47
Deputy Dawg
With the evidence on the seat beside me in a gym bag, I leaned back and closed my eyes and hoped Delbert wouldn’t talk all the way into town.
“You fixin’ to see Sam?”
I had told him to drop me at the courthouse. “Yes.”
“I think maybe he ain’t there.”
I didn’t comment.
“Thing is, he got his hands tied with all that’s been happening. That murder you know.”
I clinched my eyes shut. “I know. Well, if he’s not there, I’ll wait.”
“ ’Course he might just’ve stepped across to the Rainbow, him and Donny. Donny loves Shirl’s doughnuts.”
I sat silently, willing him to shut up.
“On the other hand, Donny’d more’n likely know where Sam’s at.”
Sliding down in my seat, I plugged my ears with my fingers. I wondered if there was ever a cab driver in any Greek tragic play. Probably not, but there must have been an equivalent. If it were China, it might have been a rickshaw operator. I could hear Delbert even over my stopped-up ears.
“There’s the Teets’s place, so we’re almost there.” He nodded toward a big yellow house behind us now. What was he saying all this for, talking as if I were a stranger to La Porte? Finally, finally, he pulled up in front of our grand white courthouse and I gave him the fare, hauled myself out of the cab, and fled. He was still talking.
Donny sat at the Sheriff’s desk, leaning back in the creaking, leather-cushioned swivel chair. He always did this when the Sheriff wasn’t around, as if he, Donny, were the law in La Porte. “Sam ain’t here, he’s out at Lake Noir. He pronounced it ‘Nor,’ as did most people. Having myself learned deus ex machina, I could certainly “N’wah.”
“I’ll wait.”
“For God’s sake, girl, he could be out there for hours.”
“Then I’ll wait for hours.” It was now a point of pride that I not move from this chair. I knew it would be really hard not to go across to the Rainbow for some chili. It was way after lunchtime and I didn’t know how long I could hold out. I had never been tested in this way, what with my mother’s cooking always available. That made me wonder if they had started back from Florida. Which day was it? I hoped I could get to the Pink Elephant in time to say good-bye to my dancing partner and the staff of the Rony Plaza. These thoughts held me for a while—dreaming on palm trees—and I didn’t bother commenting when Donny said, “Suit yourself.”
He didn’t want me waiting because he didn’t want me to know how little there was for him to do. For a while he stayed in the swivel chair, opening and closing drawers with a yank and a shove, as if whatever he was looking for better give itself up. Then he got up and swaggered around, his thumbs hooked into his Sam Brown belt, one close to his holster to impress on me how dangerous he could be. This all went on for a good ten minutes.
It’s best, I’ve found, to remain silent with someone you can’t stand so that they just fizzle out or give up. But it’s so hard to follow my own advice. “Don’t you have anything to do?” I just couldn’t resist it.
At that he swung around from where he’d been messing with Maureen’s In and Out boxes. “I got puh-lenty I ought to be doing but Sam wants somebody here, in the office, case he needs backup.” He adjusted the holster looped over his belt, adjusted his gun, adjusted his height. He managed to stretch himself an inch taller by leaning over slightly backwards.
“Backup for what? Has he gone after the killer?”
Donny paused. “Could be.” He narrowed his eyes in a threatening manner, or at least what he thought was such a manner.
“No, it couldn’t. He doesn’t know who killed her. Fern Queen,” I added, as if he might have forgotten.
His eyes got even more squinty looking. “And just how do you know that?”
“I know.”
Donny half sat his butt on the Sheriff’s desk and fake-laughed. “You know somethin’, Emma, you always have been too big for your britches. Think you know everything. Hell, you’re but twelve years old, chrissakes.”
Maybe I’d tell the Sheriff Donny worked the Devil and Jesus Christ into the same sentence that he said to a twelve-year-old. I stuck my tongue in my cheek.
“You don’t know nothin’!” he said.
It all sounded so much like Ree-Jane, just the kind of thing she’d say. How pathetic that an officer of the law couldn’t come up with better put-downs. “Well, I know more than you do.”
Now he was up and stalking about, as if that would give his reply more weight. Only, he couldn’t think of anything to say. He sat down again and pushed a few of the items on the desk around and started talking about their search for Ben Queen.
“We catch him and put him away, you got a dead man walking.” Donny looked at me, looked pleased with himself that he’d come up with something that might scare me.
I made my face expressionless and didn’t comment.
“You know what that means, I guess. Dead man walking?”
I could tell he was irritated I didn’t ask.
“Means when a killer’s going to his execution,” he said. “When he’s walking that last mile, so to speak. Guards call out ‘Dead man walking!’ Yep, that’s what’s comin’ down the pike for ol’ Ben Queen!” He smiled, showing a bottom row of crooked teeth.
He had sensed something—I guess the word is “intuited” something—of the way I felt about Ben Queen. It was then I realized that Donny was like Ree-Jane in this respect: he had a way of ferreting out the beliefs that kept a person going—like Ree-Jane knew I did not want to know the report in the newspaper about the death of Fern Queen, and so proceeded to read it to me. It was this uncanny grasp of what was important to me that had her figuring out ways to get at me; it had nothing to do with being clever. No, it was like they’d both received the same blessing from hell.
Had this been Ree-Jane talking, I would have thought up rejoinders that would really get her goat. But Donny wasn’t worth the thinking up. Donny was not a constant thorn in my side; he was by way of being an occasional mosquito bite. Still, he got to me. It was important not to let it show in my face or voice, but I felt I had at least to stick up for Ben Queen. “How do you know he did it?”
Donny had risen again to go to Maureen’s desk for nothing in particular and now he swaggered back to the Sheriff’s swivel chair and resat himself, fake-laughing as he did this. “How do I know? Plain as the nose on your face. Right after he gets free of prison, another family member gets murdered, which is exactly what got him twenty years in jail. That time it was the wife he murdered. Now, don’t that strike you as just too much of a coincidence?”
“No. It’s a coincidence, but not too much of one. You think maybe it’s just a habit Ben Queen got into—killing off family?”
This irritated Donny no end. “What’re you talkin’ about? You don’t know one damn thing about it.”
“Sure I do.” I still kept my face and voice expressionless. Your expression and your voice, those are the dead giveaways to a person who’s trying to undermine you. I’d had lots of practice at this sort of thing; I pretty much had to know it to survive.
Well, Donny just didn’t know how to handle my being so cocksure. He stared at me, then he pointed his finger at me. “I can’t hardly wait to tell Sam he’s been barking up the wrong tree.”
“What tree’s that?”
Donny snatched up this question, which betrayed my ignorance, finding in it an opportunity for sarcasm: “With you and him being such friends and all? You don’t know what Sam thinks about all this?”
Again, it was the brand of sarcasm Ree-Jane stooped to. Then it suddenly struck me—it was the strangest sensation—that Donny was jealous of my friendship with the Sheriff. So I said that: “You’re jealous.”
Well, at that he looked like he’d turned to wax (his natural coloring, only not usually hardened into immobility). He couldn’t think of a response weighted enough to do justice to what I’d said. Finally, after a few moments of pursed-mouthed movements, he blurted out, “Of you? I’m jealous of you?”
He made sounds, blubbered his lips, shook his head. Finally, he came up with, “Okay, you just take care of things here while I go across the street and get me a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Anyone stumbles in here bleeding or shot, you just take care of him. If the mayor calls about the budget, you can fill him in, too.” Donny grabbed up his black-visored cap and snapped it on his head.
“Sure,” I said. “If the Sheriff comes back I’ll just tell him you left me in charge while you went for coffee.”
For a flicker of time he looked frightened, his water-colored irises freezing up, congealing. But all he did was give me a flip of the hand, as if he were done with answering fools. He walked out.
I moved over to one of the windows that looked out on the street and across to the Rainbow Café and watched. Donny was in the middle of the street stopping the one approaching car. He just thrust his arm out, palm flat against space, as if he were a comic-strip hero like Superman. He strutted on. There was only this single car, and he couldn’t even wait for it to go by. Why did the Sheriff keep him on? Maybe because no one wanted the job of “deputy.” Was he good at anything? Paperwork? Organizing?
I turned and looked across the room at the banks of file cabinets.
Did Donny realize he’d left me alone with all of their reports?
The drawers were arranged first according to the violation; second, alphabetically. There were a lot of drawers, the cabinets stacked with a row on the bottom and one on top. Two of the bottom drawers, the ones at the end, were devoted to old cases. They went decades back, back to the 1920s. These files were pretty scruffy and stuffed in without much care taken and little arrangement. On the tabs were written what I guessed was the key word in each case, or the key name. I went through them quickly. Towards the back was a file marked “Devereau.” I yanked it out.
I was not prepared for the pictures; it hadn’t occurred to me there would be any, but of course it was logical that there would be. Two of Mary-Evelyn’s face, two of her face and torso, one of her whole waterlogged body.
And then I realized that I had never seen her except in the snapshot taken of the sisters in the shadowy vicinity of the porte cochere. I had made her up in my mind, building on what I could see of her in the snapshot. In some ways I had caught her, in other ways, missed her completely. But then the girl in these pictures was dead.
I took the doll out of my gym bag, smoothed its dress and held it next to the picture that showed Mary-Evelyn’s dress most clearly. Though the wetness of it had turned it dark in places, there was no mistaking the clothes were the same. The same dark little handsewn flowers marched down the front.
Statements made by the Devereau sisters: that’s what I wanted to read. Elizabeth, the oldest, told the sheriff (a man named Win Whittle, back then): “We dined at the usual time—seven—after which Mary-Evelyn went to her room and, we supposed, to bed.”
I frowned over the “we supposed.” Was Mary-Evelyn allowed to drift around like a little pile of leaves, with no one knowing what she did or where she blew? And besides, how could she have gone to bed so early? For they couldn’t have spent more than a half hour or forty-five minutes eating dinner. (With me, ten minutes would do it.)
I set aside Elizabeth’s statement temporarily and went to Isabel’s. Her statement matched Elizabeth’s, and added a little more. Neither did she know how Mary-Evelyn had slipped out at some point in the night. “After dinner, Elizabeth played the piano and I sang; we often do this in the evening. Iris was in her room, sewing. We have no idea why the child walked to the other side of the lake and took out that rowboat. Why on earth would she do that? She never liked to swim or have much to do with water sports. But she did, and that was that,” Isabel’s statement read. “Iris woke us sometime much later, around midnight, I think. She told us Mary-Evelyn wasn’t in her bed.”
I turned to Iris’s statement: “I sleep poorly. That night I was up late sewing. I’m a dressmaker. I found I needed some material that I’d shown to Mary-Evelyn for a new dress I was making her, and remembered I’d left it with her. So I went across to her room.”
If she went “across” that meant the room exactly opposite was Iris’s. I remembered the rooms, how the second floor was laid out.
“That’s when I discovered she was gone,” Iris continued. “Her bedspread wasn’t turned down and her pajamas were under her pillow. She was gone.”
Elizabeth: “We dressed and we went looking for her. We searched the grounds around the house and when we didn’t find her, we searched the woods. It was a black night and we had only hurricane lamps and a flashlight.”
Isabel: “When we went up to bed, about nine it was, Mary-Evelyn was in her room, lying on the bed, reading. The door was open; we always insisted she keep the door open.”
(Imagine. Imagine. Never to have any privacy, always to have to be public. That might have killed her if the water hadn’t. It certainly would kill me.)
What I wondered was, if Mary-Evelyn’s room was across the hall from Iris’s and both doors were open, then how could Mary-Evelyn have sneaked out without being seen? I remembered the room that was Iris’s; I closed my eyes and pictured the furniture. Besides a bed and dresser, hadn’t there been an easy chair near the door of the room? And a sewing machine? I had concentrated on Mary-Evelyn’s room and hadn’t paid much attention to the other bedrooms, other than to just give them a quick look. The easy chair, I thought, could be seen through the open door, which must mean Iris would be able to look into Mary-Evelyn’s room. I would have to go back there and look. For if this were true, there is no way Iris would have failed to see Mary-Evelyn leaving her room.
I was disgusted with this Sheriff Whittle. You could only believe the sisters’ accounts if it was too much trouble not to believe them. The Sheriff—my Sheriff, that is—would have punched the living daylights out of the Devereau sisters’ statements. Their story made me wonder, too, why they hadn’t gone to more trouble over the details of Mary-Evelyn leaving the house. And why hadn’t they questioned Mary-Evelyn’s getting in that boat, if she was afraid of water? After all, she wouldn’t be around to contradict them. She wouldn’t be around for anything anymore.
The answer, I guess, is that they didn’t think their version of events would be questioned, no matter how fickle it sounded, and they were right. They were right. It all made me feel like crying.
I looked at the photographs again, wishing I could see Mary-Evelyn’s eyes, the eyes that were lost in shadow on the snapshot. But the eyes were closed. Her face was kind of heart-shaped, a valentine face. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose, not going wild over her whole face, as if even the freckling had been kept within strict boundaries. I rolled up the photograph and walked over to Maureen’s desk to get a rubber band to hold it. It fit into my gym bag easily. That I shouldn’t be stealing police documents was perfectly clear to me and perfectly meaningless. I stopped short of taking the entire file, settling for using the copy-maker in the room. I copied the sisters’ statements and also the doctor’s report, Dr. McComb’s. There wasn’t anything in it that would throw light on the case; he had already told me pretty much what was in his report. But I thought I would show it to him and see if it jogged something loose in his memory. I stared at the copier as it whicked away. It was very slow. When I had all of the sheets I wanted, I put the originals back into the folder and the folder back into the tile cabinet, where it had been before.
Where was Donny? I’d had the tile open for forty-five minutes or so. Not that I wanted to see him; I wondered if the Sheriff knew he left the office for long periods of time. Or that he left the office in the hands of someone who might want to go over police reports.
I sat down again to wait for the Sheriff. The office was strange with no one in it. Hanging on the opposite wall were framed pictures of the police forces in neighboring towns. These consisted of two policeman in Hebrides, eight in Cloverly (where the Davidows went for their clothes). The pictures must have been turn-of-the-century, for the unsmiling men were dressed in heavy, old-fashioned uniforms and several of them had handlebar moustaches. (This was a fad I was very glad had gone out of fashion.) The Sam Brown belts across the dark, heavy material seemed wider than the ones today.
In the room were four desks, the fourth minus anyone to sit at it. I guessed this desk was for the extra deputy that the Sheriff hadn’t acquired because the mayor wouldn’t allocate the money.
My head felt leaden. I must have dozed off. Was it dusk already? The light at the window had turned as gray as granite, and seemed heavy, too. Then I must have slept a second time, but surely not for more than a minute. What dragged me awake was the advancing voices. What time was it? I looked wildly around. Was it dinnertime?