Shadow Country (44 page)

“Is that a fact?” Surprise rose slowly in Dyer's voice like the first thick bubble in a pot of boiling grits.

“It's possible, of course, that both were involved in both those murders.”

“Or that neither killed either. There's always that nigger, right?” Dyer said he could not talk now, being late for an appointment at the governor's office. He would be driving south tomorrow and would stop by Lake City for consultation and an early supper.

The interview with L. Watson Collins, Ph.D., in the newspaper next morning attributed to Professor Collins precisely what he had denied—in effect, the reporter's notion that E. J. Watson, “formerly of this county,” had been the mass murderer of his era.

Lucius rushed to the newspaper office to demand a retraction, knowing it would do no good. Any hope of cooperation from his cousins had been blighted. But wonderfully, feckless reportage had pierced Collins defenses where earnest entreaty had failed. A note hand-delivered to the newspaper stiffly disputed the visitor's observations and opinions.

Indignant that old family detritus had been stirred into view like leaf rot from the bottom of a well, a Collins had broken all those years of silence. What's more, Miss Ellen Collins did not hang up on him when he telephoned to apologize, so determined was she to chastise him. “Is Collins your real name? Or are you passing yourself off as kin just to snoop out scurrilous information?”

Taken aback, he felt a start of panic. “I
am
a relative,” he said. Still gun-shy from Julian's rejection, desperate not to lose this precious chance, he withheld his real name, awaiting a better moment. “And I've been talking to another relative,” he added hastily, lest the conversation lapse. “Mr. Arbie Collins.”

The anticipated outcry—
Cousin Arbie!?
—was not forthcoming. “R. B., you say?” If this R. B. was a bona fide Collins, he was a distant one indeed, her tone implied. “I don't suppose you mean R. B.
Watson
? Whose
mother
was a Collins?”

“Oh Lord, I'd forgotten that! Do you recall her name?”

His eagerness kept his flapping kite aloft: Ellen Collins was still there.

“Oh heck, let me think back.” She'd been shown the gravestone as a child. As a second cousin, Rob Watson's mother had been buried in New Bethel churchyard, south of Lake City, not in the family cemetery at Tustenuggee near Fort White. “There's still a few of us back in those woods,” she sighed, “on our old land grant or what's left of it. Uncle Edgar lived there, too.” Then she snapped, “I've talked too much already,” and hung up. Shortly she rang back: if he was really a history professor, she had decided, he should know the truth. If he promised that Julian Collins in Lake City and Cousin Ed Watson in Fort Myers would never hear about it—and on the condition that he made no mention of “that Tolen business”—the family in Fort White would meet with him the following day. “I'll be there, too,” she warned.

At the billiards emporium and pool hall, Lucius found Arbie showing off for a lacquered female of uncertain age who sat with one hip cocked on the corner of the table, her cerise bootie dangling and twitching like a fish lure—the only whore in town, Lucius suspected. The archivist turned pool shark, giving Lucius a cool nod, racked his balls and broke the rack with a ferocious shot that left him square behind the eight ball. “Damn fool shot his own dog,” he muttered, walking around the table to inspect the catastrophe from another angle. “Story of my life.”

WATSON DYER

Watson Dyer, seated squarely in the hotel lobby, was a heavyset man but not a fat one, clad in the big suit and damp white shirt favored by politicians. Lucius had only a dim memory of the sullen dark-haired boy at Chatham Bend, yet the adult manifestation was unmistakable. His well-greased hair was slicked back from the high forehead of a moonish face, and white crescents beneath the pupils made his pale blue eyes seem to protrude, though they did not: lacking depth, they appeared to be inset into the skin like stones in hide. Strong brows were hooked down at the corners, hooding those eyes, and the left eyebrow but not the right was lifted quizzically as if in expectation that whoever stood in his way must now get out of it.

“Mr. Dyer? Lucius Watson. And Mr. Arbie Collins.”

Creasing his newspaper, Dyer considered this information, as if how such people were to be addressed was for W. Dyer to decide. His eyes seemed to be closing slowly, as in turtles, and when they opened once again, Lucius noticed a rim of darker blue on the pale pupils, and also a delicate shiver on the skin surface around the mouth, as if this man were fairly trembling with inner rage. When Dyer grinned, which he did rarely and as if by accident, those delicate shivers played like mad under his nose.

“So you're still calling yourself Watson.” Mustering the meaty good-guy grin of the corporate executive, Watt Dyer pushed himself onto his feet in a waft of shaving lotion, extending a well-manicured hard hand.

“That's his name,” Arbie said sharply. Though Arbie had more or less shaved for the occasion, Dyer's hairline was so crisp that the other, by contrast, appeared disheveled; his red neckerchief, lacking its usual flair, made him look raffish, even seedy.

Dyer appraised him. “R. B. Collins, you say?” He took Lucius's elbow and guided him toward the dining room, letting the disgruntled Arbie fall in behind. “Let's get things straight,” said Dyer. “The noted historian I'm sponsoring at Naples—the
objective authority
my sugar folks wish to sponsor—is Professor L. Watson Collins, author of
A History of Southwest Florida.
” He strode a ways while that sank in, then summoned Arbie alongside. “Now, boys, I ask you,” he complained, “if a lecture on a controversial figure by a published Florida historian wouldn't be more . . .
credible
? Than a lecture by his own son? Avoid any suspicion that our author might be . . .
prejudiced
?”

“Our author?”
Arbie sneered. “You don't even know him.”

“I know all about him,” Dyer said in a soft voice, leaning in close for a long moment to peer through Arbie's eyes into his brain, “and all about you, too, sir. Routine background check,” he added, raising both palms to quell Arbie's protest. “Standard business practice. Before underwriting a project, you first investigate the background of all participating individuals.”

As for the land claim, Dyer explained that what he required were affidavits from “the Watson boys,” endorsing their father's title claim to the Chatham property. Meanwhile, the newspaper would cover the Naples meeting where Professor Collins would point out the complete absence of hard evidence that E. J. Watson had ever committed murder. “Next, we encourage petitions to save the historic frontier home of the man who brought the sugarcane industry to Florida—”

“Oh, Lord.” Lucius shook his head. “I never claimed that.”

“He won't be a party to some con game!” Arbie spat this impudence into Dyer's face. Those eyes that considered Arbie reminded Lucius of a bear hunt with his father as a boy—the morose animal biding its time until the sudden swipe of long curved claws gutted the dog and left it whimpering, confused by the waning of its life.

Dyer said in an intense cold voice, “Tell me, sir, what is it that you call yourself?
R. B.?
”

“None of your damned business.”

“Incorrect, sir. It is very much my business.” Controlling his anger, Dyer frowned at his watch and whacked his leg hard with his newspaper, startling the hostess; she beckoned them inside. Tossing the paper onto the spittoon for someone else to deal with, Dyer strode ahead.

At the table, Lucius produced his synopsis of Arbie's notes on the Belle Starr case. Dyer skimmed the entire document while the waitress stood there awaiting their order with poised pencil; he sat hunched forward over the table, mantling the papers like a raptor. “A hearing in Arkansas federal court. No indictment. Won't hurt us a bit.” He slipped the document into his briefcase. “All the same, we have to scrutinize any material in our book that might cast a bad light on our subject.”

Arbie sat arms folded on his chest as if trying to clamp down on chronic twitches. In a silence, he demanded, “What's in this thing for you?”

“I mean, it must be a lot of work,” Lucius added tactfully. Though annoyed again by that “our book,” he was more annoyed that Arbie was asking questions he should have asked himself.

“Not a blessed thing.” Dyer sat back in his chair to beckon the waitress. “Call it nostalgia for the old family place, call it my sense of fair play.” He spiked the next question before Arbie could ask it. “No fee, no commission. The family won't owe me one red cent.”

“Well, thank you! That calls for a drink.” Lucius waved the waitress to the table.

“No liquor served here,” Dyer said with satisfaction. “Fine old-fashioned fundamentalist family.
‘God is our Senior Partner'
—got that right there on the menu.” He smiled at the bill of fare. “The cheapest dinners are the best. Deep-fried chicken, deep-fried catfish, crispy and golden—they do it up real nice.”

“Crispy and golden it is,” Lucius muttered, cross about his drink. But just as the waitress fluttered in, Arbie stood up. When Dyer said equably, “Might's well get your order in,” he stopped short, cocking his head. “You talking to me?” The attorney nodded. That Watt Dyer was so calm in the teeth of the other's unreasonable hostility was impressive, Lucius thought, and a little scary. “Make mine the Cheap Golden Dinner,” Arbie told the waitress. He moved away among the diners, shoulders strangely high and stiff as if set to ward off a blow.

Lighting a cigar, Dyer shuffled through more pages. “You establish here that Cox was responsible for those last murders. Unlike Cox, E. J. Watson was a solid citizen. . . .”

“Yes, in his way—”

“You doubt that? You don't mean what you say here?” He snapped open a page and read aloud: ‘The great majority of these Watson tales are rumors unsupported by real evidence.' In all your interviews, all your research, you never learned of a single witness to even one of his alleged murders, isn't that correct?”

“All true. But it's not so simple—” Lucius stopped because Arbie had come back. “Hell
yes,
there was a witness,” he told Dyer. “His own son.”

Dyer watched Arbie produce a pint bottle and dose two water glasses under the table. “I understand from the Professor's notes,” he began quietly, “that you claim to have encountered Robert B. Watson at Key West when Robert B. Watson turned up there with his father's schooner?” He paused until Arbie assented. “And you now assert that Robert Watson told you some wild story about how his father murdered somebody named Tucker?”

“Wild story? Hell, no—”

“And you further assert that you aided and abetted Robert B. Watson in the illegal sale of his father's stolen ship and his flight from Key West on a steamer?” Dyer fired his questions at increasing speed, maintaining a dangerous, neutral tone. “Is
that
your story, sir?”

Lucius protested, “Hold on, Dyer—”

“Is that or is that not your story? Yes or no?”

“You calling me a liar, mister?”

“Not yet.” Dyer wrote some notes. “And after Robert B. Watson had escaped, you spread his wild tale about the alleged murder of these Tucker people. Is
that
correct?”

Arbie stood up in disgust and left the room.

“Why all this lawyerly bullying?” Lucius demanded. “What reason do you have to doubt his story?”

“None.” Dyer squashed out his cigar. “I have no reason to accept it, either. Anyway, hearsay evidence is worthless. So if, as you say, there were no known witnesses to the other alleged killings, then it's plausible that E. J. Watson never killed
any
body, isn't that true?”

Though Lucius had made this argument himself, hearing it from this man's mouth seemed to cast doubt on it. “It's conceivable, I guess.”

“It's conceivable, you guess. Well, that is how we shall argue if the Park Service maintains that E. J. Watson's land claim should be forfeit or invalid because of a criminal record or whatever. And I hope that no Watson nor any Watson relative”—he peered at the door through which Arbie had gone—“will contest our argument. Should that occur,” he warned after a pause, cementing his points as neatly and firmly as bricks, “then the Watson house which was to stand as a monument to your father's pioneering achievement will receive no further protection from the courts and will almost certainly be condemned and destroyed.”

Dyer spread his napkin as his food arrived. “I have a caretaker watching the place. I'll file for an injunction against its destruction first thing next week,” he said, over a raised forkful of golden chicken. He spoke no more until he had finished eating, after which he locked his briefcase and stood up, leaving Lucius to pay the bill. He was still “on the road,” he said, “taking care of business,” but in two days he'd be headed home.

“Where the heart is,” Lucius said, unable to imagine a Mrs. Dyer and the kiddies.

“Most good Americans have faith in that,” the attorney warned him. However, it was true that he had no wife or children. He didn't lead that sort of life, he said.

Lucius found Arbie hunched near comatose in the car, in his lap his small flask of corn whiskey: Okefenokee Moon 100 Proof. Guaranteed Less Than Thirty Days of Age. A rivulet of saliva, descending from a cleft in his grizzled chin, darkened his neckerchief. Lucius helped himself to a jolt of Arbie's rotgut, then urged him erect and guided him to their room. “ ‘Routine background check!' ” Arbie bitched as he fell back on the bed. “ ‘Participating individuals!' ” When Lucius suggested that Dyer might be bluffing, Arbie squinted at him. “You think that sonofabitch is bluffing?” And Lucius said, “No, I don't.”