The Cantaloupe Thief (27 page)

Branigan knew Davison hadn't spoken to Chan yet. But did the young man suspect something? She could see why Liam and Liz were worried. For Chan to find out that both his biological parents were junkies was a pretty big bomb to drop as he was headed to college.

“Charlie, I've always been honest with you, right?”

The girl nodded.

“But honey, this isn't my news to tell.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, and I'm so sorry. You're going to have to ask your mom and dad.”

“So you
do
know what's going on?”

“I have an idea.”

“And you really won't tell me?”

“I can't. This is a private matter for your family.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, clearly confounded.

“Have you talked to Chan?”

“He's always down at the church.”

“Really? What's he doing there?”

“Volunteering. Eating. Who knows? We just hand over the car keys. It's not how I pictured our last summer as a family, you know?”

She looked so forlorn that Branigan went around the island and hugged her. “I have a feeling that everything will be cleared up soon,” she told her. “Long before your summer is over.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Malachi Ezekiel Martin was a reader. People might not suspect it from where he'd ended up, but he'd never stopped reading. He got it from his grandmother, a Genesis-to-Revelation Bible reader — hence the Malachi and the Ezekiel. Besides the biblical writers, his granny loved one author above all others: Agatha Christie.

Every night in their northeast Georgia farmhouse, she read the English murder mysteries to young Malachi. Jane Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford were as familiar to him as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

It wasn't until he was identified for his high school gifted readers' program and started studying the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston and Ralph Ellison that he realized how unusual her tastes were.

“Granny,” he'd told her, “you have to be the only black woman in America readin' Agatha Christie.”

But she said she'd
lived
what Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston and Ralph Ellison wrote, and she sure didn't need to go over it again. No, she wanted to read about murder in gossipy English villages that had vicars instead of Baptist preachers.

And so Malachi had been pleased when that
Rambler
reporter asked about the death of his friend Vesuvius. He had wondered why V had been out on his bike in the middle of the night. Now he was “employing the little grey cells”, as Hercule Poirot put it, about other oddities surrounding his friend's death.

For if there was one thing the Belgian detective with the egg-shaped head had taught Malachi, it was this: look for what was out of character, out of sequence, out of the norm.

V's breaking curfew was the first thing. He had a safe bed at Jericho Road, and he seemed content to sleep in it. What was he doing three blocks away at the corner of Oakley and Anders?

The other thing was the sale of a painting to a homeless dude. In all the time that Jericho Road's art room had been flourishing, in all the time it had hosted art sales that attracted businessmen and city councilwomen and even gallery owners, Malachi had never known a homeless artist to sell to a fellow homeless person.

V had $130 in cash when he slept in Malachi's tent the week of his death. His small mental disability payment came on a debit card. So someone — a “dude”, in V's words — paid at least $130 for V's plyboard painting. Maybe more, if V had already spent some of it. And even more peculiar, the buyer then threw the painting away.

Malachi looked at it now, a gorgeously haunting moonscape reflected on a pond, the large black V in the corner fading into the grasses that surrounded the water. Why would someone pay for a painting, then discard it?

Because he didn't want the painting,
said Malachi's little grey cells.
He wanted something else.

But what? What else did V have? He was mentally disabled. Sweet-natured but not all there.

Malachi tried to recreate their conversation in his head. He asked V where he'd gotten the money. V had responded, “Sold a paintin' I done. Sold it to a dude who saw it at Jericho. I asked Pastuh Liam and he took it off the wall and gave it to me.”

Did V mean that Pastor Liam had been standing there when he made the sale? Would the pastor know who bought it? Or did V simply mean he'd asked Pastor Liam at a later time for his artwork?

It was worth a visit to Jericho Road to find out.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Charlie left too late for Branigan to get in a run. With no streetlights, it wasn't like living in the city. Once it got dark in the countryside, it was
dark.

Branigan curled up on the den sofa with a pad and pen. She needed a handwritten to-do list, something to hold. Sometimes a computer screen didn't cut it.

At the top of one page, she wrote “Demetrius”. At the top of another, “Max Brody”. Then she tried to think of everything she knew about them.

For Demetrius, it wasn't much. Probably schizophrenic. Potentially violent, as evidenced by the charges in Gainesville. As Billy Shepherd, he had lived for awhile in Mrs Resnick's pool house before Tabitha and Ramsey discovered him. Was there someone else with him? Could that someone have murdered Mrs Resnick? Or alternately, could that someone have seen who did?

Rita had been in the pool house with Ben Brissey Jr. Did she recognize someone there, and did that knowledge get her killed?

Most interesting was the timing: Vesuvius and Rita were killed
after
Billy/Demetrius was released from prison. Could the providers of his original alibi in Forest Lawn have lied, making him Mrs Resnick's killer after all? If that were true, the Grambling police were in for a nightmare — maybe lawsuits for incompetence.

Branigan had only a picture of Billy/Demetrius. Unlike Liam, she hadn't seen police questioning him a decade earlier.

But she had seen Max Brody, at a church service in early May. Jericho Road held its Sunday morning services in the dining hall. The men moved the tables out and set up rows of chairs in front of a raised stage. When Liam started as pastor, twenty chairs would do. Now they needed two hundred.

Branigan was a member at First Baptist Church of Grambling, where she sat with her mom and dad most Sundays. But she tried to get to Jericho Road's lively alternative every month or so. When she was there in May, a man had lurched past the gospel singers, stumbling into a woman and causing her to drop her hymnal, before slamming out of the door in mid-service. Liam told her afterward that it was Max Brody, already drunk at 11 a.m.

She asked Liam last Monday to inquire if any homeless people had heard rumors about Mrs Resnick's stabbing. Jess came forward immediately to tell about Max Brody's comments at an outdoor concert in mid-May.

She flipped open her notebook to yesterday's interview with Jess: Max was a mean drunk. Max had a wad of cash. Max said, “This evening's drunk is courtesy of an old lady who had the good sense [or the good taste] to get stabbed.”

Presumably that meant his beer money was related to an old woman's stabbing. But how? What did Max know? Was he being paid for his silence? That was kind of wacky. Who could trust a drunk to be silent?

She needed to talk to this guy.

She reached for her phone and called Liam at home. When he answered, she said, “It's me. I hate to keep bothering you, but can you help me locate Demetrius and Max Brody tomorrow?”

“Sorry, but I'll be writing Rita's memorial service. Want me to call you when I finish?”

“Yes, please. Meanwhile, I guess I'll try the usual spots.”

“Brani G, that might not be a good idea. Something is seriously wrong with Demetrius. And Max can be violent. Can you wait 'til I'm free? Or maybe get the police to go with you?”

“We'll see,” she said. “Just call when you break free. And thanks.”

Under Max's name, she wrote: library; bridge; Main Street; St James; Covenant Methodist; Jericho. But she'd been in those places frequently over the past two weeks and had never seen him.

Not like Malachi, whom she saw everywhere.

Hey, maybe Malachi could help. He'd be the next best thing to Liam.

Or even better.

 

With her mind set on a course of action, Branigan went to bed, knowing she had a long day ahead. She fell asleep instantly, and was still soundly out when Cleo ripped the night silence with a furious, high-pitched barking. Branigan shot up, heart pounding, fear and anger sparring for pre-eminence.

She followed Cleo to the sliding glass door in her office, which faced the cotton patch, barn and pastures. The moon was behind clouds, and she could see nothing. Cleo stood on two legs, clawing at the glass door and yowling at a hysterical pitch. Branigan's anger at being awakened turned to uneasiness.

“What is it, girl?” she whispered, holding on to the dog's neck. “What's out there?”

Heaven knew, it could be so many things. Coyote. Raccoon. 'Possum.
Human.

Cleo wanted out badly, but Branigan wasn't about to be left alone. For the first time, she wished she had accepted her mom's offer of a security system for the farmhouse. She'd said no, pointing out that Pa and Gran had never, not once, had a break-in in all their years here. And furthermore, what security system was better than Cleo? She was proving that right now. But if Branigan were really in trouble, Cleo couldn't alert the county sheriff.

Cleo continued to growl, but returned to all fours. She trotted to the den, barked out of its window, then returned to the office. She was beginning to calm down. So was Branigan.

They went back to their bedroom, where Branigan was startled to see it was after 5 a.m. Cleo went right to sleep on her pillow, but her mistress couldn't. She tossed until the blackness gave way to gray.

“Come on, girl,” she said, throwing the covers off. “Let's get that run.”

Minutes later, they were rolling under the barbed wire and into the pasture. The morning was refreshingly cool and already alive with birds singing. They ran into the breeze and lapped the first pasture twice. Branigan felt her unease dissipate.
This place is alive with critters,
she thought.
It'd be unusual
not
to have nocturnal creatures running around.

After thirty minutes, they started their cool-down walk back to the house. Branigan heard a moo from the barn. She hadn't realized Uncle Bobby had put cows in there, so they went to take a look. Sure enough, five docile black Angus were in stalls.

Branigan walked through the barn, speaking softly and petting each. Cleo, born and raised on a farm, knew not to spook them.

There were three empty stalls in addition to the occupied ones, each holding a pile of hay. But the last one had something else, something out of place. Branigan stared for a moment at the blue and white wrapper, then opened the slatted gate and retrieved it — a water bottle with a custom label affixed. “God loves you,” it read, “and so does Jericho Road.”

She looked around nervously. Who had left this here? Cleo was standing quietly, so the person wasn't still around.

Had someone slept here last night? Why had he — or she — left this bottle in plain sight? As a warning?

 

Branigan was shaken by the discovery in the barn, but didn't know whether to report it to Detective Scovoy or Chief Warren or to the Cannon County Sheriff's Office, which had jurisdiction over the farm. Or maybe to no one. She couldn't imagine a responding deputy getting too excited over a water bottle left in her barn.

She put it out of her mind, at least for the present. She showered and dressed rapidly, pulling on long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and flat boat shoes, figuring her search for Billy/Demetrius and Max Brody would take her far from her air-conditioned office and into tick-infested woods. She started at Jericho Road, where Peace in the Valley Baptist Church was serving a breakfast of pancakes and bacon.

She spotted Malachi, bent over a magazine as he ate. She grabbed a cup of coffee and slid into the seat next to him.

“Me again,” she said. “I hope I'm not disturbing you.”

“No, ma'am, Miz Branigan.” He folded his magazine. “That was a good story you wrote on V and his daddy.”

“Thanks. Have you heard Pastor Liam talking about the other story I'm working on?”

“I heard some of the mens talkin'. 'Bout that old lady who got murdered long time ago.”

“Right,” she said. “The police always thought it was possible it was a transient who was in and out of Grambling very quickly. I'm working on a ten-year anniversary story on how it's gone unsolved for so long. Today I need to find Demetrius. . . Shepherd, I guess his last name is, and Max Brody. Do you have any idea where they might be?”

“Why you want them? That might not be a good idea.”

“Why?”

Malachi shrugged. “They're... unpredictable.”

She laughed. Sometimes Malachi sounded like a precocious twelve-year-old, veering from street rhythms to English teacher. She had listened to him enough to realize that he adapted his speech to mirror whomever he was talking to.

“I still need to talk to them. For my story.”

Malachi eyed her quietly for some moments.

“Maybe you could come with me?” she suggested.

“That might be a good idea,” he agreed.

 

“Do we drive or walk?” she asked as they emerged into the bright sunlight after breakfast.

“Let's drive. Lemme make sure my bike's locked up.”

“I didn't know you had a bike.”

“I don't use it much. Pastor Liam lets me store it in a room with the shelter bikes.”

She waited until Malachi joined her at the Civic, tossing his backpack onto the rear seat. He directed her to the courthouse lawn, and sure enough, she saw the man in the picture she'd borrowed from the Forest Lawn mill house.