Hunting Season Read online

  Anna had been reading quickly, the information pretty much all of a piece with things she’d observed on scene. She stopped skimming and reread the second-to-last paragraph. The palms and fingers of the victim’s hands had been contused. The nails, bitten to the quick, had traces of bark beneath what was left.

  Tree bark. Contusions on palms and finger pads. Shortly before death, if not during the actual event, poor, fat ol’ Doyce had been climbing trees.

  Rectal tissues were healthy, no indication of prolonged homosexual activity. Anna thought about that for a moment. Doyce was evidently not gay and had not regularly or recently been involved in any rough-and-tumble sex games. Men in late middle age, whether closet homosexuals or closet masochists, were unlikely to suddenly find the nerve to act out their fantasies. That fit with her instincts but not with the way Doyce Barnette had died or the way the body was found.

  She shoved the report to the side of the desk, not rejecting it as worthless, but shelving information that might become important at a later date.

  A short stack of messages and reports had been dumped at her work station during her two days off. Needing to reconnect with the daily life of her job, she began going through them.

  Clintus Jones called twice. The slip from Monday said he’d called; no message. Tuesday’s told her Martin Crowley, the last of the three surviving poker players, had returned. Clintus would wait for her before questioning the man.

  The rest of the messages were bits and pieces from Barth’s ongoing research regarding the slave cemetery. Barth was continuing to talk with local black families whose last names matched those of the few known inhabitants of the old cemetery. He’d included several synopses for Anna’s edification. A Mrs. Jackson, eighty-seven, of Fayette, Mississippi, believed her grandmother to have been a slave at Mt. Locust. No records existed to verify the old woman’s memory. She claimed her son, a machinist at the Packard plant in Clinton, had tracked down two old bills of sale, one of a man he believed to be his great-grandfather, to a plantation south of Natchez, the other from a cabinet maker who’d built coffins of cheap pine to house the mortal remains of human chattel for local slave owners. Barth had added a note that he’d be following up with the Jackson boy.

  The second synopsis was of Barth’s talk with the mother of Paul’s deputy, Lonnie Restin. Anna read that with more interest simply because she knew and liked Lonnie. Family lore had it that they’d descended from a freedman who’d once been owned by the Mt. Locust plantation. According to the stories, he’d been freed prior to the Civil War for saving the plantation owner’s son from drowning in the Big Black River. A lovely story and possibly true, but Anna was cynical. Not that a black man could and would save a drowning child, but because orphans—and the African-Americans were orphans in the very real sense that their ancestors, their history, had been lost to the evil of slavery—often made up romantic stories about their origins. A group of people, made up of disparate tribes and conflicting customs, had been put in the uncomfortable position of reinventing a culture that would not only unite them but provide a historical matrix allowing a sense of belonging—to a place in history, to a place in the world.

  Barth was looking for a needle of fact in a haystack of memory and illusion. Wishing him luck, Anna put aside the report and dialed the Natchez Sheriff’s Department.

  Crowley worked graveyard shift, 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. In hopes of greater cooperation, or at least greater coherence, they let the man sleep till two o’clock.

  The Crowley residence was on a back road that ran roughly parallel to the Trace between the Parkway and the Mississippi River, and then veered to the west and the town of Vicksburg.

  Anna met Clintus in his office. Together they headed north, in the sheriff’s car. Rain still fell in cold unpredictable gusts, the wind playful in a malicious kind of way, buffeting the unwary from different directions, coating windshields with leaves and lying in wait near bridges to send cars skittering with sudden unexpected blasts.

  The AM radio station Clintus listened to switched back and forth between Christian music and an announcer with a pronounced drawl gleefully predicting dropping temperatures with sleet by evening. Anna preferred the dire predictions to born-again messages set to rhythms designed for sex, drugs and rock and roll.

  On either side of the two-lane asphalt road, land melted away in soggy fields of stubble rising and falling as gently as the chest of a breathing child, the “hills” of Mississippi. Ditches ran full and creeks were beginning to back up at the culverts under the road. Leaves blew and fell, stuck and slid with the rain till there was little difference between earth and sky.

  Given the swirling of this post-primordial soup, it took them three passes to locate the Crowley place. A black stroke of willow leaf had stuck to the mailbox, neatly transforming 603 to 1603.

  Set on several acres of land, the house was a small suburban-style tract house and looked to have been lifted out of a development. An attempt had been made to force a suburban lawn to frame it, but city grass was no match for rural weeds and its edges disappeared raggedly into the flooded fields.

  Martin Crowley came to the door before Clintus knocked. He was clad in plaid pajama bottoms and a University of Southern Mississippi T-shirt emblazoned with USM’s mascot, a dull-witted eagle.

  Crowley was small and compact, with hair as blond as a child’s. Anna put him in his late thirties. Though his face was prematurely aged, he was fit with the tidy matched musculature that told of hours spent working out with weights.

  “Have trouble finding the place? I saw you drive by a couple times,” he said. Anna glanced at the one window that looked out over the road. The blinds were down and closed. He’d been watching, waiting for them, worried enough to spend ten minutes peeking out from behind the blind slats. Crowley didn’t appear nervous or concerned by their visit, but he didn’t stand aside or invite them in, apparently intending to have the interview on the truncated porch.

  “Mind if we come in?” Clintus asked politely. “No sense in standing in the door heating the whole outside.”

  Crowley couldn’t think of a reason to refuse, but Anna could tell he was trying.

  “I guess you better,” he said finally and stepped back.

  The interior of the Crowley home was reminiscent of a packrat’s lair. The small living room was crammed with furniture that looked as if generations of kids and dogs had jumped up and down on it. Three of the four corners were dominated by cheap glossy knickknack cabinets filled with Avon’s collectibles in perfume bottles and glass figurines of empty-faced women in flowing pastel gowns. One wall was decorated with dead fish mounted on wooden plaques. The opposite wall sported collector plates, united by a Gone With the Wind theme; a his and hers display of bad taste and matrimonial equity.

  Martin dropped into a well-used Barcalounger and picked up a coffee cup from the stand at his elbow. The television, turned to Divorce Court or some equally irritating show, grated on.

  Uninvited, Anna sat down, or perched rather, on the edge of a sofa whose blue-and-white striped, low-rent elegance failed to hide the depredations of animals and foodstuffs.

  Clintus, mindful of his sartorial perfection, looked around helplessly and Anna stifled a laugh. Stoically sacrificing the purity of his trouser seat to the greater cause of justice, he finally sat on a glider.

  On the television, the room’s only light source, an overweight white woman with improbably red hair whined on about a two-thousand-dollar car loan her ex had left her with.

  “This about Doyce Barnette?” Crowley asked.

  Clintus began, “As you probably know, Mr. Barnette was found dead at—”

  “I read the papers,” Martin snapped as if Clintus had accused him of illiteracy.

  The vehemence of Martin’s declaration created a momentary silence. Clintus recovered first. “Yes. Well then you know about as much as we do. You played poker with Doyce the night he was killed, that right?”

  “Right.”
/>   “How did he seem?” Anna asked innocently. “Was he different than usual? You know, distracted or anything?”

  “He...” Crowley’s eyes narrowed momentarily. He ran a work-scarred hand through his hair, leaving blond spikes in its path. “He never showed up,” he said. “I meant I was supposed to play poker, but Doyce never showed. He never showed up.” Crowley shut his mouth in a hard line exhibiting no more lips than a snake. The casual coldness of a man forced to entertain the Law in his pajamas had been replaced by the hostility of a man under attack.

  Anna and Clintus went through their questions, coming at Martin Crowley from every angle they could think of. His answers were short and pat. He’d been coached; he exhibited none of the vague memories of a man trying to recall an evening that had been unmemorable at the time. Common mythology would have it that the truth was easy to remember and lies tended to morph with the retelling. The opposite was true. A group of honest men, questioned about a social evening that was merely one of many like evenings, would argue endlessly about who showed up in what order, whether they ate ham or pastrami, who won the pot. Memories were not stored in a linear fashion, ordered by some cerebral Dewey decimal system. They were dumped in a vast mental junk drawer and had to be pawed through and sorted out.

  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 ears 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, mail-order, 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 abou
t.

  “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 down. 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?”