Book of the Dead

Chapter 6

Bulrush Ulysses S. Grant has always been called Bull. Without any prompting, he begins the conversation by explaining the origin of his name.

“I ’spect you’re wondering about the S part of my name. That’s it. Just an S and a period,” he says from a chair near Scarpetta’s shut office door. “My mama knows the S in General Grant’s name is for Simpson. But she was afraid if she stuck Simpson in there, it would be a lot for me to write out. So she left it at S. Explaining it takes longer than writing it out, you ask me.”

He’s neat and clean in freshly pressed gray work clothes, and his sneakers look as if they just came out of the washing machine. A frayed yellow baseball cap with a fish on it is in his lap, his big hands politely folded on top of it. The rest of his appearance is frightening, his face, neck, and scalp savagely slashed with a crisscross of long, pink gashes. If he ever saw a plastic surgeon, it wasn’t a good one. He will be badly disfigured for life, a patchwork of keloid scars that make Scarpetta think of Queequeg in Moby-Dick.

“I know you just moved here not all that long ago,” Bull says, to her surprise. “In that old carriage house that backs up to the alley between Meeting and King.”

“How the hell do you know where she supposedly lives, and what business is it of yours?” Marino aggressively interrupts him.

“I used to work for one of your neighbors.” Bull directs this to Scarpetta. “She passed on a long time back. I guess it would be more accurate to say I worked for her maybe fifteen years, then ’bout four years ago her husband passed. After that, she got rid of most of her help, I think had money anxiousness, and I had to find me something else. Then she passed, too. What I’m telling you is I know the area where you live like the back of my hand.”

She looks at the pink scars on the backs of his hands.

“I know your house….” he adds.

“Like I said…” Marino starts in again.

“Let him finish,” Scarpetta says.

“I know your garden real good ’cause I dug the pond and poured the cement, and took care of the angel statue looking over it, kept her nice and clean. I built the white fence with finials on one side. But not the brick columns and wrought iron on the other. That was before my time and probably so overgrowed with wax myrtle and bamboo when you bought the place, you didn’t know it was there. I planted roses, Europa, California poppies, and Chinese jasmine, and I fixed things around the house.”

Scarpetta is stunned.

“Anyhow,” Bull says, “I been doing things for half the people up and down your alleyway and on King Street, Meeting Street, Church Street, all over. Since I was a boy. You wouldn’t know it because I keep to my own business. That’s a good thing if you don’t want folks around here to take offense to you.”

She says, “Like they do to me?”

Marino shoots her a disdainful look. She’s being too friendly.

“Yes, ma’am. They sure can be like that around here,” Bull says. “Then you put all them spiderweb decals on all the windows, and that don’t help, ’specially because of what you do for a living. One of your neighbors, if I’m honest, calls you Dr. Halloween.”

“Let me guess. That would be Mrs. Grimball.”

“I wouldn’t take no seriousness to it,” Bull says. “She calls me Olé. ’Cause of me being called Bull.”

“The decals are so birds don’t fly into the glass.”

“Uh-huh. Never have figured out how we know exactly what birds see. Like do they see what’s s’posed to be a spiderweb and head the other way even though I never have seen a bird caught up in a spiderweb like it’s a bug or something. It’s like saying dogs is color-blind or got no sense of time. How do we know?”

“What business is it of yours to be anywhere near her house?” Marino says.

“Looking for work. When I was a boy, I helped out Mrs. Whaley, too,” Bull says to Scarpetta. “Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Mrs. Whaley’s garden, the most famous one here in Charleston, down there on Church Street.” He smiles proudly, pointing in the general direction, wounds on his hand flashing pink.

He has them on his palms, too. Defensive injuries, Scarpetta thinks.

“That was a real privilege working for Mrs. Whaley. She was real good to me. She wrote a book, you know. They keep copies of it right there in the window of that bookstore at the Charleston Hotel. She signed a copy for me once. I still got it.”

“What the shit’s going on here?” Marino says. “You come to the morgue to talk to us about that dead little boy, or is this a damn job interview and stroll through memory lane?”

“Sometimes things fit together in mysterious ways,” Bull says. “My mama always says that. Maybe something good come out of the bad. Maybe something good could come out of what happened. And what happened is bad, all right. Like a movie in my head playing all the time, seeing that little boy dead in the mud. Crabs and flies crawling on him.” Bull touches a scarred index finger to his scarred, furrowed brow. “Up there, I see it when I shut my eyes. The police in Beaufort County says you’re still getting established down here.” He scans Scarpetta’s office, slowly taking in all her books and framed degrees. “You look pretty established to me, but I probably could’ve done you better.” His attention drifts to recently installed cabinets, where she locks up sensitive cases and ones that haven’t gone to court yet. “Like that black walnut door ain’t flush with the one beside it. Not hung straight. I could fix it easy enough. You see any doors hung crooked in your carriage house? No, ma’am, you don’t. Not ones I hung back then when I helped out over there. Can do ’bout anything, and if I don’t know, I’m sure willing to learn. So I said to myself, maybe I should just ask. No harm in asking.”

“So maybe I should just ask,” Marino says. “You kill that little boy? Kind of a coincidence you found him, right?”

“No, sir.” Bull looks at him, looks him straight in the eye, his jaw muscles flexing. “I go all over these parts cutting sweetgrass, fishing, shrimping, digging clams, and picking oysters. Let me ask you”—he holds Marino’s stare—“if I killed that boy, why would I be the one to find him and call for the police?”

“You tell me. Why would you?”

“I sure wouldn’t.”

“That reminds me. How’d you call anyone?” Marino says, leaning farther forward in his chair, hands the size of bear paws on his knees. “You got yourself a cell phone?” As if a poor black man wouldn’t have a cell phone.

“I called nine-one-one. And like I said, why would I if I was the one who killed that boy?”

He wouldn’t. Furthermore, although Scarpetta isn’t going to say it to him, the victim is a child-abuse homicide with old healed fractures, scarring, and obvious food deprivation. So unless Bulrush Ulysses S. Grant was the boy’s caretaker or foster parent, or kidnapped him and kept him alive for months or years, he certainly isn’t the one who killed him.

Marino says to Bull, “You called here saying you want to tell us what happened this past Monday morning, almost a week ago to the day. But first. Where do you live? Because as I understand it, you don’t live in Hilton Head.”

“Oh, no, sir, I sure don’t.” Bull laughs. “Believe that’s a little beyond my means. Me and my family got us a little place northwest of here off five twenty-six. I do a lot of fishing and other things in these parts. Haul my boat in the back of my truck, drive it places, and put it in the water. Like I say, shrimping, fishing, oysters, depending on the season. I got me one of these flat-bottom boats don’t weigh more than a feather and can make it up the creeks, long as I know the tides and don’t get stuck high and dry out there with all them skeeters and no-see-ums. Cottonmouths and rattlers. Gators, too, but that’s mostly in the canals and creeks where there’s woods and the water’s brackish.”

“The boat you’re talking about is the one in the back of that truck you parked in the lot?” Marino asks.

“That’s right.”

“Aluminum with what? Five-horsepower engine?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d like to take a look at it before you drive off. You got any objections to my looking inside your boat and truck? I’m assuming the police already did.”

“No, sir, they didn’t. When they got there and I told them what I knew, they said I could go. So I headed back to the put-in where my truck was. By then all kinds of people was there. But you go on and help yourself. I got nothing to hide.”

“Thank you, but it’s not necessary.” Scarpetta gives Marino a look. He knows damn well they don’t have jurisdiction to search Mr. Grant’s truck or boat or anything else. That’s for the police to do, and they didn’t think it necessary.

“Where did you put your boat in the water six days ago?” Marino says to Bull.

“Old House Creek. There’s a boat landing and little store where if I’ve had me a good day, I sell some of what I catch. Especially if I get lucky with shrimps and oysters.”

“You see anybody suspicious in the area when you parked your truck this past Monday morning?”

“Can’t say I did, but don’t know why I would. By then the little boy was already where I found him and had been for days.”

“Who said days?” Scarpetta asks.

“The funeral home man in the parking lot.”

“The one who drove the body here?”

“No, ma’am. The other one. He was there with his big hearse. Don’t know what he was doing there. Except talking.”

“Lucious Meddick?” Scarpetta asks.

“Meddicks’ Funeral Home. Yes, ma’am. According to his thinking, that little boy was dead for two, three days by the time I found him.”

That damn Lucious Meddick. Presumptuous as hell, and wrong. April 29 and 30, the temperatures ranged between seventy-five and eighty degrees. Had the body been in the marsh for even one full day, it would have begun to decompose and suffer substantial damage from predatory animals and fish. Flies are quiet at night but would have laid eggs in daylight, and he would have been infested with maggots. As it was, by the time the body arrived at the morgue, rigor mortis was well developed but not complete, although that particular postmortem change would have been somewhat lessened and slowed due to malnourishment and subsequent poor muscle development. Livor mortis was indistinct, not yet fixed. There was no discoloration due to putrefaction. Crabs, shrimp, and the like were just getting started on the ears, nose, and lips. In her estimation, the boy had been dead less than twenty-four hours. Maybe much less than that.

“Go on,” Marino says. “Tell us exactly how you found the body.”

“I anchored my boat and got out in my boots and gloves, carrying my basket and a hammer…”

“A hammer?”

“For breaking up coons.”

“Coons?” Marino says with a smirk.

“Coon oysters are stuck together in clusters, so you break them apart and knock loose any dead shells. Coons is mostly what you get, hard to find select ones.” He pauses, says, “Don’t seem you folks know much about oystering. So let me explain. A select oyster is a single one like you get on the half-shell in a restaurant. That’s the kind you want but are hard to find. Anyhow, I started picking about noon. The tide was fairly low. And that’s when I caught me a glance of something in the grass that looked like muddy hair, got closer, and there he was.”

“Did you touch him or move him?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am.” Shaking his head. “Once I saw what it was, I got right back in my boat and called nine-one-one.”

“Low tide started around one in the morning,” she says.

“That’s so. And by seven it was high again — as high as it was going to get. And by the time I was out there, it was pretty low again.”

“If it was you,” Marino says, “and you wanted to get rid of a body using your boat, would you do it at low tide or high tide?”

“Whoever done it probably put him there when the tide was fairly low, put him in the mud and grass on the side of that little creek. Otherwise, the body would have been carried on out by the current if the tide was real high. But you put him in a place like the one I found him in, he’s most likely gonna stay right there unless it’s a spring tide at a full moon when the water can get up to ten feet. In that case, he might have been carried out, could have ended up anywhere.”

Scarpetta has looked it up. The night before the body was found, the moon was no more than a third full, the skies partly cloudy.

“A smart place to dump a body. In a week, he wouldn’t have been much more than scattered bones,” Marino says. “It’s a miracle he was found, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t take long out there to be nothing but bones, and it was a good chance no one would ever find him, that’s true,” Bull says.

“Thing is, when I mentioned high versus low tide, I didn’t ask you to speculate about what someone else would have done. I asked what you would have done,” Marino says.

“Low tide in a small boat that doesn’t have much draw, so you could get into places no more’an a foot deep. That’s what I would’ve done. But I didn’t.” He stares Marino in the eye again. “I didn’t do nothing to that little boy except find him.”

Scarpetta gives Marino another pointed glance, has had enough of his interrogating and intimidating. She says to Bull, “Is there anything else you can remember? Anybody you saw in the area? Anybody you may have seen in the area who got your attention?”

“I keep thinking about that, and the only thing that comes to mind is about a week ago I was at this same landing, Old House Creek, in the market there selling shrimps, and when I was leaving I noticed this person tying up a boat. A bass boat. What got my attention is he didn’t have nothing in it you might use for shrimping, oystering, fishing, so I just figured he liked being out in his boat. Didn’t care about fishing or nothing, just liked being on the water, you know. I admit I didn’t like the way he stared at me. Gave me a funny feeling. Like he’d seen me somewhere.”

“You get a description?” Marino asks. “See what he was driving? A truck, I assume, for hauling his boat?”

“He had a hat pulled low, sunglasses. Don’t seem he was real big, but I couldn’t tell you. And I had no reason to look hard and didn’t want him thinking I was looking at him. That’s how things get started, you know. My recollection is he had on boots. Long pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, for sure, and I remember wondering about that because it was a warm, sunny day. I never did see what he was driving because I left before he did and there was a number of trucks and cars in the lot. A busy time. Folks coming in, buying and selling fresh-caught seafood.”

“In your opinion, would someone have to know that area to dispose of a body there?” Scarpetta asks.

“After dark? Lord. I don’t know anybody who goes in creeks like that after dark. I wouldn’t. But that don’t mean it didn’t happen. Whoever did it isn’t like regular people anyhow. Couldn’t be, to do something like that to a little child.”

“Did you notice any disturbance in the grass, the mud, the oyster bed when you found him?” Scarpetta asks.

“No, ma’am. But if somebody put the body there the night before during low tide, then during high tide the water would have smoothed out the mud just like when a wave goes over the sand. He would have been underwater for a while, but stayed put because of all that tall grass he was in. And the oyster bed, you wouldn’t want to step on that anyhow. Would step over it or go around it as best you can. Nothing much hurts worse than a cut from an oyster shell. You step in the middle of them and lose your balance, you can get mighty cut up.”

“Maybe that’s what cut you up,” Marino says. “You fell in the oyster bed.”

Scarpetta knows cutting injuries made by a blade when she sees them, and says, “Mr. Grant, there are houses set back from the marshland, and long piers, one not far from where you found him. Possible he could have been transported by car, then carried over a pier, let’s say, and ended up where he was found?”

“I can’t imagine anybody climbing down the ladder of one of them old piers, especially after dark, while carrying a body and a flashlight. And you sure would have to have a powerful flashlight. A man can sink up to his hips in that mud, suck the shoes right off your feet. Would think there would have been muddy footprints on the pier, assuming he climbed back up and left that way after he done it.”

“How do you know there weren’t any muddy footprints on the pier?” Marino asks him.

“The man from the funeral home told me so. I was waiting in the parking lot until they brought in the body, and he was there talking to the police.”

“This would be Lucious Meddick again,” Scarpetta says.

Bull nods. “He spent a lot of time talking to me, too, wanting to know what I had to say. I didn’t tell him much.”

A knock on the door and Rose walks in, sets a mug of coffee on the table next to Bull, her hands shaking. “Cream and sugar,” she says. “Sorry it took so long. The first pot overflowed, grounds everywhere.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Anybody else need anything?” Rose looks around, takes a deep breath, looks more exhausted and paler than she did earlier.

Scarpetta says. “Why don’t you go home? Get some rest.”

“I’ll be in my office.”

The door shuts and Bull says, “I’d like to explain my situation, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead,” Scarpetta says.

“I had me a real job until three weeks ago.” He stares down at his thumbs, slowly twiddles them in his lap. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I got in trouble. You can look at me and tell that much. And I didn’t fall in no oyster bed.” He meets Marino’s eyes again.

“In trouble for what?” Scarpetta asks.

“Smoking weed and fighting. I never really smoked the weed, but I was going to.”

“Now, ain’t that nice,” Marino says. “It just so happens one of the requirements we got in this joint is anybody wants to work here has to smoke weed and be violent and find at least one dead body of somebody murdered. Same requirements for gardeners and handymen at our personal residences.”

Bull says to him, “I know how it sounds. But it’s not like that. I was working at the port.”

“Doing what?” Marino asks.

“Called a heavy-lift mechanic helper. That was my job title. Mainly, I did whatever my supervisor told me. Helped take care of equipment, lifting and carrying. Had to be able to talk on the radio and fix things, do whatever. Well, when I was signed off the clock one night, I decided to slip off near some of these old containers you find in the shipyard. The ones I’m talking about aren’t used anymore, sort of banged up and off to the side. You drive by on Concord Street and you can see what I mean, right there on the other side of the chain-link fence. It’d been a long day, and to tell you the truth, me and my wife had words that morning so I was in a mood, so I decided to smoke me some weed. It wasn’t something I made a habit of, can’t even remember the last time I did it. I hadn’t lit up yet when all a sudden this man come out of nowhere from near the railroad tracks. He cut me up bad, real bad.”

He pushes up his sleeves, holds out his muscular arms and hands, turning them, displaying more long slashes, pale pink against his dark black skin.

“Did they catch who did it?” Scarpetta asks.

“Don’t think they tried real hard. The police accused me of fighting, said I’d probably got into it with the man who sold me the weed. I never said who that was, and I know it wasn’t him who cut me. He don’t even work at the port. After I got out of the emergency room, I spent a few nights in jail until I went before the judge, and the case got dismissed because there was no suspect and no weed was found, either.”

“Really. So why did they accuse you of possessing marijuana if none was found?” Marino says.

“Because I told the police I was getting ready to smoke weed when it happened. I had rolled me one and was about to light it when the man came after me. Maybe the police just never found it. I don’t think they was all that interested, truth is. Or maybe the man who cut me took it, I don’t know. I don’t go near weed no more. Don’t touch a drop of liquor, either. Promised my wife I wouldn’t.”

“The port fired you,” Scarpetta assumes.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is it you think you could help us with around here, exactly?” she asks.

“Whatever you need. Nothing I’m above doing. The morgue don’t scare me. I got no trouble with dead people.”

“Maybe you can leave me your cell phone number or whatever is the best way to get hold of you,” she says.

He pulls a folded piece of paper out of a back pocket, gets up and politely places it on her desk. “Got it all right here, ma’am. Call me anytime.”

“Investigator Marino will show you out. Thank you so much for your help, Mr. Grant.” Scarpetta gets up from her desk and carefully shakes his hand, mindful of his injuries.

Seventy miles southwest on the resort island of Hilton Head, it is overcast, and a warm wind gusts in from the sea.

Will Rambo walks the dark, empty beach, headed to a destination. He carries a green tackle box and shines a Surefire tactical light wherever he likes, not really needing it to find his way. The light is powerful enough to blind someone, at least for seconds, and that’s enough, assuming a situation requires it. Blasts of sand sting his face and click against his tinted glasses. Sand swirls like gauzy dancing girls.

And the sandstorm roared into Al Asad like a tsunami and swallowed the Humvee and him, swallowed the sky, the sun, swallowed everything. Blood spilled through Roger’s fingers, and his fingers looked as if they had been painted bright red, and the sand blasted and stuck to his bloody fingers as he tried to tuck his intestines back in. His face was panicky and shocked like nothing Will had ever seen, and he could do nothing about it except to promise his friend he would be all right and help him tuck his intestines back in.

Will hears Roger’s shrieks in the gulls wheeling over the beach. Screams of panic and pain.

“Will! Will! Will!”

The screams, piercing screams, and the roar of sand.

“Will! Will! Please help me, Will!”

It was some time after that, after Germany. Will returned stateside to the Air Force base in Charleston, and then to Italy, different parts of Italy where he grew up. He wandered in and out of blackouts. He went to Rome to face his father because it was time to face his father, and it seemed like a dream to sit amid the stenciled palmette design and trompe l’oeil moldings of the dining room of Will’s boyhood summer home at the Piazza Navona. He drank red wine with his father, wine as red as blood, and was irritated by the noise of tourists below the open windows, silly tourists no smarter than pigeons, throwing coins into Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi and taking photographs, water constantly splashing.

“Making wishes that never come true. Or if they do, too bad for you,” he commented to his father, who didn’t understand but kept looking at him as if he were a mutant.

At the table beneath the chandelier, Will could see his face in the Venetian mirror on the far wall. It wasn’t true. He looked like Will, not like a mutant, and he watched his mouth move in the mirror as he recounted to his father that Roger wished to be a hero when he returned from Iraq. His wish came true, Will’s mouth said. Roger returned home a hero in a cheap coffin in the belly of a C5 cargo plane.

“We didn’t have goggles or protective gear or body armor or anything,” Will told his father in Rome, hoping he would understand but knowing he wouldn’t.

“Why did you go if all you do is complain?”

“I had to write you to send batteries for our flashlights. I had to write you for tools because every screwdriver broke. The cheap shit they gave us,” Will’s mouth said in the mirror. “We had nothing unless it was cheap shit because of goddamn lies, the goddamn lies politicians tell.”

“Then why did you go?”

“I was fucking told to, you foolish man.”

“Don’t you dare talk like that! Not in this house, where you will treat me with respect. I didn’t choose that fascist war, you did. All you do is complain like a baby. Did you pray over there?”

When the wall of sand slammed into them and Will couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, he prayed. When the explosion from the roadside bomb flipped the Humvee on its side and he couldn’t see and the wind screamed as if he were inside the engine of a C17, he prayed. When he held Roger, he prayed, and when he could no longer endure Roger’s pain, he prayed, and that was the last time he prayed.

“When we pray we are really asking ourselves — not God — for help. We’re asking for our own divine intervention,” Will’s mouth in the mirror told his father in Rome. “So I don’t need to pray to some god on a throne. I’m God’s Will because I’m my own Will. I don’t need you or God because I’m God’s Will.”

“When you lost your toes, did you also lose your mind?” his father said to him in Rome, and it was an ironic thing to say in the dining room where on a gilded console below the mirror was a stone foot of antiquity with all of its toes. But then, Will had seen dismembered feet over there after suicide bombers drove into crowded places, so he supposed to be missing a few toes was better than to be a whole foot missing everything else.

“That’s healed now. But what do you know?” he said to his father in Rome. “You never came to see me all those months in Germany or Charleston or the years before. You’ve never been to Charleston. I’ve been here in Rome countless times, but never for you, even if you thought otherwise. Except this time, because of what I have to do, a mission, you see. I was allowed to live so I can relieve others of their suffering. Something you would never understand because you’re selfish and useless and don’t care about anyone except yourself. Look at you. Rich and uncaring and cold.”

Will’s body got up from the table, and he watched himself walk to the mirror, to the gilded console beneath it. He picked up the stone foot of antiquity as the fountain below the window splashed and the tourists were noisy.

He carries the tackle box, a camera slung over his shoulder as he walks the beach in Hilton Head to carry out his mission. He sits and opens the tackle box, and takes out a freezer bag full of special sand, then small vials of pale violet glue. With the flashlight, he illuminates what he’s doing as he squeezes the glue over the palmar surfaces of his hands. He plunges them one at a time into his bag of sand. He holds up his hands in the wind and the glue dries quickly and he has sandpaper hands. More vials, and he does the same thing with the bottoms of his bare feet, careful to completely cover the pads of his seven toes. He drops the empty vials and what’s left of the sand back into his tackle box.

His tinted glasses look around and he turns off the flashlight.

His destination is the No Trespassing sign planted in the beach at the end of the long wooden boardwalk that leads to the fenced-in backyard of the villa.