Another Kind of Eden Page 7

  Alcohol and drug-induced psychosis can come in many ways. I suspected Marvin had tried them all.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE NEXT DAY I replaced the previous foreman, who had retired after thirty years of working for Mr. Lowry. Three weeks passed, and I got up each morning with a feeling that something good was going to happen that day, the way you feel when you’re a kid and every day is an adventure. Mr. and Mrs. Lowry were fine people to work for. I had the run of the farm; the sky was blue from one horizon to the other, the days cool, the cottonwoods gold and green and shredding in the wind. Twice Mr. and Mrs. Lowry invited Jo Anne and me to supper. Something else was happening also. I was falling deeply in love with Jo Anne McDuffy. I had known only one other girl like her, the Jewish girl I had loved in high school, the girl with whom I had lost my virginity. Her name was Valerie Epstein. I loved Valerie with my heart and body and soul and would have given my life for her without a moment’s hesitation because I believed she already owned it.

  How did I lose such a wonderful young girl? Easy answer. It comes in bottles. The Broussard family had the patent on its destructive elements.

  On a Saturday I took Jo Anne up the Gunnison River, and inside a pinkish-gray canyon I taught her how to fly-fish. After hooking herself once in the neck, she was out on a table rock in the middle of a riffle, lifting an elk-hair caddis fly from the surface, looping it lazily in a figure-eight pattern above her head, and letting it settle as naturally as a leaf between the riffle and the froth of a beaver dam. She was wearing tight khaki shorts and tennis shoes rather than waders, and her long legs were sunbrowned and shiny from the spray of the current sluicing over the rock. She caught a fourteen-inch rainbow and brought it in without a net, then squatted down to unhook it.

  “If you’re going to turn it loose, dip your hand first so you don’t give it a fungus,” I called.

  She smiled and shook her head. It was obvious she couldn’t hear because of the echo of the river inside the canyon walls. She wet her hand and cupped the rainbow’s stomach and eased it back in the current, then dried her hands on her shorts and walked across the rock and stepped up on a fallen cottonwood, balancing with her arms, the rod flopping in one hand, until she was back on the bank.

  “Wow!” she said.

  “Where’d you learn to wet your hand before returning a fish to the stream?”

  “Saw it on television.”

  “I brought some ham-and-onion sandwiches. You want to eat?”

  “I want to fish some more.”

  The sun had slipped over the mountain, and a shadow had fallen on the bottom of the canyon wall, draining the glare from the water, turning it slate green. “It’s about to get cold,” I said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re something else,” I said.

  “In what way?”

  “In every way.”

  I took the fly rod from her and leaned it against a willow that had turned yellow with the season. I slipped my arms around her and pulled her against me and buried my face in her hair, then kissed her where her shoulder met her neck. I ached all over with desire when she stepped on my shoes and pressed her stomach against mine, her mouth parting.

  “Oh, Jo Anne,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I was just saying your name. Jo Anne McDuffy. What a grand Irish name.”

  She rubbed her face on my chest and squeezed me as hard as she could, not letting go, her tongue on my skin, her eyes closed, gripping me tighter and tighter until I thought my heart would burst.

  * * *

  I WANTED TO BELIEVE that somehow my troubles with the Vickers family and the iniquitous mindset they represented would go away, as well as the problem Henri Devos had created by arguably stealing what was at that time a large amount of money from a twenty-year-old girl who lived on tips. When I thought about that, I wanted to break my fists on his face.

  On the Monday after Jo Anne and I had gone fishing, I asked Mr. Lowry for the afternoon off, with a promise to make it up on the weekend, and drove to the liberal arts building on the campus where Henri taught. He wasn’t hard to find. Three female students were hanging in his office door while he was telling a joke, his feet on the desk. Then he bent his head sideways and looked at me through a space between their bodies. “Excuse me, ladies, an outlier friend of mine has just arrived,” he said.

  They laughed as they left, smiling at me, innocent to the core. I took off my hat and waved goodbye to them. Henri removed his feet from the desk and straightened his back. “Come in and close the door, please,” he said.

  “I think I’ll leave it open. Jo Anne isn’t the only one, is she?”

  “You’re mistaken, as always, Mr. Broussard.”

  “Forget the formality, you damn fraud. Where’s the money you owe her?”

  He lowered his eyes. “Would you close the door, please?”

  “No.”

  His face soured. He bit on a thumbnail, then got up and closed the door and sat back down. “I’m working on repaying the debt. I’ve made some bad financial choices. I’m doing my best.”

  “Sell your Mustang.”

  “The loan company owns it.”

  “Take it to a bar and sell it anyway.”

  “I think I’m beginning to understand why you’re no longer an educator.”

  “Where are the people in the bus?”

  “Search me.”

  “Jo Anne says they ran an electrical cord to her house. The pig farmer says they took one of his hogs.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Jo Anne did nothing to deserve these kinds of problems. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Want me to call security?” he said.

  “That might be a good idea.”

  “Stay away from me,” he said, pushing his chair backward.

  “Want to make a call? I’ll help you.”

  I picked up the phone receiver from his desk and twisted the cord around his neck and tightened it until the blood to his brain shut down. Then I dumped the plastic wastebasket on his head and hammered it over his shoulders and flipped his chair over backward and jumped up and down on the basket. He looked like the top half of a refrigerator on the floor.

  “Pay the money you owe Jo Anne, or I’m going to put your organs up for sale,” I said. “Clank your head if you understand.”

  He understood.

  * * *

  TWO CRUISERS AND Wade Benbow’s unmarked car forced me to the curb before I could make the highway. The deputies got out of their vehicles and headed toward me, their hands resting on their weapons. Benbow raised one hand for them to stop and pointed into my face with the other. “Get out of the car, Broussard!” he said.

  I lifted my hands. “I’m reaching for the handle. Okay?”

  “I wouldn’t waste a bullet shooting you.” He ripped the door open and jerked me out on the asphalt, then threw me against the car. When I tried to turn around, he stiff-armed me between the shoulder blades. “You really piss me off.”

  “If you want to be a hump for a man like Henri Devos, that’s your problem,” I said.

  “Spread your feet.”

  “Eat shit,” I said.

  He slapped the back of my head, then lowered his voice. “Do it, kid.”

  I half looked at him.

  “Do it,” he repeated.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “I’m going to hook you up and put you in the back seat now. Are we on the same page?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He snipped the handcuffs on me and opened the back door, then put one hand on my head and eased me onto the seat. “I got it from here,” he said to the deputies.

  They waved and drove away. Benbow got behind the wheel and started the engine.

  “What’s the deal?” I said.

  “The deal is shut up.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To school.”

  “What?”

  “I told you
to shut up.”

  He drove into an old part of Trinidad and parked behind the pool hall where Spud may have punctured the tires of the inmate who had sold him the stolen transistor radio. The alleyway was lined with garbage cans and paved with old brick that was sunken in the middle; a greasy stream of water ran all the way to the street.

  “This is the school?” I said.

  He got out and opened the back door. “Let’s go.”

  I stepped out on the bricks, my wrists still manacled behind me. He took out his handcuff key and unhooked me.

  “Why’d you put on that show for the deputies?” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Some of them are too close to the Vickers family,” he said. “Plus, I run my own investigation. Got it?”

  The alley was deep in shadow, cool and damp, the sun blazing out on the sidewalk. “There’s the back door of the poolroom,” he said. “Your friend could have come out here, seen the victim on the sidewalk, and followed her. Would you argue with that?”

  “I don’t believe Spud would do that.”

  “Cut the crap. Your friend is a whoremonger. The murdered woman was a five-dollar working girl. In her forties. According to our witness, the probable killer stopped her at the entrance to the alley, then they walked toward the hotel on the next block.”

  “The witness identified Spud?”

  “No, he didn’t see the guy’s face.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  He reached under the driver’s seat of his car and opened a manila folder. It contained four black-and-white crime-scene photos, all of the same victim. They were worse than the ones he had shown me previously.

  “Those are ice-pick holes?”

  “Either that or something like it.”

  “Was she alive when he did that?”

  “The coroner says probably.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Why her eyes?”

  “Why do these guys do anything?”

  He took the photos out of my hands. I felt dizzy. A rat ran from a garbage can and splashed across the water and disappeared under a pile of cardboard boxes.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, you are. This is where your friend could have gotten the box he used. He made a sling out of his bandana, put his arm in it, put the box under his other arm, then got her in an alley and put her through hell.”

  “I’ll never believe Spud capable of doing something like that. No matter what you say.”

  “You’re like most people. You got a big blind spot. You don’t want to believe monsters live among us.”

  “Spud isn’t a monster.”

  “Pull your head out of your ass. I know what Jude Lowry has told you.”

  “He hasn’t told me anything.”

  “Don’t lie. He told you I’m determined to prove my granddaughter was murdered by a serial killer because I can’t admit I let her out of my sight. Did or did he not tell you that?”

  “He didn’t mean it in a bad way, Benbow.”

  “Detective Benbow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’re people who look like the rest of us, but they feed on evil. Are they born like that? No one knows. They take their secrets to the grave. My own guess is they make a conscious choice to murder the light in their souls. They never come back from that moment.”

  “Are you going to take me in?” I asked.

  “Over the beef with Devos? He won’t file charges.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My wife works at the college. He’s up for that lifetime job guarantee, you know, what do they call it?”

  “Tenure?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “Tenure. Get in the passenger seat. I’ll take you back to your car.”

  But there was something missing from our conversation, a detail that didn’t fit in the behavior of the hooker and the man with the box under his arm.

  “He knew her,” I said.

  “Who knew her?”

  “The killer. Five-dollar hookers don’t do good deeds in the wee hours for strangers on the street.”

  “Your bud Caudill probably came out of the womb with a hard-on. You don’t think he fits the profile?”

  “A john wouldn’t have to deceive her. He’d just walk her down the street to a hotel or take her somewhere in his car.”

  “You’re a smart kid,” he said.

  “I’ve got to get back to Mr. Lowry’s farm, Detective.”

  “Remember when I told you I wanted to quit smoking?”

  “You beat it?”

  “I’ve got the big C. In both lungs. That means the wrong people better not mess with me. You’re dragging a chain, Broussard. I don’t know what it is, but don’t screw up your life.” He stuck his business card in my shirt pocket. “That’s it. School’s out. Latch your seat belt.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THAT EVENING JO Anne started a new job as a cook at a hamburger joint, and I spent the evening in the bunkhouse with my J-50 Gibson guitar. Much of the crew had headed for the Rio Grande Valley in Texas or southern New Mexico or Arizona. Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams had decided to stay on. Spud said he was innocent of any crime, and he didn’t want to be charged after he’d left the state and get brought back as a fugitive and have flight used against him. Cotton said he was too old for the border and the culture of drugs and alcohol and diseased Mexican girls; he thought it was time for him to consider buying a poultry ranch or a truck farm.

  I didn’t quite believe either of them. Spud was infatuated with a barmaid in Walsenburg. As for Cotton, I couldn’t forget his implied threat about putting six feet of dirt in the faces of the Vickers team. I also couldn’t forget his story about wiping out a nest of SS deep in the Roman catacombs.

  The bunkhouse was a long building, clean and well lighted, with a cubicle for the foreman, not unlike an army barracks. But when it was empty, it could be a very lonely place, and on this particular evening I felt memories of the past trying to catch up with me, like a specter trying to serve a summons or a figure dressed in leather honing a knife on a whetstone. I was also bothered by every aspect of my conversation with Wade Benbow. Why had Mr. Lowry been so certain that Benbow’s negligence was responsible for the death of the grandchild? Benbow was not a weak man. He was looking death in the face and seemingly without fear. Why would he spend his remaining time on earth chasing a serial killer who didn’t exist?

  Last, Benbow’s mention of monsters in our midst would not go away. All my life I’d had the same feelings. I was raised to believe that redemption could occur as quickly as looking up suddenly at a burst of sunlight inside a raincloud and realizing you had just been set free from all the dark days that had beset you. If that were true, and I believed it was, how could some be born with the lights of pity and mercy already robbed from their eyes?

  Even though I had witnessed the electrocution of a man in a southern prison, and seen individual acts of cruelty perpetrated on people of color for no reason other than to humiliate and degrade them, I did not understand that real evil was collective in nature until I heard the lyrics of two black convicts recorded in Angola by an academic named Harry Oster. That might seem strange, but as a southerner, I had listened too long to chivalric tales and the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux rather than the leathery whistle of the razor strop called the Black Betty.

  One of the singers, Robert “Guitar” Welch, sang a couplet I couldn’t get out of my head: “Wonder why they electrocute a man twelve o’clock at night / The current much stronger, the people turn out all the light.”

  Another convict, Matthew “Hogman” Maxey, sang about the desperation of an inmate assigned to the Red Hat gang, a group who wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats painted red and were forced to run their wheelbarrows double-time up and down the levee from sunrise to sunset. Those who fell out were stretched on
anthills or shot. Over one hundred bodies were buried in the levee, anonymous and forgotten, in summer their resting place a fairyland of green grass and buttercups, as though the earth wished to console them at least partially for their misfortune.

  The lyric he sang? “I axed my captain, ‘Captain, tell what’s right.’ / He whupped my left, then say, ‘Boy, now you know what’s right.’ ”

  I sat down on the bed in my cubicle and made an E chord on my Gibson and ran my plectrum across the strings. The resonance of the old-time Gibson acoustic guitars had no peer. The bass strings rumbled like distant thunder; the treble strings tinkled like crystal. When you curved your fingers into the neck, the chord seemed to make itself, as though an angel were guiding your hand. I began to sing my favorite Jimmie Rodgers song, “Blue Yodel No. 1.”

  T for Texas, T for Tennessee,

  T for Texas, T for Tennessee,

  T for Thelma, the gal who made a fool out of me.

  I felt a shadow move across my body and then my hands and guitar, and looked up into Cotton’s face.

  “Hey, what’s happenin’?” I said.

  “Thought you’d like to play some checkers.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He unfolded the board on my bed, then opened a box of checkers and began placing them on the squares.

  “What happened to your thumb?” I said.

  “Hit it with a hammer.”

  “You want a soda?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  I went to the machine at the end of the bunkhouse and came back with two cans. “That’s a lot of tape.”

  “Looks like an M1 thumb,” he said. “Know what that is?”

  “You press the clip in the magazine with your thumb, then roll it out before the bolt snaps on it and fixes you up proper.”

  “You told me you weren’t in the service.”

  “I read about it in a book.”

  His good eye lingered on me. I started to pop both soda cans, but he picked his up before I could, covering the top with his palm. “You go first,” he said.

  When I talked with Cotton, I always felt I was looking at half a face. “Are you planning on doing some payback?”