Ancient of Days (32 page)

Apparently, Craig had pulled the ladder clear of the rampway roof, driven out of the lot, and then reversed directions in an attempt to back over his habiline pursuer. Adam had leapt into the truck, Craig had made the GM fishtail to shake him out, and Bilker had lumbered out of Abraxas in time to fire his Ruger .357 magnum through the pickup’s open window into Craig’s head. Puddicombe had been so focused on bucking Adam out of the truck that he had not even seen Bilker. As a result, his determination to leave tire tracks on Adam had proved fatal . . . for him.

I was not sorry. I was relieved.

Bilker and I stepped through the fallen ladder’s rungs and joined Adam in the middle of the lot. I held Paulie out to him. Adam set his shoes down, in a puddle that half-submerged them, and took the child, holding T. P. with his hands under his back so he could nuzzle his son’s bloated belly and mumble comfort into his death-stopped ears.

Bilker approached the truck and tumbled the killer from the driver’s seat. With a sucking thud, his corpse sprawled onto the ebony pavement, most of its face gone. He was unrecognizable as anything but an adult male in stained painter’s coveralls. Where had the malevolent energy of his life just fled? Bilker kicked the corpse three or four times, each kick more vicious than the last.

“Don’t,” Adam said. “For him, it is over.”

Bitterly, Bilker said, “It ain’t over for you and Mrs. Montaraz, or for me. We’ll be livin’ with the fuckin’ fallout from this for the rest of our lives.”

Still holding his dead son, Adam walked over to Bilker and looked him full in the face. “I don’t think so. We will not forget, but later our shroud of grief will unravel, and we will be as good as new again.” Bilker and I gaped at Adam. Bilker turned and spat into a puddle, but we both understood there was something willful about Adam’s saintly serenity. It was too soon for forgiveness and reconciliation, too soon to offer up T. P.’s innocent body as a sacrifice to human understanding. Bilker and I were appalled. We had angers and hatreds to be worked out, sorrows and sufferings from which to distill a thin, bittersweet balm. Magnanimity, right now, was an emotional non sequitur.

“I’ll get the car,” I said. But Bilker and Adam walked with me, and we drove back to Hurt Street without saying another word.

Fingerprints identified the man shot by Bilker as Craig Raymond Puddicombe. In the dead man’s wallet were two driver’s licenses, both of them false. One identified him as Teavers, Elvis Lamar. He’d taken great care to use this alias and the Montaraz address near Inman Park when he did not wish to be traced to his rental property, a frame house on the southeastern arc of I-285. The other driver’s license gave his name as Burdette, Gregory R. It pinpointed the location of his house off the perimeter expressway. As Greg Burdette, Craig had lived in Atlanta for nearly eight months, working in a collateral branch of the profession practiced by Adam and RuthClaire. Like them, he was a painter. Unlike them, he did houses, garages, and signboards. He worked fairly regularly, but had to scratch for jobs to stay ahead of his debts.

For two reasons, the FBI let Special Agent Niedrach and his GBI colleagues conclude the kidnapping investigation. First, Niedrach and Davison had handled the Klan episode in Beulah Fork at the end of last summer; and, second, Craig Puddicombe and his accomplice-victim had never taken Tiny Paul out of the Greater Atlanta area.

Therefore, local agents interviewed the woman who had rented “Greg Burdette” his house, his most frequent fellow painters, and some of the contractors and home owners who had hired him. Their assessment was that Burdette lived quietly and frugally, never talked about his past, never shirked on a job, and tackled even the dull business of caulking a rain gutter as if it were a signal step in a fiscal game plan that would one day free him of the need to paint houses. Everyone who had known him, in fact, assumed that his highest purpose in life was to become rich. Although he never flaunted this ambition, he took care of his money, made his bids competitive without underselling himself, and insisted on payment in full before leaving the premises of any completed job. He set forth this condition at the outset of every enterprise, and his reputation as a conscientious workman—one who’d clean rain gutters, scrape away old paint, apply reliable primers, and so on—rarely failed to win his employers’ agreement.

His Achilles heel, if he had one, was an inability to work with blacks. He refused to do so. Blacks never appeared on any of the painting crews he hired out to or put together himself. Two or three times, at least, he had passed up jobs because a contractor had wanted him to share the work with a black painter. Similarly, he painted the home of a black only if he could work with a crew consisting solely of whites. This seldom happened. Oddly, though, his refusal to work with blacks never led him to badmouth them. Stereotypical comments about intelligence levels, food stamps, welfare Cadillacs, and illegitimate babies never passed his lips. He shut down on the subject of blacks altogether, visibly holding himself in, as if struggling to obey the homely injunction, “
If you can’t say anything good about someone, don’t say
,” etc., but the suppressed hostility of this effort tightened his jaw and set his eyes jitterbugging. In one way, it was funny. In another, it was frightening.

One former associate remembered that Greg strongly approved of the Fulton County DA’s crusade against pornography. Massage parlors, adult bookstores, and adult theaters disgusted him. He would cuss a blue streak with no qualm or discernible sense that some people might find such language as offensive as he found photographs of naked people. In hot weather, he worked in denim cutoffs and tennis shoes, shirtless and proud of it—but, given a context marginally interpretable as erotic, bare skin outraged him. Once, during a lunch break, he had yanked a men’s magazine from a seventeen-year-old apprentice who had held up the foldout for his approval. “This is shit you’re lookin’ at!” he had raged.

The house on I-285 yielded even more information. As Greg Burdette, Craig had been careful not to subscribe to any publications that state or federal law-enforcement agencies might classify as racist or provocatively right-wing. But he had bought them from newsstands, where possible, and had taken pains not to visit the same newsstands often enough to give their operators any real grasp of his reading habits. These were magazines devoted to firearms, post-nuclear-holocaust survival, legal redress for white “victims” of affirmative-action laws, and creationism. Along with these magazines, agents had found, stuffed in drawers, circulars announcing Klan meetings and pamphlets on many topics from ultraconservative politicians. Also, Craig had possessed a small arsenal of unregistered handguns, most with serial numbers metal-rasped or sandpapered away. A bulletin board in his bedroom displayed clippings from the Atlanta newspapers about racial conflict and crimes perpetrated by blacks. Prominent among these clippings was one recounting the acquittal of some Klansmen in a Greensboro, North Carolina, murder trial. Craig had marked every word in the headline with a red highlighter.

Also in the house: items suggesting that Nancy Teavers had lived there with him at least three months—clothing, toilet articles, mementoes of her marriage to Craig’s dead friend, E. L. In fact, the arrangement of sleeping quarters in the little house—Nancy occupying a room that Craig had once set aside as a business office—strongly suggested that they’d treated each other as brother and sister. The punk wardrobe that Nancy had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances, the GBI agents discovered not in Nancy’s bedroom but in a steamer trunk at the foot of Craig’s bed. Perhaps he had had a fetishistic fascination with such items. The clothes in Nancy’s “closet,” a cardboard chifforobe purchased from a long-defunct Forest Park dry cleaners, had about them a small-town conventionality totally at odds with the shabby glitter of the getup in the trunk. Moreover, Nancy had filled her bedroom with decorative pillows, stuffed animals, even a few dolls. The Little People doll that Craig had hung up in Abraxas beside T. P. had been Nancy’s. Her late husband had given it to her for Christmas over three years ago. An interview with Nancy’s mother revealed that, in the privacy of her mobile home in Beulah Fork, the young woman had behaved around that fabric-sculpture infant—Bonnie Laurel—as if it were a living baby. More than anything, Nancy’s mother told the GBI interviewer, her daughter had wanted to bear her own child. She and E. L. had just about decided to take the plunge when . . . but if you knew E. L.’s fate, those words constituted an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Craig had strangled Nancy in the little house off I-285. The
Newsweek
cover that had caused him to flip out, a betrayal of his every hate-handicapped concept of decency, had probably merely surprised Nancy, without leading her to believe that only the child’s murder would properly expiate and punish the parents’ flagrant sin. She had resisted Craig’s arguments to kill Paulie. Her resistance had further outraged him. He had attacked her. Signs of the struggle marked the house and her body: overturned chairs, broken dishes, a curtain pulled off its rod. The coroner’s report on Nancy mentioned not only contusions about her throat, but also deep bites on her breasts and upper arms, and her severely cracked ribs. She was small, though, and Craig had overpowered her—after their initial chase and scuffle—with ease. Afterward, he had dressed her in the orangutan outfit, which he’d rented shortly before or shortly after her murder. Her installation in the sanctuary of the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center had then had to await the cover of darkness.

As for Tiny Paul . . . Is there any need to continue? The reader can imagine the details of the child’s execution far more easily than I can write them.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, the child’s body was shipped to a crematorium in Macon. On Wednesday, his ashes were returned to the Montarazes in an ornate funerary urn. They had decided together on this means of disposing of the corpse, and, upon the recovery of Tiny Paul’s ashes, they observed a private memorial service in their own home. Bilker Moody attended these rites, but Caroline Hanna and I did not because Adam had asked me to run an errand in Beulah Fork—to visit Craig’s family and to invite his mother to bury Craig beside T. P.’s ashes in a state-approved plot of my pecan grove on Paradise Farm. It was an errand I might not have accomplished without Caroline along for moral support.
Morale
support, to use Adam’s own coinage.

Public reaction to Tiny Paul’s murder was prolonged, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally fulsome, and always wearying. The President sent a wire, as did other prominent heads of state, including the Pope. A triumvirate of East African leaders released a joint communiqué offering the Montarazes citizenship in their countries and free transportation “home.” A. P. Blair, the Zarakali paleoanthropologist, sent a two-page handwritten letter of commiseration and belated apology, but neither RuthClaire nor Adam could deduce from his self-referential prose the specific injustice for which he was apologizing. A host of network commentators and TV evangelists delivered eulogies. Every major daily newspaper in the country ran an editorial. In Atlanta, by special gubernatorial dispensation, the flags on the capitol grounds were flown at half-mast. Even more impressive, a procession of people clad in crepe marched in triple columns through Inman park to the mournful music of drums, fifes, and bagpipes. In Beulah Fork, I closed the West Bank for the remaining five days of our work week.

Georgia Highway Patrolmen directed traffic. Uninvited out-of-towners they sent back to the interstate. Relatives, friends, and invited locals, they checked through the front gates of Paradise Farm. They also saw to it that those who could not park their vehicles inside the walls pulled them safely off the two-lane connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork.

Through the window of the upstairs bedroom we’d shared, Caroline estimated that nearly every inhabitant of Beulah Fork had showed up—nothing like a funeral to draw people together and nothing like a double funeral for a killer and his final victim to swell the crowd a hundredfold. My parched front lawn swarmed with would-be mourners. Most women wore Sunday dresses or tailored Sunday suits. Most men, ties knotted beneath their Adam’s apples like tourniquets, sported linen or seersucker jackets. A gay solemnity informed their movements. Some children with scrubbed faces clung to the adults’ hands. Other children, more eager, darted through the maundering crowd to find good places in the pecan grove from which to watch the ceremony.

“Thank God we don’t have to feed this bunch,” Caroline said.

Standing at a mirror trying to put a Windsor knot in a new tie, I grunted.

Fifteen security guards roamed the grounds, while a sixteenth had his vantage on the widow’s-walk just above the room that Caroline and I were in. The Montarazes and I were sharing the cost of the guards, RuthClaire and Adam because the FBI had told them that most of their ransom money would be recovered, I because I hoped to keep a few of the rowdier mourners out of my flowerbeds and shrubbery.

Caroline kept tabs on the number of mourners here for Craig Puddicombe and for Tiny Paul. So far, she said, the
latter
group seemed to have the upper hand. If any active Klan members had come, they’d had either the tact or the caution to leave their sheets on their beds and their dunce caps on high closet shelves. Besides, a few of those coming to pay their respects to young Puddicombe surely had no Klan affiliation at all.

“Have you seen Craig’s mother?”

“Bilker met her at the gate and took her around back fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She’s fine.”

“Does she know Bilker shot her son?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not.”

Beyond the gate, Caroline saw vans belonging to the Atlanta, Columbus, and Tocqueville newspapers, and three or four TV news vans too. I had asked the highway patrol to keep them from entering. I had also ordered my security people to apprehend any intruders and return them to the gate. Paradise Farm was private property, today’s ceremony was to benefit family and guests, and reporters in their capacity as reporters were not welcome. If they chose to ignore these fiats, the Montarazes would sue them for invasion of privacy while I pressed charges for unlawful trespass.