The Devil and the River (57 page)

She turned and looked at Gaines. “Lillian,” she said, and it was not a question.

Gaines nodded. “That’s what I think, too.”

“If they knew what he’d done . . . if they actually knew what he’d done and they said nothing, then they—” She shook her head, disbelieving, confused. “And what happened with Clifton Regis? What happened with him and Della?”

“I think Della loved him, still does, and they wanted to get away. I think it happened exactly as she said, exactly as Clifton told me. Matthias found out, and Clifton got a visit from Leon Devereaux. Then, just to make sure that he couldn’t get to his sister, Matthias used whatever influence he had with Wallace to get Clifton sent up to Parchman. I don’t think that Matthias is capable of killing anyone, but I think he’s more than capable of warning them in the very strongest terms. Clifton Regis ends up in jail for his trouble, and Della’s under house arrest. I think Matthias has them both good and scared.”

“And Earl Wade?”

“I think he knew. I think it comes back to him every once in a while, but I don’t think he even understands what he knows anymore.”

“And why not tell the truth? Why not just tell the truth of what happened and be done with it?”

“I don’t know, Maryanne. The family name, the reputation, the shame, the fact that this is something that started, as far as we know, all of twenty years ago, and even after the first week of hiding it, any one of them could have been charged with aiding and abetting a felon, of obstructing justice, any number of things.”

She was pensive then, an air of defeatism hanging over her, as if her fundamental belief in the rightness of life, her certainty regarding the natural balance and order of things had been tilted wildly from its axis. Such a change in perspective could not be reverted. Such a conviction could never again be restored.

“I am sorry,” she said

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what I should be sorry for, but I feel I should be. Sorry that I didn’t ask more questions. Sorry that I didn’t remember her more often. Sorry I forgot that she was dead.”

“You can’t be sorry for such things,” Gaines said.

“Maybe not, but I am,” she replied. “So what do we do?”

“We go and find him.”

“Do you think we will?”

“Yes, I do. I don’t know where, but I think we will find him.”

I
t was easier than Gaines had expected to find Eugene Wade. Gaines had not known what obstacles he would encounter. New Orleans was a big city, and if a man wished to be lost, then he could be lost so very easily. But it seemed that Eugene did not want to be lost; he did not want to be invisible, and within an hour they had an address from the phone directory, an old address granted, an address where Eugene no longer lived, but the current tenant was a friend of Eugene’s and gave them the address to which he’d moved only weeks before.

Gaines, Hagen, and Maryanne Benedict drove over there. Gaines asked Maryanne if she would be willing to stay in the car while they went up and checked out the place.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Really? After fetching me all the way from home, you want me to stay in the car? Not a hope, Sheriff. If what you think is true, if Eugene Wade killed Nancy Denton and that family hid this thing for all these years, then I want to see the son of a bitch’s face when you confront him.”

They crossed the street and knocked on the door. An elderly woman answered, asked after their business. Gaines produced ID, said they were hoping to see Eugene Wade.

“More than likely he ain’t here,” she said. “Music playing so loud all the time when he is, but you go on up and check. You go see for yourself. All the way to the top in the attic. His room’s up there.”

Gaines went first, Maryanne behind him, Hagen last.

They had spoken little on the drive over, and though they had been in the car for more than an hour, it seemed as though that hour had vanished within a moment.

“It makes sense,” Maryanne said at one point. “I don’t want it to make sense, but it does. That night, the night he left with Catherine and Della. He must have gone back to the house and then left again to find us. Maybe he came down through the woods and saw her with Michael. She wouldn’t have been alarmed, not to see Eugene. Maybe she went to speak to him, left Michael behind for a moment, and . . . and he must have just . . .” Her voice trailed into silence.

Gaines did not speak. She was putting these things together just as he had and seeing a truth that she did not want to see.

“Eugene was sixteen when Nancy went missing,” Maryanne said. “He strangled her. Michael found the body, did what he did, and then Matthias found out. I think Matthias has known all this time. Earl, too. Maybe even Della. And they hid this from everyone.”

“What else were they going to do?” Gaines asked. “This is the Wade family. This is the Wade name. This is a dynasty that’s supposed to go on, generation after generation. They can’t possibly tell the world that they have a killer in their midst.”

“And they just let him get away with it?”

“They let him get away with a great deal more than the death of Nancy Denton. There was Morgan City as well. I think Eugene killed those two little girls, and that’s when Matthias knew he had to get Eugene away somewhere. I think we’ll find that Eugene’s rent, his bills, everything is paid for. And it’s paid for by Matthias. He’s the one directing this, dictating how it goes. He has his own situations to deal with, his own secrets, believe me. I think he has done everything he can to keep the Wade name free of scandal. I think he used Leon Devereaux to do a great many things that we will never know about, least of which was separating Della and Clifton.”

“And Matthias killed Devereaux?”

“Again, I am not sure. Maybe he did, or maybe Della killed him. We are going to find out.” Gaines shook his head resignedly. “Or maybe we’ll never know.”

Maryanne fell silent again, looking from the window as they crossed the bridge, trying perhaps to come to terms with what was now unfolding around her, trying perhaps not to think of it at all.

They went quietly, Gaines at the head of the trio, stepping lightly on the edges of the risers so as to make as little sound as possible. Why he felt it necessary to do this, he could not have explained. He was delivering an unwanted message, a statement of the truth to someone who wished for such a truth to never be known. He felt as if he were invading someone’s life, someone’s reality, and though it was necessary, though it was vital that such an invasion occur, it nevertheless felt strangely cruel. It was not something that Gaines considered greatly, for there had been so many strange and disparate emotions throughout these past days that something further was of no great concern.

Gaines stopped on the uppermost landing and waited for Maryanne Benedict and Richard Hagen to reach him. They stood together, they looked at one another, and for a moment Gaines held his breath.

His heart did not race, nor his pulse, nor the blood in his temples. He felt no rush of adrenaline, no agitation of nerves in his gut. He felt calm, unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world.

He raised his hand and knocked on the door.

“Mr. Wade?” he asked. “Eugene Wade?”

There was no immediate answer.

“Mr. Wade . . . this is the Breed County Sheriff’s Department.”

Not a sound came from inside the room.

Gaines unclipped his holster.

“You going in?” Hagen asked.

Gaines nodded.

“Warrant?”

“Not gonna get one, and right now I don’t care,” Gaines replied.

He reached out and turned the handle. The door was locked.

“Back up,” he said. Maryanne and Hagen did so, and Gaines, stepping away two or three feet, then raised his right foot and kicked the door just at the side of the lock. The frame was not substantial, and the door opened suddenly, slamming back against the inside wall.

The smell was immediate and unquestioningly familiar.

Gaines told Hagen to stay with Maryanne for a moment, and he went on inside.

He held his hand to his face. This was two days’, three days’ dead, and he knew that at least some small part of this mystery was now resolved.

Later, the autopsy complete, the coroner would estimate time of death somewhere between six a.m. and noon on Saturday the 3rd.

Eugene Wade had not known how to hang himself. He did not understand the basic mechanics of weight versus speed of descent, factoring in such things as the length of the drop and how this determined the force brought to bear upon the cervical vertebrae.

Hanging people was a science. A simple science perhaps, but a science all the same.

Eugene had been dead for three days, and it seemed at first that no one had known.

But later—once the facts of his injury was made known to Gaines—it became obvious that Eugene had been visited by someone. It did not take a great leap of imagination to determine who that might have been.

Eugene Wade’s left hand was bandaged tightly, and once those bandages were removed, it was evident that one of his fingers was missing. The wound had become infected, and had he not received treatment, the blood poisoning alone might have killed him. It was also noted, confirming Gaines’s suspicion regarding the identity of his assailant, that Eugene Wade’s blood type was AB.

Later, Gaines tried to imagine the conversation that had taken place between Eugene and Leon Devereaux. What had Matthias sent Devereaux to tell him? That he should disappear out of the state? That he should disappear for good? Had Eugene responded by saying that he would tell everything, that he would confess to the killing of Nancy Denton, that he would ruin the Wade name for all time?

Leon’s visit must have changed everything. Leon sang a different song. Perhaps he told Eugene that he was now on his own, that the game was over. The girl’s body had been found, and the soldier who loved her was dead. Eugene had no way out. If he confessed, well, Matthias had a judge in his pocket. Eugene’s accusations—unfounded, a lone voice of protest—would be ruled inadmissible by Marvin Wallace. Eugene would be charged also with the murder of Michael Webster, and he would go up to Parchman Farm for life. And perhaps that life wouldn’t be so long: there would be a disagreement, an exercise yard altercation, and Eugene Wade would be found bleeding out from a stomach wound in the dirt. Maybe Matthias Wade would get Clifton Regis to do it, the perfect irony, and Clifton would be promised exoneration and release, a reunion with Della. Of course, Della and Clifton would never be able to stay at the house; they would have to move away, to disappear and make their own life with whatever Wade money they could get, but a sister married to a colored was far and away a better burden to bear than a serial killer for a brother.

Had Matthias told Leon to hurt Eugene, to physically harm him, or had Leon taken the law into his own hands and exceeded his brief?

So Eugene had no more money, and time was at his heels. He was caught between Leon Devereaux and an altogether unknown future.

Perhaps Eugene had long since decided that he would never run, that he would make his escape more final, more complete, an escape that could never be undone.

The guilt he carried for the deaths of Nancy Denton, Anna-Louise Mayhew, and Dorothy McCormick had finally brought sufficient pressure to bear on him that he knew he could hide no further.

Or maybe he had considered some thought like Judith Denton. Maybe if I go now, I will find that my mother is still waiting for me.

So it came back to the other option, the easiest one of all.

And it was that option he decided to take in the early hours of Saturday, the 3rd of August, 1974.

He hung himself right there in his own attic apartment from a rafter in the ceiling. The rope he had selected was too fine for such a job, and—in the few hours after he had choked out his last breath—the weight of his body had brought such constriction to bear upon his throat that his face was almost black. His tongue protruded, distended and swollen, and his eyes were a deep red.

He had hung there for three days. No one knew, save perhaps Leon Devereaux and Matthias Wade. No one else had cared enough to find out where he was.

Gaines looked at that black and distended face for a long time, and then he walked back out to the hallway.

“Go down and call it in,” he told Hagen.

Maryanne accompanied Hagen. Hagen asked the landlady for the use of her phone.

Gaines returned to Eugene’s room and made a cursory search. He did not expect to find anything that would directly implicate Eugene Wade in the murder of Nancy Denton, nor the murders of Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew. But just as had been the case so many times in the preceding weeks, what he expected and what he got were not the same thing.

Gaines found the small leather suitcase open at the foot of the bed, left there—it seemed—to be found.

Within it were newspaper clippings, photographs, odd and unrelated articles—a faded yellow ribbon, a small gold locket, a dried flower—now little more than dust—pressed inside a folded sheet of paper, a silver bangle with a turquoise stone. Other such tokens and mementos.

It was the newspaper clippings that told a story that John Gaines could barely believe.

He sat there on the edge of Eugene Wade’s bed, and it seemed that where he was—that stinking attic apartment with a corpse hanging from the rafter—seemed to vanish from his awareness. He leafed through the clippings, scanned the headlines, grasped the import of what he was reading, and he began to understand what Matthias Wade had unleashed when he had chosen to hide the truth of his brother from the world.

He realized he was holding his breath. He inhaled forcibly and perceived the edges of his vision blurring. He felt as if he would lose his balance, and he held on to the edge of the bedframe.

Eventually, he rose, gathered up the small case, and walked back to where Eugene Wade hung from the rafter.

Gaines looked at the man’s face, almost unrecognizable though it was, and he knew he was looking at the face of the devil.