The Murderer Vine (22 page)

“He is,” I said without sarcasm.

As long as you’re not a civil rights worker. I’d feel pretty safe in my house knowing he’s out there riding around in that big Olds of his. If I had a kid who’d get drunk in some highway bar, I’d feel pretty good that the sheriff would see he got home all right without driving. I’d feel confident he’d know when to relax the law and when he could step outside it. You don’t challenge the political structure of this county and you get pretty good protection. But every once in a while I wonder what he’d do to me if he found out what I was really up to. Or what his friends would do after he’d arrest me, for, say, not having my rear light working. He could very easily remove my gun and then drop me outside my house. And guess who’d be waiting down the block in a car without lights? Some of those guys from the Catfish Club. And guess who would investigate the crime? It’s pretty near perfect. Every time I thought about it, I felt my spine roll up like a window shade.

She got into the front seat and watched the dark road a while. Then she fell asleep again. Her head slid across the back of the seat till it rested on my shoulder. She had handled the situation well. I met only two cars on the back roads, and when I was a mile from the Ryerson farm, I woke her up. She slid behind the wheel.

I told her I was getting out soon.

“Remember the exact location where you’re dropping me,” I said. “The sun rises at five forty-seven. You drive south on this road to the crossroad. It’s two miles south. Make a right and go three and a half miles. That will put you on the main highway. Make a right and go north, away from Jackson.”

“Why do I go north?”

“That’ll take you away from Okalusa and the chance of seeing our friend. You be back here exactly at five forty-seven.”

“Taking pictures?”

“I’m a big one for nature studies a little before sunrise.”

“An interesting hobby.”

“A good shot of a cross-grained red-bellied pushover will gain me fame and fortune. I’ve worked out the time. If you stay at a steady thirty-five, you won’t attract attention and you’ll be back here just right. Wear my hat. Put your hair underneath and take off your make-up. Turn out the dashboard lights and a casual look at you will give the impression you’re a man.”

“But I’m not.”

And didn’t I know that.

But I let that remark pass.

“Joe,” she said, “wouldn’t it be simpler for me to find a little road and just park till it’s time to come back?”

“It would be very simple. But suppose someone sees you and pulls over to see what the matter is? People are helpful around here. Suppose some kid thinks no one is around and stops to strip the car, and finds you inside? You keep movin’ at a normal speed on a highway and no one’ll give you a second look. It’s cars on these back red-clay roads that attract attention. And don’t stop moving. Don’t go to a ladies’ room. You went to the ladies’ room in the restaurant.”

“You’re terribly observant.”

“So you won’t have to go again.”

“Ladies have enormous tanks. Don’t worry.”

“Okay. Let me out here.”

She stopped. I got out and told her to push in the headlight beams. I didn’t want those powerful lights sweeping over the Ryerson farm as she made a U-turn.

“Take care, y’ hear?” I nodded and closed the door gently. I watched her turn. A good girl. A clever girl. She handled the meeting with the sheriff very nicely. We made a good team. If I were to stay in the private detective business, I would have used her a lot. A few months ago a millionaire had come in. His ex-wife used to get drunk and allow herself to be blackmailed by gigolo after gigolo across Europe. Hotel after hotel overcharged her. Paris jewelry shops sent padded bills. What he wanted was a very shrewd woman operative to keep her out of trouble. He would have paid very well, and I regretfully declined the job. I had no one who could handle it. And all the time I had Kirby typing fifteen feet away!

I watched the car disappear down the road. I nursed the bitter wisdom of hindsight. I sighed and turned toward the dark mass of the pines.

I walked upward through the pine grove, dodging the branches that whipped at my face after I had pushed through them. The needles were fragrant, and so thick that it was like walking on a luxurious wall-to-wall carpet. Occasionally I broke a dead twig. It made much too loud a snapping noise. I thanked God that Ryerson didn’t like dogs. I bumped into several trees, but my sense of direction was pretty good. In five minutes I came out on the farm just below the melon patch.

I walked back and forth through the cultivated rows between the melon vines. Nothing. I got on my knees and felt carefully at the ground. It just felt cultivated. Nothing. And there I was with a fifteen-dollar pair of slacks being ruined on the damp ground. There were no cleared areas. Full-grown melon vines that had taken months to reach their growth. And you can’t transplant melon vines without a severe cutback being necessary. All the vines looked full-grown and healthy.

There went a perfectly good theory. Shot to hell. I began to think I must have misunderstood what they were saying back in the club about manure on the melon patch. I had been drinking quite a lot. Probably I had misunderstood what had been said.

I was about to call it off and go sit down in the pine woods till sunrise and wait for Kirby when I realized that in the center of the patch was a pile of weeds about two feet high. It looked as if someone had pulled all the weeds in the patch, saved them, and then had thrown them on top of the pile. But the pile measured about eight by four feet. Thirty-two square feet. You could grow a lot of melons in thirty-two square feet. It seemed a shame to lose all that valuable space just to get rid of some weeds. Why didn’t Ryerson walk a few more feet and throw the weeds under the pine trees?

I had the time, I had the place. I had nothing to do till sunrise anyway. I kneeled down and carefully shifted the pile of weeds to the nearest open row. I wadded big clumps in my arms. I was smart enough to take off my jacket, so all I ruined was my shirt. My pants were already filthy. In five minutes I had the plot all cleaned up.

By now my eyes had adjusted to the starlight. It was enough for me to see that the soil underneath had been freshly turned over. I got on my knees and began shoveling the dirt away with both hands. Four inches down I smelled the same penetrating stench I had not smelled since Korea.

The Chinese had made a mass grave in the next valley which we took in an offensive three weeks later.

I began breathing through my mouth. That way I avoided smelling. The stink was something you finally got used to in Korea but only after a few days on the line. But I wasn’t going to get any few days here to adjust. I would only have till sunrise, which was now only thirty-five minutes away.

After two minutes of this primitive digging, my hand struck something smooth. I braced myself and slid my fingers along it. It was a shoe.

I slid my fingers upward. The shoe was attached to a foot. I reversed my position and began digging where the head would be.

Two minutes more and I had a face.

I took a fountain pen flashlight from my jacket, bent over the face with the jacket over my head to shield the light, and turned it on.

It was the face of a white man. It looked as if it had been beaten with a heavy iron chain. All the front teeth were loose. Everything else was a mess. In five minutes I had all three bodies side by side. Two blacks and a white. The blacks had not been beaten. But three weeks in the damp soil was a lot of time. I turned aside and vomited up my dinner.

I opened the camera bag. I took out the Leica and attached it to the focusing bellows. I had practiced a few times. I screwed the Leica into the tripod attachment. I straddled the tripod over the face of the white boy. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in democracy. It was just that the kid’s father was paying for everything. Let him be first.

As I worked, I could hear Farr’s voice droning on as if he were giving a lecture to the three dead boys.

“Here’s a lens designed for available-light photography. It uses aspheric lens elements which eliminate all spherical aberration. This job we have here is very interesting. I consider it a challenge. Now, notice the lens. It has an angular field of forty-five degrees. It has six elements. It’s got a click-stop diaphragm with half F stops. Forget it all. Just take a reading all over the thing to be photographed — ” “Thing” is right.

If I can do it without vomiting again.

“If your meter reading shows extremes to one side or the other, average it out. Take a few shots with a larger and smaller stop just in case you get rattled and think you’re going crazy. You have plenty of film and it’s cheap.”

Nothing to do now but wait for available light.

I sat back on the pile of dirt I had dug out like a dog panting after a valuable bone. My pants were damp on the seat. I would have given twenty bucks to be able to smoke. Anything to take that smell away. My mouth was dry from breathing with it wide open.

Time crawled. The three boys lay stretched out with their terrible faces upturned to the stars. I didn’t feel any rage or pity. They went down knowing what they were getting into. They play rough in the South. Honor to their courage. But no pity.

Farr had said I could start shooting as soon as I could make out the F numbers on the lens housing from a distance of two feet.

Not yet. I could see the outlines of the camera all right, and there was a faint tinge of gray and pink in the east on top of the ridge.

I stood up and stretched. I heard a deep croak just behind me. Part of my mind said it was a frog, but another part made me whip around and crouch, flinging up my arm to block any blow which might be coming down at me. My foot stepped on a soft mass which wriggled and let out a strangled croak. I almost went five feet in the air with my legs racing wildly, just like in one of those old Mickey Mouse cartoons. But it was just another one of those goddam frogs. This one was only a little one, about three inches long. I had squashed it flat. I felt sorry for it.

I leaned against a tree trunk. My pants were too damp to sit down. Time crawled some more. I tried to feel warm by thinking of going fishing for hammerhead shark in my brand-new cruiser, which some lucky salesman didn’t yet know was mine.

Finally I could read the numbers at two feet.

I shot one roll of each face. I had a problem I hadn’t foreseen when I wanted to shoot the teeth. How to keep the lips back?

I finally picked up some small twigs from the underbrush under the pines. One across the hinge of the jaws kept them open, and three between the lips.

I forced myself to work slowly even though the light began to increase. I had a bad moment when I began to reload the first time. The film kept slipping out of the take-up spool. I found my fingers began to tremble with annoyance. I wanted to smash the camera against a tree and then race down the slope and get the hell out of there and go home to safe New York and blackmailers and extortion artists. At least they didn’t have the local cops on their side.

Instead I counted to twenty slowly. I got a grip on myself. I fed the film in slowly and correctly.

In ten minutes I was finished. I packed everything away in the camera bag. I shoved the dirt back, stamped it flat, and dumped the weeds as evenly as they had been placed there by Ryerson. It looked the same to me as when I started, but I didn’t have a farmer’s eye.

I did have enough of one to see my footprints all around. I tried smoothing them out, but my attempt to cover them up made marks just as obvious. I wasn’t working in sand. I had damp soil to deal with. That’s what comes of being a city boy. You live your life on concrete. You never think of footprints.

If Ryerson saw them — and I had to assume he would — he would think they were there because of the mass grave. He would think so because they wouldn’t be anywhere else. He might think someone was stealing water-melons, but he was no fool. He was bound to get very thoughtful and probably he would phone the sheriff.

The sheriff might think the FBI had been up there. The sheriff would work his contacts in Jackson and find there were no FBI men around. He might even find out there were no Department of Justice men around either. So it might be a local boy not in the club who might be after the reward. And it might be a stranger in town.

Me.

What might work would be a good smoke screen. I remembered listening once to a sergeant lecturing us on guerrilla tactics.

“You wanna hold up tanks,” he said, “you gotta remember tanks are so vulnerable the jockeys are nervous. They get nervous about anything. We was in the Ardennes in forty-five and I heard a couple Tigers coming down the road. We was buildin’ an antitank barrier across the road and another ten minutes we would finish. I swiped ten soup plates from a house and I laid them across the road in a row. Nice and even.

“The tanks came up to the plates. They stopped. They couldn’t go around because of the houses. They stopped fifteen minutes wondering what they was. They thought maybe they was some new kind of mines. Every time the hatch would open, I’d let them have a spray. So we built our barrier.”

I had to think of something like that for Ryerson. Something unusual. Something weird.

I went back in the woods and scrabbled around. I found the flattened green frog. It looked like a Rorschach blot. I got a branch about four feet long. I went back to my little garden plot. By now I knew it as well as the five people whose guest I had been at the Catfish Club. I shoved aside some of the weeds and dug down. I reached for the face I remembered and pulled loose one of the loosened teeth. I covered everything up again. I sharpened one end of the branch with my pocket knife and split the other end. I jammed the sharp end right into the middle of the weeds in the dead center of the plot. Dead center. Pun by Dunne. I put the frog in the cleft end. I unraveled a thread from my sock and let the tooth dangle from the frog’s mouth.

I tried to put myself in Ryerson’s muddy farm shoes. He would come across my artwork. Probably not next day, and not the day after. He had a truckload of melons, and it would take him about two days to sell them. So he would be coming up in about three days. Say two to be careful.