Dust Devil (53 page)

“
Watch
your step,” he cautioned as he took hold of her arm firmly,
guiding her through the littered yard and up the single, sunken
concrete step to the porch.

There,
a plump little girl sat. She wore a frayed sundress that was too
tight and too short for her, showing chubby arms and legs, a thick
waist. Her black, nappy hair had been plaited into several braids
that stuck out at odd angles all over her head, their ends fastened
with bright, cheap, plastic barrettes. She played quietly with a
filthy old rag doll that lacked one arm and whose own head was
nearly
bald, displaying only a few fuzzy tufts of black yam. Renzo’s
eyes were grim and distant, lost somewhere in the past, as he gazed
down at the child, and on his dark visage was a peculiar expression
Sarah had never seen before.

It
was as though he had known once what it was to live in a place like
this, she thought. And then she realized that of course, he had. He
spoke to the little girl, but she didn’t even glance up at him,
her face strangely vacant and uncomprehending as she rocked the rag
doll and sang to it tunelessly, the words gibberish. Suddenly, Sarah
recognized that this was the child Krystal Watkins had mentioned that
night at the Grain Elevator. When the little girl went on ignoring
him, Renzo knocked on the dilapidated screen door with its mesh half
torn away.

“
Hello?
Anybody home?” he called.

Despite
how badly she wanted Lamar’s real killer identified, so Renzo
would no longer be under suspicion, Sarah hoped no one would answer
the door. She was vividly conscious of how conspicuous she and Renzo
were in the slum, of how his bright red Jaguar XKE convertible stood
out, of the uneasy quiet that filled the summer air and of how dark
eyes watched them covertly, hostilely, from behind shabby curtains.
But at last, a heavyset, elderly woman with greying hair lumbered to
the door. Her faded, flower-print dress didn’t quite conceal
the rolled-down tops of her thick support hose. On her feet were
worn, fuzzy slippers.

“
What
you want?” she asked, peering at them suspiciously through the
screen and her bifocal glasses.

“
Mrs.
Rollins? I’m Renzo Cassavettes, from the
Tri-State
Tribune.
And
this is my friend, Sarah Kincaid. We’d like to talk to you
about your grandson, Lamar, if we may.”

“
What
fo’? He’s daid, ain’t he?”

“
Yes,
ma’am, and you have our deepest sympathies for that. But before
he died, Lamar contacted me, asking me for my help if anything should
happen to him. So I’d like to find out who killed him, Mrs.
Rollins. I thought you might know something, anything, that might be
of assistance. It could be some small piece of information you’re
not even aware you know.”

For
a long moment, Mrs. Rollins was silent. Then, finally, she opened the
door and stepped outside, sighing heavily as she settled into the
battered old rocker on the porch.

“
I
cain’t stand up fo’ long periods of time,” she
explained tiredly. “My po’ ole ankles swell sumpin’
fierce, ’specially in this heat. I got high blood pressure,
too. ’Sides, you don’t want to come inside and leave that
there fancy au-to-mo-bile of your’n sittin’ out there in
the road. Won’t have half its parts or the radio or hubcaps
when you get back.” Since this was probably the truth, and
there were no other chairs, Renzo and Sarah sat down on the stoop. “I
already done tole the sheriff all I know, which weren’t much.
Lamar... he didn’t confide in me none. He wouldn’t listen
to me, neither. He dropped out of high school, got mixed up with a
bad crowd—Porkchop Isley, Zeke Folsom and that bunch—had
a run-in now and then with the law.”

“
The
sheriff seems to think Lamar both used and sold drugs, Mrs. Rollins,”
Sarah said gently, knowing from the careworn expression on the black
woman’s face that no matter how resigned she appeared to her
grandson’s death, she nevertheless grieved for him. “Do
you think that’s true, that his murder was drug related?”

Mrs.
Rollins shrugged. “Mighta been. I found some bags of that there
marijuana once in his bedroom. But there weren’t none when the
sheriff come here. He didn’t find nothin’ ’cept a
loose floorboard in Lamar’s room, with a hidey-hole underneath.
Mighta been some of them bags hid in there at one time, but it was
empty when the sheriff looked at it. If I tole Lamar once, I tole him
a hundred times that that ole weed wouldn’t lead to nothin’
but trouble. But like I said befo’, he wouldn’t listen.
You know how boys that age are. He thought he knowed everythin’,
that he was gonna live forever.”

“
In
the last days before Lamar was killed, did he behave any differently,
Mrs. Rollins?” Renzo asked. “Did he seem frightened or
depressed?”

“
No.”
The black woman shook her head, thinking back. “Fact of the
matter is, he was real excited... like he was all keyed up ’bout
sumpin’. Said as how there was gonna be some changes in our
lives, that he was gonna get back some of our own, that Keisha,
’specially, was gonna have what she deserved in life, that he
was gonna get it from the man.”

“
Keisha?”
Sarah glanced inquiringly at the little girl on the porch.

“
My
granddaughter, Lamar’s sister. Don’t know who they
fathers was, neither one. My daughter, Tonette, she weren’t
never too particular ’bout who she took up with.

She
run off with some travelin’ salesman what come through town a
few years back. I ain’t seen her since. She said Lamar was purt
near growed and Keisha... well, she ain’t never been right in
the haid, po’ lil’ thing. Some kind of brain damage at
birth, I reckon. She don’t talk much, cain’t even say her
own name proper. Calls herself ‘Kiss-Kiss.’” Mrs.
Rollins smiled wanly, her mouth tremulous, her eyes tearful.
“Lamar...he always thought that were so cute. If there was one
thing in this world that boy ever cared ’bout, it were his
little sister, Keisha. He thought the sun rose and set in that chile.
Felt sorry fo’ her, I guess.”

“
Well.
We’ve taken up enough of your time, Mrs. Rollins.” Seeing
that the black woman had told them all she really knew, Renzo stood,
pretending not to notice as, pushing up her bifocal glasses, she
wiped at her eyes. He didn’t try to offer her any money,
knowing instinctively that for all her circumstances, she would be
too proud to take it. “Thank you so much for talking to us. We
appreciate it.” He helped Sarah to her feet, led her to the
car, while Mrs. Rollins rocked silently and Keisha played with her
rag doll, still singing tunelessly, the idiopathic words making no
sense at all.

“
I
don’t mind saying that I’m relieved to be getting out of
this neighborhood in one piece,” Sarah remarked as they drove
away. “I don’t know how people live like this, why
something more isn’t done to help them.”

And
Renzo thought of a little boy, a ragged, one-eyed teddy bear and
another concrete stoop, and for the first time in his life, he
realized he did, after all, have something to thank Sofie and Uncle
Vinnie for: the fact that they hadn’t wanted him.

No
man chooses evil because it is evil;

he
only mistakes it for happiness, the

good
he seeks.

A
Vindication of the Rights of Men

—
Mary
Wollstonecraft

Lamar’s
killer sat again in the office, at the computer whose screen gleamed
lucidly in the semidarkness, its modem hooked into the vast network
that had grown to connect the world, so the modem was like the long,
long leg of a spider poised upon a horrendous web. But tonight the
spider didn’t have far to creep, only into the
Tri-State
Tribune
and
the other places in town that were part of the linking web. So the
spider crept, looking, seeking, slinking down one dark, cyberspace
corridor after another, finding nothing here, nothing there. And the
clever brain churned, and the capable hands tapped on the
keyboard.
Click,
click, click.
Somewhere
the secret files Lamar had stolen—and given to a friend as
insurance—would be found. There weren’t that many
computer systems or personal computers in town. PCs...now there was a
thought. The spider abruptly pivoted, scuttled down a new track,
poking, prying—suddenly sighing,
Ahh,
poor Morse, you found the key. How bad for you, how good for me.

*****
Gotcha!*****

Morse
Novak stared at the message on his computer screen uneasily, not
certain whether it was meant as a joke or not—and if it were,
what kind of a joke. He glanced at his wristwatch. It wasn’t
too late, he decided, for Virgil to be still at the
Trib,
although
these days, Renzo usually cleared out at five, to go home to his
family.

Ever
since returning to his own solitary house at the dead end of a
country road, Morse had worked all evening again on the diskettes
Lamar had sent to Renzo. Tonight the Vietnam veteran had finally
learned the password with which Lamar had guarded his secrets. Having
unlocked the directory, Morse had been about to take a look at the
actual files themselves when he had realized his urine bag was full.
So, leaving his computer running, he had wheeled himself into the
bathroom to take care of his physical needs. After he had finished,
he’d propelled himself from the bathroom into the kitchen, to
grab another beer from the refrigerator. So he didn’t know how
long he had been away from his desk.

During
his absence, however, someone had, via modem, accessed his computer.
While this wasn’t unusual, since he was tied into
the
Trib's
system,
no one at the
newspaper
had ever left him such a peculiar message before. He could only think
it was Virgil playing some sort of prank—or else, Morse
reflected glumly, despite all his precautions, some kind of virus
might have got into his computer, or into the entire Trib
system, for that matter.

At
that thought, he decided to run a quick virus check. But it turned up
nothing out of the ordinary. So, returning to his starting point,
Morse dispatched a message to the
Trib.

*****Very
funny, Virgil. But what in the hell is it

SUPPOSED
TO MEAN?*****

There
was no reply. After a long moment, Morse’s nape began to
prickle, his skin to crawl, some sixth sense warning him—as it
had always done in Vietnam, when the enemy, the VC, had been hidden
in the villages and jungle waiting... waiting. He had never cursed
his wheelchair more than he did in that moment, knowing that were it
not for that, he would have a fighting chance to save himself. Still,
he wasn’t a coward, a quitter. He never had been. He pushed
himself from his desk and turned, intending to wheel himself into his
bedroom, where he kept his automatic pistol.