One morning over coffee Gardner told me he was quitting. His girl back home had written to tell him she was pregnant. He went, found out soon enough that she wasn’t pregnant at all, only lonely, and shortly after turned up in Memphis again. Teamed with someone else now, but we kept in touch. After that, his heart never quite let him get back into the job. Riding alone one night, he answered a disturbance call at a motel, an altercation between a prostitute named L’il Sal and her client. All of us knew L’il Sal. She’d turn black to white and charm the sun down if it gave her points. Either Gardner had forgotten L’il Sal or didn’t care. He was listening to her story when the John came up behind and slit his throat with a buck knife.
Chapter Five
“Ordinarily, the way we’d work this is, State would send someone over. Highway Patrol. But they’re too shorthanded, couple of guys out on short-term disability, another off in Virginia for training. Not to mention the backup in their own cases. Someone’ll be there, the barracks commander told me, but when he’ll be there…” Bates grunted. “I also got the notion he might not be the barrack’s best.”
“That had to make you feel better.”
“You bet it did. We still get breakfast, Thelma?” he said to the waitress who’d dropped off coffees, gone about her business and now ambled back around to us. She wore badly pilled gray polyester slacks, a black sweater hanging down almost to her knees in front and hiked over her butt behind. Hair pinned up in a loose swirl from which strands had escaped and hung out like insect legs.
“You see there on the menu where it says breakfast twenty-four hours a day, Lonnie?”
“You’re not open twenty-four hours a day, Thelma.”
“Not much gets by you, does it? Must be what keeps down the criminal element hereabouts, why the good people of this town keep reelecting you.”
“What’s good?”
“Nothing. But you can eat most of it.”
I found myself wondering how many times they’d been through this routine.
“What are you doing asking me anyway? We both know what you’re gonna have. Three eggs over easy, grits, ham. You’re done, some of these other folk might appreciate getting the chance to order.”
“Got it by yourself, huh?”
“Yeah. You want anything besides coffee, Don Lee?”
“Coffee’ll do me,” he said.
“New girl supposed to be here, worked half a shift yesterday. Guess she decided maybe this wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life after all. Her loss. God knows there’s rewards. Toast?”
Sheriff Bates nodded.
“You know what, I’ll have an order of toast, too,” Don Lee said.
“Been most of an hour since the boy ate,” Bates said.
“And what can I get you, sir?”
I ordered a club sandwich on wheat without mayo and a salad, no dressing. The coffee was actually very good. For a long time I’d never order coffee in restaurants. I liked it the way we used to fix it back home, throwing a handful of coffee into boiling water. Nothing else ever seemed worth bothering with. Then coffeehouses started sprouting everywhere. I didn’t much care for their little ribbon-tied bundles of gourmet this and that, trinkets and dumb posters, but they brought coffee in America to a new level.
“What do you want to know?” Bates said.
“Usually I find it doesn’t much matter what I want to know, I just get what people want to tell me. So I go with that.” I looked around. A dozen or so people were in the diner, most of them sitting alone over plates of chicken-fried steaks, burgers, spaghetti. Three middle-aged women at a back table laughing too loudly and looking about furtively to see if anyone noticed. “It’s been a while, as I said. But as I recall, we generally started with a body.”
“And while we do things our own way up here, we don’t do them that differently.” Bates smiled. “Don Lee was on duty that night.”
Caught by surprise, the deputy said, “Right,” then took a sip of coffee to gather himself. “Call came in a little after twelve, which is when the bars close ’round here-”
“What day was it?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m assuming it had to be a weekday, that bars don’t close at twelve on weekends even ’round here.”
“Right. It was a Monday.”
“Back in Memphis everyone called Monday the day nothing ever happens.”
“Hard to tell it from any other day ’round here.”
“You were on by yourself, right? There’re only the two of you?”
“Lonnie and me, right. We have someone on dispatch, on the radio that is, eight to four every day. Lonnie’s daughter, mostly, or else Danny Lambert. He was sheriff close to twenty years before retiring. And we get lots of part-time help with answering phones, filing, all that, from Smith High. Secretarial classes looking for… what do they call them?”
“Practicums,” Bates said.
“Right.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to come on like some kind of asshole here.” Maybe I was bearing down too hard. “You two’ve worked together a while, you have a pace of your own. So does the town. Out of habit, experience, just because I’m who I am, I’m inclined to go about this a certain way. But it’s your investigation-yours all the way. I’m a ride-along.”
“Appreciate your saying that,” Bates said. “But we’d be more than one kind of fool not to accept the very assistance we asked for.”
“Okay… So how’d the call come?” I asked.
Don Lee answered. “Kids phoned it in, out there looking for a place to park. They’ll go out to a block of new houses-every few years developers put these up, but no one ever seems to move into them-and they’ll back in a driveway like they belong there. Girl stops with bra at half-mast. What’s wrong? Seth says. Seth McEvoy. Quarterback with the high school team, plays clarinet, honor student. What is that? Sarah says. Sarah Perkins, her family runs the local dollar store. Sarah herself’s a few steps off to the side of most of us, I guess. At any rate, she points.”
Our food came. Thelma dealt plates off an extended arm, stepped away and came back with a tray holding A-1 steak sauce, Tabasco, ketchup, Worcestershire. Seeing it, I had a rush of recognition. If we ordered iced tea, she’d ask sweetened or unsweetened.
“Y’all set, then?”
“Looks great, Thelma. Thanks.”
“What she was pointing to was what looked like a scarecrow standing there at the side of the carport. Sarah says it moved-that was why she noticed. Doc Oldham says no way, the body’d been dead four, five days. So we figure something else moved.”
“Field mice, most likely,” Bates said. “We build subdivisions where they used to live, the mice don’t know they’re supposed to leave.”
“Especially if provisions keep getting shipped in,” I said.
“Right. Seth gets out of the car and goes over to look. Male, mid- to late forties, Doc figures. He’s wearing two or three shirts, a pair of Wranglers so old the rivets are worn away. Been homesteading under the carport for a while from the look of it. Had a bedroll there, couple of sacks of belongings, an old backpack with one strap.”
“He’d been chewed on some. Eyes and tongue, mostly.”
“Postmortem?”
Don Lee nodded.
“Cause of death?”
“The developer had finished up the subdivision in a hurry and moved on. Yards still had these stakes set out in them, eighteen inches long, sharpened at one end. Someone pulled up one of those and drove it into his chest. Someone’s seen one too many vampire movies, Doc said.”
“That’s not gonna be easy,” Bates said. “Takes some industry.”
“Broken fingernails,” Don Lee went on, “maybe from the struggle, maybe from before, hard to say. Splinters in his palms. Tried to pull the stake out, we figure.”
“Or keep it from going in.”
“We found him pinned against some latticework, trellis kind of thing. Arms crossed above his head, wrists turned out. He’d been fastened up there with picture wire.”