The Affair

I said, “You saw it, I guess.”

“Up close and personal. I could see the bones inside her neck. She was all bled out. Like a lake. It was real bad. A good looking woman, real pretty, all dressed up for a night out, neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Not right at all.”

I said nothing, out of respect for something Pellegrino’s tone seemed to demand.

He said, “She was raped, too. The doctor found that out when he got her clothes off and got her on the slab. Unless you could say she’d been into it enough at some point to throw herself down and scratch up her ass on the gravel. Which I don’t think she would be.”

“You knew her?”

“We saw her around.”

I asked, “Who did it?”

He said, “We don’t know. A guy off the base, probably. That’s what we think.”

“Why?”

“Because those are who she spent her time with.”

I asked, “If your detective is out sick, who is working the case?”

Pellegrino said, “The chief.”

“Does he have much experience with homicides?”

“She,” Pellegrino said. “The chief is a woman.”

“Really?”

“It’s an elected position. She got the votes.” There was a little resignation in his voice. The kind of tone a guy uses when his team loses a big game. It is what it is.

“Did you run for the job?” I asked.

“We all did,” he said. “Except the detective. He was already bad with his kidneys.”

I said nothing. The car rocked and swayed. Pellegrino’s tires sounded worn and soft. They set up a dull baritone roar on the blacktop. Up ahead the evening gloom had gone completely. Pellegrino’s headlights lit the way fifty yards in front. Beyond that was nothing but darkness. The road was straight, like a tunnel through the trees. The trees were twisted and opportunistic, like weeds competing for light and air and minerals, like they had seeded themselves a hundred years ago on abandoned arable land. They flashed past in the light spill, like they were frozen in motion. I saw a tin sign on the shoulder, lopsided and faded and pocked with rusty coin-sized spots where the enamel had flaked loose. It advertised a hotel called Toussaint’s. It promised the convenience of a Main Street location, and rooms of the highest quality.

Pellegrino said, “She got elected because of her name.”

“The sheriff?”

“That’s who we were talking about.”

“Why? What’s her name?”

“Elizabeth Deveraux,” he said.

“Nice name,” I said. “But no better than Pellegrino, for instance.”

“Her daddy was sheriff before her. He was a well-liked man, in certain quarters. We think some folks voted out of loyalty. Or maybe they thought they were voting for the old guy himself. Maybe they didn’t know he was dead. Things take time to catch on, in certain quarters.”

I asked, “Is Carter Crossing big enough to have quarters?”

Pellegrino said, “Halves, I guess. Two of them. West of the railroad track, or east.”

“Right side, wrong side?”

“Like everywhere.”

“Which side is Kelham?”

“East. You have to drive three miles. Through the wrong side.”

“Which side is the Toussaint’s hotel?”

“Won’t you be staying with your friend?”

“When I find him. If I find him. Until then I need a place.”

“Toussaint’s is OK,” Pellegrino said. “I’ll let you out there.”

And he did. We drove out of the tunnel through the trees and the road broadened and the forest itself died back to stunted saplings left and right, all choked with weeds and trash. The road became an asphalt ribbon laid through a wide flat area of earth the size of a football field. It led through a right turn to a straight street between low buildings. Main Street, presumably. There was no architecture. Just construction, a lot of it old, most of it wood, with some stone at the foundation level. We passed a building marked Carter County Sheriff’s Department, and then a vacant lot, and then a diner, and then we arrived at the Toussaint’s hotel. It had been a fancy place once. It had green paint and trim and moldings and iron railings on the second-floor balconies. It looked like it had been copied from a New Orleans design. It had a faded signboard with its name on it, and a row of dim lights washing the exterior facade, three of which were out.

Pellegrino eased the cruiser to a stop and I thanked him for the ride and got out. He pulled a wide U-turn behind me and headed back the way we had come, presumably to park in the Sheriff’s Department lot. I used a set of wormy wooden steps and crossed a bouncy wooden veranda and pushed in through the hotel door.

Chapter 9

Inside the hotel I found a small square lobby and an unattended reception desk. The floor was worn boards partially covered by a threadbare rug of Middle Eastern design. The desk was a counter made of hardwood polished to a high shine by years of wear and labor. There was a matrix of pigeonholes on the wall behind it. Four high, seven wide. Twenty-eight rooms. Twenty-seven of them had their keys hanging in place. None of the pigeonholes contained letters or notes or any other kind of communication.

There was a bell on the desk, a small brass thing going green around the edges. I hit it twice, and a polite ding ding echoed around for a spell, but it produced no results. None at all. No one came. There was a closed door next to the pigeonholes, and it stayed closed. A back office, I guessed. Empty, presumably. I saw no reason why a hotel owner would deliberately avoid doubling his occupancy rate.

I stood still for a moment and then checked a door on the left of the lobby. It opened to an unlit lounge that smelled of damp and dust and mildew. There were humped shapes in the dark that I took to be armchairs. No activity. No people. I stepped back to the desk and hit the bell again.

No response.

I called out, “Hello?”

No response.

So I gave up for the time being and went back out, across the shaky veranda, down the worn steps, and I stood in a shadow on the sidewalk under one of the busted lamps. There was nothing much to see. Across Main Street was a long row of low buildings. Stores, presumably. All of them were dark. Beyond them was blackness. The night air was clear and dry and faintly warm. March, in Mississippi. Meteorologically I could have been anywhere. I could hear the thrill of breeze in distant leaves, and tiny granular sounds, like moving dust, or like termites eating wood. I could hear an extractor fan in the wall of the diner next door. Beyond that, nothing. No human sounds. No voices. No revelry, no traffic, no music.

Tuesday night, near an army base.

Not typical.

I had eaten nothing since lunch in Memphis, so I headed for the diner. It was a narrow building, but deep, set end-on to Main Street. The kitchen entrance was probably on the block behind. Inside the front door was a pay phone on the wall and a register and a hostess station. Beyond that was a long straight aisle with tables for four on the left and tables for two on the right. Tables, not booths, with freestanding chairs. Like a cafe. The only customers in the place were a couple about twice my age. They were face to face at a table for four. The guy had a newspaper and the woman had a book. They were settled in, like they were happy to linger over their meal. The only staff on view was a waitress. She was close to the swing door in back that led to the kitchen. She saw me step in and she hustled the whole length of the aisle to greet me. She put me at a table for two, about