The Hunt Club (7 page)

She took in a deep breath, let it out. “We’re going home,” she said, “and if you’d take your hand off that door, we’d all be spending our time a little more wisely.”

They looked at each other, then stepped in.

The door closed.

The black-haired one smiled down at me. He said, “Just a routine interview. He was there at the discovery of the body, and it’s SLED policy to interview everyone present at the crime scene.” He looked at Mom. “He’s the next-to-last one we have to interview. We got everybody else already. Just routine, ma’am.”

Mom let out a heavy breath. I couldn’t see her behind me, only imagined her eyes on the lighted numbers above the doors, her mouth shut tight.

“Did you hear anything at the club night before last?” the blond one said. “Anything out of the ordinary?”

I was looking at the numbers now, too. “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Your uncle is blind, is that correct?”

“You boys must work nights for the Psychic Network,” I said, and Mom let out a small laugh.

They didn’t look at her, didn’t blink. “How is it you discovered the body?” the blond said.

I slowly shook my head, saw Unc only yesterday morning, telling me to stop.

“I didn’t find it,” I said. “Unc did.”

“And how did that happen?” He crossed his arms.

I said, “He smelled it.”

“He
what
?”

I looked at him. “He’s blind, and he smelled it. That’s why he told me to stop.”

The black-haired one cleared his throat. “We’d like to know what you saw once you discovered the body. If there was anything out of the ordinary.”

“What’s ordinary about a dead body is all I want to know,” Mom said. They looked at her behind me. “It’s out of the ordinary just to see something like that. So you’re asking him what
else
there was about it? Isn’t it enough my boy saw it in the first place?”

“Now, ma’am,” the black-haired one said, “we’re just trying to
find out as much as we can about what happened. That’s all we’re here for.”

“You got three more floors to go before we’re out of here, and you’re out of our lives, so hop to it.”

“Ma’am,” the blond said, “we’ll ask as many—”

“Lee,” the black-haired one said, quiet, and this Lee stopped.

The black-haired one knelt, put his hand on the wheel of my chair. I could smell his aftershave, heavy and dull. “What did you see?” he said.

“His hands,” I said. “That’s pretty out of the ordinary. And that cardboard sign. That’s it.” I looked at my hands in my lap, and the skin on them, and waited for what was coming next: Have you seen the good doctor’s wife?

“And you heard nothing,” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Did your uncle act strange in any way earlier this week? Or at any time in recent weeks?”

“One more floor,” Mom said.

Unc hadn’t acted strange. Not until yesterday morning, when he told me he’d wanted to kill the man himself a long time ago. And last night, when he’d told me he didn’t want us in on any of
this
, whatever the hell that meant.

“No,” I said. “Same old Unc.”

“Did you talk about anything at all either before or after the body was discovered?”

I looked him in the eye, almost dared him to try and find what I was leaving out of what I was about to tell him.

I said, “We talked about the stands the night before, took a drive over to them Friday night, looked around. Saturday morning, after we found the body, we talked about the dogs and keeping them off it, off the body. And we talked about police stuff, like making everybody sit in the weeds on the opposite side of the road, walking single file, that stuff, so the scene wouldn’t be wrecked.” I stopped, took a breath at that place where I could have told him the fact he’d talked
to Constance Dupree Simons only Wednesday. “And he told me the person’s name, Constance, who was married to that doctor. The one who wrote the cardboard sign, near as anybody could tell. He told me they were going to get married, Unc and that woman, a long time ago.” I paused, shrugged. “That’s it. Then we went back to the body, and that’s when it—”

For a second I saw only that dead man, those skinned hands lifting his gun up, aiming for that buzzard.

The doors opened. “End of interrogation,” Mom said, and wheeled me right out. The black-haired one didn’t have time even to stand up.

Then we were in a long white hallway, headed for glass double doors down at the end.

“One more question, ma’am,” the blond said. “Just one more,” and I heard him moving quick up beside us. He took hold of the rail on the chair, pulled us to a stop. The chair wheeled around to him for his grabbing on, and here we were, this big officer looking down at me.

“Now, you look here,” Mom said. Then the man moved his eyes to her.

She looked at him a long few seconds. There was no way out. The officer would ask his question, no matter what, no matter where.

The black-haired one was there now, and squatted again, looked at me. “All we need to know is when you saw your uncle last. That’s all.”

I said, “But he didn’t do it.”

“We just want to know where he is,” he said. “Nobody’s convicting anybody here.”

“You haven’t talked to him yet?” Mom asked, her voice quiet, like she couldn’t believe it. “You don’t know where he is, do you?”

“That’s what we’re trying to ascertain, ma’am,” the blond said.

I twisted in my chair, looked up at Mom behind me.

Her mouth was open, her eyebrows up: she was thinking maybe Unc really
was
in on this.

I looked at the black-haired officer. I said, “So I’m next to last. That means Unc is all you have left.”

He looked down. He was sitting on his heels, his shoes spit-polished. He put his hands together, like a prayer. “He rode in with Deputy Thigpen and Yandle and Dr. Morrison and you,” he said. “Nobody had time to interview him. He’s the only one left, and we can’t seem to locate him.”

“He was here yesterday afternoon,” Mom said, quick and loud. “He left around two o’clock. I figured he’d just find a way home.”

The only one left. A blind man, and they couldn’t find him.

The blond pulled his billfold out again, brought out a business card, handed it to Mom. “This here’s the number you can reach us at, if you hear anything.”

And now they were done.

They weren’t here after Constance Dupree Simons at all.

Tell Leland I didn’t do it
, she’d told me.

It was Unc they were after. Not Constance.

“So what about this Constance?” I said. “The one who killed that boy, the doctor?” I knew the words might draw attention, me changing the subject from Unc and all to her. But I wanted to know, because if they had her already, then maybe she’d told them she’d visited me last night, and these two already knew everything about her showing up. Maybe all they were doing was just waiting for me to cough up what was in my pocket.

The black-haired one stood, and the two looked at each other. The blond made a face, shrugged:
I don’t care
. “It’ll be on the news tonight,” he said. “The TV crews were over there practically before we were. It’s no secret.”

The black-haired one took in a breath, looked down at me.

“What?” I said.

“She’s dead,” he said. “Suicide. She hung herself over to the Rantowles Motel, in one of the rooms.” He paused. “Somebody called it in at six this morning. A man, wouldn’t give his name.”

Here came that feel again, the same pinch at my throat as yesterday, the same collapse inside me.

She was dead.

I’d talked to her only last night. I had something of hers in my pocket right now.

Mom turned the wheelchair, aimed us for the door, her silence signal enough to me something inside her was collapsing too.

“You call us, you hear anything,” the blond said from behind us. “You have my card.”

The automatic doors opened up, and we were out on the street between the hospital and parking garage, out in sharp, white daylight. Mom turned the chair to the left, said, “Now let’s stand up,” and put a hand to my arm.

I stood, but felt my knees about to fall under me, about to snap.

“Oh, baby,” she said, “are you okay?”

I swallowed. “No,” I whispered, “but just let’s go on home.”

We started across the street, Mom’s arm looped in mine, leading me, just like I did Unc.

That’s when I saw the black Crown Victoria parked about twenty yards down to my right and across the street. Standard-issue SLED.

But behind it was a cruiser, leaning on the hood of it a man with his arm in a sling.

Yandle.

He was smiling, watching us. He had a Styrofoam cup, took a sip, winced for it. He put the cup in the other hand, the one in the sling.

He pointed at me. It was a small move, nothing big or showy. Mom didn’t even see him for helping me along the crosswalk.

Then he made his hand like a gun, pulled the trigger. He smiled, slowly shook his head.

It was a small move. Meant only for me.

“Mom, let’s go,” I said, and tried to walk faster.

I didn’t look at Mom the whole way home, didn’t say a word.

Instead I looked at the same old buildings along I–26: the redbrick high-rise, everyone in there government-assisted; the dead mall and its empty parking lot off Montague; at the concrete barrier between us and southbound traffic, a barrier it wouldn’t be all that hard for a car to flip over, kill us right here.

There was a blue sky, too, what pieces of the Ashley River I could see off to my left a dull green, rimmed on either edge in brown salt-marsh hay and spartina and yellow grass.

A sweetgrass paperweight.

Suicide
. She’d hanged herself.

The Rantowles Motel was a nothing place on 17 South, where couples from my classes at North Charleston went for a few hours on Friday nights, when they’d told Mama and Papa they’d be at the football game.

She hanged herself.

This made two of them. Husband and wife, and I’d seen both of them.

And if I told Mom anything, she’d become a part of it all, the
this
Unc wanted us out of. What I was already a partner in, though I couldn’t say why or how. Only that I had a piece of what was going on.

If I opened my mouth to Mom, even let her see my face, I’d have to tell her about Yandle, too. What was he out here for, him just an idiot droid deputy? If things worked like I thought they did, SLED was in charge of the whole thing, wouldn’t have him tagging along. Unless him being there fell under all that first-officer-at-the-scene shit he’d tried to hand Unc when he first pulled up.

I’d keep this all to myself, just go home, sit in the front room with the TV going, watch with her whatever it was she watched here, alone, on Sunday mornings.

Sunday morning. I hadn’t been here on a Sunday morning in years.

I’d just sit with her and watch. And wait.

But for what?

We headed down Remount and through that hellhole of an intersection at Rivers, eight or nine lanes plus the freeway off-ramp converging on one set of lights; next we passed the Aquarius Social Club, a cinder-block building with no windows, painted a dull turquoise, next the New Life Congregational Church. Then we turned right onto Attaway, went down the rows of houses just like ours: a short concrete driveway that led to a separate garage at the rear of the lot, concrete steps up to the front door, metal awnings over the porch and the two windows out front. They were all painted pale colors, all of them different shades of green and yellow and blue. Some of the yards were overgrown, some too neat. All of them just there, along with a couple of bushes, oil stains on the driveway, room air conditioners plugged into the windows.

Where we lived.

The first night we moved out here to Liberty Hills, Mom and I set up in that square house, the few things we had still in the boxes, she
came into my bedroom and woke me up in the middle of the night, wanting to know if I’d messed in my pants. Me, eight years old. But she was right: the place smelled like maybe something had shit somewhere.

We looked all over the house, all the lights on, searched for where maybe some animal’d snuck in, laid a pile maybe in the corner of a closet or in the cabinets. But I remember thinking it didn’t smell exactly like shit. Something else, but close enough.

Finally she opened the back door, and the smell jumped at us. I remember standing next to her, Mom in a thin white nightgown, the same one she’d worn my whole life so far, and looking out to the fence, and seeing above it and above the rooftops of all these houses the dull gray glow of lights way off, like a gray cloud sitting way off in the black. And poked up into the middle of it a smokestack with blinking white lights on it, a cloud of white coming up off it.

“It’s the paper mill,” Mom whispered.

I looked up at her. She was still a moment, then her shoulders started moving up and down, quick and hard. The kitchen light was on behind her, and I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she was crying. She breathed in quick breaths all in a row, let out these hisses, afraid to cry in front of her kid.

I was only eight, and I remember I grabbed hold of her nightgown, bunched a fistful up, and said, “Don’t cry about it.”