To Live and Die In Dixie (25 page)

He came over and stood in front of me, and gave me a cockeyed let's-make-friends smile. “Caught yourself a couple of flame-throwers, huh?”

“Actually, my neighbor's dog caught them,” I said. “All I did was try to get us out of the house in one piece.”

“Her hands and arms are badly burned,” Edna piped up. “Can't you get somebody to take care of her, Captain Hunsecker?”

He said something flirtatious to the admitting clerk sitting behind a frosted glass window. She blushed, giggled, then picked up the phone. After she hung up, she gestured to me. “You can come back now, Miss Garrity.”

Edna and Jocelyn got up to go too. “Just the patient,” the clerk said. “You two will have to wait out here.”

As Hunsecker led me toward the treatment room, the waiting room door opened again and a harried-looking woman in her forties rushed in. Her frosted blond hair was askew and she had makeup smudges under her eyes. “Somebody called. My son, Zak Crawford, is here. He's been hurt. I have to see him.”

The clerk shook her head, sending her shoulder-length earrings tinkling like a drunken chandelier. “He's in treatment in the burn unit right now. I'll let the doctor know you're here and he'll speak to you as soon as he gets a minute.”

I wanted to hang around to hear more, but Hunsecker nudged me. “Let's go,” he said.

A cute black intern with a single diamond stud in his ear and a name tag that read like an eye-chart pronounced my burns first-degree. Since I couldn't remember when I'd last had a tetanus shot, he jabbed me in the arm with a needle, then quickly bathed my hands in a cool saline solution and wrapped them in a gauze dressing.

He handed me two tablets and a paper cup of water. “Tylenol, for the pain,” he said. “Now you're ready to go.”

I guess he'd surmised from my appearance that I was one of the thousands of indigent patients Grady treats yearly. “Do you have a MARTA card? I can get the clerk to give you a token for the train.”

“Thanks anyway,” I said, touched. “My mother's waiting outside for me. But could you see if you could find Captain Hunsecker and ask him to come see me?”

“No problem,” he said.

Hunsecker stood outside the treatment room door before coming in. “You decent?”

“Come on in anyway,” I said. “We could both use a laugh.”

He leaned warily around the doorway, then came all the way inside, glanced at my hands, then sat down on the only chair in the room, a backless stool.

“How are Zak and Lissa?” I asked.

“Zak's got mostly second-degree burns on his legs and torso, some third-degree burns on his hands, arms and neck,” Hunsecker said. “He still had the empty gas can in his hands when the fumes ignited prematurely. We think the pilot light on the hot water heater in your basement did the job. Lissa was luckier. That little dog had her by the leg and she was trying to get away, so she dropped the gas can and was trying to make a run for it when the gas flared up. It was when she went back to try to help Zak that she got burned. The gas had spilled onto her clothing, so they ignited as soon as she got near the flames. She's got second-degree burns on her thighs, abdomen, and arms. They'll both be all right. I've seen lots worse crispy critters.”

I shuddered at his description. It would be a long
time before I could forget the smell of seared flesh. “Has either one of them given you a statement?”

Hunsecker crossed his arms over his chest and gave me his silent chief profile. “You know I can't tell you that.”

Linda Nickells came busying into the room then. She had a cold can of diet Coke with a straw sticking out of it. “Drink,” she ordered. The icy stuff was heaven on my parched throat. I nearly sucked the can dry in one swallow.

“Lissa's talking a mile a minute back there. Zak's got his own version of the night's events. You feel like taking a walk?” she asked me.

A uniformed cop guarded the door of the treatment room next to mine. Nickells nodded at him, and he opened the door. Hunsecker shot Nickells a warning look, but Linda ignored him.

The gauze-wrapped figure stretched across the bed bore little resemblance to the ponytailed kid I'd seen partying at the Jordans' house. Zak Crawford's face and neck were smeared with the same white goo I had on my hands. His hair had burned off in patches, his eyebrows and lashes were singed off. What showed of his face was an angry red and his eyes were swollen shut.

I winced despite myself. There were IV tubes running to his bandaged groin and one to his foot. The blonde from the waiting room had a chair scooted up close to the bed. Her face was pale and her eyes were redder than they'd been before.

“You're Miss Garrity,” she said.

“Shit,” Zak muttered.

“She probably saved his life,” Linda Nickells said, turning to Hunsecker, who'd followed us in. “Okay if she stays?”

“Ask him,” Hunsecker said, gesturing toward the bed.

“Fuck,” Zak whispered.

The blonde rubbed wearily at her eyes. “I'm Audrey Crawford, Zak's mother,” she said. “It's all right. She can stay.”

Hunsecker switched on a tape recorder that was sitting on the bedside table. “Let it be noted that the suspect has agreed that Callahan Garrity, a licensed private investigator, should be present during the statement. Go ahead,” he said.

“We left Lissa's car down the block from her, the detective's house,” Zak said tonelessly. “With the keys in the ignition, so we could peel off in a hurry.”

Hunsecker interrupted again. “Lissa Jordan's white Camaro was impounded tonight. A search of the unlocked trunk turned up an antique pistol, a rifle, and a package of letters.”

“It was all Lissa's idea,” Zak continued. “She's the one who wanted Bridget dead. I barely knew the chick. Like, last Saturday, we drove by that mansion, the one in Inman Park, a whole bunch of times. We saw the old dude leave. I thought Lissa'd get tired of it. Then she's, like, ‘Let's go in. Let's kill the bitch.' I go, ‘No way.' But Lissa wouldn't let up. Finally she says she just wants to go to the door and, like, tell Bridget off. But she made me go with her. And when Bridget opened the door, Lissa went apeshit. She pulls this freakin' gun. I didn't even know she had a gun. So Bridget starts screaming for us not to hurt her and Lissa, man, she hits her upside the head with the gun. But Bridget's crying and trying to run away. So when Lissa sees this big metal doorstop thing, she goes, ‘Hit her. Hurry up before somebody hears and calls the cops.' And man, Bridget's screaming like shit. So I hit her, you know, in the head? And she went down. We were scared shitless. So Lissa says, ‘Take her upstairs. So nobody will see
her.' So she makes me carry Bridget upstairs, while she runs around the house and grabs stuff to make it look like a burglary. And I took her and put her on this bed.”

“Was she still alive at this point?” Hunsecker asked.

“I thought she was dead,” Zak said. “But Lissa comes up and starts screaming, ‘She's still alive. You gotta kill her. You gotta.' Now I said, ‘No way. I'm outta here.' But Lissa pulls out this short knife-thing she'd found, and she stabs her. So then we left. Lissa had to get home before Kyle got back from soccer camp.”

Audrey Crawford was sobbing quietly now, bent over double, her back shaking.

“You're telling us that Lissa killed Bridget?” Hunsecker said. “You sure, Zak?”

“For sure,” Zak answered quickly. “She was alive when I took her upstairs. Swear to God.”

Hunsecker glanced at Nickells and then at me. Lissa had obviously given a different version during her statement.

“What happened to the stuff you took from the house?” Hunsecker asked.

“We had the shit in this plastic garbage bag, but I guess the point of that sword tore a hole in it, because something fell out. Lissa was really pissed.”

“And the other stuff—the silver trophy and the diary, and the dagger—what happened to them?”

A ghost of a smile passed Zak's swollen lips. “I pawned this silver cup thing. Got forty bucks for it. Lissa had a shit fit when she found out. We threw the dagger in the river.”

“What about the diary?” I asked, unable to keep quiet.

Hunsecker glared at me.

“That old book thing?” Zak said. “We thought it was just a piece of crap. I left it in the trunk of my car.”

“Is it still there?” Hunsecker asked.

“Somebody ripped off my car,” Zak said. “On Thursday. I was going over to Lissa's house, and it overheated. So I walked to a gas station and a buddy came and picked me up. The next day when I went to get it, it was gone. Ripped off. Bet the fuckers stripped and burned it.”

“Is that why you got your father's car?” Nickells asked.

Mrs. Crawford looked surprised.

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “He always leaves it at the same park-and-ride near the airport. I got a spare key. So I went down there and boosted it. I do it all the time.”

“And then you took a ride up to Ryverclyffe and tried to kill Jocelyn and me,” I said angrily.

Hunsecker shut off the tape reporter. “Out,” he said.

Nickells gave me a gentle push.

In the hallway, I leaned against the wall for support. “You believe any of that?” I asked Nickells.

“Parts of it are probably true,” she said.

“Shit,” I said. “This is unbelievable. They kill a girl for reasons neither of them understand, and then these two morons pull a burglary. The most valuable thing they steal is stolen by another moron, who probably burned up the only thing of value in the whole car. Unbelievable.”

“Very few of our criminal clientele are brain surgeons, Callahan,” Nickells pointed out.

“True,” I admitted. “But I still don't understand how Zak and Lissa knew we, uh, somebody, knew that the letters and stuff were in Zak's apartment.”

“Dumb luck,” Linda volunteered. “Lissa said she was driving up to Zak's when she saw you two coming out of the apartment. She drove on past, and when she saw
you leave, she took her skinny little fanny in there and got the stuff. When Zak got back, she says it was his idea to burn you out. He thought he'd get rid of you and the missing letter all at the same time.”

“I'm just thankful they were such amateurs,” I said. “The last way I want to die is in a fire. But how about Jordan? How did he get to my house so fast?”

Linda snorted. “He was there all along. When his wandering wife left the house tonight, he figured she was going to go shack up with the boyfriend. So he loaded the kids in the backseat of his car and followed her. He had no idea the house he was watching was yours. He thought the gym bag Zak was carrying had his clothes in it. He planned to wait outside and confront Lissa when she came out again. Catch her red-handed, as it were.”

I looked down at my own gauze-wrapped hands, which now looked like large white oven mitts. “Red-handed is right.”

W
E FINALLY DID GET a new roof on the house, and yes, in an indirect way, Elliot Littlefield did pay for it.

Not that he meant to. Nooo. To put it in the simplest possible terms, Littlefield stiffed me for my fee. Big time.

Old Mr. Byerly was right about the damage to the bungalow. It wasn't nearly as bad as we'd feared. Thank God, Lissa Jordan and Zak Crawford were the world's stupidest would-be arsonists. The gasoline burned the grass in a ten-foot swathe around the patio and blistered and charred the clapboard siding on the back of the house, so we had to replace it. And the roof. And the basement windows and the hot-water heater. The insurance paid for most.

And yes, for the month the house was being worked on, Edna moved in with her friend Agnes and I moved in with Mac and Rufus. We ran the House Mouse out of Agnes's basement rumpus room and aside from the lingering odor of mildew in my clothes, things worked out better than we'd expected.

I take two small white tablets twice a day every day. I
hope it's the tamoxifen and not a placebo that I'm taking, but if not, I recently discovered that Edna secretly says her rosary every night before she goes to bed. That's fine with me. I figure any old hoodoo will do.

From what I hear, the dysfunctional Dougherty family is in the process of healing too. Jocelyn and her mother worked out a compromise. She's in college at Agnes Scott, a small liberal arts women's college in Decatur, only a few miles from her parents' home, and she lives in the dorm there. The whole family is going through therapy. Jocelyn comes by every now and again, to sample some of Edna's cooking and to get a lesson in biscuit making. She's slowly gaining weight and the big news is that last month she had her first period in over a year. Little things mean a lot.

Zak Crawford and Lissa Jordan still haven't gone to trial for Bridget's murder yet. Lissa's attorney is claiming she has one of those talk-show illnesses: the women who love too much syndrome. And Zak's attorney is claiming that heavy-metal music lyrics drove him to violence. Don't you love the 1990s?

Elliot Littlefield may finally do time for the Sunny Girl murder. With all the publicity around Bridget's murder, a “mystery witness” came forward and admitted he and his girlfriend had been in the bedroom next to Littlefield's when Sunny Girl was killed. Littlefield hasn't gone to trial yet either. But the judge in the new trial, Byron “No Bail” DeLavelle, revoked his bond after the district attorney reported that Littlefield had been badgering the witness, an old acquaintance, not to testify against him. Eagle's Keep has a big
For Rent
sign out front.

Home for Hope has a new director. Jake Dahlberg resigned his post after city fire inspectors declared the agency's houses a fire hazard. Dahlberg was never
charged with anything relating to the deaths of Josephina and Maria Rosario. I understand all the Home for Hope residents are being put up in the Holiday Inn while their houses are being retrofitted.

I was driving down North Druid Hills Road one rainy Friday recently, when I saw a tow truck hooking an abandoned car to its winch. And it got me thinking. Six or seven phone calls later, I was picking my way between shiny new Cadillacs and crunched-up Volkswagen beetles at K & A Towing down in south-west Atlanta.

The manager of K & A was a sawed-off little guy named Karl Kaziersky. He lead me down the rows of cracked asphalt. And there it was, parked between a battered black Mustang convertible with kudzu growing up through the floorboards and a mustard-colored Chevette: a rust-covered green Vega.

“This is it,” I said. “My baby brother's car.”

“Tow fee, plus storage fees, that's gonna run you two hundred and eighteen dollars and thirty-seven cents,” Kaziersky said, unmoved by my emotion at finding my brother's long-lost car.

I had to detour to the nearest instant teller machine to get the cash, which he insisted on. It cleaned out our savings, but I didn't care. I counted the twenties, tens, and ones into his hand, which he quickly closed over the bills.

“You got the pink slip?”

I hadn't thought of that. “My brother had it in his wallet when he died in the airplane crash,” I said, improvising. “This Vega is the only thing my mother has left to remind her of Junior.”

He shoved his fist in his pocket and the bills disappeared. I walked around to the trunk and tried it. Still locked. “We think Junior might have left some family pictures in the trunk,” I said. “But it's locked.”

“So use the keys,” he growled.

“The plane crash,” I said simply. “They were in his pockets.”

“There's a crowbar in the office,” he said. “Help yourself.”

The All Saints gym bag was on the bottom of a snarl of dirty clothes and tools, with the pieces of a broken plastic foam cooler on top. I picked the gym bag up, held it in both hands, and walked quickly toward the van.

My hands shook as I unzipped the bag. Inside I found a small brown leather volume, no bigger than a woman's billfold. The cover was cracked and the yellow pages brittle. They crumbled to the touch. The page I opened to was covered, nearly every inch of it, with Lula Belle Bird's tiny ladylike writing. It zigged and zagged over the pages, starting on the thinly drawn red lines, then inching up the margins, and back in between the lines. I could make out a word, occasionally, but after fifteen minutes of trying to unlock the secrets of seducing the Confederate army, I was none the wiser.

In the back of the diary, however, I found some modern writing: a bill of sale, dated May of 1992.

I found Lula Belle Bird's distant relative in a leafy green hollow of Gilmer County, in a tiny redbrick house set in the shadow of a falling-down old white clapboard farmhouse. I rang the bell, but there was no answer.

I walked around to the back of the house. A stout lady in a straw hat was down on her knees, pulling weeds in her vegetable garden.

“Mrs. Sparks?” I called.

Startled, she looked up, then struggled slowly to her feet. She wiped her hands on the rickrack-edged apron she wore and put her hands up to smooth her gray hair.

“Yes, ma'am,” she said pleasantly.

Mattie Mae Sparks's cheerful red face crumpled into a frown when I told her what I'd come for, and what I'd brought.

I held out the diary. But she wrapped her hands in the apron and stepped away from me.

“No, ma'am,” she said. “I sold that old writing desk for one hundred and twenty-five dollars to that man from Atlanta. That was my late husband's granddaddy's desk. But the children bought me a lovely new desk from Haverty's Furniture for Mother's Day. Pecan veneer with antique brass handles. I had that old desk sitting out on the front porch. That Atlanta man drove by and saw it, rang my doorbell, and offered me cash. I was tickled to get it. I'd forgotten that book was in there, but he paid for it, and I believe it belongs to him now.”

“Mrs. Sparks,” I said. “This diary is worth a great deal of money. Thousands. And Mr. Littlefield should have told you he'd found it. It's your family heritage.”

“Not my family heritage,” she said quickly. “Us Wards are Pentecostalists. It's the Sparkses that were Methodist. Worldly, you might say. Lula Belle was my husband's great-great-aunt. His mama told me a long time ago about Lula Belle moving to Richmond and shaming the family. Miss Etta didn't feel right having that book in a Christian home, so she always hid it in the bottom of that desk drawer. Now it's gone, I reckon it can stay gone.”

The stubborn expression on her face told me she considered the matter settled.

“Good or bad, this is considered history, Mrs. Sparks,” I said, pleading. “Maybe you should donate it to a university or a museum or a library, where scholars could study it.”

She still looked dubious. I gave her the diary, and she quickly tucked it into her apron pocket, an unclean thing offensive to the eyes of a God-fearing Pentecostalist. “We'll see,” she said.

 

Months later, sipping coffee and reading the
Constitution
, I came across an item that made me laugh so hard I spit coffee out my nose.

“What's wrong with you?” Edna said, dabbing at the coffee droplets that had landed on her crossword puzzle.

“Look at this,” I said, laughing and gasping for air. I pointed to the headline on the story: “Bible College Sells Civil War Diary for Record Amount.”

“Lula Belle Bird's diary?” Edna said. “I thought you told me it belonged to some old lady up in the mountains. How'd a college get ahold of it?”

“Mattie Mae Sparks donated it to the Living Word Evangelical Bible College in Nahunta, Georgia,” I read. “But they deemed it antiscriptural and decided to sell it off and use the funds to buy more gospel-centered literature. Two-hundred and eleven thousand dollars should buy a whole lot of tracts.”

“Who's the buyer?” Edna asked.

“Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island,” I said. “Says here they already have the greatest collection of Abraham Lincoln material in the country.”

“Damn Yankees,” she sniffed.