The Cantaloupe Thief (6 page)

She detoured into the back yard to check on her cantaloupes. She'd planted them in the center of a flower patch, beneath the kitchen window. She thought one might be ripe for supper, and sure enough, a pale yellow-orange melon, smelling both fruity and earthy, looked perfect.

But that's not what caught her attention. To one side of the tough vine that connected different sized melons was a crushed branch of lantana. And a step closer to the window, a footprint — from the look of it, made by a rather large tennis shoe. Branigan cast her mind back to the last rain. Friday night, she thought. A drenching one. So someone had been outside her kitchen window sometime Saturday or Sunday or today.

She looked thoughtfully at Cleo. The dog stayed outside during the day, inside at night. “I would expect to find body parts,” Branigan told her. “Either you're falling down on the job or someone was here at night.”

Despite her attempt at nonchalance, a chill settled over her as her eyes swept the cotton patch, barn and pastures in the distance. She hurried back to the side stoop and locked the door, pocketing the key. Then she and Cleo walked the much trampled path through the cotton field that abutted the yard. Cotton hadn't been harvested here since the 1990s, but occasionally a plant still yielded the brown pods with their puffs of raw cotton.

The pair rounded the barn, the empty chicken houses, then rolled under barbed wire to enter the pasture, Branigan's mind puzzling over possibilities. Cable guy? Power guy? Uncle Bobby was her landlord and lived on the next farm over. Could he have been looking over the property?

Branigan started across the pasture at a lope, watching for cow patties. Uncle Bobby kept a few cows here, so the grass was low and good for running, aside from the obvious drawback. She crossed the first broad swath before following the fence line past the lake, then a stand of trees, then a second lake. Plum trees and aged oaks reached like scraggly crones over the fence, scratching her arms if Cleo nudged her too close. But Cleo didn't stay with her long. The dog's strong leg muscles needed far more exercise than Branigan's pace could give her, and soon she was sprinting ahead to take a drink at the lake, then backtracking to lap her mistress before taking off again.
Who would mess with me as long as Cleo's around?
Branigan thought.

There was more of a breeze here than there had been at the house, and slowly Branigan's unease evaporated. The trees whispered the promise of evening. At this time of early June, the entire South smelled like honeysuckle, and the pasture fence was awash with the trumpet-shaped flowers. The green of the grass, the gray-brown of the tree trunks, the azure of the sky, and the silent blue-green of the lakes were so rich and clear that her breath caught.

This... this land, this vividness, this startling clarity was what she had come home for, what she had come home to. She breathed deeply, knowing as certainly as she had ever known anything that her decision to return had been right.

It had taken her until nearly forty to find out. But she was ahead of the game. Some people never did.

 

Back at the house, Branigan showered, pulled on pajama pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, and fed Cleo, convincing herself that the footprint outside her kitchen window belonged to a power company employee. She cut up a bowl of strawberries, and added pieces of her garden's first cantaloupe. She toasted a wheat bagel, mounded it high with shredded cheddar and set it all on the glass-topped table beside the couch. Cleo settled at her feet and they watched an episode of
Law and Order: SVU
as they ate.

Branigan resisted the temptation to watch another recorded episode when it was finished. “Back to work,” she told Cleo. “Real life ‘Law and Order'.”

She dragged the cardboard box of copied police files from her home office to the more comfortable den, and settled back to read.

Liam had reminded her of one of the more intriguing aspects of the Resnick murder: “Remember that stranger living in her pool house?” She flipped to the first day's investigation, because this lead had surfaced early.

Mrs Resnick's property held not only her regal three-story home, but a pool and pool house in the back yard. Despite her children hiring landscapers and despite the landscapers' entreaties, Mrs Resnick wouldn't allow them to prune the trees or shrubs behind the house. As a result, you could hardly walk from the main house to the pool house. Oak limbs and prickly holly scratched and clawed even if you followed the path.

The March before the murder, Branigan read, Mrs Resnick sent Tabitha, her maid of forty years, to clean the pool house, untouched since the previous summer. Tabitha pushed her way through the tangle of shrubbery and bumped open the unlocked door to the one-level structure made of stone and cedar shingles.

In the living area sat a heavily built white man. He was talking to himself.

Tabitha screamed, and the stranger stopped abruptly.

“Who are you?” demanded the elderly black housekeeper.

“Billy,” he answered.

Tabitha backed out of the secluded pool house and stumbled up the overgrown path to call Mrs Resnick's older son, Ramsey. By the time Ramsey and the police arrived, Billy was gone.

On May 2, two months after his first appearance, Tabitha looked out of a window and saw Billy in the back yard, heading down the path to the pool. She called Ramsey.

An amazing sight met Ramsey when he entered his mother's pool house. Furniture was rearranged, frozen hamburger was thawing on the kitchen counter, cigarettes were lying about, and the remains of a fire littered the fireplace. Ramsey settled in to wait.

Thirty minutes later, Billy walked up the driveway, carrying a bulky television. He was moving in. According to Ramsey's statement to police, he thought he lived there.

Ramsey called the police, who identified Billy as a mentally ill resident of Forest Lawn, a mill village on Grambling's west side. They impounded his TV, clothes, the sheets he'd slept on, even the cigarette butts from the ashtrays. But because he'd simply jiggled the pool house lock to get in, they could charge him only with unlawful occupancy, not the more serious breaking and entering. A judge placed him on trespass notice.

On June 15, continued the reports, Tabitha answered a knock at the front door of the main house. There stood Billy. He told Tabitha he wanted to get a T-shirt he'd left in the pool house.

Tabitha hurried upstairs to get Mrs Resnick. When the women came down, Billy was seated on the piano bench in the formal living room. Mrs Resnick, all 115 pounds of her, faced the burly six-foot-two man.

“She asked him what in the world he was doing in her house,” the report quoted Tabitha. “I don't know what he told her, but I slipped to the phone and called Mr Ramsey.”

Tabitha heard Mrs Resnick's raised voice speak sharply to Billy. Mrs Resnick then hustled him outside to wait for Ramsey and the police, who arrested him for trespassing. Ramsey wasn't surprised at his mother's cool. “Mother wasn't scared of the devil,” he told officers.

But when his mother was murdered just twenty days later, he feared her sharp tongue had triggered a disturbed man's anger.

Branigan paused from reading the incident reports on Billy that Grambling police had dutifully attached to the voluminous interviews from that first day. It hadn't taken long for the news to spread among downtown neighbors about the man living on Mrs Resnick's property. Branigan remembered her mom and dad shaking their heads at the thought of Billy living in the pool house that was a three-minute walk from their house; her dad had quietly installed bolt locks on their exterior doors.

On the day of the murder, police officers made the connection almost immediately.

By 5:23 p.m. — just forty-four minutes after the neighbor's first call to the police — a patrol car with two uniformed officers was sitting outside Billy's grandmother's house in the crumbling mill village of Forest Lawn. Billy was there.

The officers escorted him to the Grambling Law Enforcement Center, a squat building behind the more gracious courthouse, and handed him over to detectives. Throughout the evening, detectives called and asked the officers to pick up friends whom Billy named as companions during the afternoon.

Branigan shuffled through other incident reports that were clipped to the investigative time line. Nine months before the murder, Billy had spent time in the Gainesville jail, forty-five minutes from Grambling. The charge was domestic violence for attacking a girlfriend, plus simple assault on the first officer who tried to subdue him. It took five officers and a stun gun to wrestle him into a cell.

Since returning home from Gainesville, Billy had been haunted by hallucinations, said family members. He saw black flies swarming from his belly button and planes zooming over his house. The grandmother blamed his condition on the stun gun, but it sounded more like full-blown schizophrenia to Branigan — and to the psychiatrist whose report was attached to the file.

Flipping forward to the July 5 incident report, she read the police department's conclusion. Because Mrs Resnick had last been seen alive at 12:40 p.m., because police had Billy in custody by 5:23 p.m., and because he'd been in the continuous company of Forest Lawn neighbors in between, it was apparent he did not commit the murder. Detectives would question Billy further in ensuing days, but their obvious suspect — the stranger who had moved into Mrs Resnick's pool house, the man she had angrily removed from her piano bench — was not her killer.

The problem was that Billy had looked so promising that clues leading to someone else might have been overlooked. This tidbit didn't come from the police file, but from a later interview conducted by Jody. Branigan reached for the notebook he'd given her when she took the assignment. It took only a moment to find the quote he'd transcribed from a homicide detective who was one of the first responders.

“My thinking was clouded by it,” the detective admitted. “I was completely focused on this guy Billy at the time.”

Branigan remembered those first few days after the murder. Billy made such a logical suspect. Who wouldn't focus on him? She idly wondered if Billy still lived with his grandmother, if she was even alive. Or did he hang out now at Jericho Road, with so many of those who faced similar demons?

The phone rang as she put down the last report on Billy. Its words were blurring, and she knew her focus was waning. She rolled her neck while reaching for the receiver.

“Brani G, I've found him,” came Liam's voice.

She was momentarily confused, thinking of Billy, then of Vesuvius's hit-and-run driver. His next words yanked her to lucidity.

“I've found Davison.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Branigan quickly changed from pajama pants into jeans, leaving on her sleeveless T-shirt, and grabbing her keys and purse. Cleo skidded to the door, and looked up hopefully.

“Yeah,” she told the dog. “I might need you.”

Cleo barked and followed Branigan to the car, hopping into the passenger seat. Branigan didn't bother with the sheet she usually placed beneath the dog.

Driving fast, she soon pulled into the convenience store parking lot Liam had named. It was in a shabby former mill village less than a mile from Jericho Road. Grambling was dotted with these mill villages, remnants of vibrant communities in the early twentieth century that were now collapsed and drug-infested. A few unbroken streetlights made a half-hearted effort, but the area beyond the lot was in deepest shadow. This parking lot was the city's single most active spot for prostitution and drugs, Jody had once told her. For rapes and murders, too, when things went wrong.

She nervously pulled alongside Liam's SUV, her stomach in a knot. Liam emerged as soon as he saw her Honda.

“He's under the bridge,” he said.

“Is he strung out?”

“No. I smelled alcohol, but he's coherent.”

She smiled tightly. “Did you tell him you were calling me?”

“Yeah. He knows. Get in the back, Miss Cleo,” Liam commanded. “I'll ride with you.”

Cleo obediently leaped over the seat back as Liam climbed in. Branigan knew where they were headed — the Michael Garner Memorial Bridge, named for a police officer gunned down in this neighborhood fifteen years before. When the bridge was built some years later, Grambling's police chief lobbied for naming rights. Had she been part of Michael Garner's family, she wasn't sure she'd want his name connected to a site so close to his murder. But they considered it an honor, and the bridge now bore his name. It also sheltered dozens of the city's homeless.

Liam knew the bridge community. He and his staff frequently visited, inviting residents to Jericho Road for drug rehab, mental health counseling and worship. But even he never came here after dark. With the blackness impenetrable, suffocating, Branigan felt her heart thumping. She was about to face the man she loved above all others.

Her twin brother, Davison.

 

They parked in the pitted lot of a storage facility 200 feet from the bridge. It was as close as they could get in a car. Liam had wisely brought a flashlight that helped illumine a path through the weeds. Cleo ran ahead, and Branigan heard her excited bark before they reached the bridge.

Then she heard the voice so like her dad's, so like Chan's.

“Well, what a pretty girl! You must be one of Gran's.”

Branigan stumbled forward. There, sitting on a cement block, was her brother. Even with Liam's dim light, she could see that his blond hair was shoulder-length and matted. A week's stubble grew along his jaw line. His jeans looked too large. But she could see the glitter of his familiar emerald eyes, identical to hers and shining like a cat's in the dark. The slow smile that emerged when he saw her was one she remembered well.

“Brani G,” he said through cracked lips, using the childhood nickname Liam had adopted. “Hey, Sis.”