Long Upon the Land (19 page)

A
t the Cotton Grove police station, Dwight discovered that the Mangums, David and Sunny, characterized by the police chief as old people who read the obituaries, were probably only in their late fifties.

Old
is a relative term, he thought, and he guessed the chief’s own age as maybe thirty.

Chief Creech had made the Mangums comfortable in his office and an extra chair was brought in for Dwight. After introductions, he asked for permission to record the interview and they agreed. Prompted by Creech, the couple repeated their story for him, interrupting each other amiably as long-married couples do.

They had received a call from their son-in-law around 9:45 on Friday, August 8.

“He said our daughter had gone into labor,” said Mr. Mangum, “so we packed up and got on the road as soon as we could. That would have been around ten-thirty or a quarter to eleven.”

“Ten-fifty-five, because you forgot to set the alarm and had to go back in,” said his wife. “David was driving, which is why I’m the one that really noticed everything.”

“We took the shortcut out of town to get to Forty-eight,” said Mangum.

“Where exactly?” Dwight asked and between them, the Mangums described a back road that led from their house to Old 48 and then to 48 proper. Not all that far from where the Booker kid had found Earp’s pickup.

“We’d just turned onto Old Forty-eight when I saw this Lincoln Town Car with a flat tire. A black Lincoln,” said Mr. Mangum.

“No, honey, I told you. It was dark green,” she said.

“Whichever.”

“How were they headed?” Dwight asked. “North toward New Forty-eight or south on the old road?”

“South,” Mangum said promptly. “I slowed down because I was going to stop and help.”

“But I asked him not to this time because I was in a hurry to get to Richmond,” said his wife, “and besides, someone else had already stopped. A red pickup with a cracked windshield.”

“A Ford,” Mangum said.

“A Ford,” she agreed. “There were two men standing by the side of the road, but I thought they looked like trouble and I didn’t want us to get involved.”

“Why did you think there was trouble?” Dwight asked.

“Something about the way they were standing. Sort of faced off like they were ready to go at each other.”

“They were under a streetlight and David had slowed down enough that I got a good look at them.”

“Could you describe them for me?”

“Both of them were our age at least. The short one was probably about my height. I’m five-six. The one waving a lug wrench was taller, more like you, Major Bryant.”

“A lug wrench?”

She nodded. “I thought maybe he was going to hit the other man.”

“Can you describe him a little more?”

“Like I told Chief Creech here, he looked like he was really mad about something. He was big and tall and he was wearing one of those silly little hats like my dad wears. I don’t remember what else he was wearing. Dark pants, maybe?”

She looked at her husband, who shrugged.

“The other man had on a light shirt. Light blue or green, I think. And he was holding a towel or something to his head. He might have been bleeding but I couldn’t tell. That’s really all we saw. He was the one who got killed, though, wasn’t he?”

“Sounds like it,” Dwight admitted.

“You think it was the man in the porkpie hat?”

“Not necessarily. Right now, though, he’s the last one on record to see Vick Earp alive.”

“So if we’d stopped like I wanted to,” said Mangum, “this Earp guy might still be alive?”

Dwight shrugged. “Or you two might be the last ones on record to see him.”

Mrs. Mangum shook her head. “Well, I’m sorry he’s dead, but I’m glad I didn’t miss getting to see our granddaughter get born.” She scrolled through some pictures on her phone. “Here she is just six minutes old.”

“Real cute,” said Dwight, to whom all newborns looked the same. He took down the Mangums’ contact information and thanked them for coming forward.

The interview had been recorded digitally and Chief Creech promised to forward it to the address Dwight gave him.

Back in the truck, he put it in gear and eased away from the curb.

“Was it Haywood?” Deborah asked.

“’Fraid so, shug. Big and tall? Green Lincoln? Porkpie hat?”

“You can’t seriously think that Haywood’s capable of—”

“Vick Earp was holding a cloth to his head like he was bleeding. Probably where Miss Young hit him. And your brother had a lug wrench in his hand, Deb’rah. I can’t ignore that and you can’t ignore that their confrontation was on Old Forty-eight, not very far from where Earp’s truck was stashed. If he was the one who dumped the body, he could have walked from the railroad tracks back to his car in just a few minutes.”

“I don’t care how much opportunity he had,” Deborah said hotly, “and I know Haywood’s done some stupid things in his time, but he would
not
have killed someone and brought the body back to the farm. He just wouldn’t, Dwight.”

Dwight grinned. “Even for Haywood, that would be real stupid.”

Her relief was palpable. “Then you don’t think he did it?”

“What I think is that I need to go have a talk with him and before you ask, no, you can’t come with me.”

“I wasn’t going to ask that.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I was going to ask if you wanted to have supper at the barbecue house. Haywood and Bel will be there. Third Wednesday night,” she reminded him. “Cal asked me this morning if we could go and he’s already there. Aunt Sister picked him up on her way.”

The date had slipped his mind. Vinegar-based pork barbecue is like mother’s milk in eastern North Carolina and members of the extended Knott family usually gathered at a cousin’s nearby restaurant once or twice a month for supper and to play and sing together informally afterwards. Always on the third Wednesday night and often on a fifth Wednesday should one fall in that month, although any Wednesday night might find some relatives there with instruments in the trunk of their car. Everybody was welcome to sit in. Cal had learned how to play the harmonica at these gatherings, Deborah strummed along on her guitar, and even though he didn’t play, Dwight usually sang with the others. Haywood seldom missed a chance to rosin up his fiddle and loved to chime in with what he called “my big gross voice,” a rich deep bass that could roll like thunder.

“Well, maybe I’ll ride along and see if I can cut him out of the herd,” Dwight said.

It was after eight before they got there. Most of the players had finished eating and were tuning up their fiddles and guitars. Cal was happily running scales on his harmonica and when Mr. Kezzie cut loose on “Shady Grove,” Aunt Sister fell right in behind him on her dulcimer. Herman’s daughter Annie Sue doesn’t play an instrument per se, but she’s an electrician and she keeps boxes of loose screws and wire nuts on her truck and passes them out to anyone who wants to help her keep the beat. Her brother Reese was the one who gave Cal the harmonica and the two of them were blowing harmony, while Haywood’s wife Isabel played the banjo.

Deborah’s foot was tapping as she ate and she quickly downed a barbecue sandwich so she could join them. Dwight took his time over his plate of barbecue, coleslaw, and hushpuppies and when the players paused to refill their tea glasses, he edged over to Haywood and said, “Talk to you outside for a minute?”

There were chairs and benches on the side porch and Dwight brought his own glass of tea along.

“What’s up, bo?” Haywood asked as he settled into one of the chairs.

“I need you to tell me about your fight with Vick Earp.”

Haywood made a face. “Which one? We been fighting since we was young’uns.”

“The one you had with him Friday night a week ago. The night he was killed.”

“Wha’chu talking about?” he blustered, almost rising out of the chair.

“You were seen in Cotton Grove waving a lug wrench at him, Haywood. Did you hit him with it?”

“
No!
I never! And if somebody says I did, he’s lying.”

“Like you were lying when you said you didn’t recognize him on Saturday? Or when Robert said y’all hadn’t seen him since last fall?”

The indignation went out of him. “I didn’t lie,” he said truculently. “I might not’ve said nothing, but I didn’t lie.”

“Tell me,” said Dwight.

“I’d been over to Fuquay to see a man about a John Deere 60 he wanted to sell us for parts. He’s got a whole shed full of old tractors and stuff. You wouldn’t believe all the things he’s got. A 1923 Farmall that looks like it just rolled off the line and a 1939 Allis Chalmers. Real pretty. Anyhow, we got to talking and time got away with me. You know how it is.”

Dwight nodded. He did indeed know how much time this particular brother-in-law could spend talking. Haywood had the curiosity of a cat and was so easily distracted that he was an endless source of exasperation to Robert or Andrew, who constantly had to prod him to keep to the task at hand.

“So it was well after ten before you started for home?”

“That’s right! How’d you know?”

“You were seen, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Right. Well, I was headed for home through Cotton Grove and out Old Forty-eight when I got a flat tire. I got out and was changing it when Vick Earp come along. High as a kite and spoiling for a fight. I told him I won’t in no mood to get into it with him right then and besides, it looked like he’d already got the worst of it in a fight with somebody else. He was mopping up blood from the side of his face. There was a bullet hole through the windshield of his truck and I thought at first maybe he’d been shot, but then I seen the hole was on the passenger side, so that won’t it.”

Haywood took a swallow of tea and shook the ice around in the bottom of his glass.

“He stood there cussing me and every Knott that ever walked the earth. Said if he had a gun, he’d shoot that wrench right out of my hand and I said it was a good thing he didn’t have a gun, but if he didn’t get back in his truck and get the heck away from me, I was gonna show him what else a lug wrench was good for.”

“And did he?”

Haywood nodded. “Almost ran me down when he pulled out, though. He turned at the next corner and I thought at first he was gonna go around the block and come at me again, but he didn’t. I finished changing the tire and come on home. Bel was still up and fussed at me for staying out so late. But she had our phone ’cause she went to Raleigh Friday. We’re gonna have to get us another one so we can call each other if we’re both out.”

“What time did you get home?”

“’Bout eleven-thirty?”

“And Bel will swear to that?”

Haywood chuckled. “Now, Dwight, you know Bel don’t swear. But yeah, she’ll tell you that’s when I come in. We finished here? I want me some of Miss Ila’s peach cobbler before it all gets gone.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Dwight said.

Not that he really thought Haywood had murdered Vick Earp, but it was good to have proof. If the Mangums had seen Earp alive around 11 and Haywood was home by 11:30, he did not have time to drive the body out to the farm and then take the truck back to Cotton Grove.

L
ying in bed that night after he had told Deborah about his talks with both Haywood and the Mangums, Dwight was nearly asleep when she turned to him and said, “Tell me again where Vick Earp lived?”

Yawning, he said, “North side of town. Why?”

“And Marisa Young lives on the east side, right?”

“You were there, shug,” he answered sleepily.

“So where was Vick Earp going at eleven o’clock at night?” she asked. “Not back to Miss Young’s house and not back to his own. Practically everything’s closed at that hour. So where was he going?”

Whereupon, she promptly fell asleep leaving him to stare into the darkness with possibilities tumbling through his head.

Next morning dawned bright and clear, a high-pressure day that brought dryer air and cooler temperatures. The predicted high was only 86 degrees with humidity expected to stay at 38 percent. Their slugabed cold front had finally arrived.

At work, Dwight looked at everything they’d collected on Vick Earp’s murder, including pictures of the dead man’s head wounds taken the day he was found. He drove out to the hospital with the pictures and tracked Dr. Singh down in his lab. Singh frowned when Dwight asked his questions.

“Look, Bryant, you know I’m just a part-time ME. If you didn’t think the manner of the man’s death was straightforward, you should have sent the body to Chapel Hill. It’s not my fault if the state doesn’t want to pay for all the autopsies they used to do. They knew they were setting themselves up for something like this the minute they cut funding for state labs.”

“I’m not second-guessing you, Doctor. You said he died from a blow to the head. All I’m asking is which blow?”

He spread the close-ups of Vick Earp’s head wounds across Singh’s lab bench and pointed to the one of Earp’s upper left temple. “This is where a woman hit him with a concrete bird about the size of a baseball a little before eleven the night before he was found. She said it dazed him, but he was still able to get up and drive away.”

“So?”

“So then he was hit twice more, right?”

Singh nodded, looking closely at the photographs.

“The woman who hit him thought she’d killed him, but witnesses saw him a few minutes later and although he was bleeding, he was still functioning.”

“So what’s your question?”

“Which one killed him? The one on the side of his head or the ones in back?”

“Well, not this one,” Singh said, pointing to one of the pictures. “This looked as if he took a whack from something like a flat board.” He looked at his notations. “Yeah, something flat. About four or five inches wide. He could have been standing or sitting. His head was upright, anyhow. His heart continued to beat after this blow because I saw severe bruising, but it didn’t break the skin.”

He picked up another picture. “This is the one that did the most damage. It looked to me more like a downward thrust. Like he was lying facedown and something came straight down. Hard. Broke his skull. This wound was around thirteen centimeters wide by about a centimeter long and at least a half-centimeter deep. If the first blow was from a thin board, then this wound could be the end of that board.”

“And that’s the one that actually killed him?”

“I wouldn’t go to court and swear it, but nobody walks around too long with a skull crushed in like that. You said that when he was first found, they thought both wounds were still oozing blood?”

Dwight nodded.

“The primary cause of death
was
loss of blood. He simply bled out. I doubt if the one in the temple would have killed him by itself, but combined with the other two? If he’d gotten treatment right away—? Hell, Bryant! I don’t know.”

He shook his head. “A pretty problem, isn’t it? He might have survived one blow, but all three? And if he was moved around so that the wounds were reopened? All I can tell you is the time of death. Your witnesses said the blood was still oozing at ten o’clock. The EMTs said he was dead when they got there at ten-thirty and that’s consistent with when they got him here to me. His heart probably stopped beating about ninety minutes before I saw him and that’s all I can tell you.”

“One thing more,” Dwight said. “Take a look at this scraping. Is it Vick Earp’s blood?”

Singh looked at his watch. “Sorry, Bryant. I have to leave in exactly twelve minutes.”

“Come on, Singh. How long can it take to do a rough comparison? You must have kept the slides. Just tell me if it looks like his blood or if it’s that damn cat again.”

“So what do you think, boss?” asked Deputy Ray McLamb when Dwight returned from the hospital.

Before he could answer, Mayleen Diaz came to the door. “Tyler Earp’s at the front desk. Wants to know why we’re keeping his gun when his brother wasn’t shot.”

McLamb made a face. “Cares more about that gun than his brother.”

“Then why don’t we give it back to him?” said Dwight. “Show him in, Mayleen.”

Tyler Earp’s broad beefy face lit up when he saw the twelve-gauge shotgun lying across Dwight’s desk. “’Bout time,” he said happily and ran his work-worn hand along the sleek, smooth stock.

Watching him, Dwight tried to peer past the bulging waistline, graying hair, and lined face to see the boy he must have been when Earps still owned part of Mr. Kezzie’s farm, but he could dredge up no memories and both of those boys had been enough older that he wouldn’t have overlapped them in school or on the school bus. With his own father dead and his mother trying to hold on to the farm while she went back to school for a teaching degree, he had hung out with the Knott brothers whenever he could. Mr. Kezzie treated him like another son and Miss Sue gave him a woman’s sympathetic attention when he needed to talk.

Now he wondered if they had tried to tame the Earp brothers, too, or had Joby Earp made that impossible by firing that first shot?

Without thinking, he said, “Did you know Kezzie Knott’s wife?”

Surprised, Tyler Earp said, “Miss Sue? Can’t say I really knew her, but I knew who she was. Joby didn’t ever have a good thing to say about either one of ’em, but they never acted ugly to me. And they sure were good to those boys. I remember once when we were playing baseball after work one hot as hell day. Miss Sue brought an ice-cold watermelon out to the field where we were playing. And she brought a bucket of water and some rags so we could wipe our faces when we finished.”

There was such wistfulness in his tone that Dwight had a sudden sense of how emotionally bleak Earp’s childhood must have been that the memory of a cold watermelon and a bucket of water could have lasted this long.

He sighed and said, “This
is
your shotgun, isn’t it, Mr. Earp?”

“Well, of course it is. Your deputy here took it off my wall. You trying to say it’s not?”

“No, sir. Just making sure. You ever lend it to anybody? Your uncle, say? Or your brother?”

Earp shook his head. “Joby’s got his own guns and Vick thought they were a big waste of good money.”

“So do you want to tell us what you did with this gun on the night your brother was killed?”

Earp took a step backward. “Wha’chu mean?”

“He came to your house that night, didn’t he? Bleeding. Maybe looking for a fight?”

“No! I told you. Rocky told you. We went to the Lillie Pad and then we came home and went straight to bed.”

Dwight made a show of picking up his notepad. “Actually, Rocky went to bed, but he left you snoring in front of the television. Yet you were in your own bed at ten o’clock the next morning.”

“I had to take a leak during the night. I woke up, turned off the TV, and went to the bedroom.”

“But not right away. Not till you’d disposed of Vick’s body. You had quite a busy night, didn’t you?”

“You’re crazy. Vick wasn’t shot. You said so.”

“It’s a beautiful gun, Earp. Nice wood stock. You keep it nice and clean, too.”

Confused, Earp said, “Yeah, well, a dirty gun’s asking for trouble.”

“Unfortunately, you missed a place.” Dwight took a straight pin from his desk drawer and ran it along the joint where the narrow metal butt plate met the heavy wooden stock.

Tyler Earp watched wide-eyed as a tiny speck of dark brown gunk fell onto the white sheet of paper Dwight had placed underneath that end of the gun.

“That’s Vick’s blood. Our medical examiner just confirmed it.” His voice was gentle. “You didn’t shoot him. You clubbed him with the stock and while he was lying facedown on the ground, you just rammed down with the butt plate and broke his skull.”

“Oh God!” Earp moaned. “Oh, God in heaven!”

He sank down in the nearest chair and put his head in his hands. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“Tell me,” Dwight said quietly.

With his head still in his hands, Earp’s words came slowly at first. “It was like you said. I was sleeping it off in my La-Z-Boy when I woke up and Vick was there. I keep this gun on a rack over the front door and he was taking it down. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing and he said he was taking it in payment for his fucking windshield and then he walked right out the door with it. I jumped up and went after him and pushed him as he was going down the steps. He rolled out into the yard and dropped my gun. Must’ve hit his head, I guess, because he came up all bloody. Said he was gonna beat my brains out. I grabbed the gun and smacked him with the stock and when he went down again, I just—I just—”

Shoulders still slumped, his hands clasped between his legs, he lifted his head and looked at Dwight remorsefully. “He was a shitty brother but I didn’t want him dead. Honest. But he was stealing my gun and he was gonna beat up on me again just like he’s done my whole life.”

“Why did you take him out to Black Gum Branch?” Dwight asked.

“Was the only place he was ever happy,” Earp said bitterly. “He was always bitching and moaning about losing the land, so I thought he might as well spend the rest of his days there. I rolled him into the bushes, then drove his truck back to town, hid it down by the railroad tracks, and walked home.”

He stood up, resignation in every inch of his body. “I guess I’m under arrest, huh?”

“’Fraid so,” Dwight said.

“No crowing,” Dwight said when Deborah got home that afternoon, “but if you hadn’t asked where Vick was headed that night, we might have given Tyler back his gun before it occurred to us that he wasn’t heading out here to the farm.”

“No crowing,” she agreed, “but what happens now?”

“Well, Bo’s dumped it all in Kevin Foster’s lap. He’s gonna let our DA figure out who’s really to blame for Vick Earp’s death and what the charges should be. Miss Young said she hit him in self-defense and I believe her, but he might not have died from what his brother did if he hadn’t already lost so much blood.”

“One thing for sure—no jury of his peers is going to blame Tyler Earp for defending his shotgun,” Deborah said dryly. “I’d better go let Daddy know that he can quit worrying about Haywood and Robert.”

“Robert? I never thought Robert was involved.”

“Daddy did, though. You know how Robert always cleans up Haywood’s messes.”