Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

Bodecker watched the deputies cross the ditch and start moving slowly through the cornfield, the backs of their shirts dark with sweat. He heard a car coming, turned and saw Howser start walking up the road to meet the coroner. “Goddamn it, girl, what the hell were you doing out here?” he said to Sandy. Reaching across the seat, he hurriedly removed a couple of keys hanging on the same metal ring as the ignition key, put them in his shirt pocket. He heard Howser and the coroner behind him. The doctor stopped when he got close enough to see Sandy in the front seat. “Good Lord,” he said.

“I don’t think the Lord’s got anything to do with this, Benny,” Bodecker said. He looked over at the deputy. “Get Willis out here to help you dust for prints before we move the car. Go over that backseat real close.”

“What you figure happened?” the coroner asked. He set his black bag on the hood of the car.

“The way it looks to me, Carl got shot by somebody sitting in the back. Then Sandy managed to get one round off with that.22, but, hell, she didn’t have a chance. That fucking thing’s loaded with blanks. And I think, judging from the place where the bullet came out her, whoever shot her was standing up by that time.” He pointed at the ground a few feet from the back door. “Probably right here.”

“Blanks?” the coroner said.

Bodecker ignored him. “How long you figure they been dead?”

The coroner got down on one knee and raised Carl’s arm up, tried to move it around a little, pressed on the mottled blue and gray skin with his fingers. “Oh, yesterday evening, I’d say. Thereabouts, anyway.”

They all stood looking at Sandy silently for a minute or so, then Bodecker turned to the coroner. “You make sure she gets took good care of, okay?”

“Absolutely,” Benny said.

“Have Webster’s pick her up when you’re done. Tell ’em I’ll be over later to talk about the arrangements. I’m gonna head back to the office.”

“What about the other one?” Benny asked, as Bodecker started to walk away.

The sheriff stopped and spit on the ground, looked over at the fat man. “However you got to work it, Benny, you make sure that one gets a pauper’s grave. No marker, no name, no nothing.”

“LEE,” THE DISPATCHER SAID. “Had a call from a Sheriff Thompson in Lewisburg, West Virginia. He wants you to call him back soon as possible.” He handed Bodecker a piece of paper with a number scrawled on it.

“Willis, is that a five or a six?”

The dispatcher looked at the paper. “No, that’s a nine.”

Bodecker shut the door of his office and sat down, opened a desk drawer, and took out a piece of hard candy. After seeing Sandy dead, the first thing he had thought about was a glass of whiskey. He stuck the candy in his mouth and dialed the number. “Sheriff Thompson? This is Lee Bodecker up in Ohio.”

“Thanks for calling me back, Sheriff,” the man said with a hillbilly drawl. “How you all doing up there?”

“I ain’t bragging.”

“The reason I called, well, it might not be nothing, but someone shot a man down here yesterday morning sometime, a preacher, and the boy we suspect might have been in on it used to live up in your parts.”

“That right? How did he kill this man?”

“Shot him in the head while he was sitting in his car. Held the gun right up to the back of his skull. Made a hell of a mess, but at least he didn’t suffer none.”

“What kind of gun did he use?”

“Pistol, probably a Luger, one of them German guns. The boy was known to have one. His daddy brought it back from the war.”

“That’s a nine millimeter, ain’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“What did you say his name is?”

“Didn’t say, but the boy’s name is Arvin Russell. Middle name’s Eugene. His parents both died up around there the way I understand it. I think his daddy might have killed himself. He’s been living with his grandmother down here in Coal Creek for maybe the past seven, eight years.”

Bodecker frowned, stared across the room at the posters and flyers tacked on the wall. Russell. Russell? How did he know that name? “How old is he?” he asked Thompson.

“Arvin’s eighteen. Listen, he ain’t a bad sort, I’ve known him for a long time. And from what I’ve been hearing, this preacher might have deserved killing. Seems he was messing with young girls. But that still don’t make it right, I guess.”

“This boy driving?”

“He’s got a blue Chevy Bel Air, a ’54 model.”

“What does he look like?”

“Oh, average build, dark hair, good-looking feller,” Thompson said. “Arvin’s quiet, but he ain’t the type to take no shit, either. And, hell, he might not even be involved in this, but I can’t find him right now, and he’s the only good lead I got.”

“You send us any information you got as far as the tags on the car or whatever, and we’ll keep an eye out for him. And how about you letting me know if he shows up back down there, okay?”

“I’ll do that.”

“One more thing,” Bodecker said. “You got a picture of him?”

“Not yet, I don’t. I’m sure his grandmother’s got a couple, but she ain’t in the mood to cooperate right now. I get one, we’ll make sure you get a copy.”

By the time Bodecker hung up the phone, it was all coming back to him, the prayer log and those dead animals and that young kid had the pie juice smeared on his face. Arvin Eugene Russell. “I remember you now, boy.” He walked over to a big map of the United States on the wall. He found Johnson City and Lewisburg, and traced his finger up through West Virginia and crossed over into Ohio on Route 35 at Point Pleasant. He stopped in the general spot off the highway where Carl and Sandy had been killed. So if it was this Russell boy, they must have met somewhere along in there. But Sandy had told him she was going to Virginia Beach. He studied the map some more. It didn’t make sense, them staying in Johnson City. That was surely taking the long way around to get home. And besides that, what the fuck were they doing packing those guns?

He drove over to their apartment with the keys he’d taken from the ring. The smell of rotten garbage hit him when he opened the door. After raising a couple of windows, he looked through the rooms, but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. What the fuck am I looking for anyway? he thought. He sat down on the couch in the living room. Pulling out one of the canisters of film he had sneaked from the glove box, he rolled it around in his hand. He’d been sitting there maybe ten minutes when it finally occurred to him that something wasn’t right about the apartment. Going through the rooms again, he couldn’t find a single photograph. Why wouldn’t Carl have any pictures hanging on the walls or at least lying around? That’s all the shutterbug sonofabitch thought about. He started searching again, now in earnest, and soon found a shoe box under the bed, hidden behind some spare blankets.

Later, he sat on the couch staring numbly at a hole in the ceiling where the rain had leaked through. Chunks of plaster lay beneath it in a pile on the braided rug. He thought back to a day in the spring of 1960. By then, he’d been a deputy almost two years, and, because their mother had finally agreed with him to let her quit school, Sandy was working full-time at the Wooden Spoon. From what he could see, the job had done little to bring her out of her shell; she seemed as backward and forlorn as ever. But he’d heard stories about boys coming by at closing time and coaxing her into their cars for a quickie, then dumping her off in the sticks to find her own way home. Every time he stopped by the diner to check on her, he looked for her to announce a bastard on the way. And he guessed she did that day, just not the kind he was figuring on.