Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel Page 2

  His radio crackled. “You coming, 32?”

  Voncille. If Silas was the Chabot police force, she was City Hall.

  “Can’t, Miss Voncille,” he said. “Got something I want to check out here.”

  She sighed. If he wasn’t there to do it, she’d have to put on the orange vest and direct traffic at the mill entrance for the early shift change.

  “You owe me,” she said. “I just got my hair done.”

  He rogered and hung the radio on his belt and shook his head at what he was about to do to his good leather boots.

  He slowed to five miles an hour. When the road ended at the bottom of the hill he braked but kept moving, his own private mud slide. The Jeep turned by itself and he turned with it and soon had it stopped. He took his cowboy hat off the seat beside him and got out and pushed his door to and passed into the trees and descended the hill, digging his heels in the wet carpet of leaves, slipping once and grabbing a vine, which rained a pail’s worth of water on him. Prettier land down here and, too steep to clear-cut, trees other than pines. The trunks were darker in the rain, some shelved with rows of mushroom or layered in moss. The air grew cooler the lower he went and at the bottom he brushed at his shoulders and emptied his hat, the hill tropic behind him, its odor of rain and worms, dripping trees, the air charged as if lightning had just struck, squirrels flinging themselves through patches of sky and the snare-roll of a woodpecker a few hollows over, the cry of an Indian hen.

  He picked his way along the water’s edge, setting off a series of bullfrogs from the cattails and reeds. Cane Creek was more like a slough, he thought. It hardly moved at all, its blackberry water stirred only by the wakes of frogs or bubbles from the bottom or the bloops fish made. Among floating leaves and dark black sticks, liquor bottles and their reflections and faded beer cans and theirs had collected in coves and turns, and he wondered who the hell would come all the way out here to litter. He fanned his face again, insects like toy planes propellering madly through the high branches. Might just be a bobcat, he thought. Come down to the creek to die. That old instinct: hurt, head for water.

  He thought of his mother, dead eight years. The time the two of them lived in a hunting cabin on land owned by a white man. No water in the place, no electricity, no gas. They’d been squatters there for less than a week when a one-eared tomcat appeared on the porch just past dark, scrotum big as a walnut. They shooed it off but morning found it lying at the steps with a twitching mouse in its jaws. My Lord, his mother said, that cat’s applying for a job. They hired it and it insinuated itself all the way onto his mother’s bed, where she said it warmed her feet. They moved from that cabin a few months later and the cat moved with them. It would live with them for years, but then, just before he left to go to Oxford his senior year, the cat disappeared. By the time he noticed, his mother said it had been gone nearly a month.

  “Where?”

  “Just off, baby,” she said.

  “Off?”

  She was washing clothes in the sink, still in her hairnet from work. “To die, Silas,” she’d said. “When an animal’s time come, it goes off to die.”

  The underbrush thinned as he went, the air hotter, muggier, and suddenly the trees had thrown open their arms to a high white sky, a burst of glowing logs and schools of steaming toadstools and clouds of gnats, wet leaves sparkling like mirrors and a spiderweb’s glowing wires. A mosquito whined past his ear and he slapped at his arms and neck, going faster, leaves plastered to his boots, aware of a sharpness to the air, now a sweet rot.

  Something fifty yards ahead began to lurch toward him. He stopped and thumbed the quick-release of his sidearm as other things moved as well, the earth floor stirring to life. But the thing veered away flapping into the air, just a buzzard, feet hanging, and then others were winging their duffle bodies over the water or waddling up the bank.

  The odor grew worse as he stepped closer to where the land gave over to swamp. Farther down more of the birds lined the bank like crows on steroids, unfeathered necks and heads and some with faces red and tumored as a rooster’s, some stepping from one scaled claw to the other and some with their beaks open.

  He hoped not to have to shoot any as he mushed along fanning the air with his hand. Here he was two years as Chabot’s law and he’d never fired his pistol except at targets. Practice. Never for real. Not even a turtle on a log.

  Another of the ungainly birds heaved itself from the bank and kicked the swamp face, breaking its own image, and flapped up to the knuckled low branch it stood clasping and unclasping with its feet. He remembered somebody, Larry Ott, telling him that once a flock of buzzards took to roosting in a tree, the tree began to die. He could smell why. He took a ripe breath and went on as the limbs closed in again. He ducked a low vine, wary of snakes. Cottonmouth-moccasins, his mother used to call them. Mean ole things, she’d say. Big and shiny as a black man’s arm, and a mouth as white as the cotton he pick.

  Silas took off his hat. In the distance, three or four lumps in rags of plaid clothing, lodged in the water among a vista of cypress trees and knees and buzzards black and parliamentary and all the flies a world could need. A large shadow passed him and he looked overhead where more buzzards circled yet, some at near altitudes not colliding but seeming to pass through one another, their wings and tail feathers sun-silvered at the tips. His mouth was dry.

  These early birds had been at work awhile, and the heat hadn’t helped. From this far off, and at this level of decomposition, an ID should have been impossible. But Silas shook his head. Keyed his radio.

  IT WAS THE PLAID, he’d later tell French.

  A few days back Silas had been called out to a secluded area behind a grown-up cotton field off Dump Road. An old Chevy Impala burning. The driver of a passing garbage truck had seen smoke and radioed it in.

  Silas knew the car from its charred vanity plates, M&M, Morton Morrisette’s nickname. He’d played second base to Silas’s shortstop in high school. After graduation M&M had worked for a dozen years at the mill until he hurt his back; now he got a small disability and, allegedly, sold weed on the side. Because he was smart and careful, and because he avoided narcotics, he’d never been stung by the police. Watched, yes: French and the county narcotics investigator managed to keep their eyes on nearly every known or suspected dealer in the county, but barring violence or a complaint, or someone flipping on him, they’d had to let him be, and M&M had sold his marijuana to trusted locals both black and white since the early 1990s.

  Regarding the burning car, Silas had called French—for anything higher than simple assault, he had to notify the chief investigator. French arrived quickly and took over and within twenty-four hours had found an elderly woman who’d seen a man matching the description of a well-known crackhead in the car with M&M. French and the narcotics investigator had been watching this man—Charles Deacon—for a while and used this occasion to swear out a warrant. But thus far they hadn’t found him. Or M&M either, for that matter. While Silas had gone back to his patrols, looking for trespassers on Rutherford land, writing tickets, directing traffic, moving roadkill, French had searched M&M’s house and discerned that somebody, presumably M&M, had been shot there and then moved. Though the place had been carefully wiped down, they’d still found a few blood specks and prized from the wall a .22 bullet, mushroomed so badly from impact that it would likely be of no use. They did not, however, locate the gun. As for drugs, they found nothing but a pack of Top rolling papers, not even any shake. A few days later, they’d found M&M’s plaid fedora snagged in a tree near a creek miles away, in Dentonville. But since the Rutherford girl’s disappearance, everybody had back-burnered Deacon and all but forgotten M&M.

  SILAS WAS SITTING on a fallen log upwind from the body. Even here, the edge of the swamp, he could see how swollen M&M’s face was—the size of a pillow, blacker than he’d been while alive and grotesque and pink where the skin had split, eyes and tongue eaten out, much of his flesh torn by the buzzards, a
long lazy line of entrails snaking away in the water.

  Silas thought he smelled cigarette smoke and was about to turn around when someone tapped him on the back.

  “Shit,” he said, nearly coming off the log.

  Standing behind him, French set his investigator’s kit down. “Boo,” he said.

  “That ain’t funny, Chief.”

  French, a former game warden and a Vietnam vet, laughed and showed his small sharp teeth. He was late fifties, tall and thin, pale green eyes behind his sunglasses and close-cropped red hair and matching mustache. He had a blade for a chin and ears that stuck out and that he could move individually. Said his nickname in Nam had been Doe. He wore blue jeans and a tuckedin camo T-shirt that showed a Glock 9 mm in a beefy hand, aimed at the viewer. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT, his chest said, FOREVER. The pistol on his belt was a dead match to the one on his shirt.

  He said, “M&M?”

  Silas flapped his hand toward the body. “What the buzzards and catfish done left of him.”

  “You go out there?”

  “Hell naw.”

  “Good.”

  Above all, the CI hated having his crime scenes disturbed. He bent to see Silas’s face and smirked. “You go puke in that water yonder the catfish’ll eat it.”

  Silas ignored him, looked up at what sky showed through the trees and swirling buzzards. He thought of M&M when they were kids, how every time you bought a candy bar at recess he’d be there asking for a piece. If not for school lunches, he and his red-eyed sisters would’ve starved.

  French sat with a Camel hanging on his bottom lip and slipped off his boots and set them side by side on the log and pulled on a pair of waders, adjusting the suspenders.

  “Watch out for gators,” Silas said.

  French smushed out his cigarette on the log and put the butt in his shirt pocket and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

  “I shall return,” he said and rose and walked off like a fisherman, not even pausing as the swamp began, slogging out, lowering with each step as if descending a staircase, his wake gently dissolving behind him.

  Overhead, crows were swirling, too, their caws something Silas had been hearing awhile, saying whatever crows said.

  Near the body and in water to his waist, the chief bent, seemingly unperturbed by the smell or sight. He fished his digital camera from his pocket and began to take pictures, sloshing around to get every angle. Then he stood for a long time, just looking. From Game & Fish, he’d got on at the sheriff’s department and worked his way up the ladder to his current position. Rumor was he might run for sheriff when the present one retired next year.

  After a while he came back and sat on the log and shrugged the suspenders off and kicked out of the waders, flexing his feet.

  “How deep’s it get out there?” Silas asked.

  French grunted, pulling on his boots. “Deep enough to dump a body, somebody thunk. All this rain brung him up.”

  “You figure his hat floated all the way to Dentonville?”

  “Upstream?”

  “Somebody trying to thow you off then.”

  “Be my guess, honcho. I’d say we dealing with above-average criminal intelligence.”

  “That eliminates Deacon.”

  “Maybe.”

  French pulled his boots on and rose and took more pictures from the bank, shook out another Camel.

  Soon the birds went all aflutter again and a pair of paramedics and the coroner came bumbling out of the trees slapping their arms, cursing. One of the EMTs was Angie, a pretty, light-skinned girl, petite, slightly pigeon-toed, that Silas had been seeing a few months now, getting more exclusive by the week. Thing he liked best about her was her mouth, how it was always in a little pucker, off to the side, always working, like she had an invisible milk shake. She sniffled, too, from bad sinuses, and weird as it was, he found it cute.

  Tab Johnson, her driver, an older white man who always seemed to be shaking his head, was doing so now, chewing his Nicorette gum.

  Angie stood behind Silas and touched her shoulder to his back and he leaned into her thinking of the night before, her on top and her face buried in his neck, her slow hips and breath in his ear. Now her hand was going up his spine. She smelled like her bedsheets and suddenly what she called his “wangdangler” moved his pants. She sniffled and he looked down at her, over his shoulder.

  “You coming over tonight?” she asked.

  “Gone try.”

  She moved her hand. Here came the coroner, a young chubby white man in a denim button-down, glasses on forehead. Had a few years on the job. He’d ridden out with Angie and them and came between the two with his bag and his shirt out at the back and walked to the lip of the land, shading his eyes with his hand.

  He said, “I pronounce it dead. Yall go ahead.”

  “Yuck,” Angie said, glancing up at Silas. “You couldn’t a found this on second shift?” She stuck out her tongue and headed down the bank, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, fastening a surgical mask to her face.

  Now the reporter who had the police beat and a couple of deputies were coming down the hill, and Silas took the occasion to walk around some more, hoping to find a cigarette butt floating, a thread snagged in a spiderweb. And to avoid seeing them roll the pieces into the body bag.

  A COUPLE OF hours later, back at the office, he sat brooding. He and M&M had fallen out of touch when he left in high school and now he wished he’d stayed in better contact. Maybe he could’ve done something. But who was he kidding. M&M wouldn’t have had anything to do with a constable. He’d be polite, that was all. No friendly visits. No fishing.

  Silas was at his computer, deleting e-mails, but paused at one from Shannon Knight, the police reporter, called “follow-up question.” He opened the e-mail and pecked out an answer. Even though he’d found the body, he knew Shannon would interview French as well, and he would be the one quoted in the paper.

  Silas sat back in his chair. He shared the one-room building of the Chabot Town Hall with Voncille, the town clerk, her desk to the left by the window that faced trees. She got the good view, she said, because she’d been here longer than him and the mayor combined, plus neither of them was ever at his desk. Fine with Silas. Except for when he left the seat up in their shared bathroom, he and Miss Voncille got along fine. They were Chabot’s only full-time employees, their benefits coming through the mill. Morris Sheffield, the mayor, part-time, kept a desk in the back; he was a real estate agent with an office across the lot. He bopped in Town Hall once or twice a day with his BlackBerry and loose tie and loafers with no socks. He and Silas were both volunteer firefighters and only saw each other at monthly office meetings and the occasional fire.

  “You okay, hon?” Voncille asked, rolling her chair back. Her desk was behind a cubicle wall she’d bought herself. She had blue eyes and a pretty, fat face and looked at him over her reading glasses. She was white, early fifties, divorced a couple of times. Her stack of stiff red hair seemed unperturbed by her morning of directing traffic.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will be.”

  “Poor ole M&M,” she said. “Didn’t yall play ball together?”

  “Back in the day we could turn the double bout as good as any two boys anywhere.”

  “Yall still talk? I mean before.”

  “Not really.”

  She bunched her shoulders, both understanding and disapproving at the same time. But who did he see but other cops and the people he arrested? Just Angie. Who else did he need?

  Voncille was back to work and Silas leaned forward. Out the window by his desk, propped up with an old Stephen King book, were Chabot’s other buildings: Mayor Mo’s real estate, the post office, a bank that was more of a credit union for the mill, a diner/convenience store called The Hub, an IGA grocery store and a drugstore, both going out of business because of the Wal-Mart in Fulsom. The third-to-last establishment, the Chabot Bus, was an old yellow school bus on blocks that had been converted
into a bar, a counter at the back end and a few plastic tables and chairs inside and several more outside. Silas met Angie there for drinks a couple of times a week, later in the evening, after the mill crowd had gone home. The first time they met there, by accident, they’d closed the bar then made out in his Jeep until they knocked it out of gear and nearly rolled off into the gully before he pulled the emergency brake. Looking out the row of bus windows, you saw the last two buildings, empty offices with boarded windows. Silas checked them nightly for vagrants and crackheads. You saw, too, that Chabot had been built on the edge of a gully filled with kudzu, that snaky green weed nothing could kill. Somebody kept throwing trash in the gully, which brought raccoons and feral cats, roving stretches of ink in the leaves at night, fleet as spirits.

  Chabot didn’t have an ATM; the nearest was eleven miles north, in Fulsom. Cell phones worked in Chabot sometimes and sometimes they didn’t. Because Gerald County, wet, was bordered on two sides by dry counties, the DUI tally was high. Fulsom was the county seat and, with its Wal-Mart, high cotton compared to Chabot’s little spate of stores. Chabot’s one barber had died, and his son had come and dismantled the building a piece at a time and carried it off in his pickup truck. Now its lot was vacant, an explosion of wildflowers and weeds, and if you wanted your hair cut, you went to Fulsom or did it yourself.

  Because of the gully, Chabot’s buildings all faced east, like a small audience or a last stand: out Town Hall’s front windows, across the road and beyond strings of railcars and tankers, the tall, rumbling city of the Rutherford Lumber Mill. It blocked the trees behind it and burned the sky with smoke, one giant metal shed after another, smokestacks with red bleeping lights, conveyor belts and freight elevators below, log trucks, loaders and skidders beeping backward or grinding over sawdust to untusk limber green logs soon to be cut to planks and treated or creosoted for poles. The mill boomedgnashed-screeched and threw its boards and sparks and dust and exhaled its fumes sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Two eight-hour shifts and a six-hour maintenance shift. Its offices were a two-story wooden structure a hundred yards past the mill, two dozen people there, accountants, salesmen, secretaries, administration. Some even got company trucks, big green Ford F-250s with four-wheel drive.