Gone went the little cash and few stock funds Mac had set aside to grow for retirement, handed over to the lawyer to help grow his own retirement. Gone went the camper van and the almost new Corvette. These days, Mac drove an old red Ford F-150 truck he’d found that had been about to be scrapped for parts.
Gone, too, went the goodwill of the people of Grand Point. Fewer and fewer came to the Bird’s Nest for the fish fry on Friday night or the chicken bonanza all day Sunday. The Bird’s Nest was teetering even more wildly, about to go down.
No, Mac Bassett thought now, as he pulled into the parking lot that had set off so much trouble little more than a year before, he didn’t need a waitress’s vague suppositions about an overheard laugh and the mention of a dead girl’s name adding to the toxic clutter in his life.
TWENTY-THREE
Mac sent the bartender home at eleven-thirty, locked the door and poured the customary last whiskey for Farris Hobbs. Farris had been drinking at the roadhouse for forty years, and somewhere in there a tradition had been established. He sipped four whiskeys each night. Three he paid for, and one, the last, was poured free to warm the man’s walk home. Farris used to drive, but that was before five DUIs, all ticketed before he’d barely weaved out of the parking lot, cost him his driver’s license. Fortunately, walking was no hardship; Farris lived in a two-room cottage across the street, just north of the parking lot. Still, to be sure Farris arrived safely home, it was Mac’s custom to walk him across the highway and then point him the few last steps to his door.
It was no chore. Farris was good company, steady or wobbling, a genial man who greeted the world with a sleepy smile. And except for one instance when he overshot the men’s room and mistook the ice machine for a urinal, he never caused a problem. Even that one slip-up was explainable, friends pointed out. It had been Farris’s birthday, and well-wishers had treated him to much more than his usual load.
That night Mac poured himself a short knock as well, and asked, ‘Farris, you’ve lived here your whole life, right?’
‘Every one of my blessed sixty-four years,’ Farris said amiably.
‘Betty Jo Dean.’
Farris’s face froze, and for the first time that Mac had ever seen, Farris’s smile disappeared. Just as surprisingly, for Farris had never been known to hurry the taste of whiskey, he gulped down the last of his drink and slipped off his stool like a man late for a bus.
Mac’s hand on the bottle was just as fast. Now much intrigued, he clanked the bottle neck loudly against Farris’s glass, pouring him an unprecedented – excepting those that had ended up in the ice machine on that long ago birthday – fifth drink. ‘On the house,’ Mac said, leaving the bottle on the counter as a promise of even more to come.
Farris wavered, standing next to the stool. ‘I don’t need that,’ he said, perhaps to Mac, more likely to the refilled glass.
‘OK, I’ll walk you across.’
Farris eyed the fresh whiskey, free and waiting. He got back on the stool. ‘I don’t hardly know anything.’
‘No big deal. It’s just the name came up in conversation today.’
Farris took a sip, and must have decided its taste was sweet indeed. ‘What kind of conversation?’ he asked, in no apparent hurry now.
Mac lied. ‘Someone mentioned the summer a girl, Betty Jo Dean, got killed. I didn’t let on that I didn’t know about that, because as mayor, I’m supposed to know the town’s history.’
Farris looked at the door, as though afraid of eavesdroppers. ‘Betty Jo was from Pinktown, across the river. In 1982, just before the Fourth of July, she was out with an older guy, Polish, down from Rockford. They were parked on Poor Farm Road in his Buick, maybe necking, maybe more. The way the sheriff’s department told it, two people came up to their car, pulled him out, shot him once in the heart and several times in the nuts. They dragged him off into the ditch. One drove off in their car; the other drove away in the Polish’s Buick with Betty Jo still in it. They left the Buick in your parking lot, across the highway. He was found the next morning, alongside Poor Farm Road. Betty Jo was found two days later up on the Devil’s Backbone, shot by the same.38 revolver. There was talk of all kind of leads: jealous girlfriends; jealous boyfriends; people Betty Jo pissed off at Al’s Rustic Hacienda; people the Polish pissed off right here on these premises, gambling. Our cops were running every which way. Headless chickens, they were, chasing them leads. They botched every damned one of them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘None of our boys was used to working a murder scene. Take that Polish’s car keys, because that I saw myself. Like I said, the Buick was found right across from here, its keys still in the ignition. Lots of folks were hanging about, including yours truly, admiring that car. Yellow it was, with black stripes – a real hot hauler. Anyway, Clamp reaches in for the keys, so nobody would get a notion to see how such a big engine might sound. Pulling them out, he dropped them in the dirt. When he picked them up, they were filthy. And so were his hands, when he got back in to drive it to the municipal garage. Whatever prints was on them keys or the steering wheel were gone, smudged away. Then Clamp had the whole inside stripped, looking for clues, and getting all sorts of new fingerprints everywhere.
‘Clamp was just nervous; they all were. Well, the whole case went like that. Our boys were overwhelmed; no leads ever worked out.’
He finished his drink in one last, fast swallow, slipped off his stool and headed quickly for the door, as though afraid of hearing Mac pour him a new drink.
‘I’ll walk you, Farris,’ Mac called to the man’s back, jangling his keys to show he was coming to unlock the door.
Farris shook his head. ‘Tonight I’ll see myself home.’
Mac unlocked the door and held it open.
Farris paused before stepping outside. There was none of the usual redness in his eyes; nothing watery to show a night of drinking. They’d become stone-cold sober.
‘How long you been living in Grand Point?’ Farris asked.
‘I’ve owned the Bird’s Nest for over a year,’ Mac said carefully, mindful of the indictment he was under.
‘Over a year, and you ain’t never heard the story about Betty Jo?’
‘Not a word of it.’
‘That tells you something right there, don’t it?’ Farris Hobbs said, and walked off into the night.
TWENTY-FOUR
Finally it was morning. There would be no more than three hours sleep. Mac gave it up and pushed himself out of bed.
It had been a fool thing to talk to Farris Hobbs about Betty Jo Dean. The man’s nervous secretiveness, piled on top of Pam’s overly suspicious fantasies, had only agitated up new questions he did not need.
He’d poured himself his usual Scotch before going to bed. But instead of sipping it in the dark to calm the chimpanzees in his head that shrieked at nighttimes, about the indictment, the failing restaurant, and the horror from further back, he’d left the light on and read the DeKalb Advocate’s twenty-fifth anniversary account of the deaths of Pauly Pribilski and Betty Jo Dean. When he finally slipped into sleep, around five, it had been to a fitful, temporary place. The image of a seventeen-year-old girl lying face down in a field, with a bullet hole blown in the back of her head, kept jerking him awake.
He made coffee and took it into the living room to read the article again. He knew the reporter. Jen Jessup freelanced for the small papers in Peering and DeKalb counties. During the mayoralty campaign she’d found a hundred hot ways to call Mac an interloper, a carpet bagger from another county out simply to settle a score over a parking lot. And, since the indictment, an outright crook.
Her 2007 piece about the murders, though, was coldly clinical. She recapped the events leading up to the discovery of Pribilski’s body, and traced the two-day search that led to discovering Betty Jo Dean in the tall grass up the Devil’s Backbone. She recounted some of the leads that had arisen from the investigation – noting, as Farris had said, that the most promising of them centered on the several pairs of people hanging around Al’s Rustic Hacienda. But, as Hobbs had also said, there were others of interest – an older man, perhaps a peeper, who liked to park near the lovers’ lane, and an almost unlimited number of social acquaintances of the murdered couple. Betty Jo and Pauly had gotten around; each had dated aggressively.