Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

‘You wouldn’t happen to know where that came from, would you?’ said Griffin.

Tilon Ward’s expression remained neutral.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t.’

Griffin nodded, as though Ward had answered in the positive rather than the negative.

‘Because if you did know, that might lead me to suspect you were familiar with the Kernigan family. Are you telling me you weren’t? Because you looked real shook up this morning.’

‘I’d just found a dead girl impaled with sticks. Maybe you’re inured to such sights, Evan, but I’m not.’

Evan : Parker registered Ward’s use of Griffin’s first name.

‘No, I can’t say that I am,’ said Griffin. ‘But you must know Sallie Kernigan. You drink at the Rhine Heart, and she used to work there.’

Ward shrugged. ‘I knew her to order a beer from.’

‘No more than that?’

‘No more than that.’

‘And her daughter, you ever speak with her?’

‘Denny doesn’t permit minors in his bar.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

‘If I’d known who Donna Lee was, I’d have told you when I found her body.’

‘I’d like to believe so, Tilon. I’d be discontented with you otherwise.’

A woman in her late sixties emerged from the house and walked across the yard to one of the outbuildings. Griffin raised a hand in greeting, but she did not return the gesture.

‘Must be awkward sometimes,’ said Griffin.

‘What?’ said Ward.

‘A man your age, living in his mother’s pocket. Hard to keep your business private.’

‘We each have our own space. It’s not so bad.’

‘That would make life easier, I’m sure. You got a woman, Tilon?’

‘No one special.’

‘How about someone not-so-special?’

‘Not even that. If you think I was sleeping with Sallie Kernigan, you’re wrong. You can hook me up to one of those lie detector machines, and it’ll confirm the truth of it.’

‘That seems like a definitive declaration.’

‘It is. You talk to her yet?’

‘Who?’

‘Sallie Kernigan.’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because her daughter’s dead, and I was the one who discovered the body.’

‘Which gives you a proprietorial interest in developments?’

‘Which means I give a shit.’

‘No,’ said Griffin, ‘we haven’t found Sallie yet. Should we be worried about her?’

‘I don’t know. Should you?’

‘I’m starting to be. It’s a hell of a thing, Tilon.’

‘It is. A hell of a thing.’

Ward shook his car keys.

‘We keeping you from something?’ said Griffin.

‘I got some errands to run in town.’

A silent exchange passed between the two men. It ended when Ward looked away.

‘Then you’d best be about them,’ said Griffin. ‘And drive carefully, Tilon. You’ve had a shock.’

They stayed behind Tilon Ward as far as the outskirts of Cargill, where Ward took a right while they drove straight on.

‘So?’ said Griffin.

‘I don’t know him as well as you do,’ said Parker, with deliberate ambiguity, but Griffin didn’t bite.

‘Feel free to speculate.’

‘He’s hiding something, but not a sexual relationship with Sallie Kernigan.’

‘A business one?’

‘If that was the case, isn’t it likely that he would have crossed paths with her daughter?’

‘Unless Sallie chose to keep any dealings with Ward distinct from her home life,’ said Griffin.

‘But what dealings? You said yourself that Ward might cook the product, but he doesn’t sell it.’

‘There are always exceptions.’

‘So why make one for Sallie Kernigan?’ said Parker.

‘Assuming Tilon did make one.’

‘Assuming that.’

Griffin chewed at his lip, then caught himself doing it. He was catching his officers’ bad habits. Next thing he knew, he’d be buying a pipe.

‘One of Sallie Kernigan’s neighbors suggested she might be whoring.’

‘In town?’

‘No, we’d have heard. Over in Malvern, where she works.’

‘Does it sound likely?’

Griffin mulled on it. ‘No, or not habitually. The older generation is not above indulging in a rush to judgment, and I wouldn’t contest that Sallie has a wild streak. We’ll make inquiries, though. Malvern has a population of about ten thousand. Not much easier to keep a secret there than here.’

Parker made another note. Griffin noticed that the pages of the notebook were heavily annotated. He had not come across it during his search of the motel room, and it had not been on Parker’s person when he was arrested. He must have concealed it well.

‘You know,’ said Griffin, ‘I was hoping you might have figured all this out by now, what with you being a detective from New York and all.’

‘Former detective.’

‘Still.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Griffin. ‘I think the TV shows lied.’

34

Tilon Ward parked his truck behind the Rhine Heart, and entered through the rear door that sat between what passed for the kitchen on one side and what qualified as restrooms on the other, both bearing only a tangential relationship to the requisite hygiene standards in either case. If Boyd’s represented the closest to upmarket dining that Cargill offered, then the Rhine Heart was its opposite. It took its name from a play on the owner’s surname, Rhinehart, and served hot dogs and schnitzel if the proprietor was in the mood. Mainly it offered beer, liquor, and pretzels, which amounted to three of their five-a-day for a considerable section of its clientele.

But the Rhine Heart was also where a man could go if he wanted to find out what was happening in Cargill without being called on his curiosity – or more pertinently, where Tilon Ward could go, since Denny Rhinehart’s premises offered a safe, nonjudgmental environment in which Tilon sometimes conducted his business affairs, with Denny receiving a sweetener in return for his facilitation.

And Denny also knew Sallie Kernigan. As Griffin had so recently pointed out, she had formerly tended bar at the Rhine Heart, until a disagreement with Denny over where his hands should be permitted to wander caused her to seek employment opportunities elsewhere. Tilon had offered to intervene on her behalf, but she didn’t like working at the Rhine Heart anyway, its patrons sharing a similar mind-set to its owner when it came to feeling up the staff. By then Sallie didn’t need the extra money, since she was earning enough from the meth she was selling. Tilon had helped her to establish herself by advancing a thousand dollars’ worth of product on trust, and in return Sallie hadn’t objected when Tilon began sleeping with her daughter.

Tilon was still shaken from his encounter with Griffin and the stranger, Parker, who hadn’t spoken beyond the initial greetings, but only listened and watched. By this point, Tilon was having trouble keeping track of all the lies he was being forced to tell. Once more, he wondered if he should have come clean with Griffin the moment he stumbled on Donna Lee’s body, but that would have brought its own difficulties. And he hadn’t been thinking straight. How could he have been? Now he had to live with his falsehoods, and hope that the damage from them could be contained.

Denny Rhinehart was working the bar alone, which meant using a dishcloth to redistribute the dirt on the glasses while watching some shitty comedy rerun on the ancient TV set high in a corner. Tilon counted four other patrons, two of whom greeted him by name, and two of whom ignored him, Cargill being a small town in which people nursed grudges the way regular human beings cultivated house plants. Tilon took a seat at the bar as far from anyone else as possible and ordered a beer. Denny deposited it before him, the bottle wrapped in a paper napkin, and told Tilon it was on the house.