Cypress Grove

Chapter Three

“I’m in over my head,” Sheriff Bates said. “You came up around here, right?”

“Close enough.”

“Then you know how it is.”

We were in his Jeep, heading back towards town. Dirt roads pitted as a teenager’s face. Now we turned out of the trees onto worn blacktop. The radio mounted beneath his dash crackled.

“Weekends, we break up bar fights, haul in drunk drivers. Maybe kids pay someone to buy them a case of beer and party till they get to be a nuisance, or some guy down on his luck climbs in a window and comes back out with a pillowcase full of flatware, prescription drugs, a laptop or TV. Not like there’s much anywhere he can go with it. Once in a blue moon a husband slaps his wife down once too often, gets a butcher knife planted in his shoulder or a frypan laid up alongside his head.”

The radio crackled again. Didn’t sound to me any different from previous crackles, but Bates picked up the mike. “I’m on my way in.”

“Ten-four.” Guy at the other end loved those vowels, rolled them around in his mouth like marbles.

Bates hung the mike back on its stirrup.

“Don Lee. You’ll be meeting him here shortly. Eager to get home to his six-pack and his new wife, most likely in that order. What time’s it got to be, anyway?”

“Little after eight.”

“My month to cover nights. Natural order of things, Don Lee’d be gone hours ago. Lisa’d have had his meat and potatoes on the table, he’d be on the couch and his second beer while she washed up. But long as I’m out of pocket, he’s stuck there.”

Bates hauled the jeep hard right and we skidded out onto what passes for a highway around here, picking up speed. Almost immediately, though, he geared down, braked.

“You need help there, Ida?”

A saddle-oxford Buick, cream over blue, vintage circa ’48, sat steaming in the right lane. An elderly woman all in white, vintage a couple of decades prior, stood alongside. She wore a hat that made you want to hide Easter eggs in it.

“Course not. Just have to let it cool down, same as always.”

“I figured. You say hi to Karl for me, now.”

“I’ll say it. What he hears…”

A mile or so further along, the sheriff said, “Back in Memphis you had the highest clearance rate on homicides of anyone on the force.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“I’m not in a habit of drafting help. Tend to be cautious about it.”

“Then you know it wasn’t me, it was us. What part wasn’t plain luck owes mostly to my partner. I’d be jumping hoops of intuition, flying high. Meanwhile he was back down there on the ground thinking things methodically through.”

“That would be Randy-right?”

I nodded.

“Like I said, I’m in over my head. Expertise, luck, intuition-we’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

We came in from the north, onto deserted streets. Pop. 1280, a sign said. Passed Jay’s Diner with its scatter of cars and trucks outside, drugstore and hardware store gone dark, A amp;P, Dollar Store, Baptist church, Gulf station. Pulled in behind city hall. One-story prefab painted gray. Probably took them all of a week to put it up, and it’d be there forever, long as the glue held. The paint job was recent and hurried, with a light frosting of gray on bushes alongside. A single black-and-white sat nosed in close outside. Inside, a rangy man in polyester doing its best to look like khaki sat nosed close to the desk. On it were a radio, a ten-year-old Apple computer and a stack of magazines, one of which he was paging through. He looked up as we came in. Wet brown eyes that reminded me of spaniels, ruddy face narrow and shallow like a shovel, thin hair. Something electric about him, though. Sparks and small connections jumping around in there unremarked.

“Anything going on?” Bates said.

“‘Bout what you’d expect. Couple of minor accidents at getting-off time. Old Lady Siler reported her purse stolen, then remembered she’d locked it in the trunk of her car. I ran the spare key out, as usual. Jimmy Allen showed up at his wife’s house around dark and started pounding on the door. Then he tried to steal the car. When I got there, he had two wires pulled down out of the radio, trying to hotwire them.”

“Been at it for an hour or more, if I know Jimmy.”

“Prob’ly so.”

“He in back?”

“Out flat.”

“This goes on, Jimmy might as well just start having his mail delivered here.”

Bates walked over and closed three of the four light switches on the panel by the door. Much of the room fell gray, leaving us and desk in a pool of dim light outside which shadows jumped and slid.

“Don Lee, this’s Mr. Turner.”

The deputy held out a hard, lean hand and I took it. A good handshake, no show to it, just what it was. Like the man, I suspected.

“Pleased to have you, Detective.”

“Just Turner. I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”

“Hope you’re not telling us you forget how,” Bates said.

“No. What happens is, you stop believing it matters.”

“And does it?” This from Don Lee.

“Does it matter, or does it stop?”

“There’s a difference?”

In that instant I knew I liked him. Liked them both. All I’d wanted was to be left alone, and I’d taken giant steps to ensure that. Rarely strayed far from the cabin, had goods delivered monthly. The last thing I’d wanted was ever again to be part of an investigation, to have to go rummaging through other people’s lives, messes and misdemeanors, other people’s madnesses, other people’s minds.

“Why don’t you fill me in?” I said.

“You’n go on home,” Bates told his deputy. “Appreciate your holding down the fort. Dinner must be getting colder by the minute.”

“All the same to you, I’d as soon stay,” Don Lee said.