“The detective reporting to Turlock is on the fence.”
“You think somebody’s putting the kid in the frame?”
“I do.”
He gave Gurney another expressionless stare. “What’s any of this got to do with what happened in Butris County nearly thirty years ago?”
“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about Turlock. Maybe I’m looking for something to justify it. Maybe some insight into who he really is.” He paused. “There’s another aspect to this. Beckert is probably going to run for state attorney general. If he wins, Turlock is virtually certain to be deputy AG. Powerful position. Makes me uncomfortable.”
Tabor’s jaw muscles tightened. After a long silence, he seemed to reach a decision. “Let me see your phone.”
Gurney took it out of his pocket and held it up.
“Turn it off.”
He did.
“Lay it down where I can see it.”
Gurney placed it in the truck bed.
“This is not something I want recorded,” said Tabor. He paused, staring down at his hands. “I haven’t talked about this in years. Of course, it still comes to mind. Even came to me in a nightmare once.”
He paused again, longer this time, then met Gurney’s gaze. “Judd Turlock talked a retarded black man into hanging himself.”
“What?”
“There was a creek with a swimming hole off the back of the Bayard-Whitson campus. There was a high bank with a big elm tree. Branch went out over the swimming hole. Boys used to tie a rope to it, swing out over the water, let go. One day Turlock and Beckert were there. There was a third boy sitting a little ways down the bank. And there was George Montgomery, sitting in his underwear in a shallow part of the creek. George was twenty years old, mentally maybe five or six, son of one of the kitchen help. There’s two stories of what happened next. One story, told by the boy sitting on the bank, is that Turlock called to George to come up and join them. George came up, shy like, and Turlock showed him how he could take the rope and swing out over the water. Except he went on to show him it would be safer if he tied the loose end of the rope around his neck, so it wouldn’t get in the way. George did like he was told. Then he swung out over the creek.” Tabor paused before adding in a strained voice. “That was that. George hung there, out over the middle of the swimming hole, kicking, strangling. Until he was dead.”
“What was Turlock’s version?”
“That he never said a word to George, that George came up on the bank, wanting to use the rope like he’d seen other people do. He somehow got all tangled up in it, and once he swung himself out there, they had no way of reaching him.”
“And Beckert told the same story?”
“Of course.”
“Then what?”
“The kid on the bank took a lie detector test and passed. We considered him a highly credible witness. The prosecutor agreed we should charge Turlock with manslaughter and petition to have him tried as an adult.”
“So at trial it was Turlock’s and Beckert’s word against the word of the kid on the bank?”
“Never got that far. The kid changed his story. Said he didn’t actually hear what was being said. Maybe Turlock was saying to George not to put the rope around his neck. Or maybe he wasn’t saying anything at all.”
“Someone got to him?”
“The Turlock family. Lots of money. Long history of corrupt construction deals with the county board. Judge dismissed our case and sealed the file. And Judd Turlock walked away from a sadistic murder without a goddamn scratch. There were times . . . times I must admit I came damn close to ending his life the way he ended George’s. Used to think about him strangling on the end of a goddamn rope. Thinking about it right now makes me wish I’d done it.”
“Sounds like Beckert was as much a part of it as Turlock.”
“That’s a fact. While we were thinking we had a case, we went back and forth on how to deal with him, but it all fell apart before we decided anything.”
“Did it occur to you at the time that it might have been Beckert’s idea?”
“Lot of things occurred to us.”
A silence fell between them, broken by Gurney. “If you don’t mind my asking, why did you move up here?”
“Wasn’t so much about moving here as leaving there. The Montgomery case changed everything. I approached it pretty aggressively. I didn’t leave any doubt with the Turlocks how I felt about their piece-of-shit son. They got the local racists riled up, claiming I was favoring a retarded black man over a nice white boy. Meanwhile my daughter was seeing a black man, who she ended up marrying, and the local reaction was ugly. I was counting the days till I could get my pension. I knew I had to get out of there before I killed someone.”
In the ensuing silence the thumping of the heavy bag seemed to grow louder.
“My granddaughter,” said Tabor.
“It sounds like she knows what she’s doing.”
Tabor nodded, came around from behind the pickup bed and gestured for Gurney to follow him to the corner of the big cabin.
There, in a level shaded area scuffed free of any grass, a wiry young girl in gym shorts and a tee shirt was delivering a series of hard right and left hooks to a leather heavy bag suspended from the branch of an oak tree.
“Used to be where her swing was hung.”
Gurney watched the flurry of punches. “You teach her how to do that?”
There was pride in Tabor’s eyes. “I pointed out a few things.”
The girl, apparently in her early teens, clearly had a mixed racial background. Her natural Afro had in it a hint of Tabor’s red-hair gene. Her skin was a deep caramel, and her eyes were green. Except for a brief assessing glance at Gurney, her attention was centered on the bag.
“She has power,” said Gurney. “She get that from you?”
“She’s better now than I ever was. Straight-A student, too, which I never was.” He paused. “So maybe she’ll survive this world. What do you think her chances are?”
“With that kind of concentration and determination, better than most.”
“You mean better than most black girls?” There was a sudden combativeness in his voice.
“I mean better than most black, white, tan . . . girls, boys, you name it.”
Tabor shook his head. “Might be that way in the right kind of world. But we’re not there. Real world is still the kind of world that killed George Montgomery.”
40
Gurney’s conversation with Merle Tabor gave him a lot to think about during the long drive to the Gelter house in well-tended Lockenberry.
The hanged black man in Judd Turlock’s past set up a disturbing echo with the two men strangled by the ropes tying them to the jungle gym in the Willard Park playground. Gurney couldn’t help thinking that a man who thirty years earlier had been responsible for one such horror might well be capable of two more. This hypothetical link received some support from one fact—the web of trails that made the Willard Park site easily reachable from the hunting cabin Turlock shared with Beckert. If one or both of them had seized Jordan and Tooker, or tricked them into meeting on some pretext, the cabin would have been an ideal location for the administration of the benzos and propofol, the beatings, the branding.
His mind leapfrogged to the shootings—specifically to the fact that the red motocross bike racing away from Poulter Street was last seen at the edge of Willard Park, within a short distance of those same trails leading to the Beckert-Turlock cabin.
Might Turlock have been the second man at Poulter Street, the one who actually shot Loomis? Wasn’t it at least conceivable that Turlock had engineered and carried out, for reasons yet to be determined, both the police and the BDA murders? It had seemed to Gurney all along that the Jordan-Tooker executions were too smoothly organized to have been a spur-of-the-moment response to the first shooting. The planning required for the acquisition of the propofol alone would preclude that.