Phantom Nights Page 8

  There was no chance she was going to marry him, should he get around to popping the question, or marry anyone else, but following his visits Mally always felt a little down in the dumps, adrift in the vacancies of her life.

  There was now a heavy stirring in treetops that had scarcely moved for the better part of a week of swelter. The sky lighting abruptly behind those trees like gunfire from ambush. Thunder. Rain was pushing in, a belting storm. Mally felt the effect of falling barometric pressure in her sinuses. She wrapped up what was left of the spice cake and stored it in her breadbox, then went to the bathroom to wash up, sitting on the edge of her tin bathtub to shave her legs.

  The glass in Mally's bedroom window was vibrating, and the willow tree thrashed outside. Her Crosley radio was full of static, and so was her hair when she brushed it, finding herself lugubrious in the tarnish of the dressing table mirror. She put on cotton pajamas and a Chinatown kimono her father had bought for her when he attended a medical convention in San Francisco right after the war.

  She went to the front of the house to close windows, and in a spray of atmospheric electricity discovered Alex Gambier on the front porch, chest heaving as if he had just finished the Tour de France, his young face kinetic with strife.

  Of all nights, Mally thought. But hadn't she asked for this?

  "Best bring your bike up to the porch if you're coming in," she said, trying not to sound put-upon.

  She went to the kitchen and unwrapped the spice cake again. The cake went well with a tall glass of buttermilk, which he drained without pause while sitting on the edge of one cushion on her bamboo sofa, tilting the cushion up behind him. He winced as the cool milk bathed the serious cut on his swollen lower lip. She poured a second glass and re-covered the crock with cheesecloth. Sat opposite Alex while approaching thunder gave some of the framed pictures on her wall the heebie-jeebies.

  When Alex had drunk his fill and seemed calm enough to describe to her the events that had him racing to her house again, she gave him the bread board, her writing pad, and a mechanical pencil. He laid the board across his knees and hunched over it for several minutes as if he had committed to composing another epic tale. Writing with such vehemence he broke the pencil lead twice. Mally wished for a Chesterfield, but she had to be careful what she spent her money on, with no immediate prospects for employment.

  Alex handed her the pad suddenly and got up to pace. The air outside was momentously still for half a minute or so. Then big raindrops spattered down like pennies on the roof. Mally gave Alex a thoughtful look before she began to read his page and a half.

  "If you've got to go," she said, mindful of the quantity of buttermilk he'd put away, "you can use my toilet. You'll get soaked to the skin outside."

  Nearly as soon as she'd spoken, the wind rushed into the hollow where she lived, bringing with it a crackling deluge.

  While he was in the bathroom, she read all that Alex had wanted to tell her. Mally put the pad facedown on the oval table next to her chair and thought, Lord 'a mercy, what goes on in that house? It seemed to Mally that Cecily Gambier had smacked Alex in the mouth for no good reason. Otherwise Alex was outright lying and mooching around looking for sympathy where he could find it. Which contradicted most of what she instinctively felt about his character.

  Mally wasn't given time to think about that. She heard the swash of a car approaching the house. Bright headlights were almost on top of her porch. She had other visitors.

  Bobby Gambier walked downstairs after looking over the ogre-footed tub in the guest bathroom, seeing that carefully slicked-over bottom for himself (the small amount of water Bernice had run into the tub had slowly leaked out). Power was off in their house and up and down the street; the storm that had swung their way to break the heat if not put an end to the drought was still pounding them after almost twenty minutes.

  Cecily and Bernice were together in the parlor, where Bobby had got a camp lantern going. Cecily rocked the fretful Brendan, hiding his face from the lightning. The two women looked at Bobby, who didn't sit down. His face was grave.

  "I could never have believed that of Alex."

  "Haven't I tried to warn you?" Cecily said, too emotionally sapped to put any sort of recrimination behind her words. It was a simple statement of fact.

  Bobby turned to leave the parlor.

  "Where're you going?"

  "Find my brother, Cecily."

  "And leave us alone here?"

  "Les Owen will be sitting outside in his prowler while I'm gone."

  Bernie put a hand on her daughter's arm while Bobby walked out.

  "We'll be all right, darling. This is between Bob and Alex now. Let it be settled tonight, for everyone's sake."

  Cecily, her brain lurid from headache, handed Brendan over to her mom, turned, and buried her face in a tasseled pillow. So Brendan wouldn't be further upset, hearing his mother weep.

  Bernice joggled the baby against her breast, looking calmly around the parlor during the eerie winks of lightning, thinking how best to rearrange the furniture to accommodate her baby grand piano. Which she couldn't play anymore; but she could teach, and she'd observed that Brendan had the hands to be a fine pianist. Start him early enough, who could tell how far he might go in competitions?

  FOUR

  Ten Big Ones

  Catahoula Leopard Dogs

  A Style of Murder

  Two men wearing hats and slickers came out of the car in Mally Shaw's yard and, leaning against the slash and flash of the rainstorm, holding tight to their hats to keep them from flying off, hurried up her porch steps.

  Mally looked out through the oval glass of her front door, which was covered with an opaque curtain, saw revealed by lightning the Pontiac Eight that had briefly visited two nights ago, and picked up the shotgun that was nearly as tall as she was. With her other hand she hooked up the chain latch and backed away from the door.

  Thumping of their booted feet on the floorboards of the porch.

  "Mally Shaw!"

  "Who are you, and what do you want?"

  "Sorry to be bothering you this time of night, Mally! It's Leland Howard! I need to talk to you."

  "Take off your hat," Mally called back, "but stay where you are! I have a shotgun."

  "All right now, Mally, all right. No cause for alarm. Like I said, just want to talk to you."

  She already knew his voice, but she wanted to see his face. When the hat came off his wavy blond head, that vanity pompadour flattened some, she pulled back one side of the curtain to look more closely at him. Rain light on his face, drops falling from the end of a hound-dog nose. No way to avoid getting wet out there. She couldn't tell anything about the tall man standing behind and sideways to Leland Howard, perhaps looking over the homely things collected on the porch. And the blue-and-white boy's bicycle.

  "Who is that with you?"

  "Oh, it's just my man, Jim Giles. Does most of my driving for me."

  "Have him go back to your car and wait there, Mr. Leland."

  "Why sure, Mally. Whatever will put you at ease."

  When he turned his head to speak to Jim Giles, Mally had a quick look back over her shoulder. Alex Gambier wasn't in sight; the bathroom door along the short hallway to the kitchen was still closed.

  The light of the single lamp in her front room, metal shade painted Gay Nineties style with a hanging fringe of cut glass beads, had gone dull orange, as if the slender wire connecting her to the rural electric line alongside Highway 19 was about to be whipped loose from its pole.

  "Mr. Leland, I wish you would come another time, if it be all that important!" Flustered now, wondering why he hadn't made himself known to her on Thursday night—or had it been only his man Giles in the Pontiac, sitting silently and watching her on the porch?

  "Surely wish I could do that, Mally! But I need to be in Knoxville by tomorrow afternoon. I'm campaigning over that way most of next week. I'm only asking for a few minutes of your time after we drove all the way
out here in a gullywasher." He opened his slicker and reached inside. "Got something here I need for you to sign off on."

  Jim Giles had left the porch and was down in the yard, lit up by the headlights of the Pontiac. Mally shifted her attention to Leland Howard again, not feeling easier about all this. She saw a white envelope in his hands.

  "This is yours, Mally! What I have here is one thousand dollars cash money my Daddy left in a desk drawer in his study at the homestead. You can see your name's here on the envelope? Money I expect he wanted you to have for all the good care you gave him, without having to wait until probate closes!"

  Mally flinched at a sear of light, opening her eyes to find herself in the dark. In more ways than one. A thousand dollars! Priest Howard had never uttered a word to her about that.

  Leland, the disinherited son, opened the envelope to show her, when the sky flared again, what surely looked like ten hundred-dollar silver certificates. But Mally still found such a windfall difficult to believe. She was down to sixty-eight dollars and change in the Chase and Sanborn coffee can she kept under the floorboards beneath the metal stove-wood box in the room behind her. Barely a month's keeping if she was especially frugal. But she had to take a couple of courses soon to renew her nursing certificate, and that was fifty dollars gone right there.

  Leland Howard thumbed the wheel of a dented steel Zippo lighter he might have carried with him in the war. In the shielded light, his fleshy but good-looking face seemed unthreatening. His smile and benign blue eyes did not begrudge a penny of her good fortune.

  "So if you will kindly sign a receipt for this money, then I can be on my way."

  "Mr. Leland, the power is gone; I'm needing to fetch a paraffin lamp from my kitchen!"

  "You go right ahead and do that, Mally," he said, dropping the lid on the tall lighter flame and putting his hat back on. The porch roof in the onslaught of rain was now leaking steadily in several places.

  She came back with the lamplight bobbing in darkness, having intuitive moments of regret, just before she unlocked the door, about not taking time to put on clothes. But she was still awestruck by the sight of all that money in the envelope. Not thinking as clearly as she ought to have been thinking. First off, when had Priest Howard had the strength, during the last weeks she was taking care of him, to rise up from his bed and go downstairs to his study? At night, when Mally wasn't there? Not likely.

  Hail pattered on the roof and struck the windows on the north side of the house. Leland Howard stepped inside as Mally retreated to set the paraffin lamp on the Franklin stove top in one corner of her front room. The crown of his hat hit the underside of the door frame, pushing it askew on his head.

  Leland grinned and took the hat off once more.

  "I'm tall myself, but ol' Highpockets must've bruised his forehead a few times coming through this doorspace."

  Mally didn't reply, just stood by the stove holding her lime green kimono tight together with one hand.

  Leland shut the door behind him and looked around. They were both aware of the shotgun at the same time. Mally had left it leaning against one end of the bamboo sofa to go to the kitchen. Leland grinned bigger and picked it up, looked it over with an eagle eye.

  "Fine old piece for bird shooting," he said, then broke the shotgun open and pulled out both shells, which he dropped into a raincoat pocket.

  "Wouldn't want an accident to happen while I'm here," he said with what looked like a wink; or maybe one of his eyes had begun to twitch from some pent-up anguish or fury. He hung his hat on the twin barrels and leaned the shotgun against the sofa where he'd found it.

  Mally knew she had been a fool for letting him into her house. Worse, the money he'd flashed at her was a ruse; it would stay in his own pocket. She knew what he'd really come for.

  When she made a break for the back of the house and the kitchen door, she learned that for a big man he had speed and good reflexes, snatching her back into the front room by an elbow, almost lifting her off her feet. She stumbled against the whatnot cabinet. Teacups and figurines rattled around on the shelves.

  "Don't be putting your hands on me, Mr. Leland!"

  He didn't let go. "Mally, I just think you've got some wrong ideas about me. Let's settle down now, have us a civilized conversation. If you're forthcoming with me, I like what I hear, I'll leave the thousand dollars and be on my way."

  Leland pulled her closer. Soft whisper of Chinese silk and bourbon on his breath; she saw a little flare of excitement in his blue eyes.

  "Here I am dripping all over your parlor floor. What I expect you to do now, sit over here on this sofa while I get out of my raincoat; I'm stifling already. Don't try and run off on me again. James got his eye on the house where he is. He's a mean sumbitch, but I'm not one to do you harm."

  "Let go of me then," she said.

  Leland put more pressure on the nerves above her elbow with that unpleasantly calloused hand; she let out a gasp. Then he released Mally and with the flat of his other hand nudged her toward the sofa. She sat down, rubbing where he'd hurt her. No harm done though, was that what he thought? And his hand had been on one of her breasts. Mally was scared but made her voice level.

  "I won't run. But there's nothing we have to say to each other, Mr. Leland."

  "That so?" He rubbed his heavy jaw that would be jowls in a few years, faintly grinning, eyes preoccupied as he stared his way around the little room again. Just the two of them and already overcrowded. But he found the space to prowl, stopping in front of her to graciously offer a piece of hard candy from a crumpled sack he had in his coat pocket. Mally shook her head. Leland unwrapped a piece for himself. Balled the cellophane and let it drop to the floor.

  "Always wondered, did William blow his brains out in the house, Mally? Or did he have the courtesy to spare you the sight?"

  "In his truck," Mally said after a few moments. Parked behind the rib shack. Three o'clock in the morning. She'd heard the shot, of course. Knowing it was William, and what he'd finally done, as her head jerked up from the pillow. Hatred of Leland Howard for mentioning William's sad end rose in Mally's breast like a blister from a hot iron.

  "Did you ever come across that secret recipe of his for rib sauce? That sauce was something all-fired special, Mally, the couple times I took out a plate of William's ribs. His sauce recipe would be worth money to you nowadays."

  "He never wrote it down."

  "Oh, too bad." In his prowling, Leland picked up the writing tablet from the oval table by the sofa. Mally thought of Alex Gambier shut up in the bathroom, wondering if he'd heard when she raised her voice to Leland Howard, hoping Alex had enough sense not to show himself now. Leland looked closely at the words on the tablet, but there wasn't light enough to make for easy reading.

  "Letter to my daddy I was writing," Mally said helpfully. Blood throbbing in her temples.

  Leland nodded and dropped the tablet on the table. Looked down at her with fuming eyes while he sucked candy clotted on his back teeth.

  "What does old Ramses do now, practice medicine in Nashville?"

  "No, he teaches at Meharry."

  "There's a colored man had the moxie to make something of himself, give credit where it's due." Leland tugged at the knot of his necktie, loosening it. "Getting close in here," he said. Mally was already about to choke on the closeness—his roiled blood, her desperation—in spite of the calm way she sat there meeting him eye to eye.

  Leland mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, put it away, came up with a gold-capped silver hip flask. Tilted it high to finish off the bourbon she figured he'd been drinking most of the evening.

  "It's been a hard day, Mally," he said, as if he were apologizing for drinking in front of her.

  "Yes, sir, I know that," she said, her words barely audible.

  "It's not like I'm going to miss the old bastard. You don't have any idea what it was to grow up with somebody had the balls and gall and mean bent of my daddy." His mouth crimped, as if, like a
cruelly hazed child, he was close to tears. "And how he must have schemed this past year! Watching me rise up in the world of national politics without his help. That's what he hated most about me; I never asked his help one time. When my mama's money ran out, I just took what I wanted and needed from him. Knew he would find out but I didn't care; because what could he hope to do except cover my tracks at the bank? You understanding me, Mally?" His look both begged and demanded her understanding. "Priest Howard's weakness—and I always knew it—was his good name. He would never allow anything or anyone to bring dishonor to his name. Now, that made him, and his fuckin' bank, easy pickings. Oh, but you know all this. He would've trusted you, told it to you a dozen times lying up there in his bed with the knowledge his life was over but determined to wreck mine. Bided his time, didn't he? Waited until I was about to enjoy the fruits of my success."

  "Mr. Leland—"

  "It's all right, Mally. I'm not here looking for your sympathy. You've had it hard yourself, I appreciate that, why I had the desire to help you out with a little of my own money. Scarce as I find it to be these days. On account of I knew Daddy Priest was too stingy to reward you. So here it is again . . ."

  He pulled out the now-damp envelope with the money and flopped it down on top of the writing tablet.

  "Yours alone. Pick it up, feel it, count it, missy. There's ten big ones. Shoo, dog! All you need do to justify keeping that money is hand over what Daddy left behind in your hands to ensure my ruination."

  Mally was deathly still during multiple lightning flashes like cameras at the scene of a traffic accident while the scent of blood was fresh and strong. An accident in which she sat pinned in wreckage looking out with stunned eyes for a rescuer to arrive.

  Leland Howard dragged the back of one hand across his mouth, staring at her, seemingly perplexed by her lack of gratitude.

  "Mally?"

  "Mr. Leland—I just don't know what you mean."