Authors: Thomas H. Cook
T
he first card turned abruptly when the door opened to my knock, the face upon it hard and brittle, with matted, unwashed hair. I guessed her age at around fifty, though she might easily have been ten years older. And yet, I had no doubt I knew who now stood before me in the doorway. There were no plastic earrings, no cheap costume jewelry, but the essential nature of Spencer’s description remained fully visible in the predatory gleam of her dark eyes. There was something low about her, and it struck me that this baseness was the soil from which she’d sprung and in which she was truly and eternally rooted. Time might remold the features of her face, pluck the plastic earrings from her ears, but she would remain forever what she had forever been: a wholly purchased soul.
“Mavis Wilde,” I said then, when she remained silent. “My name’s Roy Slater. I’m—”
“I know who you are,” the woman said.
Her face was narrow, shrunken, so that she looked curiously mummified, eyes and mouth little more than holes cut clumsily out of a leather sack.
“Wallace said you might show up here. Said you called his house this morning. Said my name and hung up.”
“How’d he know it was me?”
She grinned mockingly. “There’s ain’t much Wallace don’t know.” The grin twisted from mockery to amusement. “He drove slow so you wouldn’t lose him.”
“Porterfield likes playing with people.”
She eyed me silently, taking my measure, but without fear, so that I sensed that she’d faced down a lifetime of threatening men. “Wallace said you was all stirred up about them murders. The ones your brother done.”
“I’m looking into it.”
She stared at me as if she were trying to decide whether to hear me out or close the door in my face, able to do either with equal indifference.
“Well, you might as well come in, Roy Slater. It’s been a long time since a man set foot in this old place.”
I stepped into the house and peered about the room. The water-stained wallpaper had peeled away like a leper’s skin and the scarred floor was scattered with old magazines, piles of yellowing newspaper.
“I ain’t got around to pitching all this stuff out,” Mavis said. “Tried to sell this place, but way out here in the boonies, ain’t no buyers.” She slumped down on a faded red sofa, then slung her legs up onto the pocked wooden
table that stretched before it. “It ain’t too smart, fooling with Wallace, you know. He don’t like people poking into his private business.”
“Was this place one of his ‘private businesses’?”
She cackled loudly. “You might say we did some business. You ain’t never been in a cathouse before, have you, Roy, honey?”
“No, I haven’t.”
She plucked a purse from the table, grabbed a pack of cigarettes from it. “Well, ain’t that pitiful,” she said, and cackled again. “This little place used to be full of boys. Mostly from the army base they used to have ’bout fifteen miles from here. Different bunch of boys every night. Come from everywhere, them boys. Every part of the country.” She let her gaze drift about the room. “I had five, six girls working here.” Her eyes settled upon me. “Don’t look so surprised by my telling you all this. I ain’t hiding nothing. I done my time for running this place, so I ain’t got no reason to be afraid of you.” She lit the cigarette. “Besides, I never seen nothing wrong in it. Hell, we had plenty of boys just like you come over here. Come all the way from Kingdom City. Looking for a little … experience.” Her eyes narrowed into small reptilian slits. “But you didn’t come all the way from Kingdom County to hear about my glory days, did you?”
“No.”
“Come over here about them murders. That’s what Wallace told me. That you got it in your head your brother didn’t kill them people.”
“That’s right.”
“Wallace said if you showed up, I ought to ask you a question.” The grin returned, a mocking challenge.
“Who done it? That’s what Wallace told me to ask you. If your brother didn’t do it, then who did? Wallace said to ask you that, see what you said.”
“I don’t have to jump through a hoop for Wallace Porterfield,” I answered, an anger as fierce and terrible as my father’s flashing through me. “He’s not going to play with me anymore.”
“He ain’t playing with you.” Mavis said it firmly. “At least, not much. If Wallace was really playing with you, honey, you’d know it.”
“Well, he tried to make me believe that my father had something to do with the murders,” I told her. “Two sets of footprints, he said. Coming from my brother’s car. He said one of those sets belonged to my father.”
“Maybe it did.”
“No, it didn’t.”
Mavis peered at me for a moment, then said, “Well, don’t none of it matter to me anyway.” She leaned forward and crushed the cigarette into a dirty glass. “I don’t know nothing about them murders. Happened all the way over in Kingdom County. Heard about ’em, but that’s all.” She sank back against the stained cushions, her eyes bright with malice. “Wallace said you’d be asking about Gloria. Said you wouldn’t never heard of me if you hadn’t been snooping around, asking questions about that girl. Well, go ahead. Whatever questions you got, ask them. Then get on back home ’cause I ain’t got no more business with you.”
“You came with Porterfield to Daytonville the day he picked up Gloria?”
“Sure did.” She laughed cheerlessly. “But, hell, they
ain’t no mystery to that. Wallace needed help, that’s all. In getting Gloria. So I come along with him.”
“Why did he need your help?”
“To take care of her after he took her out of that nuthouse she was in. He needed somebody to look after her for a while.”
“Why you?”
“ ’Cause he trusted me. All those years he come over here. We had a little arrangement. While he was sheriff, I mean. All that time, I never told a soul.”
“He was one of your … customers?”
“No, Wallace didn’t never want no whore,” Mavis said. “He always brought his own girl with him. He just needed a place to bring her, that’s all. Out of Kingdom County, I mean. Private. Him being the law over there and all.” She slung her arm over the back of the sofa and grinned. “You ever just needed a place, Roy?”
“Where did you take Gloria when you left Daytonville that day?”
Mavis dragged a skinny hand through the matted curls of her hair. “Brung her home with me. And seen after her real good too. In my own house. Not here. I got another place in Pittsville. That’s where Gloria stayed. A nice place, where I could see after her proper, or make sure somebody kept an eye on her if I was gone. Girl couldn’t do nothing for herself. I mean, she wasn’t no cripple or nothing. She could walk around, talk to you. Stuff like that. Just didn’t have no get-up-and-go. But she had to be watched. Wallace was real firm about that.” Afraid she’d kill herself.
I heard my father’s voice:
Probably wasn’t nothing
wrong with Gloria, ’cept Porterfield wanted to get rid of her.
“Are you sure of that?” I asked.
To my surprise, she seemed offended by my doubt. “ ’Course I’m sure. Ain’t no reason for Wallace to have told me nothing like that if he didn’t believe it. That was why he took her to Daytonville in the first place. ’Cause he couldn’t keep her from bumping herself off and run Kingdom County at the same time.”
“Maybe he just wanted to get rid of her.”
Mavis snorted. “Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you something-if Wallace Porterfield wanted to get rid of that girl, he’d have got rid of her. They wouldn’t be no driving her over to Daytonville. Talking to all them doctors. Or taking her out again and putting her with me. And I’ll tell you something else while I’m at it: Long as I had charge of Gloria, she was well took care of.”
“How long did you ‘have charge’ of her”?
“Couple months, that’s all. Wallace paid me good for it too. But she was a whiny little thing. Money or not, I was glad to see her go.”
“Go?” I asked, now aware that I might have to follow those lost steps too, but which I felt utterly resolved to do. Gloria had become to me some frail child out of a dark fairy tale, bewildered, wandering lost in the forest, dropping bread crumbs in a futile attempt to leave a trail.
“Yeah, Wallace sent her down south.” Mavis struggled to her feet, walked to a small table, and retrieved a single white envelope. “Wallace brought me this letter when he come over this morning. He said to give it to you since you seemed so all fired up about knowing what happened to Gloria.”
“He thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” I asked stiffly.
“Yeah, he does.” Mavis’s voice was metallic. “Here. Read it. And then git gone. I ain’t got no more time to fool with you.”
The letter was from a place called Bryce Treatment Center, located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It stated that on June 9, 1974, Gloria Lynn Kellogg, age 26, had died of a brain aneurism. As Miss Kellogg’s “only living relative,” Wallace Porterfield was assured that everything possible had been done for her, and was asked to make the necessary funeral arrangements.
“Why does this say that Porterfield is Gloria’s only living relative?” I asked.
“ ’Cause he was.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“I don’t care whether you do or not,” Mavis snapped. “But I know for a fact Wallace and Gloria’s mother was cousins. That’s why she come to Kingdom County in the first place, ’Cause Wallace said he’d put her husband on as a deputy.”
“Where was the rest of her family?”
“Wallace never said. Told me he was stuck with Gloria, ’cause her mother was his cousin. That nobody else would lift a finger for her, so it was up to him to see after her. Which he did.”
I felt a small thread snap in the elaborate fabric of conspiracy my father had woven so persuasively.
“Fact is, Wallace done what he could for Gloria,” Mavis said. “Spent a fortune on her. Keeping her in that hospital down south. Cost him a whole hell of a lot of money to do that.”
“But it wasn’t his money,” I argued, determined to stitch the tapestry up again, make it tough and strong, able to bear the weight of my father’s anguished need to bring logic to the universe. “Porterfield used Gloria’s money to—”
“Gloria’s money?” A laugh rattled from Mavis’s twisted mouth. “Gloria didn’t have no money.”
“Of course she did,” I said emphatically. “The money she inherited. From her father.”
Mavis’s laugh jangled again. “Gloria’s daddy was a thief. Give hisself big loans from his own bank. It all had to be paid back. That damn girl didn’t have a penny.”
“But the house and everything in it,” I persisted, conjuring up my father’s description of the auction, people gathered in the wide front yard, bidding on furniture, dishes, finally the riches of the house itself, Porterfield in charge of it all, watching greedily as Gloria’s patrimony was sliced into pieces and carted away.
“Wallace had to sell off everything,” Mavis informed me. “They was big people had a stake in that bank. They had to be paid back or it would all have got out about Gloria’s daddy. So Wallace paid them. Time it was over, there wasn’t a penny left for nothing.” She laughed. “Wallace used to say your brother done that no-account daddy of Gloria’s a favor by shooting him. Said Horace Kellogg would have ended up in the penitentiary pretty soon anyway. Said he got what he deserved when your brother killed him.”
Which, as I realized, had finally brought me full circle, back to the reason I’d whispered Mavis’s name in Porterfield’s ear, back to that snowy night twenty
years before, the wild shots that had rung out behind the ornate door of 1411 County Road.
“Did Gloria ever talk to you about the murders?” I asked.
“She had this old locket. Said her grandmother give it to her. It brought things back when she fiddled with it.”
“Things?”
“Just got her to whining over it,” Mavis answered. “Said she had to have the damn locket ’cause she was gonna hock it. When they got away, I mean. Her and that boyfriend of hers, your brother. Anyway, Gloria said he didn’t have no money so she was gonna take that locket to wherever they went once they got away. That’s all she ever said about them killings. Just how, come hell or high water, she had to have that damn locket, and she aimed to get it no matter what he said.”
“What who said?”
“Her boyfriend, I guess,” Mavis answered. “The one she was running off with. He didn’t want her to get that locket, but Gloria said she had to have it, and she wasn’t going to leave without it.”
“But she
did
have it,” I said, baffled. “She had it when Porterfield found her that night.”
Mavis shrugged. “All I know is she had to have it. That’s what Gloria told me. That she had to have that locket and she wasn’t going to let him stop her. Said they fought about it ’Cause he didn’t want her to go get it.”
Go get it.
I felt something shift in my mind, saw Archie’s car parked beside the hedge, two people in the front seat, arguing desperately.
I have to have it, Archie. No. I’m going back for it. Gloria, don’t. I have to have it!
Then the door of my brother’s old black Ford opened,
Gloria racing out into the night, turning up the driveway, leaving the tracks in the snow that Wallace Porterfield had later seen.
“Did Gloria say what happened after she went back for the locket?” I asked.
“Just that she went to her room to get it, and she had it right in her hand when all hell broke loose downstairs. All this screaming, she said. Her mother screaming for her father, telling him that this boy had a gun.”
I heard my brother’s anguished apology,
I didn’t mean for her to see it.
Lavenia Kellogg, I thought, imagining Archie’s panic as Horace Kellogg rushed toward him.
So fast.
Rushed into the room and saw the pistol, turned and ran toward where he hoped to find his own.
So fast.
A woman fleeing up the stairs.
So fast.
A man running down a corridor.
So fast.
And so no time to think, to argue, to explain, no time to do anything but reach for the pistol they’d already seen and with it stop the screaming and the panic, the chaos and the terror, the wild rush of time, because everything was happening …
so fast.