have her, so he was the guilty one, they figure.”
So that was the reason Emanuel was confiding in me. He was isolated from his own clan. “Marlon was with Deedra Saturday night?” I asked.
The deputy nodded. “And Sunday morning. But he says he didn’t see her after he left to go to church on Sunday. He called her apartment several times, he says. And her phone records bear that out.”
“What calls did she make?”
“She called her mother,” Clifton Emanuel said heavily. “She called her mother.”
“Do you have any idea why?” I asked, keeping my voice soft, because it seemed to me Clifton was about to pull the lid back on top of his loquacity, and I wanted to get everything I could out of him before the well ran dry.
“According to her mother, it was a family matter.”
That lid was sliding shut.
“About Jerrell fooling around with Deedra before he dated Lacey?”
His lips pursed in a flat line, Clifton gave an ambiguous movement of his head, which could mean anything. The lid was down now.
“I’m gonna go,” I said.
He was regretting talking to me now, the luxury of speculating with another skeptical party forgotten, the fact that he was a lawman now uppermost in his mind. He’d talked out of school and he didn’t like himself for it. If he hadn’t been so enamored of Marta Schuster, if he’d been in good standing with his fellow deputies, he’d never have said a word. And I saw his struggle as he tried to piece together what to say to me to ensure my silence.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I don’t think Marlon killed her. And rumor has it that yesterday Lacey told Jerrell to move out.”
Deputy Emanuel blinked and considered this information with narrowed eyes.
“And you know those pearls?”
He nodded absently.
I inclined my head toward the branch where they’d dangled.
“I don’t think she would have thrown them around.” The pearls had been bothering me. Clifton Emanuel made a “keep going” gesture to get me to elaborate. I shrugged. “Her father gave her that necklace. She valued it.”
Clifton Emanuel looked down at me with those fathomless black eyes. I thought he was deciding whether or not to trust me. I may have been wrong; he may have been wondering if he’d have a hamburger or chicken nuggets when he went through the drive-through at Burger Tycoon.
After a moment of silence, I turned on my heel and went down the road, all too aware that he was staring after me. I didn’t get that uneasy feeling with Deputy Emanuel, that prickling-at-the-back-of-the-neck feeling that some people gave me; the feeling that warned me that something sick and possibly dangerous lurked inside that person’s psyche. But after our little conversation I was sure that Marta Schuster was lucky to have the devotion of this man, and I was glad I was not her enemy.
On my way into town, I was thinking hard. Now more than ever, it seemed to me-and I thought that it seemed to Clifton Emanuel, too-there was something phony about the crime scene in the woods. Though Deputy Emanuel had run out of confidence in me before we’d run out of conversation, he too had seemed dubious about the scenario implied by the trappings left at the scene.
At my next job, Camille Emerson’s place, I was lucky enough to find the house empty. I was able to keep thinking while I worked.
That implied scenario: though I’d gone over it with Emanuel, I ran it again in my head. Deedra and a flame go out to the woods in Deedra’s car. The flame gets Deedra to strip, which she does with abandon, flinging her clothes and jewelry everywhere.
Then a quarrel occurs. Perhaps the man can’t perform sexually, and Deedra taunts him (though Emanuel had testimony and I agreed that such taunting was unlike Deedra). Maybe Deedra threatens to tell the flame’s wife, mother, or girlfriend that Deedra and the flame are having sex, period. Or possibly the flame is just into rough sex, killing Deedra in a fit of passion. But would that tie in with the catastrophic blow that stopped her heart?
I was so tired of thinking about Deedra by that time that the last explanation tempted me. I didn’t want to think Deedra’s death was anything more than passion of one kind or another, passion that had gotten fatally out of hand.
But as I finished dusting the “collectibles” on Camille Emerson’s living-room shelves. I caught sight of myself in the mantel mirror. I was shaking my head in a sober way, all to myself.
The only injury Deedra had sustained, according to every source, was the killing blow itself. I knew all too well what rough sex was like. It’s not one blow or act or bit of brutality, but a whole series of them. The object of this attention doesn’t emerge from the sex act with one injury, but a series of injuries. The bottle insertion had happened after Deedra was dead. Therefore, I realized, as I carried a load of dirty towels to the laundry area, that little nasty, contemptuous act was no more than window dressing. Maybe the equivalent of having the last word in a conversation.
That said something about the person who’d performed the insertion, didn’t it? I covered my hand with a paper towel and pulled a wad of bubble gum off the baseboard behind the trashcan in the younger Emerson boy’s room.
So, we had someone strong, strong enough to kill with one blow. The blow was probably purposeful. Evidently, the person had
We had someone who despised women. Maybe not all women, but women in some way like Deedra. Promiscuous? Attractive? Young? All of the above?
We had someone who had no regard for human life.
And we had someone clever. When I turned it over in my mind yet again, I could see that the staging was successful if you didn’t really know Deedra. Deedra wouldn’t throw things around like that, even if she were stripping for someone, which I could very well imagine her doing. Even then, she might sling a blouse, but it would land on something that wouldn’t tear or dirty it. She wouldn’t toss her pearls around. And the woods… no, she wouldn’t do that in the woods! Where was the lap robe or blanket for the lovers to lie on? Why ask Deedra to strip if the goal was a quick screw in the backseat of the car?
I concluded that whoever’d killed Deedra hadn’t thought anything at all about her character, had only known facts: that she was promiscuous and biddable. He hadn’t thought of her fastidiousness about her surroundings, hadn’t thought about her care for her possessions, the care that had never extended to cover her own body.
As I closed the Emersons’ door behind me, I realized that now I knew much more than I had this morning. What to do with it, how to make it work for me, was still mysterious. These pieces of knowledge were not evidence to which anyone else would give credence, but at least Clifton Emanuel had listened. I was relieved to know he had been wondering, as I had been, if the whole scene in the woods was a setup.
A setup to serve what purpose?
Okay, the purpose had to be, as the deputy and I had hinted to each other in our conversation, to misdirect. The scene had been staged to make it appear that Deedra had been killed for a sexual reason; therefore, if the scene was false, Deedra had
She had been killed because… she worked at the county clerk’s office? She was Lacey Dean Knopp’s daughter? She was the granddaughter of Joe C Prader? She was easily led and promiscuous, so she was an easy target? I’d hit a mental wall.
It was time to dismiss Deedra from my thoughts for a while. When I was sitting in my kitchen at noon, that was easy.
My house felt empty and bleak without Jack in it. I didn’t like that at all. I ate lunch as quickly as I could, imagining him riding back to Little Rock, arriving at his own apartment. He’d return his phone messages, make notes on the case he’d just finished, answer his E-mail.
I missed him. I seemed to need him more than I ought to. Maybe it was because for so long I had done without? Maybe I valued him more deeply because of what I’d gone through all those years ago? I saw Jack’s faults; I didn’t think he was perfect. And that didn’t make a bit of difference. What would I do if something happened to Jack?
This seemed to be a day for questions I couldn’t answer.
