“So he knew he would be cleared?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe he couldn’t face being fired by the city council.”
“Maybe. I doubt it. I think he thought he could still save himself.”
“Then why did he run?”
Tucker sat back and took another sip of his coffee. “John, this has to be between you and me.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe always. Until I can make something of it. But if you write about this before I say so, I’ll never make anything of it.”
“Okay, but you have to tell me everything.”
“All right.” he opened the file on his desk. “I don’t think Sonny Butts ran.”
Thirty minutes later the two men sat and stared at each other. “This is crazy, you know that, don’t you?” Howell laughed.
“Maybe,” said Tucker. “Do you have another explanation?” Tucker tapped the last of the missing-persons bulletins in Sonny’s file. “Look at the date on this. The boy was last seen less than a week before Sonny disappeared. Considering the time it took to print and mail the bulletins, this might very well have arrived in the mail the morning Sonny vanished—the morning he hopped on his motorcycle and tore out of here.”
“Did the disappearances continue after Sonny disappeared?”
“I’ve had a man going through the files of the years since to see if there are any missing persons that fit this mold.”
“And?”
“It’s taking him one hell of a long time. The files are all scrambled as a result of a fire here a few years back, and he can only work on it when he has nothing else to do, and that isn’t often. So far, he’s found nothing between 1946 and 1958; one since ‘58.”
“So the pattern doesn’t continue. At least, as far as you know. One doesn’t make a pattern.”
Tucker shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. Something could turn up, though.”
“Do you have a suspect?”
“You’ve seen everything I have. What do you think?”
“Is this guy Funderburke still alive?”
“Very much so.”
“But how could he have gotten away with it for so long?”
“He’s been lucky. Chief Lee apparently suspected him, but he was killed. There was no reason for him to ever have mentioned his suspicions to anybody else, until Sonny caught on.”
“And then when Sonny caught on, Funderburke took him out?”
“You said that, I didn’t. At the moment, that’s libel, and don’t you forget it.”
“Right. So what’s your next step?”
Tucker leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Ol’ Foxy doesn’t like colored folks much. Why don’t we see how he likes newspaper reporters?”
Tucker walked Howell to his car and gave him directions to Foxy’s place.
“What’s my excuse for going to see him?” Howell asked.
“You’ve got a choice of two subject matters: guns or dogs. He’s apparently got a big weapons collection, and he raises Labrador retrievers. Take your pick.”
“What should I look for?”
“See if you can find a reason to walk around the back of the place. There’s a burnt-out kudzu patch back there. If he lets you into the house … well, just look at everything you can, see what you can learn about the way he lives. And John—”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let him think for a moment that you just happened by there, that nobody knows where you are.” Tucker grinned. “You’re not at all unlike the boys in those missing-persons bulletins, you know. Older, but young looking.”
“Gee, thanks a lot. That does a lot for my confidence.” Howell stopped short, getting into the car. “That’s why you want me to go up there, isn’t it? You think he’ll
like
me, don’t you?”
Tucker laughed aloud. “Of course not, John. I’m just calling on your finely honed powers of observation, your reportorial instincts.” He pushed the reporter into the car and closed the door after him. “Tell him one of my cops suggested you go see him.”
Howell looked at him for a long moment, then started the car. “Right,” he said, and put the car into gear.
Tucker watched the reporter drive away; then he walked back into the station, thinking, not about Foxy Funderburke, but about Pieback Johnson. As he entered the squad room Buddy Bartlett was hanging up the phone.
“Hey, Chief, did you hear our former colleague Bobby Patrick is going into politics?”
“What?” Tucker was only half listening.
“Yeah, Sheriff Stimson over in Talbot County, he’s been sick for a long time, cancer I think. Well, he resigned, and they’re holding a special election next month. Ol’ Bobby’s running. He just called.”
“In Talbot County?”
“Yep, he lives in Woodland, that’s over the line, so he’s eligible. He figures with his sterling law-enforcement background he’s a shoo-in.”
“Well, God help Talbot County,” Tucker said.
“Chief, you mind if I run out to the house for a few minutes? My TV’s broken, and there’s nobody to let the repairman in. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”
“Sure, Buddy, go ahead. I’ll cover for you.”
The policeman departed, and Tucker was left alone in the jail. He stood quietly in the squad room for a moment, thinking. Then he took the cell keys from Buddy Bartlett’s desk and walked back to the lockup. Through the bars he could see Pieback on a cell cot and hear him snoring. He was the only prisoner in the jail. He unlocked the outer door and walked back to the cells. Still Pieback snored. He unlocked the cell door and stood next to the bunk. A stench of cheap wine and vomit rose from the sleeping derelict. It would take only a few seconds, Tucker thought. He would never know anything. He just wouldn’t wake up. Pieback would be written off as an habitual drunkard in poor health who died in his sleep in a jail cell. Tucker picked up a pillow from the opposite bunk.
Chapter 14.
TUCKER was in the toilet when Buddy Bartlett returned from his errand, sitting on the closed john, his head between his knees, holding a wet paper towel to his face, trying not to be sick.
“Chief?”
The voice jolted him, made him sit upright, take hold of himself. “Yeah,” he called back. “I’m in here.” He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw a frightened man looking back at him. He walked quickly from the toilet to his office, calling over his shoulder, “All quiet; the phone didn’t even ring.” He closed the door behind him and sat down at his desk. Rummaging in a drawer, he found a dozen librium in a bottle and swallowed one quickly, without water. An army doctor had given them to him a year before, at a time when he had been working too hard and getting edgy. He sat back and waited for the tranquilizer to take effect. By the time John Howell returned, more than an hour after his departure, Tucker felt better, more in control.
Howell knocked and stuck his head in. “I’ve brought a witness.” He pushed the door open and held up a puppy. “Isn’t she terrific?”
Tucker laughed. “I didn’t send you out there to fall in love.”
“Well, I guess I did. I picked dogs over guns as my reason for calling, and I got carried away.”
“All right, tell me from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
Howell settled in a chair. “The first thing I noticed was the neatness, the symmetry, just like the doctor said it would be in his report. As I drove up to the house, the flower beds, the shrubs, everything was laid out symmetrically. The house, too, the windows and shutters. I stopped at the corner of the house and started to go to the front door, when he came around from the back and asked me what the hell I wanted.”
“In those words?”
“No, but in that tone. I said that Bartlett had told me he raised Labs, and I was interested in them. He asked me my name again—I’d already told him once—and seemed to be making an effort to remember it; then he softened a bit and took me around to the back, where the kennels are.”
“You got a good look at the back of the place then.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t see much of anything. There’s a garage and the kennels and the burnt patch, like you said. He told me about the kudzu; he didn’t get it all, apparently, in spite of the fire, and he’s worried about it coming back next spring. He showed me the dogs, and that’s when I got hooked on the puppy. I wasn’t expecting puppies, somehow.”
“What was his attitude by this time?”
“Softer, like I said, but still … wary, I guess. I wanted to get into the house, but I felt a little shaky using the guns as an excuse—I don’t know anything about guns—so I just commented on how attractive the place was, said I’d never seen a log cabin before. He said that he’d built most of it himself, so I jumped in and asked if he’d mind if I had a look inside. He said okay, but probably because he couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough; so we went inside.
“What’s it like? I’ve never been inside.”
“Living room, bedroom, a bath, kitchen. That’s it. Rooms are good sized, though. Everything neat as a pin. Not homey, though; almost sterile. Guns all over one wall in the living room. He was just starting to warm up a little, talking about this gun and that, when I mentioned that a guy I once worked on a paper with was a collector, and he brought me up short and asked me if I worked for a newspaper.”
“Why would that bother him?”
“I don’t know, but he switched off like a light bulb. Couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. I don’t guess I was there for more than twenty minutes.”
“So what do you think?”
Howell shook his head. “Well, Tucker, this is real thin, what you’re going on here. I tell you, I
wish
he was the guy; he’s perfect casting—the eccentric recluse and all that—it’d make a great story, maybe even a book—but I saw nothing,
nothing
that would make the guy for a string of disappearances, including a motorcycle cop. I don’t see how you could even get a search warrant.”
“I didn’t expect you to find a body on the living room couch, you know. I just wanted your impression. He won’t even talk to me, because I’m the wrong color. You’re right about the warrant, though. His place is outside the city limits and just over the line in Talbot County, so he isn’t even in my jurisdiction. But the thing fascinates me.”
“I can see how it would. God knows the atmosphere out there is eerie—it’s so neat—that’s almost scary by itself. Something else, a feeling I got when I was in the kitchen.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“It reminded me of something—I couldn’t get it at first, I thought maybe of a hospital—but then I remembered. It was the floor. It’s an unusual kitchen floor—glazed tile, and it slants into a drain in the middle of the kitchen, under the table.”
“Yeah?”
Howell leaned forward, absently stroking the puppy. “It reminds me of the floor in the morgue in Atlanta, in the room where they do the autopsies. The sort of floor that you can hose down, and it drains by itself. I’ve never seen a kitchen like that.”
Tucker gave an involuntary shudder. “Neither has anybody else,” he said.
When Howell had left for Atlanta with his puppy, Tucker sat quietly in his office for a while, thinking. He felt better now, with the Librium calming him. He got up and switched off the lights. As he passed through the squad room, Bartlett was returning from the lockup, tossing keys on his desk, shaking his head.
“Something wrong?” Tucker asked.
“It’s ol’ Pieback,” the policeman said. “I’m sure glad I won’t be on tonight when he wakes up. He’ll have the DTs, for sure.”
“Does that happen often?”
“If he’s been on a big enough binge. You saw him this afternoon. He thought he knew you. I tell you, that guy’s brain must be pickled by now.”
“Is he okay in there, do you think? Does he need a doctor or anything?”
“No, he’s snoring like a sawmill, mumbling in his sleep. I’d hate to be in the next cell.”
Tucker got into his coat. “I’m calling it a day, I think.”
“Right, Chief. See you in the morning. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Tucker replied. He walked slowly into the chill dusk and got into his car. He felt reborn in some odd way. He had gone right to the brink and pulled back. But now there was something else he knew he had to do, something he had put off too long, something he had hoped he would never have to do.
She sat at the kitchen table, her coffee gone cold, and stared at him. He could not avoid her gaze.
“So,” she said, “what am I supposed to call you now? Willie? Am I Mrs. Cole now?”
“I’m Tucker Watts,” he said. “You’re Mrs. Tucker Watts. Willie Cole is dead. He was hit by a truck in Alabama in 1932. Nobody even knows where he’s buried.”
She continued to stare at him.
“I’m the same man you married; the same man I’ve been since I joined the army.”
“I know that,” she said finally. “And I love you.”
“I love you, too. Nothing’s changed. We’re the same people. Mama is still Aunt Nellie. It will always be that way.”
She cocked her head to one side. “Why did you decide to tell me now, after all these years?”
“Because this afternoon I nearly did something stupid, and it was because you didn’t know. Now you know, and I won’t ever again have to do anything to hide it from you.” He caught a whiff of roast cooking. “I’m hungry,” he said.