Flight of the Stone Angel (36 page)

“That mob was Malcolm’s work, not Babe’s.”

“The whole mob is accountable – that’s the law. For Christ’s sake, that’s even
Mallory’s
law!” Riker held his silence for a moment, calling back his temper.

“You’re right, Charles. Malcolm had to implicate every witness at that meeting, everyone who might’ve led the sheriff back to the letter, the blue letter. But even if some of them didn’t throw rocks, they all watched that woman die. They never moved to help her, they never told. There are no innocent people here.”

Riker walked to the window and pulled up the sash. The sheriff was leaning against his car in the street below. “Hey, Tom. Two minutes, okay?”

“Take your time.”

Riker closed the window again, and now he turned around to finish off Charles Butler.
But gently,
he cautioned himself.

“Oh, yeah, I think she did it. That’s why I backed up the sheriff on that bullshit confession. At the time, I was just so happy that Mallory didn’t take out the whole town.”

Oh, wait. She did take out Owltown. It was level ground now, wasn’t it? Ah, but most of the human casualties were only punctured and burned.

Charles only stared at him with sad eyes.

“What do you want from me?” Riker picked up his suitcase and set it near the door as a hint that Charles might move away from the room’s only exit. No good. The big man showed no signs of moving.

“I’m not gonna recant that statement, Charles. There’s no point in it. The sheriff doesn’t care who killed Babe Laurie. Nobody does.” No one except for himself and Charles. But Mallory was well out of it now. She was going to get away with murder.

“It wasn’t Mallory,” said Charles. “I know that for a fact – I’m not going on blind faith this time. Does it matter a bit more now?”

Riker felt something close to that weightless moment in an elevator when the contents of his stomach rose and fell. Because he had never known Charles to run a bluff, the detective was experiencing every cop’s waking nightmare. The outlaw act, that one step across the line, was about to come back on him. He would have been more comfortable with the premonition that his plane was going to crash.

“No, it doesn’t matter.” Riker was lying, of course. He had always been the victim’s paladin – until now. Loving Mallory had cost him a great deal. “Babe Laurie raped two kids that we know about. How many more? That murder was a public service.”

No, murder was never that. It was the worst crime. All his feelings for Mallory had been altered by it. He was sorry and sick at –

“Well, you only have Jimmy Simms’s statement to back that up,” said Charles. “You wrote it down as he was telling it, didn’t you? It must have been difficult to be coherent while he was crying.”

“Are you telling me I missed something?” It was the last question he wanted answered. Charles seemed to intuit this and kept his silence.

“Charles, why are you doing this to me?”

“I just wanted to be sure that
you
weren’t playing the blind man this time around. So you don’t want to know who killed Babe? It doesn’t matter? Fine.”

Charles turned to go.

“Wait. Who was it?”

“You can’t have it both ways, Riker. Either you care or you don’t. I’m surprised that you would even ask. Suppose it was the sheriff? You know, I rather like him. Oh, did I mention that he had motive, opportunity and no alibi? But I’m sure you’d be happy to excuse him too. Isn’t that one of the perks of your job – all your friends get away with murder?”

“The sheriff? Are you saying – ”

“I’m not saying who did it. I know – but you don’t care.”

“Who killed him, Charles?”

“It doesn’t matter – your very words.” He walked to the door and opened it wide.

“Don’t make me nuts. Who –?”

“Have a good flight home, Riker.”

The door was pulled shut.

Riker ceased to hear the birds anymore. He stood by the window, looking down on the sheriff’s car. Cops could not kill their suspects, not ever – that was Riker’s law. But now he finally believed in Mallory. His suspicions of the man waiting below were a lesser sickness and easier to live with.

Thank you, Charles.

Ira was asleep in a soft nest of white bandages and linen sheets. His mother sat by the bed, reading a magazine. Darlene Wooley was not wearing a suit today. A simple dark skirt and blouse accentuated the pallor of her skin, and Charles wondered if she had seen the sun even once in the past four days.

Darlene looked up at him and smiled. She folded back a page of the magazine to mark her place, then looked quickly to Ira, as though this rustle of paper could have disturbed his sleep. She motioned Charles to join her in the hall outside the room.

Softly, she pulled the door closed behind them, saying, “It’s his first day out of the intensive care unit. His doctor says he’s going to be just fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I have some good news for you. Let me buy you a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.”

As they walked down the corridor, he noted that Darlene did not fill out her clothes anymore, and her nails were bitten down to the quick and raw.

“You know,” said Darlene, “when he’s awake, he lets me hold his hand. I’m sure he still hates to be touched. I think it’s sort of like he’s giving me a present.”

Her fingers went mechanically to her mouth. Suddenly self-conscious of the ragged nails, she drove both her hands deep into the pockets of her skirt. “When Ira was little, he used to bring me flowers from Cass’s garden. I always thought she made him do that, maybe as part of his therapy. But Mallory said no. When she came by last night, she told me Ira always asked Cass if he could pick flowers for his mother.”

Charles thought that was a beautiful story. And if Mallory had made it up, it was even better.

The cafeteria was noisy with the rush of feet and fifty conversations, clattering dishes and silverware. The staff and visitors were all deep in their own preoccupations and taking little notice of Charles and his pale companion.

Darlene’s skin was sickly in this brighter fluorescent lighting. He seated her at the nearest table. If she did not sit down, and soon, she might fall. When had this woman slept last?

“You wait here. I’ll get the coffee.”

He meant to bring her only that cup of coffee, all that she had wanted, but while he was in line with the other patrons, he also loaded down the tray with nutritious green vegetables, and suspicious gray meat swimming in dishwater gravy. The
piece de resistance
was a dry-looking slice of chocolate cake encased in a cellophane bag. It was his intention to fatten her up.

When he set the tray down in front of her, she laughed.

Well, that was an improvement.

As he sat down, he handed her the letter of introduction from the Dallheim Project. She read in silence, and then the paper fell from her hands. “They want him! They want Ira!”

“Oh, yes. Now they’re very excited about him. Eat something. And it’s not just the multiple talents. I think it was Ira’s star that finally won them over.”

He had badgered the project director for days with stories gleaned from Betty, Mallory and Augusta, until Darlene’s son had become a person instead of an application number. Ira had jumped to first place on the long waiting list.

“They’ll take him as soon as he’s well enough to travel to New Orleans. You won’t be allowed to visit him for the first three months. But later, you’ll be able to bring him home on the weekends.”

“I understand. You really think he has a chance of making it on his own?”

“Thanks to you. If you hadn’t kept up his therapy, he’d be a lost cause by now. Please eat something. It might take years of work, but in time, he
will
be able to survive outside of a care facility.”

“So if anything should happen to me – ”

“He won’t go to a state institution.”

She was happy for a few moments, even outglowing the brilliant overhead lights. Then something else must have occurred to her, for her eyes were saddened now. Perhaps she was grieving over something that had not happened yet. He could make a shrewd guess at what that might be. “That’s good – wonderful.” She was more subdued now. “There’s something I have to do. I only needed – ”

“Try the meat, Darlene. I’m just wildly curious to find out what species it is.”

She picked up the knife and fork and went through the motions of cutting the meat. Losing the last of her energy now, the knife and fork were laid down in the thin gravy. “Not too appetizing, is it? Sorry.”

“I need to talk to the sheriff,” she said. “There’s something – ”

“Did you hear the sheriff’s theory that Fred Laurie killed Babe?”

“Fred didn’t do it.” Her hand upset the coffee cup, and a stream of brown liquid ran across the table.

“I know.” Charles pulled napkins from the metal dispenser at the center of the table and mopped up the spilled coffee. “But, you see, everyone really likes this theory. So it might be difficult to force your confession on the sheriff. Try the vegetables.”

“You knew.” She raked one hand through her hair, fingers thin as claws. “I wanted to tell Tom. I wanted to tell him every day. I don’t sleep at night. I keep hearing that rock hit Babe’s skull.”

“You don’t have to tell me any of this.”

“But I do,” she said, a bit too loud. The people at the next table turned to look at her. Darlene lowered her head. “I want to.” Her voice was a whisper now. “I have to talk to somebody.” She worked her wedding ring up and down her finger. “I saw Babe leave the car at the gas station. He was heading for the bridge over Upland Bayou. I went back after him while the doctors were working on my boy. But it’s not what you think, not because of what he did to Ira’s hands.” Her ring was so loose now, so little flesh on the bone. Charles stared at his reflection in the metal napkin dispenser. He couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. She was in so much pain as she described the violence on the road to Cass Shelley’s house.

“I didn’t know if I’d killed him or not. I screamed when I saw all the blood, and I ran for the car. I was sure someone must have heard me or seen me. I left him lying there in the road and went back to the hospital to wait for the sheriff. I was so sure that any minute Tom would walk in the door and arrest me. When the doctor came to the waiting room to talk to me, he didn’t notice that there was more blood on my suit –

“Babe’s blood splattered over Ira’s.”

She buried her face in her hands, and Charles stared at her wounded fingertips.

“Eat something.” This was what his mother had always said to him when he had been through another day of torture among normal children with average-size noses and intelligence. Food conveyed nurture and caring, and it was all he could think of to comfort her.

Darlene picked up her fork and absently stirred the peas into the cranberry sauce. “I was half crazy wondering what would happen to my boy when I went to prison.” The peas swirled round and round in the red sauce, faster and faster. “Every single day, I thought Tom would arrest me. I even tried to tell him once – when I thought I couldn’t stand it another minute.”

The fork slipped and the peas scattered, some to the floor, and one flew to the next table. “But I didn’t tell. Who would have looked after Ira?”

Two people seated nearby stared at the single pea and a dot of cranberry sauce at the center of their table.

Darlene abandoned the vegetables. Peas were too difficult. She picked up the cellophane package with the cake inside. “How did you know, Charles?”

“This is the hospital where Cass ordered Ira’s blood tests. When you brought him in with his broken hands, a red flag showed up on the computer for the previous entry – when Ira was only six. The doctor would have asked you if he’d completed the treatment for syphilis. The computer entry was sparse and he would have wanted a patient history – standard procedure.”

“It was the desk nurse, not a doctor.” Her hands worked over the cake wrapper, trying to tear it open and failing to find the weakness in the cellophane seal. “I didn’t know what that woman was talking about. I said it was a mistake. Ira had been tested for hepatitis that year, not
syphilis.”

Charles wondered if it would be rude to assist Darlene with the cake wrapper, to imply that she couldn’t –

“Well, it made no damn sense at all. So the nurse took me down to the basement where they stored the old health department files for St. Jude Parish.”

The cake wrapper was impenetrable. She stabbed it with one finger, forgetting she had no nails left to tear it. “We found one file to match Ira’s computer number. There were no names, only dates and statistics for tests on a boy of six – Ira – another boy thirteen, and a nineteen-year-old. The file clerk told the nurse they were all in that same folder because the doctor – Cass Shelley – was backtracking the infection.”

“Jimmy Simms was the thirteen-year-old.”

“I guessed that. And Babe had turned nineteen that year. Everybody in town knew about his syphilis party. It was a legend. And then there was the faith-healing. Ira was never the same after that. So I thought he’d raped my boy. What was I supposed to think? And he did smash Ira’s hands. I had good reason to believe it, didn’t I?”

“You don’t seem quite so sure of it now.”

“After I killed him…” Not wanting to meet his eyes, she stared down at the insoluble problem of the cellophane bag. “I mean, later that night, I realized my husband must have known about Ira’s syphilis. They have to notify the parents, don’t they? And that would’ve explained his quarreling with Cass. Maybe she accused him of raping his own son.”