Roots of Murder (45 page)

The expression that crossed Alma Dupree's face was electric. Nell was in the room with a trapped animal. She'd been guessing when she'd claimed Alma Dupree was there, the small feet at the edge of one photo.

“I will not spend one minute of time in jail for the murder of stupid interlopers! Don't think you can threaten me.” All masks and pretense were gone.

“Killing Marcus did you no good. His files helped, but the photos—like those of goddamned trophy hunters—will damn you.”

“He was an old man, he didn't have much longer to live,” was how she dismissed his murder.

“And you're an old woman, you won't be in jail nearly long enough,” Nell spat back at her.

For an answer, Alma Dupree stood, jerked opened the drawer of an end table, and took out a pistol. She leveled it at Nell. “And who do you think you're going to tell?”

From his corner, Andre Dupree tried to say something that sounded like “
no
.” A long raspy cry.

“Shut up! You never had the courage to do what needed to be done,” Alma Dupree told him. To Nell she said, “We all made a pact that those who benefited had to take responsibility for doing what was required. Those troublemakers had to go, but poor Andre couldn't stand to do it, so I had to be there instead. I did it then and I can do it now.”

Alma Dupree was the
cold-blooded
killer in the family, not Andre. Nell could only look at her hand and the gun in it. Keep her talking, she told herself; you have an audience and they might get here in time. “Shooting me isn't going to do any good. The Jones brothers will talk, to save themselves from being executed.”

“Please, you don't think I was stupid enough to deal directly with those idiots. Their father was smarter. He married a dumb woman and got dumb children as a result. I had to give them instructions for every single step. Used a cheap,
throw-away
cell phone to text them instructions. Like lending their boat and driver's license to some friends so the Coast Guard would think they were aground at certain crucial times. To get their cousins to help when they needed to do two things at the same time.”

“So they point to someone else, who points to you.”

“You really do underestimate me. Hubert Pickings received several thousand dollars to take a sealed envelope to them. He didn't know who left it and the Jones brothers never knew who it was from. The cell phone could not be traced to me. All that mattered to them was that there was money in those envelopes.”

Andre Dupree again let out his raspy cry, rocking the wheelchair in a useless attempt to move. His wife ignored him.

“You're going to shoot me in the sun room of your house and think you can get away with it?” Nell questioned. She was desperately looking for a way out, or a weapon she could use. But there was nothing faster than Alma Dupree's finger on the trigger.

“An old woman like me a murderer? No one will believe that. The gun went off accidentally. I left you here to go make coffee. You must have picked it up and it went off.”

Nell heard a step in the next room and then Desiree walked in. “Mother, I heard voices and … oh, my God, what's going on?” She stared at the gun. Then looked at Nell.

“Your mother is going to murder me,” Nell told her. And the people on the other end of the wire. It was little consolation Alma Dupree wouldn't get away with it.

“Mother! Put the gun down. This is crazy!”

“Desiree, please leave. This doesn't concern you.”

Desiree looked from her mother to Nell, then back again. She seemed to waver, as if she was going to obey her mother. Then she said, “Mother, no. Nothing is worth this.”

“Think about it, Mrs. Dupree. Back then, you were a young woman. There were a number of men there, now dead, whom you can blame. But if you pull that trigger, in front of your husband and daughter, you'll never get away with it,” Nell told her.

“Desiree, please leave. Let me do what I have to do!”

“But you can't … ” her daughter started.

“I can! With your help, if you say the gun fired accidentally, we'll get away with it. No one will doubt the two of us.”

“Mom, please, no,” Desiree said, but her voice was weak.

The daughter has the choice to turn in her mother, Nell thought. Or to cover up, go along with the story about an accident. Nell took the only chance she had. “You can't get away with it.” Turning to Desiree, she said, “I'm wearing a wire. Everything said here is being recorded. If you go along with her, you'll become an accessory to murder. You're a
young-enough
woman to spend a long time in prison.”

Desiree looked from her mother to Nell, a growing horror in her eyes.

“Don't listen to her!” Alma Dupree instructed her daughter. “She's bluffing. Nothing has to change. Just do as I say.”

Desiree cast one more anguished look at her mother, then slowly crossed to Nell. “No, this has to stop.” She was now standing too close to Nell for her mother to get a clean shot. “I can't … ” And then Desiree broke down sobbing, but she didn't move.

“It's over, Mrs. Dupree,” Nell said quietly.

Sirens sounded in the distance, coming for them.

Alma Dupree looked frantically from her daughter to Nell. Then she spat out, “You'd better hope there is a heaven and a hell, because you'll get no justice in this lifetime.” Her eyes were blazing with anger. She turned to her husband. He seemed to know what she would do; he let out his strangled cry one more time. She aimed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. His chest exploded with red. She then put the gun in her mouth. Desiree screamed an animal sound. But Alma Dupree was not going to jail. For one horrific second, the scream was cut off by the retort of the pistol. Then there was just Desiree's anguished wail.

Nell grabbed her and pulled her out of the room, away from the blood and bodies.

They stood in the sun, in the cold sunlight, Desiree sobbing in her arms. The sirens wailed to a crescendo, followed by an abrupt silence filled with shouts and pounding feet.

twenty-six

Nell sat before the
fireplace, reading the paper that had just come out. She had skipped this routine last week, being too close to the deaths of the elder Duprees to read about it again. She'd been enough of a reporter to call in the story to Jacko, leaving it up to him, Dolan, and Pam to make the final arrangements for that week's front page.

She'd let everyone go home after lunch. Now she was in her house, alone. Josh, bundled up in as many sweaters and sleeping bags as Nell could foist off on him, was on his island camping trip, and Lizzie was sleeping over at a friend's. She hadn't told them she'd had a gun pointed at her head, held by a woman who would have pulled the trigger. Alma Dupree was beyond prosecution, leaving both Nell and Desiree with some control over what stayed quiet. Nell told herself she was keeping things back for Josh and Lizzie. She acknowledged Desiree had probably saved her life, and she owed her. For now it seemed the right decision; Josh and Lizzie had recently had days go by without the haunted look from after Thom died. They were getting on with their lives, venturing out instead of hovering near home and the mother who was left them. That had Nell alone in the house, with a fire and the paper to keep her company. And a glass of Scotch.

The headline should have been
“The Election That Wasn't.”
Instead it was
“Mayoral Race in Confusion.”
Aaron Dupree had pulled out, making the statement he could no longer live in Pelican Bay. Nell had seen him a few times since then, mostly across crowded rooms. They never spoke. He had looked at her once, first with anger on his face and then a sad, wistful expression, as if there was a place he'd briefly dreamed of that had included her. Then the anger had closed in. He'd left for California two days ago. Both he and Desiree had agreed they would sell all the Dupree property they still held. Nell had to be cynical enough to wonder if it was the memories or if the sale would create another legal hurdle for anyone seeking redress.

One of the new police chief's duties upon taking office was to arrest Mayor Hubert Pickings. His family had been one of those Pelican Property had outmaneuvered. They thought they could get the bayou property, now the Marina, for just the cost of back taxes, but by putting a little money up front, Andre Dupree had beaten them. Mayor Pickings, deprived of what he considered his rightful heritage, had made up for it by taking any consideration people might want give the mayor. Confronted about the
cash-filled
envelopes and instructions to do a few errands, he had sputtered, “How was I to know it was illegal?” Harold Reed, at hearing that, had just shaken his head and asked, “How could he think it wasn't?” Whiz Brown, the bagman for the deals, had taken a few Valium and gotten calm enough to rat on the mayor and get a plea bargain for himself. He also told everything he knew about his father's involvement. He didn't know much—he wasn't the favored son—but enough to confirm where the money he'd gotten none of came from.

That meant of the four candidates for mayor, one was murdered, one in jail, one gone, and Everett Evens, the remaining one, too crazy for consideration. In what had seemed improbable a week ago, the candidate with the most votes was Marcus Fletcher. He had received a groundswell of sympathy and pulled it out by a slim margin of
twenty-six
. One of those votes had been Nell's. Somewhere she imagined him saying, “Not too bad for a dead man.” The aldermen were debating what they were going to do.

She had done a long
follow-up
on the murders of Michael, Dora, and Ella. The story had gone national, and Nell managed a byline in several papers she'd once dreamed of having her name in. Thom would have been so proud. She felt a hard, empty ache he wasn't there to share it with. Or even Marcus, to celebrate over beers at Joe's. She'd sent copies of the paper to Gwen Kennedy in Boston, along with a list of graves she could spit on. She had also sent copies to Hattie Jacobs. Twilight years of justice. Only three were still alive; Frederick Connor probably would never get out of his nursing home to face prosecution, but Reese Allen, the man who'd placed his pistol to Michael Walker's head, was still hale and hearty. “Healthy enough that he might live to face meeting his maker early” was Buddy Guy's quote at the press conference. The ironically named Bruce Goodman was also alive enough to prosecute. He claimed to have found God, although not enough to have confessed to his sins, and was running one of those churches Nell considered a temple of hate.

Tanya Jones had called yesterday. The judge had turned down J.J.'s request for a delay. She'd sobbed, “What'll I do without him?” Nell had answered, “You'll do the same thing I'm doing, only J.J. will be coming back in ten to fifteen. Thom never will.” Then she'd slammed down the phone.

Nell glanced at the editorial she had written for this week's issue. Her
mother-in
-law had already called her twice about it; the first call had been arctic, and the next one had dropped the temperature by a few hundred degrees. But Nell had read too many issues of the Crier from that time and she couldn't be hypocritical enough to expose others' sins without looking at those she had inherited.

Thom's grandfather had written, “While we strongly condemn those who use violence to further their ends, can a real solution be imposed by people who don't live here, haven't grown up here, and won't see their children grow up here? They come in, and then leave without knowing what the consequences will ultimately be.” And in another editorial, “Society changes slowly. Attempting to impose sweeping social change, especially change that isn't seen as universally desired, is a long process. Those that agitate for change should ask themselves how well they might like to have their whole way of living upended by those who claim to know what is best.”

Nell had flinched at its tepid liberal tone. Change comes slowly, but what happens to those whose lives are lost while waiting for change? Pelican Bay had finally desegregated its schools in 1969. That had merited only a few paragraphs in a back section of what was now her paper.

Would I have been any better, Nell wondered, taken out of this time and placed back there? Would I have had the clarity of vision—and the courage—to see the monstrous injustice? How locked are we in our own times? Thom's grandfather, and even his father—who was already the managing editor at the paper—were they good men or bad? Part of Nell wanted to know, to be able to tell her children they were wrong or they were right. Dolan had showed her a picture with “nigger lover”
spray-painted
on the front of the building, a result of one of the editorials suggesting that “Negroes have the same right to vote as anyone else.” The best she could call them was flawed men caught in flawed times.

She had used Marcus's words to end the editorial. “The original American Revolution gave us the ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that we are all created equal. The civil rights movement, requiring risk of life and limb equal to that of the original revolutionaries, brought America several long steps closer to those ideals. We are still walking that road. Perhaps our children or their children will indeed be able to judge a person by the ‘content of his character' itself and nothing else.”

Nell put the paper down, watching the flames for a moment. She threw an extra log on, then poured herself another two fingers and picked up the paper again. She was suddenly reluctant to stop reading it. After she put the paper down, there would just be an empty house. She only had a bottle of Scotch to keep the ghosts away.

She took another sip, cold in spite of the fire, and again started to read the paper.