Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (36 page)

He felt an explosion of pain in his left side, and the force of the blow threw him off of Beanie and onto his back. His wind was completely gone, and he writhed on the ground in agony, staring into the searing white sky above. The figure of the sheriff stood towering over him, the blinding sun flashing out from behind him like light from the face of Moses. An instant later he felt Kathryn’s body drop across his like an interceding angel—covering him, protecting him.

“Stop it, Peter!” she screamed. “You didn’t have to kick him that hard!”

“Look at Beanie!” he shouted back. “I should have shot him!”

Beanie stood calmly a few feet away, hands on knees, blood draining freely from his nose.

“Nick doesn’t know what he’s doing! He hasn’t slept for days!”

“He knows what he’s doing, all right. He knows exactly what he’s doing!”

The sheriff circled menacingly around Nick’s body while Kathryn stretched out over him, keeping her body between him and the avenging angel above.

“He’s under arrest!” he jabbed his finger at Nick’s body.

“Leave him alone! He’s had enough!”

“He assaulted an officer of the law!”

“He hit Beanie. Don’t be so stupid, Peter! Whose side are you on?”

“Not his!”

Kathryn rose up to her knees now and put her hands on her hips. There was an unmistakable fire in her emerald eyes. “Then how about my side? You always say you’re on my side, Peter, well how about it? For me?”

Peter scowled at her and cursed under his breath. “Get him out of here,” he growled, “and keep him away from me!” He turned and stormed off, leaving the deputy still doubled over behind him.

Kathryn immediately began to drag Nick to his feet. “We’d better get out of here before he changes his mind.”

He put his right arm around her shoulders and braced his left hand against his aching ribs, and they staggered off together toward the parking lot. She deposited him against the hood of his car, then carefully lifted his shirt.

“Let me see that,” she said. “You may have some broken ribs.”

The site was already turning a greenish shade of purple. She began to feel gingerly along the contour of each rib. He winced and pulled away.

“Don’t be a baby,” she snapped. “You’re lucky you’re not dead. What in the world got into you back there? Why did you hit poor Beanie?”

“Because ‘poor Beanie’ murdered Teddy.”

Kathryn stared at him in utter astonishment.

“The entry wound on the back of Teddy’s skull was a contact wound, remember? That means the gun was placed against his skin and then discharged. In a contact wound, the gases
escape the muzzle at such tremendous velocity that they create a temporary vacuum in the barrel—and that vacuum sucks blood back into the barrel. It’s known as blowback. I watched a Calliphora vomitoria land on Beanie’s gun and crawl into the barrel. That fly is attracted to blood, Mrs. Guilford; fresh blood. It found some.”

Kathryn shook her head in disbelief. “There must be some other explanation.”

“Give me an explanation. Tell me any other way the deputy could have gotten blood into the barrel of his gun.”

“Nick, this is Beanie we’re talking about. Beanie isn’t capable of killing anyone.”

“He isn’t capable of hating anyone, Mrs. Guilford—I’m not even sure he’s capable of anger. You still want to believe that the deputy is a gigantic Pinocchio, and your friend the sheriff is just kindly old Gepetto. But this Pinocchio is capable of crushing a man’s hand or firing a bullet into a man’s brain or anything else Gepetto tells him to do.”

Kathryn’s legs felt weak, and her head began to swim.

“Didn’t you find it interesting that the sheriff suddenly developed a passion for Jenny McIntyre the other night? Didn’t you find it a little surprising? I’ll bet Jenny was surprised.”

“That’s none of my business.”

“It is your business, Mrs. Guilford. Don’t you see? When the sheriff told you he spent the night with Jenny McIntyre, he was telling the truth. He couldn’t have murdered Teddy and Mrs. Gallagher, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t send someone else to do the errands for him.”

“Nick—do you know what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying that it wasn’t passion that led the sheriff to Jenny’s door. He needed an alibi. The sheriff was in some way involved in Jim McAllister’s death. When that last specimen emerged, it proved that the body was moved—and maybe it proved more than that. The sheriff had to intervene, but he knew that I would suspect him—so he sent his boy around to murder Teddy and to knock off Mrs. Gallagher just to throw us off the scent.

“I know exactly what I’m saying, Mrs. Guilford, and so do you. I’m saying that if your friend the sheriff wasn’t a murderer before, he is now.”

The crowd at Mount Zion A. M. E. had long ago dispersed. All that remained from the morning’s elaborate funeral reception were two folding tables draped unevenly in stained and wrinkled linens.

Nick sat by himself on a sagging picnic bench. He picked at the splinters of decomposing wood; it was made of cedar, a wood whose natural resins were supposed to protect it from decay. Everything decomposes, Nick thought. Some get a little more time than others, but sooner or later everything breaks down.

He lifted his shirt and gently tested his aching ribs. He was lucky; they were bruised, but not broken. A scarlet hematoma the size of his fist throbbed an angry reminder of how the world works: Blood vessels rupture under the skin. The blood pours into the surrounding tissues, and the stranded blood cells begin to die. The skin turns purple or blue or black. Black, the color of death; your own little piece of death to carry around with you.

His thoughts were interrupted by the closing of a car door. He looked up to see Kathryn remove a small casserole dish from the backseat and turn in his direction. Her gait was slow and halting; it was obvious that she was very much preoccupied with thoughts of her own.

“I have no idea why I brought this,” she said absently, setting the casserole down to secure the edge of a fluttering tablecloth.

“Because there’s nothing else to do,” Nick said. “People have been bringing food to funerals for centuries.” He lifted the foil from the edge of the dish. “Tuna puffs … I love these things.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning—about Beanie and Teddy. About Peter.”

“And?”

“Nick, you’ve got to try to see all this from my perspective. We’re talking about Beanie—a little boy in a man’s body. And Peter, a man I’ve known and trusted all my life. You come to me with eggs and maggots and flies that can smell blood from miles away, and you ask me to weigh those things against the things I know.”

Nick leaned his head back and drew a long, deep breath through his nose. “Smell the air,” he said to Kathryn. “Go ahead, give it a try. What do you smell?”

She sniffed at the air. “Not much. Tuna, mostly.”

“Come on, you can do better than that.”

She sniffed again. “I can smell the pines. And the asphalt heating up in the driveway. And … I don’t know … some flowers, maybe.”

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Nick said. “Here we are, supposedly the highest form of life on the planet, and yet the only odors we can detect are so powerful that they would overwhelm a lower life form. We’re thinking beings,” he said, “but our senses have grown dull.”

“Where are you going with all this?”

“I find that sometimes a situation becomes clearer when you do more than think—when you use all of your senses. You say that the evidence I’ve shown you seems unconvincing compared with what you know about the sheriff—but what do your other senses tell you? How does he smell? How does the whole situation feel? What do your instincts tell you?”

“You’re asking me to weigh what I smell against things I know?”

“There are different ways of knowing,” Nick said. “Sometimes what we call ‘knowing’ is just a form of prejudice.”

“So now I’m prejudiced?”

“Of course you are. Look at it from my perspective, Mrs. Guilford. I see three men who all fell in love with you—and in your own way, you loved all three of them. You lost the one you loved the most; a week ago, you lost the second. Now you have only one left.”

“And if I accept what you’re telling me, then I’ve lost Peter too. I’ve lost everything.”

“You said you had to know, Mrs. Guilford. The truth doesn’t care.”

“Well, I care,” Kathryn said, “and I still have to know. Before I give up on Peter, I have to be absolutely sure. I’m not like you, Nick. I can’t just smell things.”

“Can’t you? While we were interviewing Amy McAllister, her house just happened to burn to the ground. Then Teddy committed an unthinkable blunder, and that same night was murdered in a random act of violence. A day later, I watched a fly in search of blood enter the barrel of the deputy’s gun. Come on, Mrs. Guilford—if you can smell asphalt, you can smell this.”

“Can you tell me for certain—absolutely for certain—that there’s no other reason that fly might have crawled into Beanie’s gun? Did you ever stop to think that if you hadn’t hit Beanie, we might have found a way to get hold of his gun? We might have been able to have it tested to see if there really was any blood—and if it was Teddy’s?”

Nick said nothing.

“And there’s something else, Nick—if Peter spent the night with Jenny, how did Beanie get to Teddy’s trailer? He can’t drive, Nick—Beanie can’t drive. I’m sorry,” she said, “I need proof.”

“Wish I could help you,” Nick shrugged. “But the only proof we might have had is gone—flying around somewhere, looking for a body of its own.”

A small white door at the back door of the church opened, and the figure of Dr. Malcolm Jameson emerged, carrying a familiar black book at his side. Nick turned to Kathryn as he approached.

“About all this,” Nick said with a wave of his hand.

“You’re welcome. I just wish more people could be here.”

“I wish Teddy could be here.”

Dr. Jameson greeted them both with a solemn nod. “This seems an inappropriate location,” he said with a frown at the littered surroundings. “Perhaps Dr. Polchak could suggest something more apropos.”

Nick quickly scanned the terrain; at the edge of the church property, through a break in the tree line a golden green meadow rose up and away from them, brilliant in the full noon sun.

“There,” Nick said. “Teddy would like that spot.”

The three of them walked toward the meadow together. Dr. Jameson’s pace was slow and deliberate, and Nick had to rein himself in to stay in step.

“So tell me,” Dr. Jameson said, “how is the fishing?”

“Not good,” Nick shook his head. “I had a big one on the line, but he got away.”

“Nonsense. No one gets away, my friend. As the apostle said, ‘Some men’s sins go before them, and some follow after.’ If your fish needs to be caught, he will be caught—sooner or later.”

“I was hoping for sooner,” Nick said.

“Patience. You are still a young man, and young men do not make good fishermen. Young men discourage too easily; they give up after the first false strike. The old fisherman knows he must wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For Providence.” The old man smiled. “There is more to fishing than meets the eye.”

At the crest of the meadow they halted. Nick and Kathryn stood side by side, and Dr. Jameson turned to face them. He opened the great book and slowly searched through the fragile pages; then he stopped, closed his eyes, and raised his face to the June sun.

“God our Father,” he began, “Maker of heaven and earth—we gather today to deliver into Your hands the soul and memory of Dr. Eustatius Tedesco …”

He said the name without fumbling—no moment’s hesitation, no awkward glance at a written reminder. He said the name as though it was worth knowing, and Nick was grateful for the offer of dignity and respect.

“We remember today the life of a man well-loved, a man who spent his life in the service of others and in the pursuit of justice. This man has been cruelly taken from us, O Lord, and our hearts are darkened—Your world is darkened by his loss! ‘Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases to be, for the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.’”

The old man spoke in slow, thundering waves. He began almost in a whisper; then his voice swelled to a rumbling crescendo, then broke, receded, and slowly rose again. Almost a song, Nick thought, just like the cicadas in the woods.

“We bring our complaint before you today, for our friend was taken from us by murder most foul. Our hearts cry out for justice, O Lord—and our brother cries out to You from the grave! Nothing is hidden from Your sight, O God, ‘For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.’”

The deputy can’t drive, Nick thought. Then how did he get to Teddy’s trailer and back again? The sheriff couldn’t have dropped him off, there wasn’t time. He had to take care of things at the lab, and then he had to get to Jenny’s to establish his alibi. Then how did the deputy get there?

“You are no stranger to killing, O Lord. You have witnessed the taking of countless innocent lives. You were there at the first, at the slaying of righteous Abel. You looked down upon wicked Cain; You knew the burning jealousy in his heart. ‘Why are you angry?’ You said to him. ‘And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; but you must master it.’” The old man glanced down at the ancient text and translated the Latin effortlessly as he read.