21

The woman deputy in the sheriff’s Office said that the sheriff was at home. She did not look as if she was inclined to bother him for less than a presidential assassination. Brady could try his home if it was that urgent. She surrendered the address with reluctance and Brady thanked her.

The address was in one of the newer subdivisions that had been reclaimed from the forest within the last ten years. Brush had been cleared and trees felled, and now a network of roads connected a neighborhood of spacious, tree-shaded modern homes, where children played on closely cut lawns and R.V.s sat in driveways.

The sheriff’s was a two-story wooden structure in the Neo-Rustic style, with lots of glass for the upstairs bedroom and a brick chimney. Planter baskets hung along the border of the front porch and someone had been working in the garden, judging from the shovel leaning against one of the wooden supports. A car and pickup were in the drive and, as he slowed at the curb, Brady could hear a motor in the backyard. He got out and, as he started up the walk, the front door opened and a petite, blond woman with a bandana over her head came out.

“Hi,” she said pleasantly. “I’m Mitzi Garitty. I think we met at the cemetery working.”

Brady nodded. “I think so. Is the sheriff around?”

“In the back with Scott,” she said, and Brady followed her around the house to a backyard that extended all the way to the forest, with oaks and sycamores providing shade for a barbecue pit and a trampoline. As he stood there, the rattle of a motor echoed from the woods and, a second later, a three-wheeled A.T.V. emerged with a man and boy astride it. It made a half-circle around the barbecue and then stopped suddenly, and Matt Garitty got off, followed by a boy of about ten. The sheriff saw Brady and a tiny smile flickered across his face.

“Well, what have we got here? You haven’t solved the mystery yet, have you?”

Mitzi smiled. “Well, if there’s nothing anybody needs me for, I’ll go back to my work out front.”

Garitty watched her go, his eyes lingering lovingly on her departing figure. The boy came up then and eyed Brady suspiciously, as if the editor might be part of a conspiracy to take away his playmate.

“So what can I do for you, Brady? Something we didn’t finish the other day?”

“I’d say that,” Brady told him. “Can we talk?”

“Sure. We have the whole yard.” Garitty turned to his son. “Scotty, go help Mom in the garden for a while, will you? I’ll be there in a minute.”

The ten-year-old made a face, but his father gave him a fond pat on the shoulder and sent him along.

“Now,” Garitty asked, turning to Brady. “What’s so all-fired important?”

“Your father,” Brady said evenly. “Your father and his feud with Judge Troy, and why you told me there was no evidence from the body at Yankee Bend. It seems to me like we have a lot of talking to do, Sheriff.”

Garitty’s brow darkened and his jaw set. “You just hold your horses. You may be a big-shot reporter down at the Picayune, but, mister, you aren’t that here.” Garitty held up his thumb and forefinger. “And you especially don’t come into my yard and threaten me in front of my family.”

“I’m not threatening,” Brady said. “I’m just asking for an explanation. You say I’ve held out on you. Well, you’ve been doing the same to me and I’d like to know why. If you don’t want to talk about it, fine. I’ll run a story to that effect. I’m sure there are lots of folks who’ll remember the feud and I can dig it all back up if I have to. But I’d rather have it from you.”

“Mr. Brady, you’re a gold-plated pain in the ass, do you know that?”

“I’ve been told once or twice. Now what about the evidence that supposedly burned up? Where is it?”

“I told you the truth,” Garitty declared. “In fact, after I talked to you about it, I got curious, myself. So I did some checking and what I’d heard was true: everything did burn up in the fire.”

“Really. Well, what about your father. I understand he was a part of the anti-Long, anti-Troy faction.”

Garitty turned around and started to walk toward the center of the yard and, for a moment, Brady had the feeling the other man might turn around and swing. He braced for the attack, but it never came. Instead, Garitty spit on the ground as if the whole subject were too distasteful to consider.

“All right,” he said finally, slowly turning to face Brady again. “So it’s true. My father hated the Machine. That didn’t make him unique. He was elected by people who hated both of them. It was only the stuffed ballot boxes that kept the Long machine in power here once Huey was dead.”

“Who shot your father, and why?”

“The Judge’s people. That’s what everybody thought then, and I still believe it. My father was looking for something on the Judge’s machine. Times were different. It was a dirty game.”

“And your father got too close for comfort.”

“Yes. It was before I was born, you understand. The father I knew wasn’t like the pictures: the young, robust-looking man in the police uniform. The father I remember was gray-haired at the age of thirty-five and stooped over, and needed help when he wanted to cross the street. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with somebody whose life ended a long time ago and who’s just waiting out his time? My father was broken because the Machine broke him and, a long time ago, I decided I’d prove they did it and then I’d get my revenge. But I was smart enough to know that I couldn’t talk too loud. And I knew better than to go out and wait for ’em on some lonely road like they did with my father. That was too easy. I wanted ’em to suffer, to know what it was like to go through life feeling like half a person. So I decided that the best thing I could do was get an education. Learn how to be a smart man, because a smart man would know how to beat these yokels.”

He spit again, making a dark spot in the dust like a drop of blood. “So I went to Nam and afterwards got an education. I went on the force as a state trooper, married the best woman in the world, and studied at nights. I got a degree in law enforcement and, along the way, a funny thing happened. I realized there was more to the law than just using it for your own revenge. That was being just like the Judge. Besides, the Judge was dead. Sheriff Thomas was dead. The people that had shot my father were almost certainly dead. What was there left to do? I served on the force for five years and then the sheriff stepped down. A few friends, the mayor, a couple of police jurors came to me and they said I ought to run for the job. They said it was time for the parish to get away from the old cigar-chomping political boss kind of sheriff, that a lot was image these days, and people would never respect this parish if it looked like something out of a Hollywood movie. I thought about it. I thought about the picture of the man in the uniform taken before I was born, and I thought, ‘Why not?’”

“Nobody said you weren’t qualified,” Brady told him.

“No. Anyway, I did pretty well. I’ve got a house, a family, a wonderful wife, and even a hound dog. Talk is that I should be a shoo-in for the next election. Man couldn’t ask for much more.” He stared down at the place where he had spit. “And then this damn business came up. And it all came back.”

He sighed and absently picked up a stick from the ground. “I knew vaguely about Frieda’s marriage and divorce. It was stale gossip when I was born. And I heard it from my mother. I knew then it had to have something to do with what happened to my father. I remember, I must have been about Scotty’s age. Mama had had a run-in with Frieda about something, and she did something she almost never did: she let some gossip slip out, she was so mad. About how Frieda hadn’t any business being high-and-mighty, because everybody knew she’d had to marry some man from out of town who had gotten her in a family way; and how the Judge had fixed up a divorce and Frieda had given her baby up for adoption, and yet she went right on with the social column in the newspaper like nothing had happened. And as soon as she’d said it, she knew she’d made a mistake, because the door opened and my father was standing there, his face the color of a bed-sheet, and she just seemed to shrink a little then. I remember, all he said was her name, ‘Emma.’ And she went to him, but he’d gone back into his room. And she closed the door behind her and afterwards I heard them in there arguing. She was telling him it had just slipped out, that I wouldn’t tell anybody. And he was talking in a low voice I couldn’t understand, but afterwards she came out and she brought out the big Bible we always kept on the bedside table, and she made me put my hand on it and swear that I’d never tell anybody about that as long as I lived.”

Little beads of sweat prickled the lawman’s forehead, and Brady could tell that he was struggling to keep his voice even. “So I guess I broke my oath,” he said, fixing Brady with strangely blank eyes. He hunched his shoulders in a half-shrug and broke the stick. “When I became sheriff I did a little discreet investigating. I got the old marriage and divorce documents from the Bossier courthouse. I didn’t plan to do anything with them. I figured it was all finished, until Frieda got killed. And when Annabelle followed, it looked like there might be more to it, so I did some more investigating. I made some phone calls and found out that Annabelle was not just some waif that Frieda took in out of the goodness of her heart—whatever goodness there was.”

“Annabelle was her granddaughter,” Brady said.

“Bingo for you,” Garitty said. “Then you obviously know that Frieda’s own daughter, Patrice Louise, was born in El Paso in 1941 and died in a traffic accident in Los Angeles in 1957, at the tender age of sixteen, leaving six-month-old Annabelle Lee.”

“I figured something like that had happened,” Brady said. “But why did Frieda, at age forty, want a six-month-old baby to take care of?”

“Who knows? She was a strange woman. She managed to hold onto her daughter’s address. I talked to some people, distant relatives. They said she insisted Patrice Louise never know she existed, but she had them give her an update from time to time on how she was doing.”

“It must have been a depressing list, if she got pregnant at fifteen.”

“I know. From what I was told, the girl was a lost cause from the first. I have an idea it was the feeling of being abandoned. It tends to give you low self-esteem, at least according to the psychology courses I took. Anyway, the girl ran away and hit the streets. Back in 1957 that was a real stigma. She got herself pregnant. God knows by whom, and she and the baby were living in a rundown skid-row hotel when the accident happened. She and some friend had been to a party, too much booze and probably drugs, and they ran a stop sign on the way back. Police found a slip with her foster parents’ address in the hotel room.”

Garitty snapped another twig from the stick. “From what I hear, Frieda didn’t seem too shaken up. Always was a cold-blooded woman. I think she considered this a chance to redo things. Originally, she’d given up her daughter because she and her parents saw it hindering her life. After years passed and her life never became the glamorous business she’d expected it to be, she began to see herself facing old age and aloneness. The last of the Troy line in Troy Parish. Can you imagine, Brady, what it must’ve been like for that woman to think of a town where there wouldn’t be any more of her kind to lord it over other folks and make them miserable?” He gave a bitter little laugh.

“Poor Annabelle never had a chance,” Brady said.

“No,” Garitty agreed, “she didn’t. Oh, she had men friends. In fact, she was pretty insatiable, from everything I’ve heard. And I had to consider the possibility that it was one of her men who might have killed her. But the more I thought about it, the more I had to wonder, just like you did, if it had anything to do with what happened to my father.”

“And that’s really why you locked up Michael MacBride.”

Garitty nodded. “Yep. He worked for the Long people in Bossier back then. I thought maybe if I kept him long enough, put the fear of God into him, he might cough up something. It seemed too damned coincidental for him to be coming back just now.”

“And?”

The sheriff shook his head. “Didn’t work. Old man’s been around. Treated the whole thing as a joke. I suspect he’s been in worse jails than this one, in a lot worse situations. Like I told you, I don’t think he had any place to go.” Garitty took a deep breath and threw the last piece of stick onto the ground. “So this morning I called and told them to cut him loose. Maybe it’ll force him into some other action. Hell, I don’t know. If it all is connected. I have to tell you, I can’t see how.”

“Maybe I can help you,” Brady said. “Suppose I was to tell you that Cantrell didn’t die in the Bulge, that he came back here in 1950 and was murdered for whatever it was he knew.”

“What?” Garitty spun as if he had been shot at. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The body. The Unknown Victim. I think it was really Cantrell. I think he came back here and somebody recognized him and killed him.”

“Brady, that’s crazy. Why would he pretend he was dead to begin with?”

“Strange things happen in wars, Sheriff. Maybe he suffered amnesia. Or maybe he just figured it would be too uncomfortable for him in Troy, with Frieda and her family. Maybe the Judge ran him out of town.”

“Lots of maybes. And you’re saying they killed him when he came back?”

“Look: by the time he went to Europe his career was going downhill fast. He was a drinker and it was starting to take control of him. All he had were his royalties, and I checked the editions of his works. After 1943 there was exactly one: a posthumous collection of his works. It might have seemed like a good thing for him to come back to his old stomping grounds and try to squeeze some money out of some of the elite.”

“And you’re saying Frieda and Annabelle knew something about all this?”

“Frieda had some document, something handwritten. I think Annabelle got it from her.”

“They couldn’t have been blackmailing their own family, that doesn’t make any sense. And besides, they were all that was left.” Garitty shook his head again. “Pretty thin, Brady.”

“Maybe, but I can’t think of another scenario. Anyway, I have a call in to somebody who may be able to confirm whether it was Cantrell they brought back from Europe and buried in the cemetery.”

“Well, all I can say is good luck and I hope to God you won’t stir all this up when there’s no need to.”

“I hope not,” Brady said. “But it looks like somebody’s stirred it up pretty well already, haven’t they?”

He turned and started out of the backyard, stepping over a play rifle on the ground.

“Oh Brady.” The sheriff’s voice stopped him. “How’s it going with Emmett Larson’s daughter?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just curious. One of my deputies checked out a car last night, just east of here, near the bridge on New River. It was parked up on the levee, and he wouldn’t have seen if it hadn’t of been for the moonlight. Turned out it belonged to Professor Richard E. Whiteside, of Fletcher State College.” Garitty gave Brady a broad smirk. “Had a young woman with him. Miss Kelly Maguire. Since it was after two in the morning and it wasn’t the best place in the world to be, the deputy sent them on their way. But I thought it was interesting. I’d tell Miss Maguire to be careful. There’s something about that fellow Whiteside.”

“What?” Brady asked. “That he stays out late?”

Garitty shrugged. “Don’t know. But it occurs to me that if what you believe about Cantrell is true, it’s going to cause him a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Touché, Sheriff.” Brady walked out of the yard.