harshly, "I examined a dead woman's remains for the truth she was beyond telling us."

"So she was raped here, then taken somewhere else, where she died. Then she was moved again."

Ramses held out his right fist and slowly opened it. He was holding crumpled cellophane.

"I found one on the floor by the sofa, two more in the bedroom. The same wrappers that were left in Mally's Dodge. He likes hard candy."

"Or Mally had a sweet tooth."

"So far I haven't found any candy in the house. Nor was there any in her purse or car."

Bobby let out a slow breath. "Better let me have those wrappers. I'll put them with the other . . . evidence that's coming over from the mortuary this morning."

"Where in town would you be likely to find Brach's hard candies?"

"Reaves Rexall and probably the five and dime. I'll check those first, but a lot of people—"

"Buy candy. Of course. But you're looking for a white man, blond, six feet one or two inches tall, who wears a size-ten boot and has probably purchased his candy within the last three days."

"How in the hell—"

"The front seat of the Dodge was pushed nearly all the way back. Mally was a small person; I doubt that she could have operated her car with the seat in that position. I'll assume that whoever drove the car to Little Grove had enough sense not to leave his fingerprints all over it."

"Blond?"

"During intercourse he left a few of his pubic hairs behind: three to be exact, stuck with blood or semen to Mally's pudendum and her own pubic hair, which is quite coarse compared to the Nordic—"

"Why don't I just hand over my badge to you, Ramses, and you finish up what I didn't do much of a job of in the first place!"

"No need to feel insulted or slighted, Bobby. I've had years of experience working with the Nashville police department on some of their difficult cases of homicide. Here I have only made a necessary beginning. The real detective work is up to you. Find him, Bobby. Or do you know who I'm talking about already?"

Bobby couldn't answer him. His throat was tight as a fist. Ramses said quietly, "Is he untouchable, Bobby?"

"Nobody . . . is untouchable, a thing like this."

"I've only given you information. What you don't have is proof."

"I know that."

"Then you have so much at risk. If you're going to pursue this.
Will
you pursue it, Bobby?"

"For God's sake, what do you expect me to say?"

Ramses nodded, then looked around the front room of Mally's house, his scan halting at the picture wall behind the sofa. Arrested by an image of himself and a young Mally holding his hand and smiling up at him. His beardless face in this photo was stern, as if he found himself an unwilling accomplice to something.

"I already know myself to be a vacant man," Ramses said at length. "Looking at
'L'horreur d'une profonde nuit.'
The horror of a deep night, as Racine put it. But what you must face is the rest of your life." He smiled. "Try it on right now, Bobby, have a look in the mirror of your soul. How do you like the fit? Comfortable? Or will you ever-after be wearing your life, as you said to Eddie, like a bad suit?"

L
eland Howard's man Jim Giles ate his lunch at the Hob-Nob Cafe on Courthouse Square: Monday's Special, which was overdone roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy and a side dish of stewed tomatoes and okra, eighty-five cents. He had two more cups of black coffee, which he had been drinking steadily for the last thirty-six hours while catching only a couple of hours' sleep on the road. All the caffeine had his brain abuzz like wearing-out neon, his heart jarring to the beat. Still, he didn't mind being off the campaign trail for a while. Politics amused Giles, but dourly: all of those candidates with shotgun mouths, loaded with double-aught bullshit.

After lunch he went outside into full noon glare, a kitchen match in one tight corner of his mouth. He stood beneath a rusted tin canopy over the sidewalk shielding his eyes with a saluting hand as if there was something to single out that made this courthouse square much different from so many others in Dixie, but the only difference may have been in the quality of upkeep, desultory civic pride. Everything needed to be swept or hosed. Some begonias and zinnias were suffocating in dust in a couple of filled-in horse troughs that fronted the squat yellow brick courthouse. There were cracked store windows here and there that the merchants lacked funds to replace. He saw kids with ice cream—they looked well-scrubbed, at any rate—including a lanky blond boy pushing his blue-and-white Schwinn bike along with one hand, keeping pace with a girl blonder than he was on an idling, new-looking Cushman motor scooter. He didn't know who they were—didn't know a soul in Evening Shade—but the bicycle was familiar. He had seen one like it on Mally Shaw's porch during the rainstorm Saturday night. With a piece of the red reflector on the back fender missing.

Giles took the match out of his mouth, walked down three steps to street level, where he spat, waited on a panel delivery truck to pass him, then strolled across the wide concrete pavement with its Medusalike snakes of asphalt patching going every which way and fell in behind the oblivious teenagers. She appeared to be doing all of the talking. Then, as if she had talked herself dry, she stopped to get a drink from the granite fountain in the shaded border of park around the courthouse—the trees growing here, true to the nondescript, down-in-the-mouth look of the town, were trash mimosas and scabby sycamores instead of oaks deeply rooted in century-old grandeur.

Giles had a good look at the reflector on the Schwinn. Same piece missing, all right. That's when the boy turned casually and saw him from thirty feet away and couldn't conceal the surprise, or dismay, that flashed into his face. Giles didn't change expression; the boy looked immediately at his scuffed moccasins where a tie had come loose, then at the girl fetchingly bent over the water fountain in her sleeveless blouse and Bermudas. But she didn't hold Giles's attention for long, and he resumed studying the boy. Turned abruptly away when the girl finished getting her drink. Giles walked across the square to where he had parked the Pontiac Eight. He had seen enough to realize Leland Howard's problems in Evening Shade had begun to multiply.

I
n his office in the courthouse basement, Bobby Gambier turned the pages of another notebook, smelling of vomit, that he had previously locked in a drawer of his desk. The door to the office was closed, shutting off circulation of air between his open windows and the large fans outside in the hall. He sweated profusely while he reread Alex's account of Mally Shaw's rape, which had led to something unspeakable later on in the night, where there might not have been an eyewitness. He didn't know yet.

Bobby had served at the end of a war in a defeated nation, rat-rubble cities, the chewed, littered countryside still criss-crossed by tank treads and reeking of shellfire, country into which lesser members of the SS Death's Head formations and death-camp administrators tried to slip away. Lacking the resources of some of their superiors to escape across borders. Bobby had seen the faces of those rounded up and shipped to Heidelberg in chains. Stolid unrepentant faces, eyes that had seen everything inhuman and hearts that felt nothing. No more guilt in the SS guards than there had been in the shepherd dogs trained to prisoners on command. Sometimes for sport.

He didn't know Leland Howard, but Bobby couldn't imagine him standing by while dogs (his dogs?) destroyed Mally. But if there was an explanation for the manner of her death, he might be the only man who could give it.

When he'd finished reading, Bobby tore the pages from Alex's notebook and struck a match. The pages curled like dark phantoms in the bottom of his metal wastebasket, drifted into ash that he stirred with the end of another match. Then he sat back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head, looking at the slow flutter of a moth inside a chamber-pot light fixture.

At least Alex was protected now.

O
n the platform at Cole 's Crossing after the nightly run of the
Dixie Traveler
Mally said to Alex, "So you've got a girlfriend? What's her name?"

"Francie. She's not exactly my girlfriend. She said I could stay over there again tonight if I want. When her folks get home, different story."

"But she likes you."

"I don't think it makes any difference to Francie that I can't talk to her the way I'm talking to you—in this place."

Alex's head jerked, and he gave a startled look at something or someone that was gone before his brain could assimilate what his eyes had picked up. Mally looked momentarily troubled by his apprehension, then smiled.

"Bet she's a pretty one."

"Francie? Uh-huh. Anyway—Francie says she likes to do the talking because most people don't have much on their minds, although she sees in my eyes I have a serious nature"—Alex's cheeks reddened a little—"and it's a relief, she says, to be with somebody who pays attention to her and isn't always telling her, 'Francie, zip it.'" Alex shied as if he'd brushed against something invisible but tactile in the air and took a side step closer to the depot wall, his image flashing in a broken piece of pane in a window frame. "You know, she can be real funny. She got peed off at her horse, Tigertown, today. Said he has only three gaits—walk, stumble, and fall. Stuff like that; I never laughed so much."