“Will you please say it?”
“Please, suh,” she said, her eyes glistening.
“You’re not making any sense, woman,” Abelard said. “To damnation with all of you. Get us out of here. I’m sick of this.”
There was nothing for it. We had taken on the roles of anachronisms making shrill noises on a stage set in front of an empty theater. We all stood motionless in the parking lot, the trees swelling and bending, our shadows trembling on the asphalt because the streetlamps were vibrating in the wind, none of us speaking, the photos of the dead girls clenched in my hand. But before leaving, I wanted to write my signature on someone’s forehead, if for no other reason than pride.
“What’s your name?” I said to the man with the bandaged hand.
“Gus,” he replied.
“Gus what?”
?
?Fowler.”
“You don’t hide your feelings very well, Mr. Fowler. You were one of the dudes down at the river. You’re also a nickel-and-dime fuckup who probably couldn’t burn shit barrels without a diagram. Here’s your flash for the day: Your mutilated hand was a first installment. I’ll be talking to you down the track.” I gave him the thumbs-up sign and winked at him.
Then Clete and I drove away in his Caddy, down old Pinhook Road under a canopy of live oaks that had been planted by slaves, the moon racing through the branches. Clete was steering recklessly with one hand, his big chest rising and falling, his face white around the eyes. “We gave it up too soon,” he said. “You had the old man in a corner. Why’d you let up?”
I remained silent, listening to the tires whirring on the asphalt.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“What you’re doing. Don’t stonewall me, Dave.”
“The tent was burning down.”
“Because I called the guy a greaseball?”
“The cops in Jeff Davis found skin tissue and bloody rags on the road by the shoot-out. We’re going to get a DNA sample from this guy Fowler. If we’d gotten into it with either him or the Hispanic guy, we’d have been in custody ourselves.”
“Fowler will be on a plane by midnight.”
Maybe Clete was right, but I was too tired to care. All I wanted to do was go home and fall asleep and not think anymore about the Abelards and the faces of the girls whose photos were rolled inside the manila folder in my coat pocket. I understood Clete’s disappointment and anger, but I wasn’t up to dealing with it. The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him. We weren’t going to bring the Abelards down with physical force or intimidation. I was beginning to believe that the photos of the dead girls and all my case notes and faxes and autopsy forms and Internet printouts would eventually find their way into a cold-case file and end up behind a locked door in a storage room, one that nobody entered without a sense of guilt and failure.
I had no idea I would receive a phone call from someone whose importance in the investigation I had treated in a cavalier fashion, maybe because of a racial or cultural bias of my own. In the era in which I was raised, people of color never gave up the secrets of their white employers. Their silence had nothing to do with loyalty, either. It was based on fear.
Early Sunday morning I heard the phone ring and Alafair pick up in the kitchen. “You’re where? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well,” she said. “My father is right here. I’m sure he’ll be able to help. No, it’s not too early. It’s good to hear from you. Hang on.”
She handed the receiver to me and silently formed the words “Miss Jewel” with her mouth.
CHAPTER
21
THE TREMOLO IN Jewel’s voice was of the subdued kind that I always associated with people whose sleeplessness and worry and uncertainty had left them on a desolate beach. “I don’t want to be saying these t’ings, Mr. Dave, but when you showed us those pictures, I got sick inside, and I was hoping everyt’ing would get set straight then and there, but it didn’t, and that’s why I’m calling you.”
“Set straight where?” I said.
“There, outside the banquet room in the Oil Center. Wit’ the wind blowing and the shadows trembling on the concrete and all of us just standing there when that lie got tole.”
“Which lie?”
“I was looking down at those girls’ faces in the photographs when Mr. Timothy said what he said, and I didn’t believe that it was him talking, ’cause Mr. Timothy has got lots of faults, but lying isn’t one of them. Now his sin has become mine, ’cause I didn’t speak up. I waited for him to do it, but he didn’t.”