The Devil and the River Page 13

  “I don’t understand, Michael. Your friend in the war told you to bury Nancy Denton in the riverbank?”

  “He told me a lot of things, Sheriff. All about the magic. He told me who to trust and who not to trust. It was because of him I made the deal, and the deal I made has got me where I am now. I knew it would happen, and I knew I’d have to make the payback. I just didn’t know when.”

  “The payback?”

  “For getting out of there. For getting through the war despite the fact that everyone around me, everyone I knew, was blown to shit that day. I made a deal for that, and just to prove to me that the deal was good, that thing happened in fifty-two, and it was the same thing all over again. That’s when they started calling me the luckiest man alive.” Webster shook his head resignedly, and then he looked through Gaines as if Gaines were not there at all. “They didn’t understand that I was already dead. Had been dead ever since the moment I made that deal.”

  “I don’t understand, Michael. What deal? What payback? What happened in fifty-two?”

  Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? She’s gone. She’s dead. She ain’t never comin’ back. Whatever I did to help her after she was dead, it all counts for shit now, doesn’t it?”

  Webster turned and looked at Gaines directly. This time Gaines believed that Mike was really seeing him. Webster’s eyes were filled with tears, his skin pale, and a fine sweat varnished his brow. He looked sick, upset, agitated. “Just trying to do whatever I could to get her through this thing. I read stuff afterward, you know? Trying to understand what I’d done. Trying to understand the deal I’d made, if there was any way out of it. Well, I found out one thing for sure. There ain’t no way out of a deal like that. I was raised in Louisiana, out in Baton Rouge, and I heard what Al was saying, ’cause he was out of Louisiana, too, and later on, afterward, I read all about that stuff, and I figured there had to be some truth in some of it. That’s the way it goes when you’re raised out that way . . .”

  Gaines heard the words, words he had heard before, and the memories came back, images from his own childhood, the things he had seen, and he knew what Webster was talking about.

  “But when she didn’t come back, I figured maybe it was because of the deal I’d made. And then I figured that maybe I just had to be patient and never say a damned word about it, because saying anything about it would have ruined any hope that it would work . . .”

  He shook his head, lowered his chin to his chest, and for a moment Gaines believed the man was crying again.

  When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.

  “But it didn’t work, did it? She didn’t come back. You found her all this time later, and now all I can hope for is that she made it through to the other side and she’s safe somewhere, someplace where she don’t hurt no more . . .”

  But she did come back, Gaines thought. She was preserved perfectly, looked the same as she had twenty years before.

  “But why, Mike?” he asked. “Why do what you did to her after killing her so brutally?”

  Webster’s eyes widened. “What?” he asked, in his voice a tone of disbelief and incredulity. “What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t kill her. Is that what you think I did? Jesus Christ, no, I didn’t kill her. I found her dead, Sheriff . . . found her dead in the doorway of that shack by the side of the road and just tried to help her the best way I knew how . . .”

  18

  Gaines could only listen to so much. He knew he was dealing with a crazy man, and whatever chords might have struck with him, it was still delusion and insanity.

  Gaines did not want to question Webster further, not until a lawyer was there, not until they could get this on tape. He did ask Webster one other question, however, and that was the location of where Webster had found Nancy Denton. Where he said he’d found her. The location was a half mile or so from the motel where Webster lived. Gaines took Hagen with him and drove out there. He just stood at the side of the road and tried to imagine what had happened twenty years before. If ever there had been a shack there, it was long since gone. Perhaps if they tore up the undergrowth, they could find the footprint of it, but Gaines wasn’t about to do such a thing.

  Gaines and Hagen then drove on out to Bogalusa, only to learn that Sheriff Graydon McCarthy was off shift. A couple of questions and they found him in a bar up on Wintergreen. He was sitting in the corner with another man, the pair of them watching a pickup band rehearsing a set for a visiting singer. Above their heads, right there on the wall, was a sign.

  Bar Tabs Available

  Terms & Conditions Apply*

  *$1,000 Deposit Required

  “Didn’t think I’d be seein’ you so soon,” McCarthy said.

  “Looks like maybe we got our man,” Gaines said.

  “Good to hear it.”

  “Need to coordinate this with you.”

  “Understand that, Sheriff,” McCarthy said, “but this here is my brother, come on down from Hattiesburg to see a little music with me. We don’t get to see each other much these days, but we do like a bit o’ country music.” McCarthy nodded at the band. “This here shower o’ half-wits are strangling a couple of classics, but we got Mary May Coates arrivin’ sooner or later, and she’s an old-time star, a real class act.” McCarthy smiled. “You could stay and have a drink with us, sociable like, and then we could deal with this mess in the morning.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff McCarthy, but I gotta get back. All I need is your sanction on taking this case. The guy we got lives out in that motel place you spoke of, so, in truth, that makes the arrest itself a Travis County matter. However, the girl was from Whytesburg. Her ma still lives there, and that makes it Breed County. I wanna take this thing, Sheriff, but I’m more than likely gonna be back and forth in Travis checking up on things and getting myself involved in other people’s business, if you know what I mean.”

  McCarthy set down his glass. He leaned forward, rested his hands flat on the table. His expression was serious, almost foreboding.

  “You’re tellin’ me that you wanna take a murder case off my hands? You want to take a case from Travis and just move it all over to Whytesburg and leave me with nothin’ to do?”

  “I don’t mean this disrespectfully, Sheriff—”

  McCarthy grinned—high, wide, and handsome. “Hell, son, I’m just yankin’ your chain. You go on and take all the cases from Travis you can carry, and when you’re done with them, you can come on back and take some more.”

  Gaines nodded. “ ’Preciated, Sheriff.” He stood up, extended his hand to McCarthy’s brother. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.” They shook hands. “Sheriff,” Gaines added, replacing his hat and touching the brim.

  Gaines headed back to the door, found Hagen standing beside the car watching an overweight woman in full country singer regalia—rhinestones, knee-high maroon leather boots, a mountain of blond curls—as she maneuvered her way out of a station wagon.

  “Miss Mary May Coates, I believe,” Gaines said.

  The woman turned, beamed at Gaines.

  “Think you’ll find yourself an enthusiastic crowd tonight, ma’am.”

  “Why, honey, that’s mighty sweet of you,” she crooned.

  Gaines got in the car, and Hagen headed around and got in the passenger side. They pulled away sharply, left a wide crescent in the gravel of the forecourt behind them.

  “He all right?” Hagen asked.

  “It’s our case,” Gaines replied. “Because he doesn’t want it, first and foremost, but mainly because we do.”

  Back at the Whytesburg office, Gaines headed on down to see Webster. Webster was sleeping, snoring lightly, the expression on his face one of a man seemingly untroubled by anything.

  Gaines woke him.

  Webster rubbed his eyes, sat up, stretched his neck from side to side.

  “Mike, I have to get straight what you’re telling me here. You’re telling me that you found Nancy Denton dead in a shack at the si
de of the road.

  Webster nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  “And the things that were done to her . . . before she was buried?”

  “I just did what I had to do,” Webster replied. “To help her through, you know? Just to help her through.”

  “And she was already dead? This is what you’re telling me?”

  Webster looked hurt. “I cannot believe you would think I was capable of killing Nancy—”

  Gaines was silent for a moment—taking it all in, trying not to picture this man sweating over the body of Nancy Denton, the strength it must have taken to cut through her chest, the removal of her heart . . . and as far as the snake was concerned, he could not even bring himself to mention it.

  “I need to look in your room, Mike. I can fuck around for a day getting a warrant, or you can give me permission to go look in your room.”

  “Go look,” Webster said. “I ain’t hiding nothin’ from you.”

  “You’ll sign something to that effect, that you gave me permission to search your room, your belongings, everything?”

  “Sure I will.”

  “Good enough,” Gaines said, and then he turned to walk away.

  “Sheriff?”

  Gaines hesitated, turned back to look at Webster.

  “After you’re done searchin’ my place, can I see Nancy?”

  Gaines didn’t reply. He took a deep breath. He exhaled slowly. He walked as quickly as he could to the stairwell and left the basement.

  19

  As Graydon McCarthy had said, the motel was owned by one Harvey Blackburn. Harvey was easily found, again in the nearest bar, and Gaines explained the situation as far as Webster was concerned.

  Blackburn was a drunk, was drunk when Gaines found him, would be drunk for the rest of the night. From Gaines’s first impression, the man was a chiseler and a thief. Somehow or other, he’d wound up owning the property—a dozen or so falling-apart motel rooms built in a crescent, the neon sign in the center driveway, now broken down and out of action, a small office to the right. This was the kind of place that had been in its prime in the midfifties, a simple, clean stopover joint for interstate travelers, some headed south to New Orleans, others north to Jackson, perhaps even Memphis. There would have been a catalog of house rules, a wedge of pages with a hole punched through the upper-left-hand corner and hung from a nail behind the door of each cabin. No smoking in the bed. No milk to be left in the room upon vacating. No music. No dancing. No loud talking after nine p.m. On it would go—item by item—until it seemed that whatever brief sojourn might be endured there would involve nothing more than standing silent and immobile in the corner of the room, your unpacked suitcase ready for collection at the door, your shod feet encased in polythene bags to prevent inadvertent marks on the carpet or scuffs on the baseboard.

  Now Blackburn charged by the hour, the day, the week, the year, whatever you liked. He catered to all and sundry.

  Gaines knew that whatever Blackburn told him, there would always be some other story hiding just beneath the surface. He was curious as to how such a small man could bear such a burden of secrets.

  Gaines told Blackburn that Webster’s motel cabin was a crime scene, that it was to be treated as such. There would be no entry, not even for Blackburn, and he—Sheriff Gaines of Whytesburg—would be overall responsible for any and all matters that related to the investigation.

  He asked Blackburn how long Webster had lived there.

  “A year,” Blackburn said. “Maybe a year and a half.”

  Gaines didn’t wait for questions, and it seemed Blackburn didn’t have any. Blackburn seemed like a man well practiced in keeping his mouth shut tight, just in case he opened it and the truth inadvertently fell out.

  Gaines told Hagen to call in to the office, to get Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton out there. Every resident of the motel needed to be questioned, their particulars taken. Gaines wanted to know—first and foremost—if any of these people had known about this. Had Webster ever spoken to anyone of these twenty-year-old events?

  Chantry and Dalton arrived. Gaines gave Hagen the responsibility of overseeing the actions there, the canvassing of the neighbors, the collection of whatever information they could glean about Webster himself, about his comings and goings during his residence at the motel. Lester Cobb had said that Webster was upstream regularly, but had Webster been seen in the proximity of the buried body? Did he make a habit of returning to the scene of the crime?

  Hagen produced the release document. “I typed this up,” he said. “Get Webster to sign it soon as you can.”

  Gaines read it through, folded it, and tucked it into his pocket, and with Hagen and the deputies then organized, Gaines steeled himself for the task at hand. He would search the room, the bathroom, the front and rear of the cabin.

  Once again, he covered his face, and once again he entered Lieutenant Michael Webster’s motel cabin, the first room of which was dark, unsettling, and stank like rotten meat.

  Gaines switched on the lights, and it was only then—in the glare of two stark and shadeless bulbs—that he appreciated the level of filth and chaos that had consumed Webster’s cabin. It was said that the state of a man’s living space was a reflection of his state of mind. Gaines’s own quarters were somewhat stark, an evident lack of personal touches, but he lived with his mother, cared for her there, and thus had considered all things from her perspective and for her comfort. When she died, if she ever died, then her things would go. Gaines would not want to live with constant reminders of her presence. And then the house would be empty and he would have to start over.

  But here? Here was something beyond all comprehension. In the darkness of the unlit room, those minutes when he had first spoken with Webster, his attention had been on Webster. Now Webster was not present, the room no longer dark, and Gaines could see the reasons for the unbearable funk of the place. To the right was a small kitchenette and eating area, and it was here that the vast majority of the garbage was concentrated. Takeout food boxes, a half-eaten pie, trash bags spilling over with mold-infested waste, dirty plates, articles of unwashed clothing, a heap of skin mags, clothes, shoes, boxes of ammo, three handguns, a rusted bandolier, napsacks, a suitcase full of 45-rpm records, many of them broken. Amid this bedlam were ashtrays piled high with the roaches of joints, a couple of plastic bags of weed, twists of paper, within which was amphetamine sulfate. And then Gaines found a grocery sack filled with prescription medication bottles, many of them bearing names that were not Webster’s. Uppers, downers, everything imaginable, a concoction of which would have killed any man of regular constitution. Webster was able to stand, to talk, to act, but his mind, his imagination, his rationale, had to be utterly fucked.

  Gaines found a heap of clothes in the corner of the room. Using the tip of his pen, he lifted the pants, held them up, saw the thick, dried mud that traveled as far as the knees. He gagged, felt the tension in his throat fighting against the urge to just puke, to just let it out, to release the entire physical reaction to this terrible, terrible thing. But Gaines held it down.

  He dropped the pants, headed back to the car for some bags, returned with a pair of gloves as well. Carefully, trying to ensure that none of the dried mud fell away, he bagged the pants, a shirt, a pair of boots. If this mud could be identified as the same mud from the riverbank, then it would corroborate Cobb’s statement that he had seen Webster there. It was of no great consequence, of course. So Webster liked to go looking for garter snakes. So Webster took a walk by the river every once in a while. Perhaps, Gaines thought, he himself was looking for nothing more than any small certainty he could find amid the ocean of uncertainties that faced him. He put the bags in the trunk of his car, and then he took a few moments to breathe deeply, to gather his thoughts, to steady his nerves before he searched further.

  He stood for a while, almost as if he believed that he could become acclimated and insensate to the smell. He could not, and he would not, and he knew he wa
s merely postponing the inevitable.

  He maneuvered his way through the garbage to the back of the room. Here were the boxes he had seen behind Webster. There were a good half dozen, and he lifted down the first and started looking through it. At first, Gaines had the impression that here was nothing but a mountain of random newspaper clippings, but then a certain pattern seemed to emerge. Fires, collapsed buildings, mining disasters, floods, storms, hurricanes, typhoons, ships lost at sea, car crashes, train wrecks, bridges dropping into ravines and rivers, forest fires, farming accidents and gas explosions. On it went, both natural disasters and man-made calamities. The common thread, sometimes so obvious from images of individuals being carried from the ruins of some building, other times revealed in the third or fourth paragraphs, were the survivors. Sometimes one, sometimes two or three, but always a small number in relation to those who had lost their lives. And the clippings had been collected from newspapers right across the country, not only local but national, covering everything from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to the Boise City News and the Charleston Post and Courier. The boxes were dated in sequential years, starting as far back as Christmas of 1945 and running all the way to the present. Gaines counted six boxes, each box covering five years, the last box having started in 1970 and still incomplete. If nothing else, Webster had been obsessive in his organization. He had underlined the number of survivors in each case, and where they had been mentioned, he had underlined their names.

  What this meant, Gaines could not even begin to conceive, but it had to represent something.

  And then Gaines had it. The reference Webster had made to his section in Guadalcanal.

  November third, I was in a foxhole with my section. Nine of us left, all hunkered down to weather it through, and they hit us direct. Eight dead, one living.