Chapter thirty-three

So we started searching for Laura. Trying to find her past, trying to find some reason someone would want her dead. We started with the trial transcripts and the clips we had out at Yardley’s. We read them into the night, until an hour before dawn. By eight A.M., we were at the Chronicle, going through the old bound editions of the paper. But there wasn’t much there. Even at the time, Laura had not been considered a central figure in the case. It just seemed to be a possibility overlooked by everyone.

When the county offices opened, Yardley went over there to snoop around. He came back with some ancient tax records showing Laura had worked at a diner in town before going to work for my father at the inn. Susannah and I, meanwhile, had tracked down some numbers for people who’d testified at the trial. Yardley and I left Susannah at the phones, climbed into his Chevy and went out in search of the diner.

We found it—or what was left of it. An old shell of a train car on a back road near the Hickman railroad station. Jagged edges of glass in the windows. An interior picked clean by scavengers. But Yardley had gotten the name of the diner’s owner too. We drove off together in search of him.

We found his widow. An ancient mass of putty-like flesh rooted to her sofa. The sofa was in the living room of a small, two-story house. The house was near the freight tracks, just this side of them. We sat with her in her living room with her TV on. We smoked our cigarettes and watched her intently. She watched the TV, never took her eyes off it. The trinkets on the mantelpiece rattled when the train went through.

“Never said much about herself,” the old woman said, mashing her gums together. “Never one to say much, Laura. I ’member her well enough though. Harvey hired her soon as he saw her ’count of her being pretty, bringing the people in and so on. And she’d had some experience down south where she came from.”

“New Orleans,” said Yardley. He tried not to sound too eager.

“New Orleans, yeah,” said the old woman. “That was it.”

When we got back to the Chronicle, Susannah was still on the phones. We joined her, going through the list she’d made.

We went all the way through it. Slowly. It was past noon by the time we ran out of names. Yardley threw his phone down into its cradle with a clatter.

“Damn it!” he said. “Nothing!”

I murmured a good-bye into my own phone and set it down. After a minute or two, Susannah did the same. We sat there silently.

Yardley was in his seat at the front of the room. Susannah was at the sports guy’s desk behind him. I was across from them in the church notices desk. I’d usurped the divorcee. She’d left in a huff.

The air was smoky. Yardley and I had been going at the cigarettes hard. I peered through the smoke at the storefront window. Out through the glass at the elms on Main. The buds on their branches were fiercely bright in the midday sun. Their shadows gathered at their trunks in dark little pools.

“Twenty years,” said Yardley.

I nodded.

“There’s nothing left of her,” he said.

“There is.” This was Susannah. “There’s got to be something. Something somewhere.”

She reached for the phone again. Yardley and I watched her wearily. She started dialing, searching for another person or agency or establishment that might have come in contact with her mother all those years ago. Her fingers hit the phone hard, her lips stayed pressed together. When she leaned back in her chair, listening to the ring, her eyes were focused sharply on the wall across from her.

She’d been like that since the night before: focused, sharp. Ever since she’d guessed it had been Laura who’d been the primary target of the scarred man. It seemed to galvanize her. To make her want to know more. To make her want to know everything.

As Yardley and I watched, she turned to her desk: hunched over, the phone to her ear, a pen in her hand. She murmured briefly, scribbled on a pad. Hung up after a moment. We watched her. Brushing a red curl off her forehead, she pushed out a breath. Then she picked up the phone again. Looking for Laura. Looking for the scarred man who had come to the Turner inn to murder her.

That was the way it had happened. The moment she said it, all three of us knew it was true. It made sense of all my memories, anyway. The sequence of those awful old events had fallen into place as Sue gazed at her mother. I had gotten out of bed, gone to the top of the stairs because I’d heard whispering. There had been a lot of whispering before the shooting started. Laura must have been talking to the killer, he must have been someone she knew. She had started running up the stairs because she realized, finally, that he meant to kill her. And only when my father stepped out to protect me did the killer determine he would have to take us all.

If there was a motive for the killings, it lay with Laura. We felt sure of it.

Yardley and I watched Susannah dialing again.

“Who’re you calling now?” Yardley said at last. “We’ve practically gone through all of Hickman.”

“New Orleans,” Susannah answered quietly. “I’m going through New Orleans now.”

Yardley and I sighed in unison. We took our phones up too.

Susannah hit the government offices: tax departments, motor vehicles bureaus, anyone who might keep a record. Yardley went at the cops and the D.A., looking for anything he could. I went after diners, restaurants, neighbors, family; I was practically calling through the area at random.

I got lucky around four o’clock.

I had phoned a restaurant, The St. James Pancake House. One of maybe two dozen names I’d gotten from information. A waitress answered at this one, a whiskey-throated woman with a thick, slow-moving drawl. Her name was Jeannie.

“Is this some kind of a joke?” she asked me.

“No, ma’am,” I said. I pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers, closed my eyes, resigned to another dead end. “It’s very important.”

“Yeah, that’s what t’other one said.”

I opened my eyes. “Pardon me.”

“Well, you’re the second man who’s asked me about her, honey. After all these years, too.”

I was tilted back in my chair, one hand wrapped around a coffee cup, my feet up on the desk. Now, though, I straightened in my chair. I lowered my feet to the floor.

“The second …” I cleared my throat. “The second man.”

“Yeah. Fellow came by here just t’other day. Said he was a private de-tective. Asking me about Laura, just like you. Asking me what I knew about her.”

“A private detective.”

“You hear all right, fellah?” she asked me. “That’s what I said, you don’t have to. tell me. A private detective by the name of Johnson. Sandy-haired fellah with a mean-looking scar right down the middle of his face.”

Susannah and Yardley turned in their chairs as my coffee cup spilled over the edge of the desk. One look, and they hung up their phones, left their chairs, came to me where I sat.

“I told him the same thing I’m gonna tell you,” Jeannie went on. “I wrote to Laura once or twice a long while back. But I ain’t seen hide nor hair of Laura for over a quarter of a century.”

There was a long pause. I couldn’t speak. I swallowed hard.

The woman said: “Not since Stan Harris killed that debutante.”

Yardley called the police again, and then the FBI. It took a little while, but they dug up the records for us. It was that easy in the end. If anyone had thought to ask, they’d have done it twenty years ago. No one had thought to ask.

By the time the street outside went dim with sunset, Yardley had everything he needed. He hung up and told us about it as dusk gathered at the window, as the office grew dark.

I had an odd feeling, as we sat there, as we listened. I had an odd feeling that it was Christmas again. That we were trading ghost stories again and that it was Yardley’s turn to tell the one about the scarred man.

Only this time, it was the real story. The one that had taken place in New Orleans twenty-five years ago. The one that had taken place when the killer’s name had been Stan Harris.

It was Mardi Gras. The streets of the French Quarter were packed with people. There were the solemn shuttered facades and the wild places with neon lights and the wrought-iron railings that looked down on green mermaid fountains in the courtyards, and jazz, jazz everywhere: in little smoke-filled halls like caves, where old men jammed while the beatniks nodded and snapped and yeahed; and in big nightclubs, too, where fat guys with name tags would take off their green ties and dance on the tables, swinging the ties around their heads; and in the streets, which were packed with people.

One of the people was Stan Harris. He was about twenty, a scholarship student at Tulane University. He was very smart. He would have had to be. There are towns in the south that are mostly dirt and hunger. There are places where the sun beats down on the tin roofs of the shacks and the roofs glare back at the sun and nothing much else happens except some times there’s a new baby and it cries and sometimes someone passes away and sometimes, if the driver’s lost, a car goes by. That last kicks the dust up, but it settles again soon. Stan Harris was from a town like that, but he was very smart, and he had made it to Tulane.

His scholarship didn’t take him far. He still had to pinch pennies. But he couldn’t resist taking the Desire streetcar into town that long-ago February night to see the Mardi Gras. His first Mardi Gras.

He pushed through the people—or he tried for a while—but soon he saw there was no pushing against them, there were just too many. He let them carry him along instead, and they carried him through the quarter on a tight, smelly, steady flow of bellies and shoulders and sweat and beer and coarse laughter. Openmouthed as the hayseed he was, he saw the light and he heard the jazz. He watched the parades in the street where the people dressed up as gods and the women in short dresses threw necklaces of plastic beads to the crowds. He had never seen women who looked like that before. He reached out for the plastic beads. Some of the women waved at him.

The crowd carried him into the heart of the quarter, and there he saw the people swell and eddy under an iron balcony on the third floor of a pale yellow town house. He looked up. Debutantes stood on the balcony. They were dressed in shiny lamé gowns that flowed down to their Cinderella slippers. They were fresh from their coming-out balls of the night before. They, too, were throwing plastic beads down into the crowd. Hands reached up at them, each one stretching to get higher than the hand beside it, to grab the beads tumbling down from the balcony.

Harris just stood there, just stood there looking up. The crowd jostled him like the ocean jostles you if you stand in it. He swayed back and forth in the waves, but he did not move. He would not be carried on. There was a woman up there in the balcony, a woman in gold lamé with a tiara in her hair. Her hair was golden. She was plump and had a round, sweet face. She was throwing beads to the crowd, and when she saw him staring at her—it seemed to him—she threw one necklace down to him directly, dropped it right above him so he couldn’t miss it. He didn’t even reach up. It fell on his shoulder and slid down into his cupped hands as the others grabbed for it. He stood, jostled by the waves of the crowd, and he stared at her.

Stan Harris didn’t have many friends. There was his roommate, who was a nice enough guy, and a pretty waitress at the university coffee shop who would listen to him talk. He told them about the girl in the gold lamé. They listened to him and kidded him, but he didn’t think it was funny. He went back to the pale yellow town house to find her. He fought the crowds. He stayed there. He waited for her through a night and a day. Finally, he saw her. She was coming into the house with a man on her arm. It was night. She was dressed in a midnight blue gown that showed off her ample cleavage. Her golden hair was shining in the light from the streetlamps. The young man was decked out in a tuxedo.

Stan Harris didn’t care about the young man. He approached her. He told her who he was, how he had been standing under the balcony when she threw the beads down. She was flattered. She saw how things were and she tried to be nice. The young man with her tried to be nice, too, but Stan wouldn’t back off. Finally the young man took the girl by the arm and began to guide her into the big house. Stan grabbed the young man’s shoulder. The young man knew how to box. He hurled javelin on his college track team too. He didn’t want to hurt Stan but he swung around and dusted him back a little. Dazed, Stan stood shaking his head while the young man and the girl who had worn gold lamé went inside. She looked back at him as if she felt sorry for him.

Stan went home then, but he came back later and killed her. It took him a week. First he had to find them. It turned out the big house was not a house but a hotel where the girl had been staying. She lived out in the suburbs, not far from the school, in fact. But it took Stan quite a while to find that out. When he did, he went there and waited. He was good at waiting, Stan was. He waited until she was at home alone, and then he broke into the house. He had apparently decided to give her another chance, but she screamed and scratched him, and he took his hunting knife and cut her throat. Then he stabbed her several times in the chest and stomach. Then he left.

It didn’t take long for the police to get on to Stan. They interviewed the young man in the tuxedo and he, of course, remembered the confrontation outside the hotel. It took him a while to remember everything Stan had said but he got it eventually. Then the police knew.

It’s possible this took Stan by surprise. As the cops found out later, he hadn’t had much trouble with the police the last time he’d killed someone. It had been an argument over a dog, and all he’d had to do was bury the man’s body in a shallow grave and forget about it. But then, that was back in his hometown. He hadn’t figured on the big-city publicity and the big-city police.

In any case, Stan got away just an hour before the police arrived at his dorm room to arrest him. Somehow, he just decided that he wasn’t waiting around. He was spotted once on a streetcar, and then again down by the Mississippi where the freight trains go. And then he was seen no more.

But the case was a sensational one. It was all over the papers and the television. The mayor and therefore the chief of police and therefore the police themselves were not about to give up easily. They went after Stan, and once or twice they almost got him. In fact, they had Stan cornered just north of Shreveport, but that was as close as they ever came.

What happened next was important, however. It was right about then that a vagrant was found dead and buried by the train tracks. No one could ever identify that vagrant. He was a man without a name. But Agent Frederick Sample of the Federal Bureau of Investigation strongly believed that Stan Harris had killed him. The marks of the knife seemed the same as those in the murder in New Orleans. And there was more. After Harris got away outside of Shreveport, the law never came close to him again. He vanished without a trace. Agent Sample stayed on the case, off and on, for the ten years until his retirement, but he never found a single clue to Harris’s whereabouts. He eventually developed a theory. He believed that Harris had sat and talked with the vagrant before he murdered him. Maybe the vagrant wasn’t even the first one Harris had talked to. Maybe he had talked to several and taken the best of the lot. Anyway, Sample believed Harris had found out the man’s name and his history, and then killed him—and then taken over his identity. He believed that’s how he had evaded the law so completely: he had literally become someone else.

And that was all we knew about Stan Harris.

That, and that the waitress in the university coffee shop had been our Laura. She must have liked Stan before she found out he was “not so nice.”