Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

twelve

SILAS FULL OF dread, switching his hat one hand to the other, waiting for the hospital elevator, its third-floor light lit so long he imagined somebody must be holding the door. He knew what was going on up there now, Lolly and French coercing Larry, wheedling him, crafting a confession, French so damn smooth at what he called interviewing that people said he could make a stump confess to saying “timber.”

Finally the elevator doors slid open and Silas stepped in, pressed “3” and the doors closed. On the third floor he excused himself between a pair of nurses holding cigarettes and lighters and hurried down the hall, Skip rising with his newspaper to meet him. A doctor talking on his cell phone, finger in his other ear.

“Hey, 32,” Skip said.

“Skip.” Nodding at the door. “They in there?”

“Yep. Bout twenty minutes, this time.”

The doctor snapped his phone shut. “Can I help you? I’m Dan Milton, Mr. Ott’s physician.”

Silas offered his hand. “32 Jones.”

They shook.

“The officer who found the Rutherford girl?”

Nodding, looking from Skip to Milton. “Can I go in?”

Before either could answer, he’d entered the room, Skip and the doctor saying “Wait,” together, following him in.

French turned and Lolly rose from his chair, his hand on his pistol.

“Speak of the devil,” French said. He pointed to the door and Skip nodded and left, but the doctor stayed.

Larry raised his head and, when he saw Silas, smiled, his eyes misted with drugs, but he still moved his hand up to his lips, covering his mouth, like he did when he was a kid, his wrist red from the restraints.

“Hey, Silas. There you are.”

“Hey, Larry. Here I am.” He wondered should he offer to shake his hand. “How you feeling?”

“Not too good. They say I shot myself and killed that girl, but I can’t remember doing either. And now they want me to say I killed Cindy Walker, too.”

“You had enough, Mr. Ott?” Dr. Milton said. “You want me to ask these gentlemen to come back tomorrow?”

Larry said, “No, sir. I’m glad Silas is here.”

“Press your buzzer,” Milton said, “if you need me.” He glanced at French, then the sheriff, and left the room.

“Chief,” Silas said. “Can we have a moment or two? Me and Larry?”

“Not right yet,” French said. “But you can stay and witness our interview.”

Interview.

“Did you come in my room at night?” Larry asked Silas.

“Yeah.” Silas willing him to shut up, not say more, wait till they could be alone. He focused on the bed rail, long, stainless steel, one of the restraints looped on it halfway up. He felt like a kid caught in a lie. “Sometimes.”

“You was feeding Momma’s chickens, too?”

“Yeah. I never did move the pen, way you do.”

“Did you bring me Night Shift?” The men followed his eyes to the book on the table between the beds. The gauze-wrapped hand on the cover, the eyes in its palm gazing out, seeing all.

“Yeah,” Silas said.

“Thanks.”

“You welcome.”

“Did you ever read it?”

“Yeah.”

“You like it?”

“No,” he said. “Horror, it ain’t my thing. Too much of that in real life.” He wanted to say how Larry’s versions, way back when, were better, but French cleared his throat.

“If we can end our Oprah book club, we was just telling Larry here that his guilt won’t go away till he owns up to what he’s done. Ain’t you found that to be the case, 32?”

“Only if he’s done something.” Silas sensed French stiffen, heard Lolly squeak in his chair.

“Tell em, Silas,” Larry said, “that we used to be friends.”

“Yeah,” French said. “Tell us, Silas.”

“We was,” he told Larry.

“Friends, huh?” French kept his eyes on Silas. “Yall meet at school?”

“No.” Larry seemed stronger now, buoyed, a splotch of color coming into his cheeks. He shifted in his sheets, flexing his hands. “We couldn’t be friends there cause Silas was black. We used to play out in the woods. Remember, Silas?”

“This might,” French said, “be a good time to get back on track. You want to tell us what really happened to Cindy Walker, Larry?”

“Wait,” Silas said.

The sheriff coughed behind them and French fixed him with a hard gaze, one that said, Don’t fuck up.

“I took her where she asked me to,” Larry said, oblivious, it seemed, to the tension mounting in the room. “And I let her out. Then I drove off.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying all these years,” French said. “Tell us the rest. It’s time, Larry. Like I said, it ain’t going away, this guilt.”

“It wasn’t him,” Silas said.

“Constable Jones,” the sheriff now, “you want to wait in the hall?”

“No, I don’t.”

The room quiet except for the tick and beeping of Larry’s machines. Silas aware of the chief’s hot eyes on his face and the sheriff’s on his back like the red dots of laser sights.

“Is there something you want to say, then?” French asked.

Here it all came. A quarter of a century bunching up on him, bearing down, a truck slamming on its brakes and its logs sliding forward, over the cab, through the window, the back of his head, shooting past him in the road.

“It was me,” he said, turning away from French.

“You.”

“I’m the one picked her up after Larry dropped her off. In the woods. I’m the one let her off at her road.”

Larry said, “What?”

French clamped his fingers on Silas’s shoulder and turned him so he could see his face. “Wait,” he said. “It was you that Larry took her to see in 1982?”

Yes, it was him.

“You mean,” French said, “he’s been telling the truth all this time? And that you, in fact, were the last person to see her alive?”

Silas nodding.

“It was you?” Larry asked.

“Yeah.”

“She was pregnant,” Larry asked, “with your little baby?”

Silas had taken hold of the bed rail.

“Is that why you left?” Larry staring at him. “Went to Oxford?”

“Part of why.”

“To meet her?”

Silas said, “Larry-”

“Was it a boy or girl?”

“What?”

“The baby. Your baby.”

“There wasn’t,” Silas said, “a baby.”

French pulled his hand away in disgust. “Jesus Christ.”

“Roy-” Lolly said.

Larry looking puzzled.

“Larry.” Silas made himself face him. “I’m the one owes you an apology. More than that. See, Cindy, she wasn’t ever pregnant. She just…said that cause she knew you’d bring her to see me. I didn’t know that’s what she was doing, then. We were in love, or thought we were.”

Larry saying nothing, his open face.

“That night,” Silas went on, “after you dropped her off? We drove out to a field we used to go to, and we argued. She wanted to run away together, but I-” How to say it. “I had my baseball career ahead of me, and my momma was after me not to see her. It wouldn’t have worked, for half a dozen reasons. So I just took her home.”

Larry said, “Took her home.”

“Yeah.”

“You got there early.”

“Yeah. She didn’t wait on you cause she was mad at me. She just run off down the road, in the dark.”

“Where Cecil was.”

“Yeah.”

They stared at one another, Silas aware of what Larry must be thinking, how Cecil would have stood up as she came in the door, her face red, tears streaking her cheeks, him holding his beer, stumbling forward, toward her, yelling. Outside, Silas driving away in his mother’s car, faster and faster, Larry heading there at the same moment, the two boys missing each other by a few minutes, maybe their cars even met on the dark highway, lights on high beam, both too distracted to think of dimming, both flinching against the oncoming bright.

“He killed her,” Larry said.

The doctor was back in the room, tapping his watch.

“This interview”-Lolly stepping between Silas and French, putting an avuncular arm over both their shoulders-”might need to be concluded, fellows. For now.”

“Wait,” Larry said as French began to fasten his restraints. “We were friends. Weren’t we, Silas?”

Tell the fucking truth, 32. Silas.

“You were, Larry,” he said. “I don’t know what I was.”

SILAS FOLLOWED FRENCH and Lolly to the Sheriff’s Department and parked next to French’s Bronco. The chief got out and dropped a cigarette on the asphalt and ground it with his boot toe, looking up to where a reef of dark, swollen clouds, like a tidal wave, seemed ready to tumble over the building, wind on Silas’s cheeks, the Mississippi flag snapping on its pole and the asphalt freckled with rain. Lolly hurried back to his reserved spot by the handicap space to roll up his windows and then French held the door and the three of them walked inside, Silas like so many others summoned down to this redbrick building, to be questioned. Interviewed. They stopped at the receptionist’s desk, French and Lolly getting their messages, as Silas stood numbly behind.

He followed them to French’s box of an office lined with filing cabinets. The CI tossed his recorder on his desk with cardboard evidence boxes stacked beneath and, overhead, a bookshelf lined with videotapes and manuals and three-ring binders. To the left a dry erase board on which his current cases were listed, Tina Rutherford first, M &M second, a string of burglaries, a car theft, a rape, and, at the bottom, Larry Ott’s shooting. Silas sat in a folding chair while Lolly closed the door and French clicked on his coffeemaker. The sheriff stood with his arms on the top of a filing cabinet and took a can of Skoal from his pocket and fingered himself out a dip.

French rolled his chair from under his desk and sat, the coffee starting to drip.

“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

“THAT’S A HELL of a story,” French said when he’d finished, telling everything but being Larry’s half brother.

He’d poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Silas, then made another and given it to Lolly. “But you want a little advice? If I was you? I wouldn’t go too public with it. You know what I mean? Back in 1982? Might a been a good time. Then they could’ve made Cecil Walker the suspect. Questioned him at least. But since he’s been dead awhile-”

“Cancer,” the sheriff said. “If it’s any consolation, he had a tough go at the end.”

“And now,” French went on, “here you been carrying this information around with you for a quarter-century. I understand your reasons. But considering they never found the Walker girl’s body, and Ott never did no time-”

“Shit,” Silas said. “Larry’s done time his whole life.”

“Well, you reaching into ethics here, I’d say. Or civil law one. And both of them’s a tad outside our jurisdiction. But considering he never went to prison, it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie. We’ll focus on the current case. If he’s innocent, it’ll come out.”

“So none of what I’ve told yall changes anything,” Silas asked, “about Tina Rutherford?”

“Like what?”

“Like whoever killed her’s probably cashing in on Larry’s reputation. If I’d killed her,” Silas said, “guess where I’d bury her?”

“We know where you would,” French said, “but it wasn’t a lot of folks aware of that little tomb, was it? And Ott, before you busted in and started fucking everything up, he’d give what I’d consider to be a preliminary confession. What about you, Sheriff?”

“Sounded like one to me. Enough to keep him clipped to his bed. Keep Skip by the door.”

“But not you,” French said to Silas. “I think you’ll understand why, as of now, I’m taking you off guard duty.”

“Yeah,” Silas said.

AT THE HOSPITAL, his shoulders and hat wet from rain, he stopped and talked a moment with Skip, who got up from his chair by the door.

“You early,” he said. “You hear he confessed?”

“Yeah.” It was the day for it. “I ain’t staying.”

“Can you babysit him a minute? I need a smoke.”

“Go on.”

Silas watched him hurry down the hall, and when he was sure the man was gone and wasn’t coming back, he slipped into the room. Larry lay with his eyes closed, turned toward the window, his bandaged chest rising and falling.

Silas said, “Larry.”

He shifted. Opened his eyes and peered up where Silas stood holding his hat.

“Hey,” Silas said.

Larry lay watching him. Then he opened his lips and said something, his voice so quiet Silas came forward, leaned in.

“Do what, Larry?”

“All this time,” he said, “she’s been dead?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

“And all this time, you’ve been the one that dropped her off.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All this time people thinking it was me.”

“Look,” Silas said, “we can talk about that. We will. I got a lot to say to you. Hell of a lot, more than you know. But right now, it’s real important that we get this mess with that dead girl cleared up. The Rutherford girl. They think you confessed to it. But we both know you didn’t do it.”

“How you know I didn’t do it, Silas?”

“Same way I know you didn’t shoot yourself.”

“How? Cause you knew me for three months, twenty-five years ago? What makes you think you know anything about me now?”

“Just tell me who shot you. I got a good idea that that person may be the one that killed her.”

Outside, thunder. Larry turned toward the window.

“You called me,” Silas said, that note of pleading in his voice, “right before you got shot. You said it was important. What was it you wanted to say?”

“You never called back.”

“I didn’t get your message in time.”

“Those other times.”

“I’m sorry about that. But-”

“The thing,” Larry said, “that I wanted to tell you that first time, when you didn’t want to talk to me, was that I was sorry. About what I said, when Daddy made us fight.”

“That’s okay, Larry. It was a long time ago.”

“But now,” Larry said. “I don’t know what to think. Or even if I’m still sorry.”

“Fine,” Silas said, “but do you know who it was that shot you? Why’d you call me?”

“32?” Skip from the door. “What you doing?”

“Nothing,” Silas said. He looked again at Larry, who’d turned back toward the window, shut his eyes. Silas waited a moment, then left the room and closed the door.

“The chief just called,” Skip said, a puzzled look. “You off nights?”

“Guess so.”

“How come?” he asked. “What the hell?”

Silas turned to go. “Long story,” he said.

HE SAT AT a plastic table in a plastic chair in the back of the Chabot Bus, tracing his fingers up and down his Budweiser bottle wishing he had a glass. The mill crowd had gone home, loud, dirty, and he had the place to himself. He’d been wondering what you felt when you learned you’ve been robbed of twenty-five years of life, Larry like a convict exonerated by DNA evidence and Silas, the real criminal, caught at last.

It was 11:00 P.M. The rain had quit. The bartender, Chip, a white dude with a goatee, sat on his stool behind the counter cutting limes into wedges and putting them in a bowl and fanning mosquitoes with his knife. He’d tended bar long enough to know when to let a man alone, bringing Silas a fresh beer when he needed and taking his empties and clinking them in the garbage can. Shannon, the police reporter, had called his cell phone again but he didn’t want to talk to her.

Out the row of windows in front of him were more tables and chairs and, beyond, the gully overflowing with kudzu, trash caught in it like bugs in a spiderweb. Silas remembered riding the school bus as a boy, after they’d left the cabin on the Ott land and moved to Fulsom, how the landscape blurred beyond the windows as you rode, him on his way to school, baseball, his future. Maybe, before its recruitment to bar service, he’d ridden this very bus. Now look out. Nothing but a gully full of weeds and garbage. Everything frozen. Was that what childhood was, things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice consequences? If so, what was adulthood? The bus stopping? A man in his forties, slammed with his past, the kudzu moving faster than he was?

“Hey, cop. Where’s your hat?”

He looked up, ready to grumble he wanted to drink alone. But it was Irina, from White Trash Ave., standing with her hip cocked and a little snarly smile, her pale skin glistening from rain.

“Any more snakes in your box?” he asked her.

“I been scared to open it. And them boys has got it staked out, hoping whoever it was’ll try again.” She’d streaked red into her blond hair. She wore a short denim skirt and red cowboy boots, wet too. A low-cut tank top that showed her tattoo. Was it a pot leaf? He was wary of looking too hard. She had a lot of plastic bracelets jangling on her wrist and a cigarette in her hand and red nail polish. “Had to carry my damn phone bill down to BellSouth to pay it. Can I join you?”

He nodded to the empty chair next to him.

“Hey, Chip,” she said. “Budweiser.”

“You ready, 32?”

“Sure. Both on my tab.”

Silas pushed the chair out with his boot and she eased into it, a snake crawling in his own mailbox now, if Angie happened in. He’d half expected to find her here. They hadn’t talked since the night before, his interpreting her not calling as a point she was making. I’m disappointed in you. Well, who wasn’t?

Irina leaned forward to look into his eyes, the low neck of her shirt inviting, the cups of a lacy black bra showing, its tiny straps. “You okay, Officer?”

Chip’s arms appeared between them, two bottles. “Enjoy.”

“Cheers,” she said, touching the neck of her bottle to Silas’s.

He cheered her back and they sipped together, her putting her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“What you doing?” she asked. “Getting drunk?”

“Getting?”

“I better catch up, then.” She ordered a shot of tequila, no salt, and when it came she downed it and set the glass on the table. “That’s better” she said, her eyes watering. “I was on my way to a party when I saw your little Jeep outside.”

“It’s hard to miss.”

“It’s cute. Hey,” she said, pushing at his arm with her knuckles, her bracelets rattling. “I got a tip for you.”

“I’m off duty,” he said, “but go ahead. I can always use me a good tip.”

Irina took another slug from her bottle and sank even lower on the table, her breasts resting on it.

“Evelyn? She’s my other roommate? She was at work when you came over, so you didn’t meet her. But we got to talking the other night, the snake and all, and she gets all apologetic, something she hasn’t told us, how she used to go out with this weird guy. Before she moved in with us. So one night Ev goes over to his house, and they’re partying, you know, and this guy has all these guns. Pistols. A rifle in the corner.”

“That’s your tip?”

“Guns? Hell no. Ev’s fine with guns. She loves to shoot. But the other thing is, he also has all these live snakes. In aquariums. On shelves. The kitchen table. Right in his living room. He told her he collected em.”

Silas watched her as she talked. Her pupils were dilated. Weed. Maybe pills.

“So they start fooling around and she says it’s weird, you know. Necking, with snakes watching. How they don’t blink? So by then it’s getting too heavy, she tries to stop but he won’t. It starts getting ugly, she’s really scared. Now Evelyn’s second ex-husband, he gave her this little pistol. Single-shot. For her purse. She manages to get it out and threatens to shoot this guy if he doesn’t let her go. She said for the longest time he just looks at her, this weird smile, easing his hand toward one of the pistols on his table, like daring her to shoot, and she thinks, God, she might really have to nail the son of a bitch. But finally he just calls her a cunt and tells her to get the fuck out.”

“She make a complaint?”

“Not really. Evelyn’s not, you know, the complaining type.”

Some part Irina wasn’t telling him, drugs probably. Maybe this Evelyn had thought he’d flip on her if she reported him.

Irina tapped a cigarette from her pack and he took her lighter and lit it. “She just barely got out of there. Had to call somebody on her cell phone. Come pick her up.”

“So this guy. You think he mailed the snake?”

“Maybe. She admitted she left her other place cause of him. He kept riding by. Calling.”

“What’s his name?”

“Wallace. Wallace Stringfellow. Lives over on past the catfish farm.”

He felt his pocket for a pen and scribbled the name on a napkin, stuffed it in his jeans pocket. It rang a dim bell. That guy on the four-wheeler? With the pillowcase. Wasn’t that his name? Didn’t Larry once say a good way to carry snakes was in a pillowcase?

“You best get on,” he said. “To your party. You ain’t gone be fit to drive, you keep drinking.”

“You want to come?”

“Me? The Chabot constable? You sure you want me there? I can have a dampening effect for certain kinds of partying.”

She was sipping her beer, using her tongue on the lip of the bottle. “I see your point.”

Instead, after a few more beers, more shots of tequila, they took his Jeep to her house. She had the place alone, Marsha and her baby gone to her mother’s for the week, Evelyn at the party. The roads were slick with rain and he drove carefully. She said it was cool riding drunk with a cop; you didn’t have to worry about a DUI. In her yard they waded through the muddy dogs and he put his hand on the wall beside her door for balance as she felt under the mat for her keys. Inside, she clicked on the light and a room appeared and he made his way to the sofa while she went to get more beers. Place was clean enough, baby toys around, a lava lamp churling on the end table, drapes open to the night. He put his fingers to his head to stop its spinning, thinking, What are you doing, 32 Jones? You got to get out of here.

She came back with two Bud Lights and sat beside him, handed him a bottle, put hers on the coffee table and her feet in his lap. “Remove these, Officer,” she said. Her boots. He got up and worked the first one off slowly and pulled at her little sock, her toes wiggling to help, her toenails red when the sock slipped free, her foot a good kind of musky. He let his gaze drift up her legs past her knees to where he saw red panties under her skirt, another tattoo (an apple with a bite out of it) high on her inner thigh. She was watching him with a sleepy smile. He started to work the second boot off and lost his balance, his momentum taking him to the door where he caught its handle. She giggled and shook her foot at him. Get back over here. He held the doorknob, looked out the window where a car passed slowly, its lights on dim. He thought how he was leaving fingerprints on the knob, on the beer bottle, too, her cowboy boots. Plus a witness just now out of sight, around the curve in the dark. He thought of Larry in his bed, thought of Angie in hers. What the hell was he doing?

“I got to go,” he said.