Black Light

“You boys been here so long it’s dark out! Ha! And what’d you learn? Nary a goddamned thing! Hah! You got my money, Swagger?”

Bob threw the twenty on the table.

“Have a party, Posey.”

It was full dark and Russ felt both exhausted and liberated when at last he sucked in a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with the odor of bacon fat and stale sweat.

“We didn’t learn much,” he admitted, as they stepped off the porch.

“I told you we wouldn’t,” said Bob. “You keep trying to make this link between poor Shirelle and what happened to my father. You keep trying to do that but it don’t work out in time or in logic.”

“Well—” said Russ. But then he paused. “Consider this. First, coincidence. Is it logical that there would be two elaborate conspiracies engineered within days of each other in a remote backwater of West Arkansas? I mean, things like that hardly ever happen in real life. Doesn’t it make some kind of sense to presume they were in some way connected, that there was only really one?”

Bob said nothing.

“Then consider,” Russ said, “that although each conspiracy is different in terms of objective, they share the same mechanism or pattern. In both cases, there’s two levels. The first, seemingly impenetrable, offers a plain and simple crime, complete to motives and very obvious clues. Jimmy and Bub Pye rob a grocery store; ten hours later they’re confronted by Sergeant Swagger, who guns them both down and is killed himself. Open-and-shut. Shirelle Parker is raped and murdered twelve miles outside Blue Eye. Her hand conceals the monogrammed pocket of her killer. At his house, the rest of the shirt, smeared with her blood, is found. Open-and- shut. But in both cases, at the level of the most excruciating detail, the anomalies begin to assert themselves and if you go beyond the open-and-shut, you see that in each case some genius operator set it up—night infrared for your dad, moving the body from the site of the crime in the other case. Don’t you see?”

“Consider yourself,” said Bob. “The boy that killed Shirelle was black, you dope. Shirelle’s mama told Sam she was raised so she wouldn’t get in no car with no white boy. Now, you got to ask, if he’s a black boy, who the hell in Arkansas in 1955 had the wherewithal to throw together a frame? For a black boy? Don’t make no sense at all. If it were a white boy, maybe. But no: it was a black boy.”

“Shit,” said Russ.

“I’m convinced my daddy was investigating a crime and that’s what got him killed. He learned something, something big, that powerful men wanted stopped. How else would they have had the resources? They had the CIA, an army sniper, state-of-the-art gear.”

In exasperation, Russ shouted, “I am the son of a state police sergeant. My dad couldn’t investigate an outhouse!”

“Shut up, we just passed our mark.”

“What?”

“I’m counting.”

“What?”

“Steps. Once we hit two hundred forty steps from that big boulder, we head off this goddamned path, veer to the left and begin our zigzag back. We move in units of two hundred forty of my long steps, hard left, hard right by the compass, and that gets us back to the car.”

But Russ hadn’t been paying attention. They had now reached the draw where the creek bed, off to the left, cut between the two hills. The trees loomed above them, more felt than seen. The wind gently pressed through them, filling the night with whispers. The dark lay like a blanket, suffocating Russ. A flash of paranoia illuminated a far corner of his mind; he thought of being alone out here with his hyperactive imagination, zero visibility, lost in some maze that wore an ancient cloak, alone completely. He would die.

Then he heard something terrifying: from close by, it was the raspy, dryly cracking rattle of a poisonous snake; it released an almost archetypal toxin of fear into his system.

39

T

hese were difficult days for Red. He could do so much and then had to let go, sit back and trust the others to execute his plan. He couldn’t, as Amy had said of her father, indulge in his capacity to overmanage. He had to trust. Would Bob read the clues correctly? Would he show up as predicted? Would the damned Duane Peck be able to bring off his end or would the man’s stupidity and impetuousness bring them down? Would Jack Preece hit the shots that needed to be hit? Would the old man, the scrofulous, nasty Jed Posey, hold together in a long session with Bob?

Ironically, of them all, Red trusted Posey the most: he was familiar with the type, the prison rat so hardened by a life lived at the extreme end of existence he’d been turned into some Nietzschean thing, a being so intense and one-pointed he hardly had any other life left him except the life of duty.

The other irony was that this whole thing even now, as it had for so long, completely delighted him. It was … remarkably fun. Such a clever plot, so astutely calibrated, based on such an intense analysis of Bob’s character. Really, truly a masterpiece.

“Red, you’re away.”

That was Jeff Seward, first operating vice-president of Fort Smith Federal. The others in the foursome were Neil James, of Bristow, Freed, Bartholomew and Jeffers, Attorneys-at-Law, and Roger Deacon, of McCone- Carruthers Advertising Agency. It was the weekly golf foursome of the Fort Smith Rich Boys Club, at Hardscrabble Country Club off Cliff Drive.

And Red was indeed out and Jeff was indeed delighted.

His ball lay a long fifty-three feet from the pin. Between it and the hole was a wilderness of elevations, switchbacks, slopes and bare spots. It was the eighteenth hole: Red had shot low, standing at a 71, but damned Jeff, who had never beaten him, was standing at a 72 and had hit an uncharacteristically nice approach shot that had deposited him a few feet from the pin. His one-putt would put him out at 73; Red’s two-putt would leave him at 73 also—damn!—and if he three-putted, a distinct possibility, he’d lose. The image of Jeff’s smirk filled him with dark rage, which he enjoyed because it cut through the mesh of anxieties that he otherwise had suffered.

Jeff was an old friend and enemy; he’d played on the same Razorback football team with Red in the early sixties, and had at least kept up with him in the wife department, trading in an older model on a newer one every fifteen years, though he’d never reached—and never would—the beauty pageant level as had Red. They’d been in and out of business deals a dozen times and made at least four or five million off of each other’s friendship and connection. But … golf was thicker than blood. Red did not want to lose.

He approached the ball and knelt to read the green. Around him the vivid beauty of the course expressed itself in full vertiginous glory, the most agreeable golf course in West Arkansas and better than all of the courses but one in Little Rock.

So Red looked across the ball into a treacherous maze of possibilities. He glanced at his watch. It was late. Suddenly, he felt a strange thing, a collapse of will. It was as if his warrior’s spirit, which had sustained him these many years, had suddenly vanished. He didn’t want to putt out. He wanted to lie down.

I am getting old, he thought.

He read the putt as a left-to-right crosser and knew it demanded courage above all else. It would seem to die a half dozen times, seem to quit and sputter or slide off into irrelevancy, would live a whole odyssey of adventures before it even got in the neighborhood of the cup. You had to hit it hard. You had to believe. You could not shirk or flinch or whine: go at it like a man and live or die, like a man.

“That would be a hell of a putt, Red,” said Jeff.

“You wouldn’t want a side bet, would you, Jeff?”

“Hmmmmm,” considered Jeff. “Something in the neighborhood of—oh, a grand?”

“A grand it is, bubba,” said Red, smiling wolfishly and setting himself up. “Did I ever tell you boys about the time I took three grand off Clinton? That’s why he won’t play with me no more!”