Absolute Rage (16 page)

They laughed and told several mountaineer jokes, mainly hinging on people or animals having legs on one side shorter to compensate for the slope. Judging the ice to have been sufficiently broken, Marlene said to Emmett, “I couldn't help overhearing—I take it you don't approve of what Dan did. Calling me, I mean. Would you mind telling me why?”

Emmett looked uneasy as he replied, “Oh, you know, nothing personal, but Dad always told us to handle things ourselves. There's no need to have you all bothered about our troubles.”

“That's good advice, generally,” she agreed. “But if it'll make you feel any better, I don't intend to do very much. Dan said that the police had a man . . .”

“Moses Welch,” Dan put in.

“Right. Who Dan thinks is a frame-up. What do
you
think?”

Emmett dropped his head for a moment, considering. “Yeah, I guess. I mean we all know who really done it. Or hired it done. Mose, all they got on him is the boots. And him being . . .” He tapped his temple.

“Okay,” she said, “so the first thing is to look into his case. If, in fact, he's innocent, we want to get the charges dismissed so that the cops will keep looking for whoever really did the murders.” She saw them nod in agreement. “Okay, Emmett, tell me about the night of.”

“It was about a week after they stole the election. A Friday. We had a meeting here, about twenty guys from the union. Dad was telling them about him going to Washington and his meeting at the Department of Labor. They were real depressed at first, but he got them up again. He thought DOL would throw out the results and call another election and supervise it and then we'd win. The meeting went on till about ten, ten-thirty. Then everyone left. I went over to Kathy's house—that's my girlfriend—and stayed over. I usually do on weekends. The next morning, we slept in and then I came back here. I came around back and saw that somebody'd taken off the storm door in the back and tossed it down next to the stairs, and the back door into the kitchen was all ripped up around the lock, like with a wrecking bar.” Emmett paused, swallowed.

“I found them inside. Mom and Dad in their bedroom. Lizzie in her bed.” He paused and took several breaths. “It was pretty bad. Do you want to see where it happened?”

“Later. What did you do?”

“Well, they were dead. Anyone could see that. They used a shotgun on Dad and Mom. He must have known they were coming because he was out of bed and he had his pistol. He had a .38 he kept under the mattress. Lizzie was in her bed. They shot her sleeping. In the head.”

“You said, ‘they.' What makes you think there was more than one of them?”

“Had to be. Lizzie was a light sleeper. Her room was right next door to theirs. No way she wouldn't have got up to a couple of shotgun blasts. But she was shot in her bed, sleeping like I said. You could tell that.”

“I take it she wasn't killed with a shotgun.”

“No, a pistol. Which they didn't find on Mose or anywhere around his place. They said he must've tossed it.”

“I guess they probably didn't look all that hard,” she said. “Blame the lame; it's a famous stupid cop trick. He's confessed to it, naturally.”

“Sure,” said Dan. “They promised him a dish of chocolate ice cream is what I heard.”

“And what was his lawyer, what's-his-face, doing while all this was going on?”

“Ernie Poole,” said Emmett. “Sleeping, probably. That's what he mostly does. He stands up to be counted in the court and then takes a nap. It's a joke.”

“Good. I love a joke. So after you found them, you called the cops.”

“Right. Swett came over with a couple of his guys. They found Dad's wallet was missing. He always carried a bunch of cash on him, so they said that was probably it, a random robbery. They said the killer came on foot.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Well, that part made sense,” Emmett admitted. “After they shot our dog, Dad rigged up one of those sensors like they have in gas stations, across the drive. At night it turned on the floodlights and rang a little bell in the house. They said that would've got him up, and it would have.”

“I see. Did they do any crime-scene work? Take prints, vacuum for fibers, like that?”

Emmett let out a bitter laugh. “Hell, no! Those jerks don't do any of that stuff. They just about good enough to grab drunks and kids smoking weed in the bushes. The state cops do all that kind of thing.”

“And did they call the state cops?”

“Yeah, they sent a team of guys out from the barracks in Logan. They took up the carpets and all and sprayed a lot of black powder around. They said they would be back and not to touch anything. I stayed with Kathy that night. Then the next day, Mose Welch came to town to show off his new boots, and they arrested him. It went with what they said about the car. Mose can't drive.”

“I see. How convenient. And then . . . ?”

“Nothing. I called the sheriff and he said the case is over, you can move back in, so we did. I got some people in to help clean up and fix the back-door locks. I still haven't put the storm door back on. Not that we need it any with this weather. We've been here since.”

Marlene made some notes on her pad. “Tell me, does this Moses Welch have any relatives, a guardian of some kind?”

“I don't know about a guardian,” said Emmett, “but Fairless Holler got a load of Welches. It's their home place.”

“And of these Welches, which do you think would care the most about old Mose?”

The two Heeneys considered this for a moment. Then Emmett said, “I guess that would be Betty Washburn. She's his sister. He used to live in a busted-up trailer back of their place, and I guess she kept him fed and dressed, more or less.”

“Good, we'll go see Mrs. Washburn,” said Marlene briskly. She turned to Dan. “Meanwhile, did you get any paperwork from Poole?”

“No, sorry. He wouldn't give me any. He said it was none of my concern.”

“Technically, he's right. Well, we'll have to change that. Starting with me. Show me a place I can get cleaned up and changed, will you?”

Neither of the Heeneys had ever seen Marlene in any apparel but the sort of rags she wore around her farm. She now emerged in a gray Anne Klein silk and linen suit over a pearly, loose-necked blouse, dark nylons, and Blahnik sandals. Her face was made up and her expensive haircut had been arranged the way her hairdresser had intended. A whiff of L'Aire du Temps hit them; their eyes widened; she grinned back at them.

“What do you think? Good enough for Robbens County?”

“I guess,” said Emmett. “What are you going to do?”

“A couple of things. One is I have to get up to speed on local criminal statutes and procedure. I don't suppose you have anything around town like a library with a computer connected to the Internet?”

They both laughed. Dan said, “Uh, I think so. We got electricity and indoor plumbing, too. Follow me, lady.”

He led her to a bedroom, a teenager's den, posters on the wall, dirty clothes strewn about, an unmade bed decorated with books and magazines, and on a table, a squat, black IBM tower, a large monitor, and a DeskJet printer.

“Oops,” she said. “I forgot MIT. Sorry.”

“No problem. What do you want? I got a satellite hookup.”

“Great. Get me the state criminal code and the rules of criminal procedure for a start. While you're doing that, I'll take a ride with Emmett.”

She went to leave and then stopped. “No, wait. Could you bring up a word-processing program?”

He did. She sat and typed out a short document and printed it. “Emmett! Let's go see Mrs. Washburn.”

They drove back through town, north on 130, and off the blacktop onto a rutted gravel road that wound back and forth across a narrow stream on timber bridges. Through gaps in the trees Marlene could see little groups of structures—small, rickety houses with washing flapping on lines in their yards, some newer mobile homes, and weathered gray sheds falling back into nature. Every dwelling had several elderly vehicles in front, in various stages of demolishment or repair. From time to time a glint of metal indicated a dump in the woods. The GMC jumped and shook; a rooster tail of tan dust rose behind it.

“This is Belo Knob,” Emmett told her. “I mean the mountain we're on. The town's on a flat place where five mountains come together, like in the middle of a flower. Belo's on the north side, say twelve o'clock. Then Hampden's at three, where our place is, Hogue is at six, down south of town, then Filbert Ridge, that's the highest one, at seven through nine o'clock. And then Burnt Peak's up at ten or eleven.”

“And the hollows are on the mountains?”

“Up in there. The hills are all cut up by streams and those make the hollers. This is Peck Creek we've been going over, and Fairless comes into it, just up here a piece.”

They turned off the gravel onto an oiled dirt road and off that onto a driveway marked by a white-painted truck tire. The Washburn home was a one-story affair with pale green siding and a narrow porch in front, on which stood an ancient round washing machine and a rocking chair. An old-fashioned “streamlined” aluminum house trailer with no wheels squatted on concrete blocks just to the rear of the house. In the front yard were a rust-red, twenty-year-old Ford pickup and an El Camino with the hood gaping. Among these stigmata of rural poverty stood, jarringly, a satellite dish eight feet in diameter, round and white as the moon. When they pulled up, two yellow dogs ran out from beneath the house and ran around their truck, barking and snarling.

The woman sitting in the rocker yelled at the dogs, to which they responded not at all. She rose heavily, picked up a baseball bat, and started toward the GMC. The dogs retreated. Emmett and Marlene left the car and walked up to the woman. Marlene thought she must have weighed 250 pounds; her upper arms looked the same size as Marlene's thighs. Her hair made a long, dirty-blond braid down her back; her eyes were small, almost colorless, and wary. She wore denim cutoffs and a pink, sleeveless sweatshirt with a picture of Tweety bird on it.

“How're y'doing, Betty,” said Emmett.

“Fair,” said the woman. Marlene noted she continued to grip the ball bat. “I'm sorry about your loss, Emmett, but you know my brother didn't have nothin' at all to do with that.”

“I know that. That's why we're here. This here's Marlene Ciampi from New York City. She's a lawyer. She wants to help get Mose out of jail.”

The woman stared at Marlene unbelievingly. “We can't pay nothing.”

“There's no need to pay, Mrs. Washburn,” Marlene said. “I'm taking your brother's case pro bono.”

“Who?”

“It means I'm working for free.”

The woman's eyes narrowed. “Why'd you want to do that?”

“Because Rose Heeney was a friend of mine. Lizzie played with my kids. I have two boys her age. Someone killed them and I want them to pay for it, and the first thing we need to do to make that happen is getting your brother free of the false charge that
he
killed them.”

Betty Washburn flicked her eyes rapidly between Marlene and Emmett, and Marlene could see how difficult it was for her to accept anything a stranger said at face value. Finally, her features relaxed a trifle, as did her grip on the ball bat. “Well, you all better come on in, then.”

The house was cooler than the yard, but musty. The ceilings were low and made of pressboard. Everything in the house was old and worn. It was clean, though, the furniture and floors rubbed down past the finish so that their substance was slightly ground away. They sat in the kitchen around a wooden table covered by sticky lace-pattern plastic. Betty Washburn served them thin, over-sweet iced tea in jelly glasses. Marlene explained that before she could do anything for Mose, she had to be named formally as his attorney. She asked whether Betty was his official guardian.

“No'm. He don't need no guardian. Mose, he kept to hisself and never hurt nor bothered no one. He got his playthings and his animals. He's real gentle with my kids. Sometimes he takes him long walks in the woods. Tell you the truth, I'm more scared of what other folks might do to him than what he might do.”

“I understand. Tell me, has Mose ever been examined by a psychologist?”

“Yeah, way back, when Maw first noticed he wasn't right. We took him upstate to this school? You know, for slows. They said he wasn't going to ever get much more'n five years old.”

“Do you have any papers relating to that?”

“There was some in a box. I took it in when Maw passed. I guess they's somewheres around.”

A search was organized, a dusty cardboard box appeared, and after rummaging, Marlene came up with a brown envelope containing a paper with several paragraphs of psychological bureaucratese pertaining to Moses Welch's mental abilities. She stuck it in her bag.

“Okay, the next thing is, we'll have to go down to the jail and get him to sign a paper. Have you talked with his lawyer at all?”

Mrs. Washburn sniffed. “Him? Ernie Poole ain't no more use'n tits on a boar hog.”

“So I hear. Maybe I can persuade him to be more useful. Anyway, we need to go see your brother.”

“What, now?”

“Unless you like having him sit in jail.”

Mrs. Washburn seemed to think about that for a slow minute. Then she said, “Well, let's go do it.”

She rose up, she grabbed a white patent leather handbag, and strode out of the kitchen. They followed her into the house's main room. In it were a sagging couch covered by a tan chenille bedspread, a green La-Z-Boy, a couple of rickety tables, a standard lamp with a paper shade, a wooden chest covered by a plastic doily, and a shining thirty-two-inch color television set. Two little girls were sitting on the couch watching cartoon people fight each other. They were dressed in worn tops and shorts, and each had her blond hair in a bowl cut, which Marlene was sure had been done in the kitchen with an actual bowl. Mrs. Washburn barked, “Girls, get on your shoes. We're goin' to town to see Uncle Mose.”