Authors: Thomas H. Cook
Suit yourself.
Those had always been the words he’d used when he’d had enough of me.
I’m going to stay in California.
Suit yourself.
Never marry.
Suit yourself.
No kids.
Suit yourself.
“It’s all too far back, Dad. It wouldn’t make any difference what I found out.”
My father held his gaze on the television, his eyes yellow and watery. “Suit yourself.”
With that, he grasped the ball bat beside his bed, brought himself to his feet, and trudged into the bathroom, leaving me alone beside his cluttered bed.
I waited for him to return, but he never did, so after a time I rose and headed for my room. On the way I saw him in the kitchen, standing beside the refrigerator, gently holding the jar of bugs as if he preferred their company to mine.
M
ost of us make them suddenly, our most fateful choices, but those who stop to think things through rarely make any better ones. All that night, as I tossed on my bed, I reasoned that there was no point in “getting mad,” no point in finding out why, twenty years before, Wallace Porterfield had thought or done anything, and certainly no reason to believe that whatever he’d thought or done could possibly matter to me now. Surely, the best argument was to let sleeping dogs lie.
But there are certain questions that we avoid at our peril, certain things that if we do not know them will forever hold our lives in thrall. That’s why adopted children so often leave those who kept them to search for those who let them go. It’s easy to live without knowing the history of the universe, but hard to live without knowing the history of yourself.
“Hey, Roy,” Lonnie said with a wide smile when I entered his office the next morning. “You looking for another case to work on, or is this just a social call?”
“Well, actually, I
am
looking into another case.”
“Oh yeah, which one?”
“Archie’s,” I said. “I’d like to take a look at whatever file you have on his case.”
“You mean the murders?” Lonnie asked unbelievingly. “That file’s nearly twenty years old, Roy. You got a reason for wanting to see it?”
“Yes, I do,” I told him. “Something Doc Poole mentioned when he looked in on my father last night.”
Lonnie gave a chuckle. “What would Doc Poole know about that case?”
“Well, it was actually something your father told him,” I answered. “That he believed that Archie hadn’t told the truth about the murders.”
Lonnie offered a quick laugh. “Roy, you know as well as I do that Archie sat right in this office and told my daddy the whole story.”
Standing before Lonnie’s desk, looking into his eyes, I knew how frightened my brother must have been as he’d faced the far more menacing figure of Wallace Porterfield. He’d been a teenage boy from a family of no standing, easily confused, easily led, charged with the murder of a banker and his wife. How small and helpless he must have felt, something Wallace Porterfield could scrape from the bottom of his glossy boots and be done with.
“A story maybe,” I told Porterfield’s son. “But evidently not one your father wholeheartedly believed.”
“Of course Daddy believed it,” Lonnie said emphatically. “He was probably just trying to get old Doc Poole’s goat.”
“Well, he succeeded at that,” I said dryly.
Lonnie leaned forward. “Archie confessed to the whole thing. And he never denied it. Those are the facts.”
“Then why didn’t your father accept them? Why did he go up to Waylord and talk to Lila Cutler?”
That Wallace Porterfield had done precisely that did not appear to surprise his only son. “A lawman has to look into lots of things, Roy. Especially in a murder case.”
When I gave no response to this, Lonnie added, “You know, Roy, I’ve never put a man in jail that really, deep down, thought he deserved to be there. Thieves caught redhanded. Rapists. In their own minds they’re always innocent. Somehow they screw it all around in their heads, and lo and behold, they come up clean. It’s the way they think, criminals. The thing about Archie is that he wasn’t a criminal. He just got caught up in something. Girls and all. Running off. But he wasn’t a criminal. Didn’t think like a criminal. When he got caught, he owned up to what he’d done. Not like a criminal, denying everything no matter how much evidence you have. Archie told the truth flat out.”
When I continued to stare at Lonnie silently, his voice turned grave. “You’re set on this, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
He chuckled dryly. “Okay, Roy,” he said. “I’ll see that you get that file.”
I waited.
“I don’t mean right now.” Lonnie eased himself back in his chair. “Those files are over at my daddy’s house. He keeps them in his garage.”
“Those are county files, Lonnie. They don’t belong to your father.”
“ ’course not,” Lonnie said. “He’s just storing them, that’s all.”
“Well, I’d like to see the file on Archie as soon as possible.”
He heard the threat in my voice, the fact that if I didn’t get access to Archie’s file right away, I might just make a call to the state capital, raise the legal issue of why official state records were currently being stored on the property of a man who no longer had authority over them.
“Okay, Roy, if you’re sure.”
I had never been more sure of anything in my life.
Wallace Porterfield came out of his house as I brought my car to a halt beside the shimmering black Lincoln that sat luxuriously in his driveway. He was dressed in black pants and a white short-sleeve shirt, and he descended the stairs with surprising speed, still powerful in his old age, with muscular arms and legs, a charging bull of a man.
“Lonnie says you want to see that file on the Kellogg murders,” he said.
“That’s right.”
He came toward me with the wide, striding gait I remembered from the night he’d led me from Archie’s cell for the last time, both of us passing Doc Poole on the way.
Once we’d gone through the thick door that separated the sheriff’s office from the short block of cells, he’d stepped aside to let me by, saying only that I was a “lucky boy.” In what way, I wondered now, had Porter-field thought me lucky?
“That file’s stuck in with a lot of other stuff.” He waved me forward, his gigantic hand floating like a huge brown raptor in the summer air. “This way.”
I followed him across the lawn much as I’d followed him out of my brother’s cell and down the long corridor to the office all those years before. Of all the men I’d ever seen, he appeared the least weakened by his great age, not at all the withered scarecrow my father had become.
At the garage he bent forward and drew up the door.
“The stuff’s not in any particular order,” he warned as he stepped into its darkened interior. “You’ll just have to go through it.”
He yanked a string. A naked lightbulb revealed a wall of cardboard boxes, each with a date scrawled in black ink.
“You can narrow it down by the year, at least,” Porter-field told me. “It’s all sorted by the year.” He squinted at the boxes. “It was about twenty years ago, wasn’t it? When your brother killed ’em?” His ancient eyes drifted toward me. “And you went off to college about that same time.”
“Just a week or so later,” I answered, remembering
Porterfield’s words, struck by how true they’d been, the fact that the old sheriff really did know everything, the dark recesses of his kingdom.
Porterfield’s eyes swept back into the shadowy interior of the garage. “Well, there they are, the records. How long will you need? An hour, something like that?”
“It shouldn’t take long, once I find the file.”
I expected him to turn, go back to the house, but instead he continued to stand before me, his great head slumped forward, the dark eyes bearing down upon me.
“Lonnie said old Doc Poole set your bowels to blubbering,” he said. “Got you all shook up about things.”
“Not exactly shook up. He just mentioned that you didn’t buy Archie’s story.”
“Well, I guess I should have just kept my big mouth shut, then,” Sheriff Porterfield said with a grim smile. “Especially knowing what a big mouth Doc Poole’s got. He’s sort of a gossip, you know. Talking through his hat all the time. Believes anything he’s told. Lucky he was born with a dick instead of a pussy, or he’d have been knocked up all the time.” He laughed, then sucked his laughter back in when he saw that I hadn’t joined him in it. “You came by the jail that last night. Walked you out, I remember that.”
“You have a powerful memory, Sheriff.”
“Fair enough.”
“The night Archie died, you said I was lucky. As I was leaving your office. That I was lucky.”
Porterfield stared at me, his face unreadable as a granite slab.
“In what way did you think I was lucky, Sheriff?”
“That you’d stayed out of trouble, I guess,” he said. “Not like that brother of yours.”
But the true answer flickered instantly in his eyes, so that I knew the one he gave me was a lie.
“She was above him, but he didn’t pay that any mind. That’s what fucked him up.” Once again the dark eyes tried to squeeze me into something small. “You had more sense. Stayed with your kind. That girl in Waylord. Lila Cutler. The one you was dating back then. Fact is, your brother should have taken a page from your book. Dipped his pen in some Waylord girl, not in Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”
“How do you know I dipped my pen in anybody?”
His dry chuckle rattled between us. “Anybody dates a Waylord girl’s bound to get a little.”
“They’re never fresh, you mean.” I said it coldly.
Rather than answer, Porterfield said, “Problem is, that brother of yours got stuck on a valley girl.” Again his laughter jangled. “Got himself all fucked up over a girl that wasn’t even that pretty. Not like that one of yours.”
Then I knew what Porterfield had meant about my being lucky. It was that I’d been lucky to have Lila Cutler, known the pleasure of a body that must have seemed to him, in the grim throes of middle age, impossibly sweet and young.
“You talked to Lila. The day after the murders,” I said.
Something moved behind his eyes, silent as a shadow.
“Why didn’t you ever talk to me?” I asked.
He shrugged indifferently, neither curious about nor alarmed by the question.
“Was it because Lila cleared me?” I asked. “Told you that I was with her at the time of the murders?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered to me what that girl said. Where you was. I wouldn’t of cared.”
“But you told Doc Poole that you thought someone else was involved in the murders.”
“Doc Poole again.” There was a cold edge in the old man’s voice. “That old bastard ought to keep his pie-hole shut.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Sure did. Still believe it too.”
“Then why didn’t you ever question me about it?”
He released a small, sneering chuckle. “Because a man has to have some fight in him to kill two people. Some gumption.” A smile slithered onto his lips. “And the way I heard it, you didn’t even fight back when that pretty little girlfriend of yours got insulted.”
His son’s voice pierced the air,
Waylord girls ain’t never fresh.
“But you thought that Archie had the ‘gumption’ for it?”
Porterfield peered at me as if, using his eyes alone, he could burn holes in my soul. “I’m sure that somebody came along with him that night,” he answered. “Went into the house with him too. Maybe even did the shooting. There was two sets of footprints in the snow. It was melting fast, that snow, ’Cause the sun was up and it was getting mighty warm. But I saw them just the same. One set of footprints went back and forth from the driver’s side of your brother’s car to the house. But the other one went back and forth from the passenger side of that car. So somebody was in the car with your brother, and got out of that car, and walked up to that house with him.
And that somebody come back and set with him, I guess, in that car.”
“So where was this second person when you arrested Archie?”
He smiled. “Just take a look at that stuff you’re wanting to see so much. Everything’s there. Everything that had anything to do with the murders. Even that gun your brother did it with.” He looked at me pointedly. “You’d recognize it, wouldn’t you? That old thirty-eight? Found it on the seat right next to your brother. Figured he was thinking about putting an end to himself right there. There was one bullet left, you know. Figured he’d saved it for himself. But he found another way, didn’t he?”
In my mind I saw my brother hanging from the black bars, the jailhouse bedsheet twisted into a noose. I stayed silent.
“Take a good long look in that file,” Porterfield said. “At that old gun too.” There was a grim challenge in his voice, like someone coaxing a child to open a box where, as he already knew, a viper lay coiled. “Take a real close look at all that stuff.”
“I intend to,” I said stiffly.
Porterfield smiled but said nothing else. Instead, he turned and headed back toward the house, his tread heavy with age and dreadful experience, moving like an old mastodon toward his granite cave, still so huge he seemed almost to shake the earth as he moved away.
I
found the file on the murders a few minutes later, a file so slender it could be contained in a single nine-by-twelve envelope, the word
KELLOGG
scrawled in smudged ink in the left corner. Porterfield’s initial report lay inside, along with Archie’s confession and Gloria’s statement.
The first thing I noticed as I read through the file was that there’d been no call summoning Wallace Porter-field to the Kellogg house that night. He’d simply descended upon it from out of the snowy darkness.
The time was 5:14
A.M.
, a very strange time indeed for the sheriff to have seen what he claimed he saw as he made his early-morning rounds, first patrolling back and forth along the deserted, snowbound streets of Kingdom City before extending his vigilance northward, along County Road.
As he’d neared the mailbox at the end of the driveway
at 1411, his statement said, he’d noticed an old Ford parked beside the tall hedge that bordered the grounds of Horace Kellogg’s home.