Butler wasn’t wearing his three-piece suit. He was filling out a pair of jeans and a denim shirt like a regular working man with some muscle on him. Jessop liked the man better this way.
As Butler and Roth passed behind one of the low tombs, they were lost from sight and only the head of the angel and her sword floated past the pitched roofs with their crosses and crucifixes.
The sheriff and his deputy watched in silence as the angel came into full view again. Now she was rising straight up in the air. The two men worked a jack on each side of the pallet until she was level with the top of the stone platform. Butler was surprisingly strong. He stood on the pedestal and rocked the angel to dance it into place.
And now Butler jumped to the ground and picked up the heavy pallet and the planks. He did it with such ease, it might have been only a bundle of matchsticks he was carrying. Henry collected the jacks, and they left the cemetery together.
The deputy stood up and stretched her legs. “You really think this is Mallory’s idea?”
“I know it is. And now I got her connected to Charles Butler. Your cousin’s in it with ‘em. She backed up that story Butler gave me.”
The sheriff walked up to the statue and admired this new incarnation of Cass Shelley. The angel was so fierce, just like Cass when she was on the opposite side of an argument.
Lilith stood beside him. “Why is she doing this?”
“She wants them to know she’s coming for them.” And it showed a lot of style, this threat carved in stone. The girl really knew how to hate. “Now I need a way to head her off before someone else gets killed.”
“You don’t think Mallory killed Babe, do you?”
There was something a tad anxious about her tone, like she had a lot riding on his answer, and he had to wonder about that. What might Lilith be holding back?
“You said there were quite a few locals with a grudge against Babe,” she said, in an offhand manner, as though it didn’t matter, and now he was sure that it did.
“So you don’t see any reason to consider out-of-town talent?”
“What about Babe’s widow? She hated her husband, didn’t she?”
There was a trace of hope in her suggestion of an alternate suspect, and this bothered him.
“Sally Laurie didn’t do it,” he said with finality and the positive authority of hard fact.
Did Lilith crumble a little? Yes, she did.
“Sally made a pile off the Laurie connection,” he said. “Malcolm gave her a house on prime waterfront property. It was a bribe to stay married to Babe. But her source of income was IRS money. Those tax boys have a real keen interest in the New Church.”
“Why? Churches don’t pay taxes.”
“Nobody in the Laurie family pays taxes. Malcolm makes a healthy donation to the town treasury to stay on my good side, but no Laurie ever pays any taxes. Turned out to be legal, and after a while, the IRS took Sally off the payroll.”
“How did you know Sally was working for them?”
“I saw her spending cash in the next parish. Nobody in the New Church gets any spending money. They donate all their time to the church, and the church owns their houses, their VCRs, their dishwashers and every stitch of clothes on their backs. Even their groceries are bought with church vouchers. But Sally had cash – a lot of it. She was a first-rate businesswoman.”
“That gum chewing bimbo?”
“Sally Laurie was also your predecessor with the FBI.”
Well, that set his deputy back on her heels. He smiled. “It was my idea. When IRS stopped her paychecks, I told her it was a shame to waste a perfectly good government resumé. IRS gave her a nice recommendation to the FBI. She made out real well selling lies to those suckers. You should see the size of her bank account.”
“She told you all this?”
“Sally and me were good drinking buddies for years. I was the only one in town that hated the feds and the New Church as much as she did. Who else was she gonna talk to? I do admire that woman. But here’s the best joke. Travis used to be a member of the New Church, and everybody thought he was the FBI mole.”
“What about Fred Laurie? He skipped town, too. Could he have killed his own brother?”
“I would like to know what happened to old Fred. Though I’m not all that curious in any official capacity. I’ve got enough murder on my plate right now.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s dead all right. He didn’t take any clothes, and he didn’t have any money. Where was he gonna go? Maybe there was more than one gun in the woods that night. Maybe he just annoyed the wrong person. Augusta walks that land every night, checking the feeders and counting her owls. She wouldn’t have tolerated Fred out there with a gun.”
“Augusta? You’re crazy. That old lady couldn’t – ”
“Now don’t you sell your cousin short. Remember, Augusta has killed before.”
Lilith smiled, as though this were a cozy memory of baking brownies instead of a murder in the family. “She was a pistol in her younger days.”
“She still is. So try to stay on good terms with her.” The ground fog was dispersing, and his feet scattered the wisps as he moved along the path. He was wondering how far to trust his deputy. “I’m meeting that New York cop for a beer at the Dayborn Bar and Grill around noon. You know the place?”
She nodded, but failed to mention her recent visit there and the long chat with Riker. The bartender had been unable to tell him what the conversation was about. The man could only say for a fact that Lilith could down a drink even faster than her father.
She kicked up some gravel as she walked alongside him. “Dad spent some memorable nights in that bar.”
“That he did. I remember the night you were born. Your father came in with four boxes of cheap cigars, and the place just stank for days after that.”
He and Lilith’s father had celebrated all night long. Toward morning, Guy Beaudare had begun to cry; it had suddenly occurred to him that the entire universe, from the Big Bang to the last evening star, was one great conspiracy of heaven to birth the beautiful and perfect Lilith. A drunken young Tom Jessop had taken exception to this theory, as Kathy Shelley had been born several years earlier.
“Every man in that bar was relieved when your father left town. We were so sick of hearing about the latest cute thing you’d done. And I never met a man with so damn many wallet photos of the same kid.”
No need to mention that he had matched Guy, story for story, ‘Lilith’s so smart’ for ‘Kathy is smarter.’ And then Kathy had disappeared, and the sheriff had not listened to Guy’s stories anymore. He had learned to drink alone, shunning all talk among men with children, believing that Kathy was dead.
As the sheriff and the deputy were walking toward the bridge, Lilith was saying, “If those two split up, you want me to keep an eye on Henry Roth or Charles Butler?”
“Neither. There’s something else I want you to do.”
The sky was lightening in the east, clouds flaming in advance of the sun. A blue jay opened its eyes to the tasty sight of a beetle and devoured it alive and squirming. Overhead, a hawk was circling on the air, watching for groundlings. Every waking thing in St. Jude Parish was scurrying into motion, hunting food or running from sudden death.
A new day.
CHAPTER 18
The air was foul, and the only light came from bright holes in the rotted fabric covering the windows. Mallory pulled aside the heavy velvet drapes and threw up the sash. A cold breeze gusted over the sill and whipped through the room to set a storm of dust motes spinning in the bright shaft of sunlight. Now she could clearly see the bat droppings on the floor and the insects crawling off to the more hospitable shadows in the corners of the room.