Deep South (21 page)

One of the deadliest had taken place in Pearl, just over the river from the city of Jackson. "Mrs. Pigeon, we all liked Danni. She was a sweet girl. But I've given you all the help I can, and it's time I was getting back to work." When an interview's over, it's over. Once Colonel Deforest compared notes with his son, Anna doubted he'd do much in the way of cooperating with the law and certainly not with her.

It was four o'clock. School would be out by now, the Sanders boy and Thad Meyerhoff would have scattered. More important, Brandon would have had time to talk to them. She would be surprised if the next time she talked with them they hadn't synchronized their stories. Synchronized to hide what? At that age, troubles tended to seem the same size, unwanted pregnancy as terrifying as assault and battery, cheating on an exam on a par with driving under the influence. Because the boys were lying to hide something didn't prove that something was murder.

The alligator with the clothesline around its neck, a prank gone sour that nearly killed her dog and could have killed or crippled her. The yellow line around Danni's neck, the newly hacked eye holes in a dirty sheet; they had the same half-thought-out, reckless disregard of the alligator prank.

More and more, it seemed, murder, brutality, was just kid stuff.

After five o'clock, when Anna got back to the Port Gibson Ranger IN-STATION, there were two messages from Sheriff Davidson on the answering machine. The first told her he had information to share from the day's interviews; the second invited her to go with him to talk with Leo Fullerton, the Civil War re-enactor and Baptist minister, in Port Gibson.

Anna erased them and stood for a moment awash in thought. This was business. She was new and female and single and in a strange place, a place where she was unsure of the rules. This was also social.

Unless her romantic instincts had atrophied from years of neglect, the second of the sheriff's messages was tinged with the odor of a date, The words had been too casual, too offhand, as if he too knew they'd slipped over some professional line and he was unsure of himself.

Truth was, Anna wanted to go. She was interested to hear what he'd learned, interested to find out what the minister had seen, if anything, but mostly she knew she'd rather spend the evening in a patrol car with Paul Davidson than in her pajamas with Piedmont. It had been a long time since she could say that about a man.

Feeling the unpleasant frisson of a woman with a hidden agenda, she dialed the number he left. It was different from that on the Rolodex she had inherited. Probably he was at home.

Because of her tortuous thoughts, Anna was businesslike to the point of brusque. It was quickly decided she would meet him at the Port Gibson Sheriff's Department, where he had a loose end from another case to tie off. They would go from there. She hung up wishing he'd been stereotypical: a fat redneck with mirrored sunglasses. Then there would be no danger of complications. She deeply resented the space in her brain that the machinations of interpersonal relationships required.

Lady MacBeth crying "Unsex me!" suddenly didn't strike her as unsympathetic.

The door banged open and she started guiltily, caught in the act of thinking about a boy. A man in a suit and tie came in. It took her a second to recognize George Wentworth out of uniform. Behind him was a handsome youth in blue jeans and a sweatshirt.

"You're working late," Wentworth said. "I'd like you to meet my son, Lockley. I'll just be a second. I've got to pick up some paperwork I need to fax." The Port Gibson Ranger Station had yet to stumble into the age of the fax machine. They still used the local drugstore. George disappeared into his office." Anna Pigeon," Anna said, proffering her hand. "Your dad has told me a lot about you." Lockley took her fingertips and shook them gingerly. Lockley Wentworth, for all his bulk and youthful vitality, looked drawn and pale. Anna'd never seen an African-American look pale, but he did.

The skin around his eyes and mouth was drawn and had a grayish cast under the dark pigmentation. "Are you okay?" she asked impulsively.

"Yes, ma'am," Lock replied politely. He didn't sound it, and he didn't meet her eye. "Your dad says you're being courted by the big leagues," Anna tried. "The pros. Yes, ma'am." The fellow didn't want to talk. That was fine with Anna. "I'm off, George," she called. "Don't bother to close the gate. Nice to meet you, Lockley," and she escaped to the sanctity of her patrol car.

Though she'd cleaned it, it still smelled of blood and urine where Taco had lain. Yet another reason to be glad the dog had survived.

Living with a constant reminder of his demise would have been hard to take.

Port Gibson was the city the Civil War re-enactors told her retained its historical aspect because General Ulysses S. Grant had declared it "too beautiful to burn." Its glory days were gone.

There were still beautiful houses and gardens that had been cultivated for more than a century, but many of the old buildings were in sore need of paint and repair. The courthouse, grand and domed, seemingly too large for the shrunken city, lorded it over a shabby Main Street with an air of genteel poverty.

Behind the courthouse was the uninspired low-roofed building that housed the Sheriff's Department. On her tour the first day with George Wentworth, they'd driven by, but Anna'd never been inside.

Familiarizing herself with it was one of the many things on her list that had been preempted by the murder investigation. Because of the vagaries of law, urisdiction and accreditation, any individuals arrested on the Natchezto-Jackson stretch of the Trace had to be brought to Port Gibson for incarceration.

Davidson's car was out front. Anna parked beside it. Inside, the Sheriff's Department was even more depressing than most. A waiting room steeped in pain neglected was watched over by a glassed-in kiosk where a black woman buzzed the unfortunates and their keepers through a double-door setup, a sort of crime airlock.

The only cheery note was the department's uniform. The woman in the kiosk wore a nifty burgundy number.

Anna introduced herself. "I'm Cameron. We been hearin'about y'all," the policewoman said.

"It's this big deal. Like there haven't been policewomen down here forever. Glad to finally meet you." After stowing her weapon in a lockbox outside the jail area, Anna was ushered into the inner sanctum, where Cameron showed her the location of the Breathalyzer and the grim double row of locked doors. Prisoners, bored, hungover, angry, shouted questions in hopes of getting a crumb of attention. Anna ignored them.

Cameron knew them by name and was good-natured about the distraction.

Davidson was waiting when Anna reclaimed her weapon and her freedom. The sun had set and the velvet evening was upon them. In her mind, Anna heard the strains of the old song "Blue Velvet." Blue velvet was the night, the lyric went. The songwriter must have been from the South. The sky was a deep blue pricked with stars.

Murder proved a nice distraction and, as the sheriff told her of his day's findings, Anna relaxed into the familiar role with which work always provided her. A comfortable place where reason and not emotion was the most effective tool.

"The boys are going to stonewall," Davidson said as he backed his vehicle out of the lot. "My deputy got to the two you'd named, Thad Meyerhoff and Lyle Sanders, but the juice ain't worth the squeeze.

They're saying they were drunk prom night and remember nothing. My guess is that'll be Brandon Deforest's story when next we talk to him."

"The Three Musketeers: one for all and all for one," Anna said, then explained, telling him of her interviews with Brandon and his father.

Colonel Deforest and the Meyerhoffs are good people," Davidson said.

"They won't take kindly to their sons saying they were so drunk they blacked out. Whatever those boys are hiding, they've got to figure it'll get them in worse trouble than admitting to drunkenness,"

"If I hadn't actually seen those two boys-probably Sanders and Meyerboff-in the graveyard, the story they made up would probably have been less toxic," Anna said. "Maybe the three of them playing cards or night fishing together."

"No doubt."

"How about the Sanderses? Are they 'good people'?"

"Lyle's father is an abusive alcoholic. Hearing Lyle admit to the family failing, my guess is he'll beat that boy half to death." They ruminated on that for a while, the silence In the car deepened by the crackling worries of the police radio. What would a kid take a beating to avoid?

Jail? A murder rap? "Do you think they killed Danni Posey?" Anna asked.

"I sure don't want to." Neither did she. "What did you get from our used-car salesman, McIntire?"

"Not much. He said they'd had a little too much bourbon and went to bed early. He slept right through the cars and the shouting that the other campers complained of. Says be knew nothing about it till the next morning.,, "It seems alcohol's the excuse du lour in these parts," Anna said. "Everybody everywhere drinks too much. It's just in Mississippi most folks don't waste time going to AA meetings in between." That was the first cynical remark Anna'd heard him make. She liked him better for it. Saints had a way of wearing on the nerves of the less exalted.

"McIntire made a point of asking me to tell you he doesn't think it was your fault," the sheriff said. "You being new and all, and that he and his buddies have no intention of deserting Rocky because of it."

"Big of him," Anna said dryly. "He thought so."

"Talk to the lawyer?"

"Jimmy Williams? Tomorrow, he's at the top of my morning.

I did have one interesting bit of information turn up.,, Because he was pleased with himself and wanted her to ask what it was, Anna did. "I dropped by the Posey farm and talked to Cindy I'd forgotten I'd met her before four or five years ago when her son got on the wrong side of things. Just the pre-penitentiary warm-ups, I'm afraid.

Anyway Cindy and I had a two-Coke chat. She's sick enough I think Fred should see if he can get her back into care, but that's not my field.

Not with this hat on. She said she'd had two other children besides Darml and Mike. She told me they'd been stillborn and they were penguins."

"Jesus," Anna said. "It gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. I asked her how they came to be penguins, and she admitted that they weren't really penguins. That a black nurse at the hospital had chewed them up. After he spit them out, they were black babies so she had to turn them loose."

"Turn them loose?"

"She said she let them go in the woods so they could return to the wild.

I got hold of Fred, Cindy had a miscarriage between Danni and Mike. He said that's when she started 'slipping," with a fixation on African-Americans. He swears there were no babies, black or otherwise, turned loose in the woods,"

"That's a comfort, I guess.

Did you believe him or do you think there's baby bones buried somewhere under the cotton crop?"

"I believed him. We'll need to check it out as best we can, but I think he was telling the truth.

"Then she told me Danni had been insured for forty thousand dollars.

After the penguins, I wasn't taking anything on faith but I checked. The girl was insured by Mrs. Posey. According to Cindy, Fred Posey didn't know anything about it."

"Life insurance on a sixteen-year-old girl? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you intend to kill her. They might fool you and me, but insurance companies mean business." Davidson laughed and Anna was relieved. Too often one man's joke was another man's insult.

"Not life insurance. Mrs. Posey had her daughter's face insured. She'd heard on some TV show that an actress had her legs insured for a million dollars through Lloyds of London, she thought. And she knew Danni's face had to be protected."

"She'd told me Danni was going to be a model," Anna remembered." As big as Cheryl Tiegs."

"Cindy Posey's heard that her daughter was struck across the right side of her forehead over the corner of her eye, disfigured, and she wants that forty grand. She says she paid for it, it's hers, and she means to have it," the sheriff said. "Since the girl's dead, I wonder if the policy is still valid."

"Who knows. The point is Cindy Posey thinks it is."

"And maybe Fred Posey," Anna added. Secrets were hard to keep, especially secrets requiring paperwork, records, canceled checks.

There was a time that it wouldn't have crossed her mind that anyone could murder their own child for a measly forty grand. No more.

Forty grand might be a fortune to the Poseys. "If one of the Poseys did it, the sheet and hangman's rope don't make a whole lot of sense," Anna said. "Making sense doesn't seem to be Cindy Posey's long suit. This is it." Davidson turned off the two-lane road they'd followed out Of Port Gibson and into the whale-belly darkness of a wooded dirt lane.

A tidy brick house was tucked back in the trees and surrounded by white azalea bushes in such glorious bloom that they glowed like the light of the moon shattered and brought to ground. A Dodge truck was parked in the drive and the porch light was on.

"Are we expected?" Anna asked as they got out of the car.

"I let Leo know I'd be by tonight. No sense wasting a trip if nobody's going to be home," Anna followed Davidson up the walk. The door opened and a cacophony of barks commenced. When they reached the porch, Anna saw the perpetrators through the screen. The minister had half a dozen Boston terriers, all clicking their nails on the linoleum, whiffling through squashed noses and yapping. Not a pretty sight. "Father Davidson, come on in," said a voice Anna recognized as that of the dark man under Captain Williams's command. "Ma'am," he said as Anna was ushered in first. She'd forgotten how striking Leo Fullerton was. The lowering brow with black eyebrows that extended far beyond the corners of deep-set eyes, the full mouth that she suspected could turn cruel, but mostly the stiff way he moved, as if he'd not yet grown accustomed to the human form.