Chapter Fifteen
I VISIT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
I DID HOUSEWORK all morning and then told Maggie I had to run a few errands. It was a lie, but I didn’t want her to worry about me. She didn’t ask where I was going. All she said was, “Be careful.”
I met up with Daniel, and he led me to where Patrice’s body had been found. It was downstream from some rapids formed by a narrowing of the river.
I stared into the roiling water. What wasn’t foam was the color of milk chocolate.
“Has the water always been so muddy?” I asked.
“Far as I know.”
A length of tree branch swirled past us, moved quickly through the rapids and vanished.
“If you dumped a body here, wouldn’t the current carry it away?”
“If you mean Patrice’s body, it wasn’t just dumped. It was weighted down. I told you that. The killer chose that place because the water is so deep, and because of the rapids people don’t come here very often.”
“If the body was weighted down, then how was it found? I can’t see anything in there. And if people don’t come here often, why would anyone think to look for it here?”
“There was a big storm just before they found him. Everyone says if it wasn’t for that storm, he might never have been found.”
“What do you mean?”
“His body was tied to an old metal pulley, a really big one. But the rope broke during the storm, and he floated to the surface.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“The body floated to the surface,” Mr. Standish said. I’d found him in the first place I looked: the diner, talking over coffee with Mr. Selig and Mr. Drew. He waved me into a chair—clearly, there were no hard feelings from the night before—and ordered me a cup of coffee.
“Way I heard it, the rope didn’t hold,” Mr. Drew said. “Seems to me they didn’t teach those boys proper knot tying while they were in the army.”
“Knots are for the navy,” Mr. Standish said mildly.
“Bad luck though,” Mr. Selig said. “If he’d tied the rope good and proper, he might have got away with it. It wasn’t like anyone was going to check where that fella had gone. If anyone gave him a second thought, they’d think he finally smartened up and got himself back where he belonged.” He sipped his coffee. “Yes sir, if I was that boy, I surely would have checked that knot.”
I had another question.
“Was someone looking for Mr. LaSalle? Or did someone just find him accidentally?”
Mr. Standish frowned thoughtfully. Mr. Selig shook his head. Mr. Drew said, “The Jefferson boy was looking for him. He came by the store and asked if he’d been around.”
“Marcus owned a feed and seed store back then,” Mr. Standish explained. “His nephew runs it now. That one and two more. A regular chain.”
“A short chain.” Mr. Drew laughed.
“So only Mr. Jefferson was looking for Mr. LaSalle?” I asked. “Nobody else?”
“Can’t think why anyone else would,” Mr. Selig said. “He was a stranger in town. The only thing we knew about him was that he was Jefferson’s friend.”
“And a Frenchie,” Mr. Drew said.
“And a soldier,” Mr. Standish said.
“All adds up to a whole lot of not much,” Mr. Selig said stubbornly. “Why would anyone look for a stranger?”
But I couldn’t help thinking, Why would Mr. Jefferson have looked for Mr. LaSalle? If he really had killed him, tied his body to a pulley and dumped it in the deepest, muddiest part of the river he could find, why would he go around town looking for him? Wouldn’t that just call attention to the fact that Mr. LaSalle was missing? Why didn’t he keep his mouth shut and if the subject came up (unlikely, according to these three old men), tell whoever asked that LaSalle had gone back home? Nobody would have questioned that.
“Who found the body?” I asked.
“Sheriff Hicks. Of course, he was just Deputy Hicks back then. I guess he would have been on the job for about two years at the time.”
It was after dark, and I was in the kitchen waxing the floor—it needed it—when I heard a swoosh. A large manila envelope slid under the kitchen door and halfway across the floor. Printed on the front were the words For the girl staying at Maggie’s. I pushed open the kitchen door and stepped out into the heavy night air in time to see someone—a black woman—hurrying down Maggie’s driveway. I called out, but she didn’t stop.
I went back into the kitchen and opened the envelope. Inside was a file folder. I slipped it out and opened it. It contained three black-and white-photographs. The first made me flinch. It was an eight-by-ten police photograph of a body, badly bloated, its hands and ankles bound. Something was wound around its waist. I stared at it. There was a river in the background. It looked like the same place Daniel took me to—the place where Patrice LaSalle’s body was found. I shuffled the photo to the bottom and looked at the next one.
It was a close-up of…of what, exactly? It looked like a piece of heavy equipment—like a giant pulley. Which was exactly what it was. It was the pulley Daniel had told me about, the one that had been used to weight Mr. LaSalle’s body and keep it hidden beneath the surface of the muddy water. I moved to the next picture.
The third and last photograph showed the body with the pulley beside it. Where had these pictures come from? Who was the woman who had delivered them? And why had she left them for me? To scare me? To warn me of what might happen to me if I continued to ask questions about Mr. Jefferson and Mr. LaSalle? Did that group of men put her up to delivering them?
I was slipping the photos back into the envelope when something caught my eye. I stepped directly under the overhead light and studied the third photo again. I flipped back to the second one. Was I really seeing what I thought I was seeing? If I was, what did it mean?
In the first picture, the body’s hands and feet were bound with rope. It was as plain as day. But the binding around the waist—that wasn’t rope. It was some kind of wire, but it was thick, like cable.
I flipped to the second picture, and then the third. There was no doubt about it. One end of the cable was attached to the body, the other end to the pulley. But the cable wasn’t in one piece. It looked as though it had been cut.
I sat down at the table, spread the three photos out in front of me and tried to estimate how much cable there was altogether. It didn’t look very long. Maybe three or four feet.
Daniel had said the river was deep where the body was found. But how deep was deep? Surely more than three feet. At three feet, a man could stand up and the water would hit the top of his thighs, or maybe his waist if he was short. The river had to be a lot deeper than that. So if the body had been attached to the pulley by cable, and if the pulley was at the bottom of the river, then there was no way the body would ever have bobbed to the surface.
One of the old men—was it Mr. Selig or Mr. Drew?—had said that if Mr. Jefferson had been better at tying knots, the body would never have been found. But you tie a knot in a rope, not in a cable. And besides, this was a crime-scene photo, I was sure of it, and the cable was still wrapped around both the body and the pulley. There was no knot. Yet somehow the cable had ended up in two pieces. There was only one way that could have happened: someone must have cut it. But when? And why? Why cut the cable and leave the body floating in the river where someone might find it? That was the question that ate at me all night.
I was up and out of Maggie’s house at sunrise the next morning. I planted myself on a bench across the street from the sheriff’s office and watched until I saw a familiar figure get out of a car.
“Sheriff Hicks!” I ran across the street.
The sheriff, his uniform shirt crisp at the beginning of what promised to be a hot day, the crease in his pants knife-sharp, squinted into the rising sun at me.
“Cady. You still in town?”
“I need to ask you a question.”
I saw a flicker of impatience in his eyes. “Shoot,” he said.
“It’s about the man that Mr. Jefferson killed.”
“What about him?”
“I heard you were the one who found the body.”
There was a tick of hesitation before he answered, and I couldn’t help thinking that he was wondering how I knew that. He nodded.
“Where did you find it?”
“In the river.”
“In a deep part of it, where the rapids are, right?”
“I don’t recall exactly. It was a long time ago.”
“Someone showed me the spot.”
“Well, that person has a better memory than I do,” he said. “I’d have to look it up.”
“Okay.” I looked expectantly at him.
“But I’m not going to do that,” he said. “In the first place, like I told you, the records from that time were destroyed in the flood. And in the second place, I have a lot of work to do. I don’t have time to worry over cases that were closed before you were even born.” He locked his car and started for the stairs.
“Can I ask you one more question?”
“Would it make any difference if I said no?”
“How did you find the body?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you find it? Were you out looking for Mr. LaSalle?”
“I don’t recall that anyone was looking for him. He’d supposedly left town.”
“Who told you that?”
“I believe it was Jefferson.”
“That can’t be right,” I said. “Mr. Jefferson was looking for him. He was asking people around town if they’d seen him.”
“Now how would you know that?”
“I asked around.”
“Did you, now?” The sheriff shook his head. “Why do I get the idea that there’s more to you than meets the eye? You’re sticking to this thing like a puppy to a root. What’s it to you?”
I dodged the question.
“Are you sure Mr. Jefferson said that Mr. LaSalle left town?” I asked.
“That’s my recollection, but I guess I could be mistaken. I was just a deputy at the time. Sheriff Beale handled the case.”
“But you found the body.”
“So you just happened to be passing that part of the river and you saw it?”
“Something like that.”
I thought about the river and the rutted dirt road that ran alongside it.
“Were you on your way somewhere?”
“Must have been.”
“Where?”
Sheriff Hicks made a show of consulting his wristwatch.
“I have work to do.”
“What about the cable?” I asked.
“What cable?”
“The body was anchored with a cable and a pulley so that it would stay under water, isn’t that right?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did you cut the cable after you pulled him up, or had the cable already been cut?” I asked.
“I don’t recall.”
“Because a lot of people I talked to seem to think the body was tied to that pulley with a rope.”
“These would be the same people who told you where the body was found?”
I saw no harm in letting him think this.
“Like I said, the people you’re talking to seem to have better memories than me,” he said.
“You don’t remember if it was a cable or a rope?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“If I’d seen something like that, I’m sure I’d never forget.”
“Well, you’re not a police officer.” The sheriff consulted his watch again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He tipped his hat and strode away.