At the office late, he was hoping he saw somebody who admired him, but there were either those who didn’t or other subhumans. Help me, he thought. I’ve acted my way into this job. I am now an officer and a coward. There was a note on his desk from an anonymous hand: PLEASE REMEMBER TO ARREST THE CORPSE OF MY UNCLE.
The next morning a call came in at four A.M. and dispatch awoke him at his nice apartment near the old Catholic school and convent. They had found the old owner of a bait store early this morning with a missing head and a football stuffed in its place.
It was six before Facetto arrived at Pepper Farté’s bait store. Facetto didn’t even live in the county, and this was not known yet. He seemed to push them and dare them, didn’t he?
The smell of minnow water, cricket refuse, crawfish aerated in a tank where hundreds of these bait crustaceans clicked together in the sound of sprayed mist on aluminum, each on its way to digestion by one monster or another. Pepper despised everyone, a deputy told Facetto, but he was up to date on bait, he missed nothing in colors, wiggle or odor that was the rage nationally on black bass, white and black crappie, blue and yellow catfish. The black bass was so sought after for its hard hit and pull, sometimes a full minute before boatable, and the expenditure so enormous per decent fish, that you came close to an industrial religion of bassers. Pepper would have sold colored New Testaments with hooks in them if that’s what the bass wanted this season. Because the fish tire of the same colors, trim and wobble after a season, like high-fashion ladies. Crawfish were big this year for largemouth bass. The next year they might be ignored altogether. There was an era when fish hit bath soap as it dissolved underwater. Pepper knew all this. He knew that bassers expend a ration of money to bass almost exactly that of modern warfare. In Vietnam, for instance, the budget was one million dollars per dead Viet Cong. Bassing was a war, in fact, and the exorbitant fiberglass boats doing sixty over water spread in miles of honey holes was about like an airport where no machine did anything but taxi. This was music to Pepper’s ears, if he heard music at all. He was an institution and not a poor man.
A part of his store was devoted to army surplus. This was a brisk trade too. Fishermen are fetishists about equipment. They are high-lonesome folks and need to surround themselves with goods like knives with good edges, whetstones for sharpening hooks, superior lanterns, army rain ponchos, machetes and cut-down twenty-gauges for snakes. Pepper had been done in, after general laceration by some other sharp edge, by one of his own bolo knives. These short and thick machetes will take down an old kudzu trunk, which is like a sapling. They cut so quickly the parted end stays in the air a millisecond before falling. The Bolos were frightening commandos and guerrillas in the Philippines. Heads rolled.
The football concerned Facetto. They had left it in, the deputies, one of them Bernard. The corpse had no family to horrify, for his son stood right there, conversing too cheerfully around it with the police and photographer. It might have been an exotic cargo just in that Sidney had ordered for a conversation piece. The store was his now. He told stories about the old man, none of them pleasant, since Pepper’s fatherhood of Sidney at the age of fifteen. No mother came into any of these stories. Three of the cops knew Pepper for a rude bastard, but still. There was blood everywhere and one of the cops was a woman. She noted the mother was dead and now the father was dead. In this family, dead meant dead. Sidney’s wife had been dead for four years, and he recalled little about her.
Facetto told the deputies about the mutilation the same night over at Edwards. It was not his investigation, but somebody had called him about midnight just to chat about committing his uncle to a mental ward or Onward. A pastor Egan. The old man was loose on the fields as they spoke, and nobody had seen him for days. So he was a missing person too, and a candidate for the bin when and if he was run down.
The football game, the football game, Facetto kept saying to Bernard and the woman corporal.
“Conway Twitty and football,” said Facetto. Sheriff Millins of Hinds County, who liked Facetto, had called him earlier too, right before he left the office. A man resembling the singer Twitty standing around the urinal talking football with a child. The little schoolboy knew more about the game than the tall man. Very odd. Another eyewitness said the man dressed like a pedophile. This witness was the boy’s father and the description meant little besides shiny black loafers, as far as Millins could tell. He could run fast, this perp. Somebody heard an open muffler or glass pack. A driving nun had been threatened on the road by a car with wings on it, loud muffler, she said. Wings on it.
“Did your father play football?” Facetto asked Sidney. “In high school, that you know of?”
“He didn’t get to but seventh grade. He never played nothing, except he was in the merchant marine in a liberty ship that was blowed up right outside its own harbor in Port Aransas, Texas. He started swimming. He couldn’t swim, but he damn well did swim. A German Nazi torpedo boat was chasing them sailors too. It couldn’t just shoot the boat off the water. Them Nazis was mean.”
This was the only near-positive story Sidney had ever told about his father, who leaned off the stool stiff with rigor mortis and with a football for a head. The actual head lay just to the east of the stool on the filthy oiled floor where he had stood for fifty-five years. Sidney appeared to have a lump in his throat all of a sudden.
“He cared about his own life, I guess, back then. Well, folks change.”
“You don’t think he cared for his life?”
“I don’t give much of a shit for mine,” said Sidney. “Do you?”
“My life, or your life?”
“Well sure you care for your life. You tappin’ Mrs. Wooten. You tappin’ that old pretty grandmother, son. You gone break ol’ Bennie Harvard’s heart when he finds out.”
Everybody there, twelve, turned to look at Facetto and Sidney. Facetto simply went out and got in his car. Bernard was the only one who noticed his hurt and confusion. That was a mean little fuck himself, Sidney. They had a tradition here that broke with southern civility. French. Just straight mean and rude and unnecessary, this line.
Facetto had two idols as investigators. One was the well-known sheriff of Coweta County, Georgia, the man who had no unsolved crimes in his county during his tenure in the forties. A man of humble genius and savvy. But look. What about the population. Small. Homogenous. Everybody a cousin. Little to kill for. Finding a murderer might be like finding Frankenstein in an elementary school. What would he do with crack, folks killing for cell phones, sneakers. Fiends off the highway rearranging someone’s body for some aspirin, for methedrine, sometimes just for the hell of it.
The other was a brilliant investigator in Mexico City. Plenty of unsolved untold everything. But the quick deduction. The five-minute profile. No, not a murder, a suicide. See here. Exactly the right thing. Piece of bird shot in the ceiling. Feather on a finger from a pet pigeon. The blood on it there. No other bird would stay close to a gunshot. So his first model would be Lieutenant Maury Fuentes.
The sheriff seemed nonchalant, but he was afraid. These cuttings and the phone calls drew him into a family of hurt he did not want to know. He was paralyzed.
He could not think about this case and had no interest. He wanted only to pull the panties off of Melanie Wooten and enter her and listen to her make her joyful noises again. Straightening and pumping her nice legs and girl’s bottom. He was consumed by love for her. And afraid anywhere she wasn’t.