Hunting Season (24 page)

Not so with Thorton, Lundstrom and Crowley. Their poker evening was meticulously scripted. The three of them had been up to something that night, but as yet, there was nothing to indicate it had been the killing of Doyce Barnette. Try as she might, Anna's imagination—or her stomach—was not strong enough to picture the timid purveyor of Army surplus goods, the practical-joking scrap metal dealer and this hard-bodied bass fisherman in a homosexual orgy with bondage trappings.

It was more conceivable that they'd gone to Jackson to frequent the titty bars and wanted to keep it from their local church vestry. Or, in Crowley's case, his wife.

Eventually the investigation might turn up a fact that could be used as a pry bar to leverage one of them out of their story. So far it hadn't, and both Anna and Clintus realized they would get nothing worthwhile from Martin Crowley.

They were winding it up with the usual handing out of business cards to be used if anything was suddenly remembered, when the door opened on a gust of rain-laden wind and female energy. Mrs. Martin Crowley was home.

"Ooh-ee! A gully-washer. I liked to drown just getting from the car to the door. I must look like a drowned rat." She took off her coat, exposing a trim body clad in tights and a black miniskirt hugging a nicely shaped behind. Giving the coat a shake, she spattered them with icy droplets. "Can't keep big hair on a day like this. Mine must be flat as a squashed cockroach. And I like it big. If it doesn't touch the roof of the car when you sit in the driver's seat, then you just aren't half trying." She tossed the coat over the arm of a chair and crossed behind the Barcalounger to plant a kiss on her husband's head, leaving traces of hot-pink lipstick on his yellow hair. "Hi, killer, why didn't you tell me you were entertaining today. I'd've swamped the place out. Hah!" she smiled into Anna's eyes, and Anna found herself smiling back. "Like I'd've really done it. I just say that so's you all will think my mamma raised me right."

Anna laughed. Crowley's wife was an irresistible rebel force, embracing all that was southern, reveling in it, revering it and laughing at it in the same breath. Anna wished she'd met her under circumstances other than the investigation of her husband for suspected homicide. By the way she'd kissed "killer" it was a good bet the Mrs. would have another trait of southern women: fierce loyalty and a willingness to defend her man tooth and lacquered acrylic nail.

"Isn't this a picture of southern hospitality," she said, perching on the arm of Martin's chair, ruffling his hair and exposing a lot of attractive leg. "Martin here in his pjs sipping hot coffee while y'all faint away from lack of something to drink. What can I fix you? Coffee, tea? We got bourbon if you're not Baptist. If you are, we never touch the stuff."

Clintus was smiling. Anna laughed aloud and was sorely tempted to take her up on her offer for the simple reason Mrs. Crowley was a woman with whom Anna wouldn't mind hoisting a few. Had she not been in uniform and not thought bourbon such a vile brew she'd have succumbed.

"Nothing," Clintus said and started to rise. "We were just—"

"Coffee," Anna said suddenly, cutting the sheriff off. She wasn't sure what she hoped to gain by presuming on the Crowley hospitality a bit longer. It was just a feeling, a hunch that now was not the time to leave. "I could use a good cup of coffee right about now," she said to cement the decision. Both Clintus Jones and Martin shot her a hard look but Mrs. Crowley seemed genuinely pleased. Anna doubted it was she, personally, that brought the sparkle into Mrs. Crowley's eyes but people in general, washed and unwashed, proper and im—.

"I can't promise good, but I can promise coffee." Having brushed a bit more bright lipstick on her husband's head, she stood and clattered into the kitchen, the heels of her leather boots at least four inches high. Without them and the "big" hair—dark brown and worn short over the cars in a modernized version of what the girls in Anna's class at Mercy High School had referred to as the Bubble—Mrs. Crowley couldn't have been more than five feet tall.

"I'll help." Anna escaped the living room, following in the energy trail of Mrs. Crowley's social comet, clearing the swinging door to the back part of the house before the sheriff could register a protest.

The kitchen was in the same disarray as the living area. The counter was covered with dishes, the dining table with catalogues, junk mail and used coffee cups. A shelf, built at eye level, ran around three sides of the room. Scarlett and Rhett, usually portrayed as Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, were further immortalized on yet more limited-edition, mailorder, collectors-series plates.

"I'm Anna Pigeon," Anna said, introductions having gone by the wayside in the living room.

"Jerri, Jerri Lee as in 'Great Balls of Fire.' Daddy's hero till he found out Lewis had married his thirteen-year-old cousin. By then it was too late to change my name. I'd learned to spell it." Jerri lit a long, thin, brown cigarette as she bustled for coffee-making paraphernalia. She smoked more like the affected than the addicted, and it added to her hardball brand of belle charm.

Filter found, coffee spooned and the coffeemaker dripping companionably with the sound of the rain against the windows, Jerri slowed down. The chatter stopped. She leaned against the counter and took a drag on her cigarette. "Now Anna, why don't you tell me what this visit is all about." Jerri Crowley wasn't more than thirty-five, tiny, dressed and made up like a high-class tart with good taste, but there was little doubt of the intelligence behind the heavily mascaraed eyes.

Since she looked like a girl who'd learned to smell a lie at an early age, Anna opted for the truth.

"A man was found dead at Mt. Locust, Doyce Barnette. He was supposed to meet your husband and two other men to play poker the night he was killed. They say he never showed up. We're trying to backtrack, find out where he was. We figured Martin might know."

"They say
he never showed up." Jerri went straight to the heart of the matter.

"So far it's all we've got to work with," Anna admitted.

Jerri thought through two drags on her cigarette, then stubbed it out less than half smoked, her porcelain nails cutting through the thin paper as she ground the butt against the glass of the ashtray.

"I don't know Doyce Barnette. Don't know his people, nothing. Martin didn't meet him till that poker night got set up. Herm Thorton invited him in. Martin bought a bass boat from Herm. Got a real good price on it. I guess they been card playing for about a month now. Maybe not that long. Martin's not a big gambler. He joined up with some guys last year, but the group piddled out after a couple months. Without a ball game of some kind to take up the slack in the conversation, men don't seem to have a lot to talk about.

"Martin never lost any money to those guys. Never won any either far as I could tell. And if Martin would've won or lost, I'd know. Not a penny comes through this house but what I pinch it. We got two boys and both are going to college if I have to drive them to school every day till they're twenty-one.

"What I'm saying is, Martin's got no reason to feel one way or another about this Doyce guy. And when you don't give a hoot, you got no reason to scrape up the energy to lie."

They drank their coffee standing in the kitchen, fannies braced against the edge of the counter in the time-honored tradition of American women. They talked of inconsequential things: how Anna'd come to Mississippi, where Jerri got her boots, if it was possible to get a decent haircut without driving all the way into northeast Jackson. They laughed a lot the way women do when relaxed, the kind of laughter that, if it were to be examined afterward, would be found not to come from a comedic arrangement of words but from an undercurrent of shared experience that provided unspoken punchlines to everyday events. While thoroughly enjoying herself, Anna was aware of two cold facts.

If the easy camaraderie was false, she was at risk of being manipulated should she let her guard clown. Jerri Lee Crowley was intelligent and creative enough to feign any level of friendship if she felt it necessary to protect "Killer."

If the connections with Jerri were genuine, Anna was at risk of compromising the investigation of Martin Crowley by the conscious or subconscious motive of trying to save his wife's feelings.

Murder not only made strange bedfellows but distinctly uneasy ones.

This flawed but pleasurable kitchen idyll was interrupted after about ten minutes. The pressure of being left alone together had gotten to Clintus and Martin.

Martin stuck his head in the kitchen, looking mildly desperate. "You growing those coffee beans or what?"

Jerri smiled. "You want a refill, darlin'?"

"These people've got to go, Jer, and I got things to do."

In the well-mannered homes of the South, his comment was tantamount to being tossed out on one's ear. Anna left her coffee and followed Martin to the living room. Despite the freezing rain, Jerri walked with Anna and Clintus to the edge of the abbreviated porch. Her white Lexus was parked crookedly near the sheriff's car. Jerri saw Anna looking at it and said, "Bought it used off one of those rental car dealers. Don't I just feel like the Queen of Sheba driving around town?

"Oh!" she said suddenly, startling Anna. Over her shoulder she called, "I forgot, what with the company and all, your stuff's back from the butcher, baby."

Ignoring the rain, Jerri trotted out to the Lexus, apparently oblivious to the cold. "Hang on a minute," she said to Anna as she and Clintus reached the patrol car. "I've got a treat for you." Having opened the trunk, she grabbed out a small paper package wrapped in butcher from a pile of like parcels in varying sizes. "Genuine homegrown venison." She cocked her arm to toss it like a football.

Martin, rudely flopped in his chair as they'd left the house, was now on the porch barefoot in his pajamas.

"Jerri, you leave that be! Hear me now. Let it alone." The venom in his voice was uncharacteristic after the displays of obvious affection between him and his wife. Jerri didn't seem accustomed to it either. She faltered, but he'd yelled too late to reverse the order from her brain, and she threw anyway, wide and wild.

Instinctively, Anna dove for it and, sacrificing the knee of one trouser leg to the icy mud of the drive, managed to catch it before it hit the ground.

For a long moment, made longer by cold and awkwardness, the four of them waited for the mood to change. Anna was comfortable in polite society, and she was more or less comfortable in a fight. Nobody was comfortable in a domestic altercation: motives were too tangled, emotions ran too deep. The good guys and the bad guys kept exchanging hats.

Jerri didn't have the look of a woman accustomed to verbal violence. Dripping, beginning to shiver, she wore the stunned face of a favored child slapped down for behaviors that once earned only praise.

The rigidity born of anger or fear—Anna couldn't even guess—left Martin's face. "Sorry, baby. That ven ... the uh steaks ... I was planning to, to give them to the Catholic Charity in Port Gibson."

The excuse was so lame, so patently made up on the spot that Anna, who an instant before could think of nothing she wanted less than a bloody hunk of flesh that had once been a magical woodland creature, was now determined to keep her venison at all costs.

"Thanks a million, Jerri. They won't miss one tiny steak," she called gaily and, hugging her dripping prize, ducked into the sheriff's car and slammed the door.

"You a big venison fan?" Clintus asked as they drove away.

In the side mirror Anna could see Martin Crowley, still on the porch, watching the car leave. Jerri had darted inside.

"Martin didn't want me to have it," Anna said.

"And you know why?"

"Probably poached," Anna said.

"Martin's been around long enough he'd know we can't prove nothing without catching him red-handed."

"I know. There's something more," Anna said. "And I want to find out what."

12

 At Port Gibson the sheriff dropped her at the ranger station and headed to Natchez to catch up on work he'd let pile up while chasing the National Park Service's murderer. Anna stayed in the office just long enough to reassure Barth that finding Mrs. Jackson's son and hunting down old records of cabinet makers was a worthy use of the taxpayer's money, and to read her messages.

The last was from Paul Davidson. Anna stared at it too long. "What's wrong?" Barth asked finally. "Feeling up to your back pockets in southern sheriffs?"

That was precisely what Anna was feeling. A woman with a lick of sense would have fallen for a veterinarian, a high-school teacher, dog catcher, anything but a local priest and sheriff. And she would have made damn sure he was single before she did it.

Predictable as most women in a like situation, she called him back.

Paul said he needed to see her.
Needed:
his word. Again, appallingly predictable, she said sure. Then he did something that surprised her. He invited her to his house for dinner. She'd been there before, but not after dark, not since they'd become lovers. Paul's home was in one of the many fine old houses that still existed in Mississippi. Even tiny towns on the back roads boasted a few. Most were not the antebellum mansions one thought of when envisioning southern architecture, but aped that graciousness and were better for it. Ceilings were high, nine, ten, fourteen feet, doorways wide, windows generous, floors of hardwood and banisters curved. Too many of the old homes, fallen on hard times, were beyond saving. Paul's had been rescued structurally but pillaged by bad taste in the 1970s. As a new owner, Paul—or more probably Mrs. Davidson—had struck back. Evidently the marriage ended before the renovations. Scars remained where partitions had been knocked out. Wallpaper was steamed off and never replaced, carpet pulled up but the battered oak floors remained unsanded and unsealed. Mrs. Davidson had moved to Jackson and put ten thousand dollars down on a new condominium. Paul kept the house, living there, a tidy but indifferent tenant. Paul and, she had to admit, she herself preferred the spurious privacy of Rocky Springs.