Phantom Nights (12 page)

"Have him go back to your car and wait there, Mr. Leland."

"Why sure, Mally. Whatever will put you at ease."

When he turned his head to speak to Jim Giles, Mally had a quick look back over her shoulder. Alex Gambier wasn't in sight; the bathroom door along the short hallway to the kitchen was still closed.

The light of the single lamp in her front room, metal shade painted Gay Nineties style with a hanging fringe of cut glass beads, had gone dull orange, as if the slender wire connecting her to the rural electric line alongside Highway 19 was about to be whipped loose from its pole.

"Mr. Leland, I wish you would come another time, if it be all that important!" Flustered now, wondering why he hadn't made himself known to her on Thursday night—or had it been only his man Giles in the Pontiac, sitting silently and watching her on the porch?

"Surely wish I could do that, Mally! But I need to be in Knoxville by tomorrow afternoon. I'm campaigning over that way most of next week. I'm only asking for a few minutes of your time after we drove all the way out here in a gullywasher." He opened his slicker and reached inside. "Got something here I need for you to sign off on."

Jim Giles had left the porch and was down in the yard, lit up by the headlights of the Pontiac. Mally shifted her attention to Leland Howard again, not feeling easier about all this. She saw a white envelope in his hands.

"This is yours, Mally! What I have here is one thousand dollars cash money my Daddy left in a desk drawer in his study at the homestead. You can see your name's here on the envelope? Money I expect he wanted you to have for all the good care you gave him, without having to wait until probate closes!"

Mally flinched at a sear of light, opening her eyes to find herself in the dark. In more ways than one. A thousand dollars! Priest Howard had never uttered a word to her about that.

Leland, the disinherited son, opened the envelope to show her, when the sky flared again, what surely looked like ten hundred-dollar silver certificates. But Mally still found such a windfall difficult to believe. She was down to sixty-eight dollars and change in the Chase and Sanborn coffee can she kept under the floorboards beneath the metal stove-wood box in the room behind her. Barely a month's keeping if she was especially frugal. But she had to take a couple of courses soon to renew her nursing certificate, and that was fifty dollars gone right there.

Leland Howard thumbed the wheel of a dented steel Zippo lighter he might have carried with him in the war. In the shielded light, his fleshy but good-looking face seemed unthreatening. His smile and benign blue eyes did not begrudge a penny of her good fortune.

"So if you will kindly sign a receipt for this money, then I can be on my way."

"Mr. Leland, the power is gone; I'm needing to fetch a paraffin lamp from my kitchen!"

"You go right ahead and do that, Mally," he said, dropping the lid on the tall lighter flame and putting his hat back on. The porch roof in the onslaught of rain was now leaking steadily in several places.

She came back with the lamplight bobbing in darkness, having intuitive moments of regret, just before she unlocked the door, about not taking time to put on clothes. But she was still awestruck by the sight of all that money in the envelope. Not thinking as clearly as she ought to have been thinking. First off, when had Priest Howard had the strength, during the last weeks she was taking care of him, to rise up from his bed and go downstairs to his study? At night, when Mally wasn't there? Not likely.

Hail pattered on the roof and struck the windows on the north side of the house. Leland Howard stepped inside as Mally retreated to set the paraffin lamp on the Franklin stove top in one corner of her front room. The crown of his hat hit the underside of the door frame, pushing it askew on his head.

Leland grinned and took the hat off once more.

"I'm tall myself, but ol' Highpockets must've bruised his forehead a few times coming through this doorspace."

Mally didn't reply, just stood by the stove holding her lime green kimono tight together with one hand.

Leland shut the door behind him and looked around. They were both aware of the shotgun at the same time. Mally had left it leaning against one end of the bamboo sofa to go to the kitchen. Leland grinned bigger and picked it up, looked it over with an eagle eye.

"Fine old piece for bird shooting," he said, then broke the shotgun open and pulled out both shells, which he dropped into a raincoat pocket.

"Wouldn't want an accident to happen while I'm here," he said with what looked like a wink; or maybe one of his eyes had begun to twitch from some pent-up anguish or fury. He hung his hat on the twin barrels and leaned the shotgun against the sofa where he'd found it.

Mally knew she had been a fool for letting him into her house. Worse, the money he'd flashed at her was a ruse; it would stay in his own pocket. She knew what he'd really come for.

When she made a break for the back of the house and the kitchen door, she learned that for a big man he had speed and good reflexes, snatching her back into the front room by an elbow, almost lifting her off her feet. She stumbled against the whatnot cabinet. Teacups and figurines rattled around on the shelves.

"Don't be putting your hands on me, Mr. Leland!"

He didn't let go. "Mally, I just think you've got some wrong ideas about me. Let's settle down now, have us a civilized conversation. If you're forthcoming with me, I like what I hear, I'll leave the thousand dollars and be on my way."

Leland pulled her closer. Soft whisper of Chinese silk and bourbon on his breath; she saw a little flare of excitement in his blue eyes.

"Here I am dripping all over your parlor floor. What I expect you to do now, sit over here on this sofa while I get out of my raincoat; I'm stifling already. Don't try and run off on me again. James got his eye on the house where he is. He's a mean sumbitch, but I'm not one to do you harm."

"Let go of me then," she said.

Leland put more pressure on the nerves above her elbow with that unpleasantly calloused hand; she let out a gasp. Then he released Mally and with the flat of his other hand nudged her toward the sofa. She sat down, rubbing where he'd hurt her. No harm done though, was that what he thought? And his hand had been on one of her breasts. Mally was scared but made her voice level.

"I won't run. But there's nothing we have to say to each other, Mr. Leland."

"That so?" He rubbed his heavy jaw that would be jowls in a few years, faintly grinning, eyes preoccupied as he stared his way around the little room again. Just the two of them and already overcrowded. But he found the space to prowl, stopping in front of her to graciously offer a piece of hard candy from a crumpled sack he had in his coat pocket. Mally shook her head. Leland unwrapped a piece for himself. Balled the cellophane and let it drop to the floor.

"Always wondered, did William blow his brains out in the house, Mally? Or did he have the courtesy to spare you the sight?"

"In his truck," Mally said after a few moments. Parked behind the rib shack. Three o'clock in the morning. She'd heard the shot, of course. Knowing it was William, and what he'd finally done, as her head jerked up from the pillow. Hatred of Leland Howard for mentioning William's sad end rose in Mally's breast like a blister from a hot iron.

"Did you ever come across that secret recipe of his for rib sauce? That sauce was something all-fired special, Mally, the couple times I took out a plate of William's ribs. His sauce recipe would be worth money to you nowadays."

"He never wrote it down."

"Oh, too bad." In his prowling, Leland picked up the writing tablet from the oval table by the sofa. Mally thought of Alex Gambier shut up in the bathroom, wondering if he'd heard when she raised her voice to Leland Howard, hoping Alex had enough sense not to show himself now. Leland looked closely at the words on the tablet, but there wasn't light enough to make for easy reading.

"Letter to my daddy I was writing," Mally said helpfully. Blood throbbing in her temples.

Leland nodded and dropped the tablet on the table. Looked down at her with fuming eyes while he sucked candy clotted on his back teeth.

"What does old Ramses do now, practice medicine in Nashville?"

"No, he teaches at Meharry."

"There's a colored man had the moxie to make something of himself, give credit where it's due." Leland tugged at the knot of his necktie, loosening it. "Getting close in here," he said. Mally was already about to choke on the closeness—his roiled blood, her desperation—in spite of the calm way she sat there meeting him eye to eye.

Leland mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, put it away, came up with a gold-capped silver hip flask. Tilted it high to finish off the bourbon she figured he'd been drinking most of the evening.

"It's been a hard day, Mally," he said, as if he were apologizing for drinking in front of her.

"Yes, sir, I know that," she said, her words barely audible.

"It's not like I'm going to miss the old bastard. You don't have any idea what it was to grow up with somebody had the balls and gall and mean bent of my daddy." His mouth crimped, as if, like a cruelly hazed child, he was close to tears. "And how he must have schemed this past year! Watching me rise up in the world of national politics without his help. That's what he hated most about me; I never asked his help one time. When my mama's money ran out, I just took what I wanted and needed from him. Knew he would find out but I didn't care; because what could he hope to do except cover my tracks at the bank? You understanding me, Mally?" His look both begged and demanded her understanding. "Priest Howard's weakness—and I always knew it—was his good name. He would never allow anything or anyone to bring dishonor to his name. Now, that made him, and his fuckin' bank, easy pickings. Oh, but you know all this. He would've trusted you, told it to you a dozen times lying up there in his bed with the knowledge his life was over but determined to wreck mine. Bided his time, didn't he? Waited until I was about to enjoy the fruits of my success."

"Mr. Leland—"

"It's all right, Mally. I'm not here looking for your sympathy. You've had it hard yourself, I appreciate that, why I had the desire to help you out with a little of my own money. Scarce as I find it to be these days. On account of I knew Daddy Priest was too stingy to reward you. So here it is again . . ."

He pulled out the now-damp envelope with the money and flopped it down on top of the writing tablet.

"Yours alone. Pick it up, feel it, count it, missy. There's ten big ones. Shoo, dog! All you need do to justify keeping that money is hand over what Daddy left behind in your hands to ensure my ruination."

Mally was deathly still during multiple lightning flashes like cameras at the scene of a traffic accident while the scent of blood was fresh and strong. An accident in which she sat pinned in wreckage looking out with stunned eyes for a rescuer to arrive.

Leland Howard dragged the back of one hand across his mouth, staring at her, seemingly perplexed by her lack of gratitude.

"Mally?"

"Mr. Leland—I just don't know what you mean."

"Copies of the altered accounts is what I mean. Those investment accounts I jiggered for a year, thirty-five thousand dollars' worth, so I could get out of his bank and his clutches and enjoy a free life! And I suppose he prepared his own account of what I stole and how I did it. I'm a thief—as he correctly named me in his last hour, with you standing by and not missing a word of it."

"But he never mentioned to me, Mr. Leland, what you did! It wasn't my business—"

"Don't think I'm a fool. There was nobody else as close to him in his dying days. Sax? Sax was clear the other side of the state running dealerships Rose Heidi inherited. But Daddy never would have left my fate in Sax's hands for the simple reason Sax never had the nerve to cross me. Burnell? A good soul who couldn't pour pee out of a boot and get it right. No, he chose you. You're bright; you've got education. You were like an angel to the old fucker. So what if you didn't know what you were messing with? I expect he kept his instructions simple. Take this little package, keep it for me. When I'm gone, put it in the mail to the state bank examiner's office. Or the
Nashville Banner
."

Leland's mouth was spitty from an excess of fervor as he envisioned these possibilities for his eventual downfall. He wiped his mouth again, a hard glitter in his blue eyes.

"That's right. The
Banner
, the
Tennessean
, or the
Press-Scimitar
, that muckraking reporter they got on their political beat. Any goddamn newspaper would print the story! And my ass would be barbecue."