Paint It Black

Chapter Forty-three

Candy jerked the cruiser to a stop behind the Lee County Sheriff’s Department car. Louis could see Sheriff Mobley and a deputy standing under an awning at Heller’s door. They had already checked the tiny trailer twice before, first doing a routine welfare check the night Heller went missing and then again the next day. And there had been a sheriff’s deputy posted out front since last Tuesday.

But now they were here to look with different eyes, armed with a search warrant.

Louis got out of the cruiser and hurried through the driving rain to the door. Candy came up behind him and pulled off his cap, shaking the water from it. The four men stood huddled under the listing awning.

Mobley stared at Louis. “Wainwright couldn’t come?”

“He’s with Horton,” Louis said. He had to speak up to be heard over the rain beating on the metal awning. He debated whether to fill Mobley in on what they had just learned about Heller from Emily’s file. He decided not to bother. He wasn’t sure he understood it well enough himself.

“There’s no reason for Dan to be here when we know Heller isn’t here,” Louis said.

“You’re not even sure Heller is a killer. He could be dead,” Mobley said.

“We’re sure.”

“Tell me why.”

“It’s complicated,” Louis said, watching the deputy pry the door open.

“Then tell me this. If Heller wasn’t killed in the shrimp shack, who the hell was?”

“We don’t know.”

“There seems to be a lot you don’t know,” Mobley said.

The door popped open.

Louis trailed the other three men inside and stopped, wiping the rain from his face. The trailer was stuffy and smelled of fish, and he sensed it came from the unwashed clothes he saw piled in a corner. All the blinds were drawn and the television was on. He wondered if Heller had been watching the press conference from here.

The deputy switched on a lamp and the tiny trailer was revealed in all its cramped mess. Louis took it in quickly, but decided Heller had not brought any of his victims here. The mess seemed to be just the usual squalor of daily living; there was no sign of a struggle. Besides, he doubted that someone like Heller would have allowed those men inside his home in the first place.

They started in the living room, tossing cushions and rifling through drawers. Louis wandered to the kitchen, opening cupboards. Cereal. Macaroni and cheese. Canned chili.

In the sink, a few food-encrusted dishes and a dead cockroach. On the counter empty beer cans. Louis spotted a beer mug with red lettering on it. He carefully turned it around. It said SMOKEY’S HAPPY HOUR 2 FOR 1 DRINKS 4 TO 6.

Emily had been right. Heller had stalked Walter Tatum from Queenie Boulevard. How had Heller felt walking that street, sitting in that bar, among all the black people? As a “white” man, he must have been uncomfortable. Or had he felt simply invisible?

Louis moved on to the refrigerator. Pepsi. Gatorade. Eggs. He checked the freezer, half expecting to find some human body part. There was nothing. He stood for a moment, listening to the rain batter the metal roof, wondering how anyone could stand the racket.

He moved past Mobley to the narrow hall and entered a small room. It was a bedroom, but also had been used as an office and storage room. It was packed with papers and clothes strewn around a cheap particleboard desk lodged under the window.

Heller’s bed was small, a twin with plain wooden posts that resembled pilings at the dock. The bed was made, covered with a plain green blanket. On the dresser Louis could see a hairbrush and a bottle of Vitalis.

He moved to the closet. It was open, the sliding door off its runner and propped against the wall. The inside was crammed with boxes and clothes. Louis sifted through the boxes carefully, finding more crumpled clothes and an array of old fishing gear-tangled line, rusted hooks, and lures.

At the bottom of the box of clothes, hidden beneath a sweater, he saw a wadded denim shirt. Gingerly he pulled it out and laid it over the bed. It was covered with blood, brown and dried stiff.

He looked for more. There were three, all long-sleeved shirts, all with blood splattered across the front and down the sleeves. Then came the pants, worn old jeans, two pairs, both stained dark brown on the groin area and thighs. One pair had a blood splotch on the upper leg and a small puncture in the denim. The puncture Roscoe would have made when he stabbed Heller in the thigh.

“Sheriff,” Louis called, “better get in here.”

Mobley appeared at the door, ducking slightly to come into the tiny room. He stared at the clothing, curling his lip.

“Christ,” Mobley said. “I guess you were right.”

He snatched the radio from the belt, barking at his dispatcher to speed up the crime scene techs. He shoved the radio back, looking slowly around the room. “This fucker needs to fry,” he said.

Louis went to the desk and started opening drawers. “He’s in the right state for it,” he said.

“Not anymore. Texas is doing one a month,” Mobley said, peeking into the closet. “We’ll never catch them now.”

Louis opened the top drawer. It was stuffed with old newspapers, and Louis looked through them quickly, searching for articles about the murders. All the sections were from the News- Press, but there was nothing in the pages about the murders. Under the newspapers, Louis spotted a worn manila envelope. He pulled it out, sliding the contents to the desk.

On top was a letter. It appeared to have been typed on an old typewriter and it was stained with water spots. It was dated June 23, 1981, and addressed to the Florida Department of Health, Vital Statistics. It read To Whom it May Concern, My name is Ty Calvin Heller and my birth certificate has a mistake on it. Under race it should say Caucasian. I would like this corrected immediately.

Louis swallowed dryly and set it aside.

Next was a copy of Heller’s birth certificate. The box titled RACE had been whited out with Wite-Out and the word Caucasian written in.

Beneath the certificate was a small stack of drawings done with colored marker pens on loose-leaf paper. They were childlike scrawls of stick men, but the heads were round black circles with no facial features.

Finally, Louis pulled out four snapshots, yellowed with age, their edges curled. The first one was a white woman and three white kids, standing on a beach. The second one showed the same thin blond woman in front of a truck-laughing with two men who could have been friends, lovers, or uncles. The third picture was another shot of the woman and the kids, sitting on a brown sofa with a dog. Louis was suddenly very sure the blond woman was Heller’s mother.

There was no sign of Tyrone in any of the shots-except in the last picture. It had been taken in front of a gray house. It showed the white woman and the three white kids, but someone had painstakingly glued on a cutout of another child-a child with dark brown hair and tan skin.

Mobley came up behind him, staring at the drawings. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Family album,” Louis said, tossing the pictures on the desk.

“Kincaid, I just got off the radio with Horton. Why didn’t you tell me about the damn file on Heller you found?”

“I figured Horton would.”

“Yeah, he did. And he told me it says Heller killed his own father.”

“So?”

“So, what the fuck is this then?”

Mobley was holding a greeting card. “We found a Father’s Day card. Doesn’t look that old.”

“Maybe Heller has a kid somewhere,” Louis said.

“It’s from Heller,” Mobley said, handing it to Louis.

Louis looked at the signature beneath the greeting inside. It had been written with a black marker and simply said Ty. He lowered it and glanced around the bedroom.

Had it been meant for his dead father, a man who still lived in his mind? Or a phantom father, an invented father whom Heller could call his own?

“Until I read that file, I don’t know what I’m looking for in all this shit,” Mobley said. “We need to wait for the CSU guys.” He started to the door and turned back.

“Don’t move anything else, Kincaid.”

Louis didn’t reply. He had seen enough anyway. He walked from the bedroom, back out to the dingy kitchen. He felt someone behind him and turned. It was Candy.

“Dispatch called. You have a message waiting for you at the station.”

“From who?”

“A Captain Lynch. Said he needs to talk to you about Tyrone. Said it was urgent.”

Louis sighed. “He’s heard the news. Damn it. I should’ve gone to tell him myself.”

Candy nodded toward Mobley. “They got this covered. We know who we’re chasing and we know he did it. Let’s go see Lynch now.”

Louis nodded, slipping past the deputy who was sorting through stuff from a kitchen drawer. Louis stopped in the living room.

The rotting fish odor hit him again, only this time it was different, tinged with the stink of bloody clothes and an almost palpable feeling of despair. The rain beat on the metal, pounding like Heller’s fists against faceless men.

The photographs came back to him. That small brown face, pasted into the family photos.

The anger he had felt back at the station was coming into sharper focus now. But what had he been angry about? Heller and his inability to deal with his reality, his blackness? The woman who had killed a child’s soul? The father who wasn’t there to save him? He was angry at all of them.

In some small, strange, distant way, he understood Heller. He hated him, hated what he had done, but he could understand. The need to be part of something more than himself, the need to belong to someone. He had lived it himself. He knew what it felt like to be different. . and ignored because of it.

He had felt it back in Mississippi, even at age seven, seeing people staring at his light skin. He had felt it in the foster homes, hearing the other kids whisper. He had spent so much time searching for acceptance and finding only turned heads. Finally, he had stopped looking. By the time Phillip Lawrence had come along, he had almost closed up completely.

Louis realized he was still holding the Father’s Day card. He set it on the kitchen counter.

“Louis, let’s go,” Candy said. “This place gives me the creeps.”