All the Devil's Creatures (22 page)

Now Tasha sat up. Covering her breasts with the sheet, she looked down at Bobby. “Does he have any evidence of this?”

“The sheriff pressed him on that. Waltz doesn’t have anything he’s willing to give us yet, but he’s digging into it on his own. He has a private investigator—we met them both last week. The sheriff told him he couldn’t reopen the investigation without some hard evidence, that it’s in the DA’s hands—frankly it’s just too political. Waltz said he understood and would let us know anything he finds out.” He considered. “Seastrunk’s kind of taken a shine to this Waltz fella.”

“Great.” She leaned back.

“So he does want me to interview the twins one more time on Monday—just act like we’re tying up a loose end or two, you know? See if I can glean anything. I guess you’ll want to be there?”

“Of course I’ll want to be there.” She sighed. “Hargrave’s not going to like this. Not to mention Robert Duchamp.”

“Well,” Bobby said, sitting up and preparing to get dressed. “None of us work for the Speaker.”

“In my shop, we all work for the Speaker.”

•

Wayne sobbed throughout the interview. Duane sat smirking with arms crossed over his chest. They wore matching orange jumpsuits, but Wayne’s shaved head and Duane’s lanky hair set them apart. Their lawyer sat between them.

The public defender could have objected to this interview but did not. Rumpled, probably hung over, working only for the meager fee the county provided, he seemed disinterested in his clients’ defense.

Bobby let Tasha begin. Though she had told him she did not want to start negotiating with the Tatum twins until after she had performed some legal maneuvering in front of the judge, a discussion of the DNA evidence now would offer a fine pretext to allow Bobby to see if the twins would reveal anything giving credence to Geoff Waltz’s suspicions.

“We have the DNA results. It matches your clients’. Do y’all care to offer an explanation before we get to the jury?”

The lawyer glanced over at Duane, who said: “I don’t know nothing about how that stuff got there.”

Then he moved his gaze to Wayne, who shook his head and said, “Me neither.”

“Well, one or both of you raped and killed that girl. The other’s an accessory at least. Duane, who’s who?”

“I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Wayne?”

He sobbed louder now. “Me neither.”

“The only difference is, the accessory will get life in prison, the killer will get death.” Tasha looked at the distraught twin. “Wayne, are you willing to let your brother claim he was the accessory? That means you would die.”

Wayne’s sobs had turned to full cries—almost like his wailing on the night Bobby had brought him in. He shook his head back and forth over and over and mumbled
no, no, no, no, no
. Tasha had warned Bobby that neither twin was liable to say anything, even in light of the DNA evidence, as long as they were in the same room together, with the same counsel representing them.

Duane said, “Shut up, Wayne.”

The lawyer said, “Ms. Carter, we could keep going like this all day—”

“Of course, all this is assuming the jury doesn’t decide y’all were both there that night. Maybe you both raped her. Nailed her to that tree. Seems like a job for two—”

“At least two,” Bobby said.

“It’s a reasonable conclusion for the jury to reach—”

“
No No No No No
—”

“Shut up, Wayne.”

“—and then y’all would both be put to death, and all this hemming and hawing—”

“Ms. Carter, I think this interview is over.”

“—wouldn’t have done either one of you a lick of good.”

“
NO NO NO
—”

Duane leapt from his seat and around his lawyer as fast as his shackled legs would allow and leaned down and his lips almost touched his brother’s ear as Wayne rocked back and forth in time with his cries. “
I SAID SHUT UP DON’T BE A FUCKING MORON!
”

“
NO NO NO JIMMY LEE IT WAS JIMMY LEE’S IDEA!
”

The lawyer rose and pushed the brothers apart and glared down at Tasha and Bobby. “I said, this interview’s over.”

But it was enough, Bobby thought.

•

Bobby’s fall from the nation’s good graces came as suddenly as his rise to hero-of-the-week.

After a day figuring out who “Jimmy Lee” might be, his mind spinning with the possibility of a grand conspiracy, Bobby tried to make his way to the sheriff’s office. But the cable news people had continued their occupation of the town, along with a handful of print reporters. When they saw his uniform, they pounced. The glare of the sun blinding him, Bobby squinted at the cameras and the microphones. They all shouted questions at once. He felt disoriented. Then, without thought, he shouted an answer back.

“We don’t even know this was a hate crime, really. And if it was, It probably wasn’t safe for a girl like that to be out on the lake by herself in the first place.”

Silence from the scrum. Maybe a faint gasp or two. Bobby heard a crow overhead, and felt his face redden.

Then a question from a handsome woman representing a national magazine: “Deputy, can you elaborate?”

That broke the ice. The questions came on again like automatic rifle fire. Sinister now. Accusatory.

“How could Dalia Bordelon’s murder not have been a hate crime?”

“And are you implying that the victim brought the crime on herself?”

The reporters multiplied and spread around and crowded Bobby like carnivorous fish. The sun hurt his eyes, and he was hungry. He could see his cruiser just fifty yards away in the annex parking lot.

“I’m implying no such thing,” he said. He heard himself begin to sputter but could not stop. “There’s a lot going on down at the lake. Polluted refinery. A murder down in New Orleans that might be linked to this one.”

Camera equipment and microphones lurched for his face like insectoid robots. Their child-like handlers from the cable shows shouted questions now in a cacophonous roar.

One voice penetrated: “Are you saying you’re sympathetic to the suspects’ defense?”

“I’m not sympathetic to anything.”

“Not even to Dalia Bordelon?”

They piled on:
You’re saying race might not have been the motivating factor? Will the Tatum brothers be prosecuted for a hate crime? What did you mean by “a girl like that”—are you referring to the victim’s race? Do you believe Dalia Bordelon had it coming?

He shoved the toothy blow-dried plasticine man-child who shouted the last—right in his ear and close enough that Bobby’s empty stomach lurched at the smell of his mentholated breath—and made it to his car.

•

With a rising unease, lurching toward anger, Sheriff Seastrunk watched the little television set in his office.

The anchor sat in a distant studio: “Deputy Bobby Henderson, credited with breaking the case in the gruesome lynching of Dalia Bordelon, now seems to be siding with the killers’ defense team—yes, they killed her, but were they acting alone and of their own accord? And was race really the motivating factor? At least one civil rights leader thinks the investigators’ own motives should be questioned.”

The scene flashed to a close-up of Reverend Carter: “Certainly and sadly, at the very least, the sheriff’s deputy is complicit in the evil by denying it. This is consistent with a heinous plan to deny full justice to Ms. Bordelon by removing the added legal sanctions provided by the hate crimes statute. We must see a full investigation of the Sheriff’s Department.”

“Complicit in evil? It certainly seemed so to our own correspondent on the scene.” The camera cut back to Bobby shoving the celebrity newsman followed by a cut to the assaulted newsman himself: “He seemed so full of hate and rage; I feared for my safety. Back to you, Jill.”

The sheriff muted the television. He had summoned his deputy. He stared out his window until he heard him arrive.

“Sheriff, I—”

Seastrunk swung around in his chair. “Dammit, boy. What did I tell you?
What did I tell you?
”

“To be careful. I know it. But man, sir, they ganged up on me.”

“You really opened up a shit storm here, son.”

“I know it.”

Outside, a group of protestors had left the courthouse lawn to picket in front of the sheriff’s office. They demanded Bobby’s ouster. They demanded racial justice. They carried signs portraying Seastrunk as a closet Klansman. They chanted slogans to the television cameras to encapsulate the sheriff and his deputy as beings the nation could recognize and revile.

“You know you’re off the case, Bobby.”

“Now come on, Sheriff. I brought in the Tatum twins in the first place. If there’s really more to this, I deserve to be the one—”

“You don’t deserve a rag to take to the outhouse. And that’s all there is to it.”

Bobby breathed and rubbed his face. “Sheriff, sir, you and I sat in here and talked to that Dallas lawyer, Waltz, on the phone just the other day. You remember as well as I do. He said somebody’s killed Dalia Bordelon’s boss—that Eileen Kim, who we interviewed barely a week ago right here in this office. And Kim told him that Dalia feared for her life because of something she uncovered through her research at the lake—something related to that old refinery.”

Seastrunk fought to contain his anger as he leveled his gaze at his deputy. “Bobby, none of that matters now. The Tatum boys are in jail. Their DNA was all over the place. You heard the Reverend—hell, you can look outside. If we do anything that the media could conceive as standing in the way of the prosecution of those dang ugly twins, we’re as cooked as a Christmas hen.”

“Well, what about the interview yesterday? Wayne cracking for second before his brother and his lawyer shut him up. I think I know who he meant by Jimmy Lee—”

“I don’t care what you think you know—”

“Jimmy Lee Monroe. He’s a no-good loser that lives by himself on the edge of town. I stopped him for a DUI once. Not from around here—ex-army stationed out of Shreveport. Dishonorable discharge.”

“Bobby, I said you’re off the case.”

“And now Jimmy Lee’s not around, seems to have skipped town—”

“I’ll interview Jimmy Lee Monroe when he surfaces, but there’s nothing linking him to the murder except the crying word Wayne Tatum. So Bobby—the case is closed as far as we’re concerned. And that’s another thing: I’ve got Hargrave coming down on me so hard I can hardly get a breath. He knows all about our call from Waltz, all about the damn private eye. If I find out you blabbed to that Carter girl—”

“Now Sheriff, since when are we keeping secrets—”

“Your safest bet is to stop talking right now, son. And let me tell you something else: there’s a federal hate crime law on the books. That means the FBI can assert jurisdiction over this case any time they want. Congress passed that law because they didn’t trust redneck law enforcement like you—don’t you dare smirk at me; yes, like you, Bobby; that’s how they see you—to go after these things. The last thing we need is for the feds to swoop in here. And one more thing you might be too young or too stupid to understand: the wider world has never believed Jim Crow is really, fully dead down here. They’re all watching this county on TV. We do a thousand things right and one thing wrong, what do you think they’ll notice? Not only that, any slip-up only confirms the worst fears of the conspiracy fringe among the local black folk. Those people will only stick with me so far.”

Bobby put his hands in his pockets and looked down at Seastrunk, still sitting in his big leather desk chair, glaring up at him. “Now I think I get it, Sheriff.
Those people?
They’re all just votes to you. You know there aren’t enough yellow dog Democrats left among whites anymore. If you lose the black vote, you’re out of office.”

Seastrunk stood and leaned forward on his desk so that his face was inches from Bobby’s. He narrowed his gray eyes to slits, and Bobby could smell his musk. “Don’t you even think about trying to turn this around on me, deputy. You are one idiot word away from turning in your badge and gun. You are going to walk out that door and take the rest of the week off. When you come back, your tail better be tucked so far between your legs it tickles your nose.”

•

The next day, Bobby looked up from a cooler of live bait crickets outside the filling station on the lake highway to see Tasha Carter lifting the lever on one of the antiquated gas pumps. He walked over.

“Hidy, Tasha.”

“Bobby.” She looked surprised and a little wary. “What are you doing here? Why are you out of uniform?”

“Got the day off. Figured I’d go fishing with my dad this evening.”

“Day off? Why?”

“I guess Seastrunk and I had some words.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll bet I know what about.”

Bobby reached to take the gas pump nozzle from her. “Here. You’re all dressed up.”

Tasha jerked away. “I got it.” She inserted the nozzle into her tank and then turned back at Bobby with a look of consternation and impatience, as if she were still an overworked associate in a big city law firm. As if she could not spare him even the three minutes it would take her to pump the gas.

Bobby said, “It’ll blow over.”

“Bobby, I don’t think you appreciate how serious this is. To suggest the victim may have had it coming …”

“Come on, Tasha. Why does everyone keep saying that? That’s not what I meant. And anyway, you heard Wayne Tatum. We need to find Jimmy Lee Monroe.”

Tasha shook her head. “You don’t get it. What you said … it’s about people in charge not caring about crimes like this. It’s about history. About when white racists could murder blacks with abandon and get away with it.”

“You know it’s not like that anymore. If it ever was.”

Tasha looked at him as if he had just spat into her face. Or her father’s face. Her eyes clouded with anger. “It was. It was like that, Bobby. And don’t you dare suggest otherwise, or you’re no better no better than the rest of them.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Like the rest of
who
?”

The pump clicked off and Tasha looked down at the nozzle. She stood hunched and tense. Then she turned on Bobby, yanking the nozzle free and gesturing with it and dribbling gasoline on his shoes.