Who Let That Killer In The House? (10 page)

8

Bethany ran straight into my office Thursday morning and didn’t give me time to fuss. “The school’s a mess! Somebody’s painted stuff all over it.”

I flapped a hand at her. “Calm down. It happens almost every year. Some kid with too much time on his hands filches spray paint from his daddy’s workshop and decorates the door. The principal will make him take it off and work around the place for a while. I’m surprised it happened so early in the summer, though.”

Bethany heaved the sigh of a teen dealing with an ignorant adult. “This isn’t like usual, Me-mama. It’s awful. I won’t tell you what they wrote—I don’t even want to think things like that—but I hope Daddy can catch Coach Evans before he sees it.”

I got a funny feeling somewhere under my belt. “What kind of things are they, honey?”

“Nasty.” She wrinkled her nose. “Not true, of course, but some people may believe them.”

I reached for my pocketbook. “Let’s go over there. I want to see.”

Hope County has two lovely new regional high schools, but Hopemore High, which serves the town, has merely added wings over the years to the old redbrick building Joe Riddley and I attended. Almost everybody in the crowd on the sidewalk had graduated from that school. We all stared in dismay at the front of the building, which was now decorated with red, white, and blue designs—a horrible parody of patriotism. The artwork ranged from nasty racial epithets to Confederate flags and swastikas. Right over the front door was a huge caricature of DeWayne Evans with a message beneath:
Coach Evans
♥
White Girls
. An arrow pointed from the heart to the word “touches,” written at an angle.

Anger swelled up in me until I felt I could burst. Bethany sniffed and dabbed her eyes with a soggy tissue. As I handed her a fresh one, I noticed other Honeybees sidling our way, equally teary and outraged. They greeted us in bursts of indignation.

“It’s not true.”

“Of course not.”

“Coach Evans is the kindest, sweetest coach in the world. He’d never . . .”

“How could anybody be so awful?”

My own question was: How could anybody have drawn that caricature without getting caught? It must have taken time, and we had police cars patrolling the town all night.

I turned Bethany away. “I hadn’t imagined it was this bad, or I wouldn’t have brought you.”

Far back in the crowd somebody muttered, “No smoke without fire.”

Her head shot up, lashes damp and spiky. “That’s a lie. Anybody knows it who knows Coach Evans at all.”

To forestall a shouting match, I asked loudly, “How will they ever get the paint off?”

Other voices joined the chorus. “Have to paint the whole danged building.”

“That’ll cost a pretty penny.”

“And once you paint brick, you have to keep painting it.”

An approaching siren wailed a coda to our tune.

I hadn’t noticed Brandi’s mother until she spoke. “They could paint the front. In Chicago, a lot of houses have fancy bricks on the front and ordinary ones on the sides and back.” Everybody in the crowd turned to glare. Apparently Shana hadn’t learned that the fastest way to unite a southern crowd is to tell us a better way things are done up North.

Miffed at our lack of enthusiasm, she climbed into a red Volkswagen parked at the curb. As she drove away, the siren deafened us and a shiny new cruiser slid into her space.

Two weeks ago the
Statesman
had carried a feature about Police Chief Charlie Muggins’s new car. I doubted he’d get much call for most of the equipment he’d ordered, and as far as I knew, this was the first time he’d been able to use that fancy siren. He climbed out and swaggered my way. “Well, Judge,” he said with that leer that passes for a smile, “what have you been up to now?”

Charlie Muggins is one of my least favorite people, and the feeling is mutual. Thumbs in his belt, he looked me over like he suspected I was concealing spray paint in my pocketbook.

“This is dreadful,” I told him. “Do you have any idea who did it?”

He took off his cap and smoothed back his yellow hair for any camera that might be pointed his way. “Give me a minute. I just got here.” He sashayed off.

Bethany and I stayed a few minutes longer to watch officers look for clues, but nobody seemed to be finding any. “We need to get back, honey,” I finally told her.

“Could we go by Hollis’s on the way? She’s not here.”

Hollis’s house was not on our way. Our store is on West Oglethorpe, a block from the courthouse square.The Tanner Harem, as it is still called, is on East Oglethorpe, in the last of a string of lovely Victorian homes plus three antebellums General Sherman missed in his torchlight procession through town. Furthermore, it takes a while to drive those blocks in nice weather, because Oglethorpe is part of a federal highway and gawking tourists drive slow to admire those houses. Joe Riddley says we could speed up traffic through town by creating an alternative historical route with markers at a number of sites:
General Sherman Burned Here.

Still, I turned my car, as Bethany and I had both known I would.

Few families these days are rich enough to afford the paint, lumber, and roofing shingles those big houses soak up, so most are law offices, antique stores, or realty companies. A few are subdivided into apartments. As I pulled into Sara Meg’s gravel drive and parked under one of the big oaks in her front yard, I saw that her house needed painting again. “You go in. I’ll wait in the car,” I told Bethany. While waiting, I sighed over former perennial beds, now a mass of weeds, and over scraggy camellias and azaleas near the porch. Overgrown ivy snaked up the hydrangeas near the steps and was working its way up one column. Even if Sara Meg didn’t have time to work in her yard, she could fill the concrete urns flanking her front steps with mounds of colorful impatiens. It might lift her spirits. But with the supestore coming, how long could she even afford to keep the house?

Hollis came to the door in shorts, holding car keys. Bethany poured out the story and Hollis sagged against the doorjamb, her head shaking from side to side in disbelief. Bethany threw me an anxious look. I let down my window. “Why don’t you take today off and go to the pool with Hollis?” I called.

I didn’t feel much like working, either. To make myself feel worse, I drove by the lot outside the city limits where bulldozers were leveling an enormous field. The new superstore would sit all by itself, surrounded by cotton and corn, but I knew that cotton and corn would soon be replaced by pizza parlors and video stores. I suspected Smitty and his boys had painted the school. Who else in town was mean, or arrogant enough to think they’d never get caught? But it occurred to me that Smitty and his band of young thugs were junior versions of the educated older thugs who are taking over the world field by field. Was it Teddy Roosevelt who said if you take a boy who steals rides on boxcars and give him an education, he’ll steal railroad companies?

Back at my desk, when I found myself writing the same check a second time, I reached for the phone. “Hey, Martha. Did you hear about that awful thing over at the high school?”

“Ridd called. It makes you sick, doesn’t it?”

“Makes me want to go eat chocolate pie. I heard that chocolate releases chemicals in our brain that cheer us up. You and Cricket got time to meet me at Myrtle’s?”

Martha’s chuckle warmed me all over. “Sure. Another study has shown that in times of stress, women should spend time with other women and children. That releases some chemicals, too. And if you walk over, the exercise will reduce
you
.”

I reached for my pocketbook. “Hooray for science, if all it takes to make me feel better today is a pretty walk, good company, and chocolate pie.”

9

Myrtle’s had a thriving breakfast crowd of widowers and men whose breakfast clause in their marriage contract expired when they retired. By the time I arrived, however, only two booths were occupied. The customer at a back booth was hidden by a newspaper. Smitty’s gang filled the corner booth, their heads in a huddle, squirming and sniggering like boys half their age.

Myrtle was sitting at a corner table having herself a cup of coffee, a half-full pot beside her.

“Get ready for a rush,” I warned her. “Did you hear what happened over at the school?” Whenever trouble strikes Hopemore, folks naturally gravitate to Myrtle’s.

She hadn’t heard, so I sat down across from her and filled her in. “Somebody painted up the school real bad last night. Nasty things I won’t repeat—”

A shout of laughter made us both turn toward the corner booth. “Ignore them,” Myrtle begged in a low voice. “If that Smitty gets riled, he can be mean as a copperhead.”

“So can I,” I assured her, “but I won’t today. I’m going to take the next booth, though, to see if I can hear what they’re talking about. I wouldn’t be surprised if they painted the school.”

“You want your usual?”

“Not yet. Martha and Cricket are joining me in a few minutes.”

She nodded. “Two chocolate pies and a chocolate ice cream with a place mat and crayons. I’ll bring it when they get here.” Myrtle knows her regulars.

When Smitty saw me moseying their way, he made a chopping signal. His friends lounged back like young collegiates enjoying summer vacation. I’d have ignored them, but a spiral of smoke rose from the back of their circle, so I detoured in their direction. “No smoking in here.”

Smitty’s chin might sprout only a few yellow hairs, but his eyes were insolent and older than mine. “We ain’t smoking.”

“
We
may not be, but one of you certainly is.” My eyes roved around the table and stopped at Willie Keller, known as Wet Willie because his eyes were always red and watery. Willie had the biggest ears I’d ever seen on a child, but he seldom heard a thing unless you said it twice. “Willie? Willie! Put out that cigarette. Do you hear me? I said, put out that cigarette.”

“I ain’t got—” He got that far before he glanced up and met my eye.

I saw his right shoulder tense. “Don’t you drop it on the floor. Put it out in your glass. Now! In the glass!” I didn’t raise two sons for nothing. Reluctantly his grubby hand crept from beneath the table. A lit cigarette sizzled as it hit the ice, then sputtered out.

Smitty slid out of the booth and jerked his head. “We got places to go and people to annoy. Let’s head out.” The others scrambled to follow, displaying the combined intelligence and manners of cows spying an open gate.

Only Tyrone muttered, as he passed, “Hey, Judge.” He turned slightly away, but I’d seen what he was trying to hide: a smear of blue paint on his jacket. He saw that I’d seen it and gave me an anxious look over one shoulder as he followed Smitty as fast as a big kid can scurry.

Halfway to the door, Smitty turned. “What’s that you were saying, Judge? Somebody painted the school? Imagine that. Must be real purty.” He drawled the word like a television cowboy. “Come on, fellas. We oughtta take a stroll and have a look.” He sauntered past the cash register and out the door like his daddy owned the place. Nobody paid. Myrtle didn’t mention it.

“Thanks, Judge, for clearing out the vermin,” Buddy Tanner said, lowering the
Wall Street Journal.

“Glad to do it. Wish we could make it permanent. Did Ronnie start work today?”

“He sure did. I vacated the premises to let him learn the ropes from the guy he’s replacing.” Buddy gave me a genial nod and returned to his paper. I would have asked him to join Martha and me, but he didn’t look like he wanted company.

Smitty or one of his friends had left a green spiral notebook on the seat of the booth. I leaned over and used a paper napkin to flip the pages. It contained a number of caricatures of teachers at school, all done in purple ink. I recognized Ridd, his bald head elongated and his hair in tufts like a mad scientist’s, writing elaborate formulas all over a blackboard. Another showed Hollis sliding into second base, hair streaming behind her. With only a few lines, the artist had caught every expression of her body.

Then I froze. After Hollis, the next two pages were covered with pictures of DeWayne: a king with a crown, a chemist blown up by his own explosion, a lecher leering at a white girl. The rest of the notebook—five sheets—was empty.

I pulled out my cell phone and punched in the number for Assistant Police Chief Isaac James. Isaac would have been police chief of Hopemore if life were fair and our enlightened city fathers had been willing several years before to promote a competent local black man instead of importing an incompetent white one. Joe Riddley and I like and respect Ike, and the feeling seems to be mutual. When I explained what I’d found and where, he was instantly alert. “Leave it in place, and don’t let Myrtle sit anybody else in that booth. I’m on my way.”

“I’ll be in the next booth,” I promised. “Oh, and Ike—Tyrone Noland’s jacket has blue paint on it. You might try to find him before he gets rid of it. He left Myrtle’s a minute ago.”

“Thanks, Judge. We’ll pick him up.”

I slid into the next booth along the side wall. I couldn’t see the notebook—it was on the part of the bench with its back to me—but I could keep an eye on the booth and the front door.

A few more people straggled in. When Myrtle got in speaking distance, I motioned her over and said, “Don’t sit anybody in that corner booth. Isaac James is coming to get the green notebook that’s there, and he’ll want you to tell him who was sitting there when it was left.”

She scowled. “I don’t want trouble with those boys. They’ll slash my tires, break my windows—who knows what else?”

“You mustn’t let them terrorize you,” I reproached her.

She hefted her coffeepot. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Judge, they already have.”

Cricket spoke from under her elbow. “What’s terrorize?”

“Scare you,” I explained briefly as she moved away. “You want the outside or the inside?”