The Whipping Boy (40 page)

As if she hadn't heard him, she continued her story. “I must have sensed that there was more to this man than owing her money. She wanted to talk about it, but she didn't. Maybe he'd humiliated her somehow. Whatever grief she suffered was fine with me, at the time. I was sixteen years old and generally disgusted by her. But I knew there was more to it than money. Somehow I knew.” She shook her head slightly.

Jake sighed impatiently.

“I went to see Ralph Dekker a week ago. The night he died.” Jake looked at her. “Wednesday?”

“No. It was Monday.”

She went quiet again, heaved another sigh, and threw back the blankets. “I can't stand this. I
have
to have a bath.” She got up and went out in the hall, long legs and all, and told the guard that she wanted a bath. He told her to either go to the toilet or get back into the room, and she started arguing with him. It wasn't long before she was cleaning his plow. “Getting me a little water's not going to hurt you. And damn you, I want some kind of clothes to wear!” Jake lay there listening until she said, “Boy, you are one big brave shithead, waving your gun at an unarmed woman.”

Jake looked up at the Jesus on the wall and groaned to himself. He climbed out of bed and went into the hall, where their guard had the expression of a dog with his first porcupine. Miller showed up and acted eerily polite. There would be a “meeting” tomorrow, he said. He was “sincerely sorry for the discomfort,” and of course she could have a bath.

This fake solicitude worried Jake worse than anything. The old woman eventually came to their room with two buckets of water, some soap and rags, a Mother Hubbard dress for Sam to wear, and a couple more blankets. Jake tried to ask her, in English and then in halting Cherokee, where they were, but she acted as if she didn't understand him. The water was ice cold, the air in the room seemed below freezing, and the building wailed with wind, but Sam unhesitatingly stripped down to belly naked. Jake sat on the bed, turned away, thinking,
Go ahead, don't give me any warning
.

“I don't care how cold it is,” she chanted. “I don't care. I don't care.” After she'd finished and put on the Mother Hubbard, Jake noticed her grab something from the coat she'd been wearing and slip it into a pocket. She crawled back into the bed. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!”

Having dipped her hair into the water, she now rubbed it vigorously. Jake stiff-walked over to the buckets and washed his own face and arms. For good measure, he took off his shoes and washed one foot at a time. That was all he felt inspired to do. He knocked the dust out of his clothes, went back to bed, and crawled in with her. She was shivering.

“So,” he said. “This was Monday, you say?”

“I went to see him about five o'clock Monday evening. I stood outside, on the steps of his house. I told him who I was and why I'd come. I said that my mother was dead, but as her sole legatee I'd come to collect the debt that he owed her estate. I told him that I wanted to talk to him in person, but Fd contact him through a lawyer if he preferred.” She frowned. “At first he just stood there staring at me, like you might expect—acting as if he didn't know what I was talking about. He didn't invite me inside. But I could tell he didn't want me to leave. He was . . . interested. He kept looking at me.” She sounded hesitant. “Finally he invited me in, asked me to sit down. He started pacing and asking me questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“First he said that he didn't know my mother, but then he asked me things that half admitted he was lying, like how had she died, had I been there, were we reconciled. I asked him what he meant by ‘reconciled,' and he said he meant were we close. He wanted to know whether I was married. He didn't ask it casually or lightly like people will do.”

“Whether you were married?”

“He demanded to know whether I was married.”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

“He had a set to his face, kind of mean, kind of confused. ‘Are you married?' he said.”

“Well, did you answer him?”

“I did, but I was getting nervous.”

“Because you were a lone woman—”

“Oh, heavens no. He wasn't acting
that
way. I expected him to be suspicious and provoked. To tell you the truth, I thought he'd just tell me to depart the premises. I expected that. I didn't expect him to be asking all kind of questions about me.” She was staring up toward the Jesus. “It caught me by surprise. It didn't even seem to have much to do with the money. At first I thought he was going to reveal something, maybe talk to me about my mother, but he didn't. He acted like my mother had, ten years before, the day she told me about him. As if he couldn't speak what was really on his mind. I had the strangest feeling, like I'd been there before.” She broke her stare and looked at Jake. “Anyway, there we were. I told him that I'd come to offer him a way to right what was wrong, and I earnestly requested some answer from him. He faltered a little. Finally he turned around and looked me square in the eye and told me to leave his house.”

“Debt collectors are usually tobacco-chewing men in dirty black suits,” Jake said. “And here comes one looking like you. I can see how it might throw him a little off.”

She reached into the dress pocket and pulled out a small rectangle that Jake had to hold up close to his eyes in the dim light. It was a twenty-five-cent studio portrait of a young girl with long darkish hair and striking eyes. Jake's unhesitating, first thought was that it was a picture of Sam as a child. On the back was written, in what looked like Mr. Dekker's distinctive, looping hand,

 

M. King's daught
.

Left b
.

 

“Where'd you get this?”

“It came from a photograph album in his sitting room.” She pointed at the last of the scrawl. “What do you think that means?”

“‘Left b.'? . . . Left before, left back, left . . . behind.” A chill went through Jake. “Did he give this to you?”

“No. Tom went to his house later that night. You had asked him to find out if Ralph was back from St. Louis. Well, he did, and he found him dead in his bedroom. The photo album was on the floor in the sitting room, and this was in it. Those words were written beside the photograph as well as on the back.”

“
Tom
found Mr. Dekker dead?”

“Yes.”

“So Ralph got killed between the time you left and Tom came?”

She looked him in the eyes and nodded.

“You told me earlier that you knew nothing about who your father was. Is that right?”

“I didn't care, or thought I didn't.”

Jake tried to see Mr. Dekker as someone who abandoned children and rued back on personal debts. All these years he had thought of the old man as a model of rough but honest dealing—a truth teller, stingy but straight. But he hadn't really known much about Ralph's past or his private life.

“So what happened to him, Sam?”

“I don't know. I left him standing in his house looking tired.” “Why wouldn't he talk to you?”

“He wanted to. Like my mother had wanted to. The way he was questioning me, asking me all about whether I was married and reconciled and all. That was as close as he could get.” Her voice went small. “I don't judge him,” she said, her voice barely audible in the sound of the wind. She closed her eyes and shockingly big tears popped out of them. “God knows, I can't judge anybody.” Jake didn't know what to say. “Hadn't your mother told you anything about who your father was?”

She looked at him and said nothing. She looked as if she was having trouble breathing. “Oh, Jake. My momma couldn't tell me the truth about whether the sky was blue or grey. She couldn't tell me the truth about anything. She was trying to keep me as far away as possible. She was trying to prevent me from entering her life.”

“Why didn't you just go to Ralph in the first place about this debt business? Why'd you latch on to me?”

“I had no reason to trust him. I had to find out about him. Get whatever I could on him. Learn about his business. Find out whether he even had any money.”

“From me,” Jake stated, looking at her.

“That's right.”

“And did I give you the information you needed?” Jake said. She stared at the picture. “You told me he was going to the bank in St. Louis.”

“And that's why you left Guthrie in such a hurry?”

“Yes. And he did go to St. Louis. He took forty thousand dollars in cash from his bank.”

“Borrowed it?”

“No, it was his own money. All of his savings. He took it in cash.”

Jake understood now. “That's why we're out here, then. Where is it? Do you know?”

“He told me to leave his house. I left. I left him standing there. I don't know where his money is.” She looked away. “He was my father, Jake. He had the chance, and he wouldn't tell me. Something stopped him. The question about whether I was married was as close as he could get. He knew about me and was ashamed of me.”

“Maybe he was ashamed of himself.”

A
T TEN-THIRTY
Tuesday morning, walking with LaFarge through snow-quiet streets, up the ample entrance steps of the new courthouse, into its ominously wide halls, Tom again remembered Johnny Pointer's struggle against the marshals as he was being dragged, now drooping, now stiff, yelling and sobbing up the thirteen stairs. Tom's sympathy for Johnny Pointer was deepening. It was the loss of control and dignity more than death itself that he thought about. Being reduced to a pleading, frenzied animal. At least three times over the last few days he had sensed it happening to him, or almost happening—the accustomed solidity of things melting away, and his own mind floating somewhere outside himself.

The hollowness of the courthouse halls made him conscious of his heart beating against his clothes. At LaFarge's request, Tom wore the buckskin suit that Jake had bought for him in Tulsa, flamboyant with fringe along the breast and arm seams. Tom almost laughed when he saw the image of the lawyer and himself in the glass-paneled door at the end of the hall: a tall, slightly stooped white-haired gentleman and an Indian in buckskin. An Indian! LaFarge briefly hesitated before opening the door that Said
JUDGE ISAAC C. PARKER
, 13
TH DISTRICT COURT
.

He spoke to the secretary, a corpulent man with muttonchops and cold eyes, who acted annoyed but asked them to wait in the hall while he went off to the courtroom. LaFarge glanced at Tom and tried to look reassuring, indicating the satchel. “Have faith. All we have to do is tell him the truth.”

Tom had had an entire sleepless night to think about truth and lies, and about how dangerous a game he was playing, about what he could say and what he couldn't say, and the more he thought, the more complicated it became. He knew now why he had been for the most part defiantly truthful when he lived at Bokchito: because lies were like building rickety steps beneath yourself into the air, adding one more flight in this direction and then that direction, until sooner or later the whole thing is swaying in the wind, threatening to crash down. Now he was about to admit that he had gone to Muskogee with the person who was found, or soon would be found, in the basement with the dead Reverend Schoot. Admitting it to LaFarge was one thing, Parker was quite another.

The courtroom door at the other end of the hall burst open, startling them both. Two marshals, with big holsters and mouths set grimly beneath ornate mustaches, appeared out of a blue haze of tobacco smoke with a man in handcuffs and leg irons, blinking his eyes, stumbling awkwardly before them.

Leonard watched anxiously as the judge came down the hall with the secretary talking to him in an undertone.

The judge's hair was cotton white, and his face looked puffy and sickly. In the hallway he gave both Tom and LaFarge a brief handshake and smile. He smelled like borax soap.

“I recall you, Mr. LaFarge. Haven't you practiced in my court?”

“I did, sir, some years ago.”

“Do you practice elsewhere now?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yes sir, in Guthrie. Not so long ago I returned to the territory and fell into my former trade.”

Judge Parker smiled. “Did you try some other occupation?”

LaFarge looked slightly pained but answered him. “I tried several, Your Honor.”

“Oh?”

“Yes sir, I traveled a great deal . . .” LaFarge cleared his throat.

Judge Parker looked surprisingly curious, as if he wanted to ask LaFarge more. Tom could not then know—few people besides Judge Parker and his doctor knew—that the judge was seriously ill. Tom could only sense that on that day, at that moment, standing outside his office, the judge was mild and almost disconcertingly open.

“And you?”

Tom realized that the blue-grey eyes were on him. “I worked at Dekker Hardware Company, sir.”

“Sad news about Ralph Dekker. I didn't know him well, even though our places of work were close for many years.”

“What we'd like to talk to you about relates to that subject,” LaFarge said. “I was hired by my old friend W. W. Jaycox, who worked at Dekker, to help find out something about Ralph's death.”

The judge's pleasantness began to fade.

“Mr. Jaycox doesn't believe that it was suicide.”

A look of impatience, or weariness, started forming on Judge Parker's face, and LaFarge said quickly, “I realize that your time is limited, Your Honor, so I will get to the point. Inquiring about what happened to Mr. Dekker, we've stumbled across the fact that an attempt is being made to bribe the federal judge in Muskogee.”

Judge Parker stiffened and narrowed his eyes.

“Judge John Crilley,” LaFarge said.

“Please come into my office.”