Bluebird, Bluebird Page 5

  So they’ve been talking, Darren thought.

  “They’re starting a new Innocence Project at the law school, dealing specifically with suspected police brutality in the interrogation process, and with your knowledge of the culture of law enforcement, this is something you could be running in a few years. You have the talent, son, the heart. Everything you’ve been trying to do, everything they won’t let you do, you can do that here, son, protecting folks. This thing with Mack ought to show you—”

  “I’ve made some good arrests, Pop. I’ve done good work.”

  “In service to whom, Darren?”

  It was an argument they’d had dozens of times, more if you count the years when William, a fellow Ranger, was able to weigh in. Clayton strategically avoided taking it any further now. “Come by the house after you finish up with everything in Houston,” he said. “Naomi and I will make a nice dinner. I’ll show you around the law school, introduce you to folks making a difference for people like us,” he said, ignoring, as he often did, the class dynamics that made his us quite complicated. “Lisa’s talking about a potential transfer to her firm’s Austin office. She would do that for you, Darren. You can start over, son.”

  His mother called three times before he made it even fifty miles, and at a certain point he turned the phone facedown on the truck cab’s front seat, which is how he missed Greg’s first text. The second popped up on his phone as he was gassing up a few miles outside of Nacogdoches. Three words: check ur e-mail. From his personal Yahoo account, Greg had sent Darren an e-mail outlining the little he knew about Wright, Michael, and Dale, Melissa—“Missy,” as it turned out. After a few Google searches and liberal use of the Bureau’s many databases, Greg had found out the following: Michael Wright was thirty-five years old and actually a Texas native. Darren sat in his idling truck, reading. Michael Wright had been born in Tyler and gone through elementary school there before moving with his mother and father, both deceased, to Chicago. Married, he’d been traveling alone, at least according to the few eyewitness statements Greg had access to. He had no criminal record and was a graduate of both Purdue and the University of Chicago Law School and had stayed close to his adopted home up north. Here Greg had made a note in brackets: Did you know him at U of C? But of course Greg’s math was way off, since Michael Wright would have still been in high school when Darren started law school. But the similarity in their backgrounds was not lost on him. There was a rush of recognition, a kinship that felt instant. In the attached photo—a head shot from Wright’s law firm—Michael was fairer-skinned than Darren, whose color deepened to a rich hickory after just a few hours in the sun, and more sharply dressed. Still, he felt he knew Michael Wright. But for a few years’ difference in age, they might have known each other at U of C, swapped stories about growing up as black boys in East Texas—drunk beer together and talked about girls, basketball, and constitutional law.

  The wife has been notified.

  It was Greg’s final note on Michael Wright, along with the wife’s name, Randie Winston, and the fact that her whereabouts at the time of the murder were still unclear. There was no picture of her. But Darren thought of Lisa—the buttery brown skin, the astral spray of moles across her cheeks, the lank curls that cost a hundred dollars a week to maintain. She had worried for years about getting a call like the one Michael Wright’s wife had just received.

  The rest of Greg’s e-mail was a much lighter dossier on Missy Dale. A graduate of Timpson High School; enrolled for a semester and a half in cosmetology studies at Panola College; a waitress at Jeff’s Juice House, an icehouse right off 59 in Lark. The details of her life could fit on a postcard. The one thing of interest Darren almost missed at first glance. It was the mention of her marriage to Keith Avery Dale, of Lark, presently employed at Timpson Timber Holdings and fresh from a two-year stint at the Walls, in Huntsville, on drug charges—possession and intent to sell.

  Greg had added a note: ABT?

  The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas had been born in a Texas prison, and more than half their members were incarcerated at any given time—not that it stopped them from running their criminal organization. In fact prison was their breeding ground: recruits caught religion on the inside and came out desperate to kill their way into the gang. Initiation into the ABT required a black body, didn’t matter which one, long as you skinned it yourself. Greg’s point—that a few months after doing a deuce in a Texas correctional facility Keith Dale returned to a town that saw the death of a black man and Dale’s wife in less than a month—was not lost on Darren. It irritated him that Greg probably knew about the potential Brotherhood connection when he’d called earlier but had waited until he imagined Darren was halfway to Shelby County before adding this bit of information. Darren could still turn around, if only for spite. But the mention of the Brotherhood put a little lead in his boot. He was back on the highway, doing eighty-five, before he knew it. He would have done well to slow down, to consider how his displeasure with the Rangers was racing him headlong into something he didn’t know the half of. But he didn’t—not then, at least.

  When he crossed the line into Shelby County, he removed his badge, tossing the five-point star inside the glove box. It slid against a half-empty pint of Wild Turkey he’d forgotten was in there, clinking softly, a siren call he left unanswered for the moment. He felt naked without his beloved badge but also strangely protected by the anonymity of its absence. Without the star, he would draw no undue attention, make no advertisement of his presence to any rank-and-file Brotherhood in the county, rabid dogs always on the hunt. And no word would get back to Houston, where he was stationed, that he was poking around something, unauthorized by his superiors, something he guessed he did hold an outsize interest in as a cop, as a Texan, and as a man. In fact as long as he wasn’t wearing the Rangers star, they couldn’t stop him from doing any damn thing. Without the badge, he was just a black man traveling the highway alone.

  Part Two

  5.

  THE BRASS bell on the front door of Geneva Sweet’s Sweets trilled gently when Darren first walked into the cafe. It was an aged sleigh bell tied to the push-bar handle by an old piece of ribbon, plaid run through with red and Kelly green, the edges frayed like a puff of Christmas cotton, something someone had tied up one particularly festive December at least a decade back. Christmas was apparently a favored holiday at Geneva’s. There was a string of colorful bulbs haloed over the door that led to the kitchen, a few feet behind a countertop that was also festooned with colored lights, the cord twisted and sticky with dried ketchup and barbecue sauce where it had been stapled to the warped plywood underneath. The calendars on the back wall by the kitchen were all turned to the final month of the year, pictures of poinsettias and pinecone wreaths and baby Jesus aglow, all yellowing in the afternoon sun pouring through the wide windows at the front of the cafe. Twice Darren had heard Mahalia Jackson singing “Silent Night” on the jukebox next to the booth where he’d been sitting for the past hour. The whole place was barely eight hundred square feet, doing good business for a one-room cafe in the middle of nowhere. The sign for Lark Darren had passed just over the county line read POPULATION 178. Part of Geneva’s had been made over for a barbershop, an oddity in a room full of oddities and knickknacks. Texas license plates going back fifty years, an old electric guitar on display, plus rows of crocheted baby dolls on a high shelf. There was a middle-aged freckled black man sitting in a green barber’s chair, reading a comic book.

  Darren had been around places like this as a kid. Mary’s Market & Eats, in Camilla, where he bought snow cones as a kid and brought home plates of fried catfish when his uncles didn’t feel like cooking. Rochelle’s, in Coldspring, sold lemonade so sweet it made your teeth ache, and on a summer day there’d be a line almost to the courthouse. For generations, black women in Texas had put up four walls, whipped up a favorite recipe, and counted the money as colored folks came from all over just to have a place where they were welcome. Geneva’
s was a throwback, and Darren wondered if twenty years from now places like this would even exist anymore. Maybe they would, he thought, if the food was this good.

  He hadn’t eaten anything besides the roadside snack.

  He was halfway through a plate of black-eyed peas and oxtails, eating as slowly as he could in order to buy a seat at the window, through which he kept an eye on the town. This was about it, far as Darren could tell. There was Geneva’s cafe, and at an angle across Highway 59, there was a large dome-topped house that was fenced on all sides, the wood whitewashed and pristine. A quarter mile north, on the same side of the highway as Geneva’s, he’d passed an old-school icehouse, a drinking hole half out of doors, with a porch that wrapped around three sides of the flat-roofed box of a building, the wood a weathered gray, black and rotted in some spots. The bar’s walls were covered in aluminum siding that was painted a dull ocher, and the neon sign across the building read JEFF’S JUICE HOUSE. He remembered the place from Greg’s e-mail.

  Whatever the town’s other gems, they were tucked deep in the countryside or along the narrow farm roads that ran like rutted creek beds off the main highway, their red-dirt paths snaking between pine trees and leading to houses and trailers tucked into the piney woods. You could cover the whole of Lark, Texas, in the time it took to sneeze. Darren had driven through it and doubled back twice before he realized this was all there was. There had been two squad cars parked in front of Geneva’s when he’d rolled into town, so he made the cafe his first stop. He knew the Attoyac Bayou, which made up the western border of the county, ran through the woods behind Geneva’s restaurant.

  A white trucker wandered in off the highway. Through the window Darren could see his bug-crusted plates: OHIO, THE HEART OF IT ALL. The man hovered in the doorway, lifting a ball cap off his sweaty hair and looking around, struck by the half dozen or so black faces that were staring back at him.

  “What can I get you?” Geneva said.

  “This the only truck stop around here?”

  “There’s one up to Timpson if you can make it that far.”

  The trucker glanced back at his rig, which was blocking half the parking lot, Geneva’s lone gas pump dwarfed beside it. He was hesitating.

  “But looks like you could stand to eat something, so come on. Don’t worry, we’ll let you sit at the counter.” She smiled and caught Darren’s eye, winking. He smiled back, despite himself. They’d exchanged only a few words when he’d ordered his meal, but he’d liked her at once. The trucker ordered a pork sandwich to go. And Darren took the opportunity to move in for conversation. He took the last open stool at the counter, sitting beside a black man in his sixties and a younger black guy who was wearing a nylon shirt that said TRANSWEST ALLIED TRUCKING.

  “Don’t mind my saying,” Darren said to Geneva. “Couldn’t help noticing you got a lot of men in uniform around your place. Everything all right?”

  The man in his sixties whistled under his breath, snapping the edges of the newspaper in front of him, but said nothing. Geneva looked up from the paper bag she was stuffing with squares of prepackaged wet wipes. She, too, declined comment. It was the young black guy who spoke up. “Girl died back there,” he said, looking up from his cell phone to give Darren a once-over. Then, deciding Darren was worthy of the whole story, he added, “A white girl.”

  The trucker from Ohio looked up. “How much longer on that sandwich?”

  “She got a baby at home, don’t she, Geneva?” the younger black guy said.

  “Who? Missy?” said Geneva’s cook, a man in a white apron coming out of the kitchen, holding a sandwich wrapped in white paper, thin streaks of barbecue sauce staining the sides. He set the sandwich inside the paper bag.

  “Four-ninety-nine,” Geneva said to the trucker, ignoring everyone else.

  Ohio left a five in front of the register and booked it. A few seconds later, Darren heard the roar of the rig’s engine as the trucker revved his way back onto the highway. Geneva ignored Darren, instead busying herself with a stack of mail on an open secretary’s hutch pressed against the back wall.

  “Huxley, you got some mail need to get out?”

  “Not today,” the older man said.

  The younger man piped up. “Yeah, she got a baby, that’s what you said.”

  “That’s enough, Tim,” Geneva said. She stacked her outgoing mail neatly and wrapped an orange hair band around it. She seemed to pointedly refuse to meet Darren’s eyes. He wasn’t one of them and therefore not entitled to any town secrets.

  Fair enough.

  Darren paid for his meal in cash, leaving a ridiculously large tip.

  The bell dinged behind him as he stepped outside, heading for his truck. Behind the front seat, he kept a navy-blue duffel bag. Inside were a change of clothes, a couple hundred dollars in cash, extra clips for the Colt, deer jerky a friend at work had smoked himself, a hairbrush, and a pack of cigarettes. Darren didn’t smoke, but he’d learned that people were less likely to ask questions of a man loitering long as he had a cigarette in his hand. He fingered a Camel from its pack and walked around to the back of the cafe. Behind Geneva’s was a lumpy lot of dirt and crabgrass about a hundred yards long that ran right up to the weedy bank of the Attoyac Bayou, a flat stretch of water ten feet wide, moss-green in some places and rusted brown as an old penny in others, depending on which way the trees bent in the sun. Not a ripple winked across its surface, the water as still as tinted glass. There was no telling how deep the bayou was or what wildlife might live beneath its surface. He wondered again about the words condition of the body and what they meant, if some creature had made a meal of Michael Wright.

  The thought made Darren’s stomach lurch, the oxtails and peas swimming upstream. He turned his head and spit in the grass, willing himself not to retch. Between the fishy bayou and the fetid, sickly sweet odor of human decomposition, Darren felt like he might faint. He covered his mouth and nose. It wouldn’t do a damn thing, never did, but it was an instinct not to be argued with. The corpse was already covered, but he knew it was her. It had to be. Michael Wright was on a medical examiner’s table in Dallas. This was Missy Dale’s final resting place. Darren noted the distance from the edge of the water to the cafe’s back door—where Geneva’s cook, the man in the apron, was leaning against the doorjamb, keeping an eye on the whole scene. There was also a rather sizable mobile home parked back here. White with green trim, it was a lot bigger than his mother’s trailer—three bedrooms, maybe.

  Whoever lived there was probably the one who’d found her.

  “Tell Geneva she gon’ have to keep her people from outta here,” said a man in a pair of tight trousers, a sheriff’s badge pinned to his white shirt.

  He was speaking to Darren, who had wandered a little too close to the crime scene. On instinct, Darren opened his mouth to explain himself, but then thought better of it, remembered he was just a man out here. He’d been around small-town sheriffs his whole career. More than half the Rangers’ work was in service to local law enforcement agencies that lacked the resources to do the kind of in-depth investigations the Texas Rangers could. Some welcomed the Rangers, Darren in particular, because he was perceived to have a special touch with suspects and witnesses of a dark hue; and some, like this five-foot-six barrel of a man before him now, were suspicious of any outsiders. They resented everything about the Rangers, from their sizable state funding to their intercounty jurisdiction and freedom to roam to the rapt awe they inspired.

  Darren was fine playing the disinterested onlooker. The day had cooled, and so had his ill temper. He’d grown tired, he realized, the heavy food playing tricks on his nervous system. He actually allowed himself a thought of home.

  The place in Camilla. Or Houston, if Lisa would have him.

  He knew it was his thirst talking.

  It had run out ahead of the wagon he’d pledged to ride, a wild stallion that had somehow gotten hold of the reins and was pulling Darren by the neck. He wanted a fucking drin
k. Maybe more than he wanted to solve a mystery. He could stick around till sundown, gather what he could for Greg, then drive back to Houston, as he’d told Lieutenant Wilson he would. Maybe there was something to his uncle’s offer of dinner and a university tour in Austin. Maybe law school was something Darren couldn’t afford to dismiss out of hand. He could already taste the bourbon that was waiting for him when this long-ass day was done. It would be his reward for being open-minded about his future, something even Lisa couldn’t begrudge him. He felt the pull of surrender.

  He backed past an invisible line in the dirt, just a few feet from the cafe’s back door, and the sheriff nodded his approval.

  “You got another one of those?” he heard.

  Darren turned to see an aging black woman standing next to him. She was no taller than a middle schooler, but she was dressed like an elderly man who’d just discovered the concept of gender fluidity. She’d been watching the deputies working when Darren wandered back here. Now she had her hand out, pointing to his cigarette. He hadn’t yet lit his prop, so he gallantly handed it to her. She made a face, and Darren reached into his pocket for the pack, lifting out a fresh one for her. “That’s right,” she said. She didn’t ask for a light but pulled one out of her pocket. A little plastic thing with a dancing crocodile printed on the side. She lit her cigarette, then motioned for Darren to lean down so she could light his, too. She eyed him over the flame. “Who you?” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I ain’t seen you around here before.”

  “Just passing through.”

  “You picked a day for it,” she said, nodding at the grim scene.

  “I see that,” he said. “What happened?”

  The woman spit an errant tobacco leaf onto the ground, then pulled at the sides of her jacket, gathering herself with great care, as if she were about to deliver the ten o’clock news. “A mess, that’s what’s happened. See, first it was the one who come through here last week, Wednesday, I believe Geneva said, and then he come up dead on Friday, and they trying to say drowning. And now this little girl, now somebody did whatever in God’s name they done to her,” she said, pointing to the body, the five-foot shape covered by a white nylon tarp. There were clumped strands of her blond hair peeking out on one end.