The Tin Roof Blowdown (48 page)

I DIDN’T WAIT for Betsy Mossbacher to call me back with information about Tom Claggart. I used my cell phone, in case Betsy called on the landline, and talked to the state police in both Virginia and South Carolina, but the people on duty were all after-hours personnel and had the same problem I did, namely that all the state offices that could give answers about Tom Claggart were closed.

Then I used the most valuable and unlauded investigative resource in the United States, the lowly reference librarian. Their salaries are wretched and they receive credit for nothing. Their desks are usually tucked away in the stacks or in a remote corner where they have to shush noisy high school students or put up with street people blowing wine in their faces or snoring in the stuffed chairs. But their ability to find obscure information is remarkable and they persevere like Spartans.

The tidewater accent of the one I spoke with at the Citadel library in Charleston was a genuine pleasure to listen to. Her name was iris Rosecrans and I had the feeling she could read aloud from the telephone directory and make it sound like a recitation of Shakespearean sonnets. I told her who I was and asked if she could find any record of a past student by the name of Tom Claggart.

“As you probably have already gathered, Mr. Robicheaux, the registrar’s office is closed until tomorrow morning,” she said. “However, that said, I think I can go back through some of the yearbooks and be of some service to you.”

“Ms. Rosecrans, I need every bit of information I can get regarding this man. It’s extremely urgent. I don’t want to burden you with my situation or to seem melodramatic, but someone tried to kill my daughter and I think the man responsible is named Ronald Bledsoe. I think Ronald Bledsoe may have some relationship to Tom Claggart.”

She paused a moment. “Spell ‘Bledsoe’ for me, please.”

Twenty minutes later she called back. “Thomas S. Claggart was a freshman and sophomore student here in 1977 and ’78. His hometown is listed as Camden. He’s not included in the yearbooks after ’78. Ronald Bledsoe appears never to have been a student here.”

“Well, I appreciate your—”

I heard a piece of paper crinkle, like a sheet on a tablet being folded back. “I do have other information, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

“Please, go ahead.”

“I talked to the reference librarian in Camden. She checked the old telephone directories and found a T. S. Claggart listed during the years ’76 to ’79. I called the police station there, but no one had heard of a Claggart family. The officer I spoke with was kind enough to give me the number of the man who was police chief at the time. So I called him at his house. Would you like his name?”

“No, no, what did he tell you?”

“He remembered the senior Claggart quite well. He said he was a United States Army sergeant stationed at Fort Jackson. His wife had died several years earlier, but he had a son named Tom Junior, and perhaps a stepson. The stepson was named Ronald.”

“Bledsoe?”

“The retired police chief wasn’t sure of the last name. But it was not Claggart. He said the boy was peculiar-looking and strange in his behavior. He had the feeling the boy had been in foster homes or a place for disturbed children.

“That’s all I was able to gather. We’re about to close. Would you like for me to search a little bit more tomorrow? I don’t mind.”

“What I would like, Ms. Rosecrans, is to buy you an island in the Caribbean. Or perhaps to ask the Vatican to grant you early canonization.”

“That’s very nice of you,” she said.

I told Clete what I had just learned from Ms. Rosecrans. He was eating a sandwich in the living room, watching the History Channel.

“You think Claggart has been covering Bledsoe’s ass all these years?” he said.

“Probably. Or maybe they work as a team. You remember the Hillside Strangler case in California? The perps were cousins. Explain how one family can have two guys like that in it.”

He started to reply, but I opened my cell phone and began punching in numbers.

“Who you calling?” he asked.

“Molly.”

“Relax, they’re at the university. I mean it, noble mon, you’re giving me the shingles just watching you.”

I got Molly’s voice mail and realized she had probably left her cell phone in the automobile or turned it off when she entered the library. I tried Alafair’s number and got the same result, then I remembered Alafair had left her purse at the house.

The phone rang in the kitchen.

ALAFAIR HAD SPREAD her note cards on a table that was not far from shelves of books that dealt with the flora and fauna of the American Northwest. She was writing down the names of trees and types of rock that characterized the escarpment along the Columbia River Gorge just south of Mount Hood. Then her eyes began to burn from the fatigue of the day and the sleepless nights she had experienced since Bobby Mack Rydel, a man she had never seen before, had tried to kill her.

In her earliest attempts at fiction, she had learned that there are many things a person can do well when he or she is tired, but imagining plots and creating dialogue and envisioning fictional characters and writing well are not among them.

She gathered up her note cards and placed them in her book bag, then took out the yellow legal pad on which I had written down the remnants of the words at the bottom of Bertrand Melancon’s letter to the Baylor family.

In the stacks, a man with a raincoat over his arm and an oversize hat on his head was gazing curiously at the titles of the books arrayed along the shelf. He lifted a heavy volume off the shelf and seated himself on the opposite side of Alafair’s table, three chairs down from her. He did not glance in her direction and seemed intent upon the content of his book, a collection of photographic plates of scenes in Colorado. Then, as an afterthought, he seemed to remember that he was still wearing his hat. He removed it and set it crown-down on the table. His scalp was bone-white under the freshly shaved roots of his hair.

“How do you do?” he said, and nodded.

“Fine, how are you?” Alafair replied.

He opened his book and began reading, his forehead knitted. Alafair went back to work on Bertrand Melancon’s water-diluted directions to Sidney Kovick’s diamonds. Molly returned from the restroom and looked over her shoulder. The original letters had been Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an. Alafair had spaced them out ten times on ten lines, trying different combinations with them on each line. By the tenth line, she had created a statement that seemed to make syntactical and visual sense.

“You should have been a cryptographer,” Molly said.

“Spelling is the challenge,” Alafair said. “He probably spells most polysyllabic words phonetically. So if the first word is ‘The’ and we create ‘dymines’ out of ‘dym,’ we’ve got a running start on the whole sentence. If the third word doesn’t agree in number with ‘dymines’ and we substitute ‘is’ for ‘are,’ it begins to come together pretty quickly.”

The man with the mustache and shaved head paused in his reading, stifling a yawn, his head turning in the opposite direction from Molly and Alafair. His eyes scanned the high windows for a flicker of lightning in the sky. He watched a tall black kid in a basketball letter sweater walk by, then resumed reading.

“We turn ‘un’ into ‘under’ and let ‘the’ stand. Put a ‘b’ in front of ‘ri’ and add a ‘k’ and you get ‘bricks.’ ‘On’ stands by itself and ‘ot’ becomes ‘other.’ ‘Of’ stands alone and we turn ‘h’ into ‘the.’ So we’ve got ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the…’ It’s the ‘an’ I haven’t worked out.”

Molly thought about it. “Put a ‘c’ in front and an ‘e’ behind.”

“‘Cane,’ that’s it. ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the cane.’ How about that?” Alafair said.

The man staring at alpine scenes in the large picture book he gripped by both covers, the spine resting on the table, looked at his watch and yawned again. He got up from the table and replaced his book on the shelf. Then he walked over to a periodicals rack and began thumbing through a magazine, occasionally glancing out the window at the darkness in the sky.

At 9:53 Molly and Alafair left the library and walked toward their automobile.

It was 9:12 p.m. when the phone rang in the kitchen. I hoped it was Molly. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call was blocked. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

“I had to cajole a couple of people, but this is what I found out,” Betsy said. “Tom Claggart attended the Citadel in the late seventies. His father was stationed at Fort Jackson. The father was a widower and had only one child with the name Claggart. But at various times on his tax form he claimed two dependents besides himself, his son. Tom Junior, and a foster child by the name of Ronald Bledsoe.”

“Yeah, I’ve already got that.”

“You’ve got that? From where?” she said.

“A reference librarian at the Citadel.”

“A reference librarian. Thanks for telling me that.”

“Come on, Betsy, give me the rest of it.”

“Dave, try to understand this. An agent in Columbia, South Carolina, drove to Camden, thirty miles away, and found people who remembered the Claggart family. He did this as a favor because we were in training together at Quantico. Be a little patient, all right?”

“I understand,” I said, my scalp tightening.

“Claggart Senior was originally from Myrtle Beach. Evidently he had a child out of wedlock with a woman named Yvonne Bledsoe. She came from an old family that had fallen on bad times, and ran a day care center. Evidently she thought of herself as southern aristocracy who had been forced into a life beneath her social level. According to what my friend found out, a couple of parents accused her of molesting the children in her care. Tom Claggart, Junior, seemed to have lived with his father at several army bases around the country, but Ronald Bledsoe stayed with the mother until he was fifteen or sixteen.”

“Where is she now?” I asked.

“She burned to death in a house fire, source of ignition unknown.”

When I hung up, the side of my head felt numb. I called Molly’s cell phone again but got no answer. Clete was looking at me, a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” he said.

“Let’s take a ride,” I said.

MOLLY AND ALAFAIR walked across a stretch of green lawn between two brick buildings covered with shadow, crossed the boulevard, and entered an unlit area by the side of Burke Hall. The wind was colder now, threading lines through the film of congealed algae in the lake. The vehicles that had been parked by Molly’s car were gone, the windows in Burke Hall dark. Molly unlocked the driver’s door, then got behind the wheel and leaned across the seat to unlock the passenger side. In a flicker of lightning, she thought she saw a man standing at the rear of the building, leaning against the bricks, his arms folded on his chest. When she refocused her eyes, he wasn’t there.

Alafair got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her. “I’m tired. How about we pass on picking up a dessert?” she said.

“Fine with me,” Molly said.

Molly removed her purse from under the seat and set it beside her. She slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. But the starter made no sound, not even the dry click that would indicate a dead battery. Nor did the dash indicators come on, as though the battery were totally disconnected from the system.

“I bought a new battery at AutoZone only three weeks ago,” she said.

“Let me have your cell phone. I’ll call Dave,” Alafair said.

A gust of wind and rain blew across the cypress trees in the lake and patterned the windshield. Suddenly the man who had been sitting across from Molly and Alafair in the library was standing outside Molly’s window, wearing his raincoat, his oversize hat cupping his ears. He was smiling and making a circular motion for Molly to roll down her window. That’s when she noticed there was a one-inch airspace at the top of the glass, one that she didn’t remember leaving when she had exited the car.

She hand-cranked the window down another six inches. “Yes?” she said.

“I saw you upstairs at the library,” the man said.

“I know. What is it you want?”

“It looks like you got car trouble. I can call Triple A for you or give you a ride.”

“Why do you think we’re having car trouble?” Molly said.

“Because your car won’t start,” the man replied, a half-smile on his face.

“But how would you know that? The engine made no sound,” Molly said.

“I saw you twisting the key a couple of times, that’s all.”

“We’re fine, here. Thanks for the offer,” she said.

The man looked out into the darkness, toward the side of the building, holding his raincoat closed at the throat, his face filmed with the mist blowing out of the cypress trees. “It’s nasty weather to be out. I think a storm is coming,” he said.

Alafair gave Molly a look, then pulled Molly’s purse toward her, easing it down by her foot.

The man who wore a hat that cupped his ears and whose mustache was streaked with white leaned closer to the window. “I got to tell you ladies something. I didn’t choose this. I feel sorry for you. I’m not that kind of man.”

“Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and say it, whatever it is,” Molly said.

But before the man in the raincoat could answer, Alafair’s window exploded in shards all over the interior of the car. Alafair’s face jerked in shock, her hair and shirt flecked with glass. A hand holding a brick raked the glass down even with the window frame, grinding it into powder against the metal.

Alafair and Molly stared at the grinning face of Ronald Bledsoe. In his right hand he clutched the brick, in his left, a .25-caliber blue-black automatic. He fitted the muzzle under Alafair’s chin and increased the pressure until she lifted her chin and shut her eyes.

“Pop the hood so Tom can reconnect your battery, Miz Robicheaux,” he said. “Then lean over the backseat and open the door for me. We’re going to take a drive. Y’all are going to be good the whole way, too.” He leaned forward and smelled Alafair’s hair. “Lordy, I like you, Miss Alafair. You’re a darlin’ young girl, and I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve had the best.”