The Cantaloupe Thief (8 page)

It was a warm June morning, as good a day to live outside as Georgia offered. The flower beds flanking Jericho Road were filled with day lilies and verbena, as well as blooms on the roses. He liked to weed and water the beds, but today they needed neither.

He shifted his pack to better balance the weight between his shoulders, then set out for the Grambling courthouse. It wasn't the courthouse he wanted — not by a long shot. He'd seen the inside of municipal court more times than he could count. Vagrancy. Loitering. Trespassing. Urinating in public. Being homeless wasn't illegal, but being a human and doing human things outside was.

One thing he was proud of: no panhandling charges. Fourteen years on the streets, and he'd not panhandled once. He'd gone hungry, Lord knows. Hungry and wet and cold and chafed and sick and hot and mosquito-bitten and lice-infested and weary — as weary as a man could be. He'd eaten free meals at every church, restaurant, hospital room and jail cell that offered. But it was always by invitation, never because he went begging. The distinction was important to him.

Still, the grassy square that surrounded the courthouse was shady and well stocked with benches. It was his favorite place to read on days as fine as this one.

He covered the six blocks to Main Street easily. Most days, he walked eleven miles, he'd once calculated. Since it wasn't yet 10 a.m., the benches were deserted except for other homeless people. Malachi recognized everyone except a tall and beefy white dude, mid-thirties, his work pants streaked with red mud, his hooded, brown eyes darting restlessly over the square. Was he vaguely familiar? No, maybe not.

Malachi hoped he was just passing through. Clearly bad news. He ducked out of the white dude's line of sight and found a bench under a massive oak.

He was engrossed in a story about soccer in the slums of South America when a professionally dressed man, maybe thirty-five, walked over and sat on a bench three feet away. The man was on his cell phone, and he looked right at Malachi.

“Oh, babe, you know what'd happen. She'd take the house and the kids. Her old man has so much clout I'd lose my job too. You have to be patient, and we have to be careful.”

So careful you're letting a perfect stranger hear you're cheating on your wife,
Malachi thought. I mean, the man was looking right at him.

It wasn't the first time. He'd told Pastor Liam about it — “The worst thing about being homeless is being looked right through.” Pastor Liam was something of a crazy white guy himself. But he got it. He told Malachi he quoted him every time he gave a speech.

The man finished his conversation and jammed his phone into a holster on his belt. Muttering to himself, he got up and walked back into the courthouse.

Malachi wondered if he had stabbed someone as the man was talking, stabbed someone right here in the open, would Mr Cheating Cell Phone Guy be able to describe him to the police?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tanenbaum Grambling caught Branigan as soon as she stepped off the elevator. “What've you got?” he growled.

She followed him to his office, the largest in the building, with a quartet of windows facing Main Street. He eschewed the gargantuan desk that fit his six-foot-four bulk and joined her in his seating area, furnished for eight. Trouble was, there were rarely eight people in the newsroom any more. Between layoffs and reporters filing remotely, the staff was seldom in the newsroom together. Branigan missed the camaraderie of her early years.

She took a burgundy leather chair while Tan settled with snorts and sighs on a couch facing her. Tan-4 didn't do anything quietly.

“What?” he barked.

There was a time she would've jumped. Now she barely registered his tone. Neither did he.

“When I went to see Liam about the homeless angle on the Resnick murder, I stumbled onto a good story,” she began. “It's about a homeless cyclist killed last week in a hit-and-run whose father was killed almost the same way five years ago. The father wasn't homeless, just poor. In fact, it was the father's death that threw the son into homelessness.

“But the point is, these people are invisible, you know? I think we should start covering the whole homeless issue more aggressively.”

“What the hell are the police doing?”

“I still have to check with them. But it's bigger than that. This happens all the time with these people. They're disposable.”

Tan looked pensive. “I'm hearing squawking from Main Street businessmen about the homeless,” he said. “Of course, they're bitchin' about panhandlers. Write your story for 1A, then we'll decide where to go.”

She nodded. “Then on Mrs Resnick. Whew! There's so much to go through.”

He looked unsympathetic. “And?”

“And I'm revisiting some of the major players to see if they remember something or realized something later. I've got Liam Delaney questioning the homeless guys about rumors that may have gone around ten years ago. Also, I want to see if that man who moved into Mrs Resnick's pool house is still around. Remember that?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tan said. “I'd nearly forgotten. So strange — then Alberta throwing him out of her living room for playing her piano. Which was no surprise.
Nobody
touched that piano but her.”

“Alberta Resnick's two sons still live here,” Branigan continued, “including Ramsey, the one who stayed at her house the night before she died. What's he — your second cousin?”

Tan waved away her question. “Whatever. I am well acquainted with Ramsey.”

“Well, I've got an interview set up with him. And I'll get to his brother. But their sister — the one who spent the night of July 4 in the house — lives at Lake Hartwell. And the two granddaughters are living on the coast of South Carolina.”

He nodded. “Sounds right.”

“One granddaughter in Edisto, the other, who apparently married well, on the Isle of Palms. So I was wondering...”

“If you can have an all-expenses-paid trip to the Grand Strand?”

She laughed. “Actually, those beaches are south of the Grand Strand. Mom and Dad still have their place, so I wouldn't need a hotel. Just mileage and meals.”

“Go ahead,” he said, dismissing her. “Keep it cheap.”

 

Branigan sat down at her desk. The room was cool and quiet; more like a morgue, she thought morosely, than a newsroom.

The Rambler
had started in the early 1900s as a Monday-Wednesday-Friday newspaper, founded by Tanenbaum Grambling Sr. His son, Junior, added a Sunday edition. But Tanenbaum III didn't want anything to do with the family business, so the newspaper fell to his younger brother, Josiah.

Josiah turned out to be the savviest newspaperman of them all, taking the paper to a daily, and building a state-of-the-art printing press and offices to anchor the south end of Main Street. At every leap, there were discussions about whether to change the name
Rambler
to something more sophisticated. But the people of Grambling loved vestiges of their small-town roots even as they were outgrowing them. The name remained.

In
The Rambler
's heyday, the newsroom had held sixty-five desks populated by editors, reporters, columnists, copyeditors, artists, designers, clerks, interns and secretaries. Now, under Tanenbaum IV, who'd taken on the dual roles of publisher and executive editor, the staff was down to a third of that number. No one blamed Tan-4. The whole industry was in seismic upheaval.

Branigan slipped on the ugly maroon sweater she kept on her chair to ward off the chilly air conditioning, and opened her email. Not too bad. She worked through it for an hour, then stood, stretched and poured a cup of coffee from her Thermos. The few reporters around were busily working, heads down, so she didn't interrupt.

She sat again, and called the police for an update on the hit-and-run that killed Vesuvius Hightower. They had nothing. She pulled out her notebook, recorder and earphones. There were a few quotes from the Hightowers, Dontegan and other men at the shelter that she wanted verbatim.
Rambler
policy dictated that she clean up their pronunciation, but she wanted their verbiage intact.

Fortunately, she had enough background from Liam on homelessness in Grambling that she was able to weave the narrative of the Hightowers' deaths seamlessly into a larger fabric. She wrote about Vesuvius's artistic talent and about how he and his father were inseparable, using quotes from the younger man's siblings.

By the time she had finished, it was 1:30, and her stomach was protesting the passing of the lunch hour. She saved the story to give it a final read-through before handing it over to Julie. When not up against a deadline, she liked to revisit a story after twenty-four hours and see what glaring holes or inappropriate wording struck her.

She told Julie she was heading out for the afternoon for interviews on the Resnick story. Julie nodded distractedly, as she did when editing one of Gerald's arts stories. If he turned in a story without at least four words an editor didn't know, he considered it a personal failure. Branigan peeled off her sweater, glad to escape the building.

Outside the sunshine and heat felt welcoming. She walked the six blocks up Main Street to Bea's, passing black iron lampposts hung with baskets of geraniums and petunias. Grambling worked hard to retain its small-town flourishes while courting banking and industry headquarters. Cranky old-timers like Branigan worried that new money would eventually trump old charm.

She ordered an uncut rye bagel and an iced tea, then took them to a sidewalk table. She opened the morning's
Rambler
and for the next half-hour caught up on stories she'd missed. Harley had the annual preview of bathing suits, poor guy. Gerald had a yawner about an art exhibition in an obscure Atlanta gallery. Not sure how that got in. But Marjorie had an exceptional piece on a woman in nearby South Carolina who'd researched her family land, including a graveyard that was covered when the mountain lake Jocassee filled in those secluded valleys. The writing was sparse, and got across the point of terrible loss without being syrupy. Branigan silently applauded Marjorie.

She chucked her trash into Bea's bin, and walked back to her taupe Civic, parallel parked outside the
Rambler
building. Her interview with Ramsey Resnick wasn't until three, so she planned to drive to the Forest Lawn community. She wanted to see if Billy's grandmother knew where he was.

The grandmother's address was on the incident reports, so she got to the dilapidated mill village with no trouble. But finding the house was another matter. Few of the houses were numbered any longer. Many of the old mill houses — distinctive four-room structures with sloping roofs to cover a shallow rear porch — were boarded up. Branigan knew from Liam that the homeless were likely to be inside, having pried boards from windows then replacing them to hide their presence.

The ones occupied by owners or renters looked scarcely better. Broken-down cars littered the streets and alleyways between houses. Rusted fences guarded yards of knee-high weeds and the occasional chained pit bull. Sporadically, there was evidence of someone trying to infuse a little beauty with a petunia or zinnia in a coffee can.

Billy's grandmother had given up even that attempt. The steps leading to her rickety porch were missing. A cement block had been placed as a substitute; it required some athleticism to reach the porch. Once Branigan did, she tiptoed across, afraid her foot would rip through the rotting wood at any moment.

She knocked on a door that wasn't latched. Her knock sent it swinging into a dark interior.

“Is that my lunch?” The voice sounded ancient, scratchy.

“No, ma'am. I'm Branigan Powers from
The Grambling Rambler.”

She heard shuffling. Moments went by, but finally an elderly woman, maybe seventy, maybe one hundred and ten, stood before her. “You Mobile Meals?” the woman asked, examining Branigan hopefully.

“No, ma'am. Did they not come today?”

“They did not.”

“Well, I can bring you something to eat. May I ask you a few questions first?”

The woman turned, leaving the door open, so Branigan followed her inside.

“Are you Mrs Shepherd — Billy Shepherd's grandmother?”

“Sure am,” she said, smacking her lips. She took Branigan's arm and escorted her to a long, slender table that took up almost an entire wall of the living room. It was covered with photos — babies, school pictures, wedding pictures, church directory photos — all in cheap metal frames. “This here's him.”

She plucked one of a large teenager, his laughing eyes squinting at the camera. “And then here”: another photo of a young man, possibly mid-twenties, standing over a car engine, caught unawares.

“Here's the last one I have. It was took after them po-lice hit him with that stunned gun in Gainesville. Made him crazy.”

Branigan recalled the incident report saying it took five officers to subdue Billy.

“Came home talkin' ‘bout flies and airplanes, all crazy,” his grandmother said disgustedly.

The man in the picture did look like a different person: bulkier, face transfigured, all but snarling at the photographer.

“When did you last see Billy?” Branigan asked.

“When he went off to prison in South Car-lina,” she replied, plopping onto a faded sofa that answered with a screech. “Damn near three years ago. Guess he still there.”

“What was his sentence?”

“Don't remember.”

“Do you remember ten years ago when he moved into the pool house of Mrs Alberta Resnick?”

The old woman broke into an amused cackle. “I shore do, honey. I thought he was stayin' in my back bedroom and come to find out he was spendin' half his time in that old lady's pool house.” She laughed again.

“Do you remember Mrs Resnick getting killed about that same time?”