“Beeler something?”
“Beeler Grissum. I think she married him,” Clete said.
“Thanks, Cletus.”
He opened the office door. “I’ll let you know how my lunch came out. This is a class broad, Dave.” He blew his breath on his palm and sniffed it. “Oh, man, I smell like puke. I got to brush my teeth.”
The sheriff’s wife, who was a mild and genteel woman, happened to be passing in the corridor. She shut and opened her eyes, as though she were riding in an airplane that had just hit an air pocket.
Helen Soileau and I checked out a cruiser and drove the thirty miles down to Franklin, then
stopped by the sheriff’s department and got directions to Ruby Gravano’s, which turned out to be a one-story, weathered, late-Victorian frame house, with ventilated window shutters and high windows and a wide gallery hung with flower baskets. An oak tree that must have been two hundred years old grew in the side yard, a broken rope swing dangling in the dust. Ruby’s husband, Beeler Grissum, who was from north Georgia or South Carolina, sat on the steps, cracking peanuts and flicking them to a turkey in the yard. Two or three years ago, in a Murphy scam gone bad, a john had delivered a martial-arts kick into Beeler’s face that had broken his neck. Today his body had the contours of a sack of potatoes, his chin held erect by a leather and steel neck brace, so that his head looked like a separate part of his anatomy positioned inside a cage. His hair was dyed platinum, like a professional wrestler’s, combed straight back on his scalp. He rotated his upper torso as we approached the steps, a vague recognition swimming into his face.
“Sorry about your wife, Beeler,” I said.
He removed a peanut from the sack in his hand, then offered the sack to us.
“No, thanks,” I said. “The sheriff thinks maybe Ruby was thrown from a car.”
“He wasn’t there. But if that’s what he says,” Beeler said.
As I remembered him, he had been a carnival man before he was a pimp and had lived most of his life off the computer. His speech was flat, adenoidal, laconic, so lacking in joy or passion or remorse or emotion of any kind that the listener felt Beeler did not care enough about others or the world or even his own fate to lie.
“Two women have been murdered recently in Iberia Parish. Maybe Ruby’s death is connected to them,” I said.
He looked into space and seemed to think about my words. He scratched a place under his eye with one fingernail.
“It ain’t her death brought you here then. It’s the cases you ain’t been able to solve?” he said.
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said.
“Don’t matter. It’s my fault,” he said.
“I don’t follow you,” I said.
“We had a fight. She took off in my truck. Sometimes she’d go to a colored blues joint, sometimes to the casino on the reservation. She kept all her tips in a fruit jar. She had a thing for poker machines.”
“Was she involved with another man?” Helen asked.
“She was out of the life. She been a one-man woman since. Most ex-whores are. Don’t be talking about her like that,” he replied.
“Can you let us have a picture of your wife?” Helen asked.
“I reckon.”
He went into the house and returned with a photograph of Ruby and himself that was tucked with several others inside a gold-embossed Bible. He handed it to Helen. Ruby’s hair was full and black, but the gauntness of her face made her hair look like a wig on a mannequin.
“Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain’t gonna catch him,” he said.
“You want to explain that?” Helen said.
“I just did,” Beeler replied.
He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying goodbye.
That night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house. A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road.
“You looking for somebody?” I asked.