The End of the Pier (10 page)

Sam wondered a lot more about the husband's having an alibi than Boy's not having one. Carl Butts had been nearly a hundred miles away with his rig, sleeping at a truck stop just this side of Meridian. No one, Sam had suggested, had stayed awake all night to make sure that Butts was actually sleeping like a baby while his wife, Loreen, was being raped and carved up outside of Hebrides. You think we're idiots? asked the Elton County sheriff. You think we don't know it's usually close to home? You think we didn't check the mileage? You think we—?

Husbands, Sam had agreed, generally don't bother raping their wives before they kill them, though he imagined it happened sometimes. Hadn't everything? He didn't go on to say: Christ, any truck driver could set back an odometer; any truck driver had so fucking many good ol' buddies along the route he could probably produce enough witnesses to fill the back of his rig.

Sam didn't say it because he didn't really believe it. It felt too much like a story he himself was constructing because he thought the Chalmers kid had been railroaded into the county jail. Sam didn't mind telling them—Sims and the state's attorney, Billie Anderson—he thought it was a disgrace. He thought no one had been overly zealous in a search for the murder weapon (never found, but the pathologist thought the blade was that of a common kitchen knife). He thought the FBI should be called in. County lines were being crossed, and none of them had the forensics experience of the FBI people.

Just the mention of taking this matter out of her hands was enough to drive Billie Anderson crazy. And Billie, cold sane, wasn't really anyone Sam wanted to deal with. She was worse than Sims because she was smart, she was shrewd.

But the Eunice Hayden killing—no, they couldn't hang that one on Boy, because Boy had an alibi: he'd been in his bike shop with four kids whose bikes he was repairing. Boy had four witnesses to
his whereabouts for the entire afternoon and part of the evening of Eunice Hayden's death.

Sedgewick and State Attorney Anderson had tinkered in every way they could with that alibi; the four kids had been talked to again and again, and their testimony questioned because they were, after all, only ten or thirteen. But they all remembered, because one of the kids was going into the hospital the next day, and Boy had fixed their bikes, no charge. Boy Chalmers was popular with kids; that in itself told Sam something.

If one-tenth of the effort spent in trying to break down Boy's alibi had been spent in trying to find the truth of Carl Butts's, Sam thought they might have gotten somewhere. Cuckolded husbands were pretty likely suspects. The police in Meridian had checked out the truck stop, but without much assiduity; after all, the Highway in the Skyway truck stop was their own favorite eating joint, and they weren't about to yank around their friends there.

Sedgewick was not at all pleased that Sam was messing in the Butts case: it wasn't Sam's case, and he was sorry if Boy Chalmers had charmed the pants off Sam DeGheyn (Sam just chewed his gum at that one), but get the hell out of the Elton County jurisdiction. Tony Perry might have been half his, but Loreen Butts was all Elton County. Sedgewick said it as if the two of them were bickering over prom dates.

So Sam had waited for over three months before approaching the Elton County sheriff again, hoping that Sedgewick would have forgotten his massive irritation by then.

Sam had stopped in the sheriff's office in Hebrides to invite Sedgewick for lunch at the Stoplight Diner, a popular little place at a crossroads just the other side of Hebrides and one Sam knew Sedgewick liked. He had a case on a waitress they called Tater, some holdover nickname from the “One potato, two potato” childhood game that Tater had been particularly adept at.

Sam had deliberately left his uniform behind and worn jeans
and a quilted hunting jacket over a checkered woodsman's shirt, and a cap with a brim. He hated hunting; Sedgewick loved it. Sedgewick was a hell of a lot better at stalking deer than men, had more patience with it, had more respect for the intelligence of what he hunted. Men, he'd often say to Sam, couldn't teach him no new tricks. He was a great hunter and a sloppy cop. Fortunately, he had no ax to grind, had no career ambitions, or he'd have been more suspicious of Sam's casual request to be allowed to talk to Carl Butts.

The request was made over the third mock-frosted mug of Coors, and Sedgewick was very busy watching the swaying rump of his henna-haired waitress, Tater. Sam only wanted to satisfy himself as to the character of Loreen Butts, that was all. Just curiosity, nothing official. Sedgewick told him it damned well wasn't, and maybe he could have a word with Carl Butts, but not if he was going to harass that poor man. Boy Chalmers was in the county jail, with his next stop the state prison. Appeal turned down; case closed and neatly tied up. The discussion of the two murders was casual, what with the sheriff dividing his time between his beer and Tater; he'd reach for her thigh, growl, and look lecherous as she passed by, giggling. Sedgewick was a lecher; indeed, Sam wondered if the talk about Sedgewick and Tony Perry had anything to do with the sheriff's vehemence in wanting so much to claim that first murder.

Right now, the sheriff was happy enough to go one step further and be helpful by telling Sam that Butts was probably home because he'd seen him in town that morning. He drove his rig four days and got off three.

“And don't you go harassing that man—he's bought his share of trouble and grief.”

•  •  •

The only thing Carl Butts had bought that Sam could see was three cases of Bud tallboys and a half-gallon of Jack Daniel's.

Sam knocked on the trailer's storm door, still with the summer
screen insert in it. That autumn, Sam remembered, had been especially chill, the air musky with the smell of leaves someone was burning illegally on the other side of the dank river that narrowed between its high banks as it slid through the trailer park grounds as if trying to shoulder off the debris: rusty tin cans and bread wrappers and empty plastic detergent bottles. The sheriff's office had served the trailer park's owner, Nicholas L'Amour, with several warrants, demanding he improve the conditions. But the L'Amour Trailer Haven (its dirty buff sign decorated with hearts filled in with information about lot size, price, and amenities—kiddies' playground, for example, that no kiddies went near; sauna in a lean-to where you could see through the boards) never saw any improvements; money was changing hands, but not between the owner and the grounds keeper.

Carl Butts, though he didn't leave his chair, was a man of probably only medium height, but squarely built: square jaw set on thick neck, square shoulders and torso—the type of man that put you in mind of a trash compactor, pressed down hard and heavy inside, a lot more than meets the eye.

Sam guessed it was a lot less, the way he stayed glued in the TV chair, the tube of flesh beginning to overshadow the belt, and the rather whiny voice that called to someone in the dark environs to get the door. He was sitting almost within arm's reach of it himself, but the person who came to it was a woman. It must have been from her that Butts got his sweetheart looks and general ebullience. She had narrow eyes and a mouth like a mail slot—thin, squared off, and with a way of clamping down on words. Sam wondered idly, as he answered the question as to what his business was here, if Grant Wood had made his first pit stop here at the L'Amour Trailer Haven; Mother Butts was right out of
American Gothic.
Finally, she let him in, and then quickly reclaimed her seat before the TV, as if Sam might steal it.

Butts looked up briefly from the soap they were watching,
grunted out something about his day off, and returned his eyes to the screen. Neither of them asked Sam to have a chair; both of them wore equally puzzled looks, prompted by a witless dialogue between two interns and the open-mouthed, wide-eyed expressions of two nurses (meant, probably, to register shock, but managing only to look stupid). The Buttses were as intent on figuring this out as if it were the Idea of Order at General Hospital, an intellectual puzzle capable of being patched together only by a roomful of Harvard professors.

Sam folded his arms and watched for a minute. He'd seen bits and pieces of this one; it was Florence's favorite. He started burrowing his way into their attention by addressing the woman as “Mrs. Butts” and discovering he'd been wrong.

“Grizzell. That's ‘Griz-
zell
,' mister, accent on the second syl-
la
-ble—not like them papers kept calling it, ‘Grizzel.' Made it sound like “gristle.' ” She had a whiplash voice and the same punishing eyes as the grammar school teacher who'd walked between the third-grade desks with a narrow birch rod.

At least he'd got her attention for a moment. “Mrs. Grizzell. Sorry. I guess I just supposed you were Mr. Butts's—relative.” He didn't want to say “mother” in case she turned out to be not more than ten years older than Carl Butts. “Newspapers aren't known for being accurate. But you'd think they could get a name spelled right, wouldn't you?” Sam smiled his damnedest, realizing this was the mother-in-law, Loreen Grizzell Butts's mother.

She eased a bit in her rocking chair and nodded. “Think so. Now, what's police coming back for? They got that Boy Chalmers that murdered my Loreen.” Her attention went back to the soap, where a discussion between a toffee-haired girl and a tearful woman had replaced the one between the doctors.

Same talk, different people, thought Sam. “I'm real sorry about your daughter, Mrs. Grizzell. I'm sorry to intrude upon your grief, ma'am.”

At that, she had to look up and look grieved, and pull the wad
of handkerchief from her sleeve. But her eyes were still gorging on the soap.

“Carl, offer the man a chair. What did you say your name was?” she asked, as Butts rose to drag over a folding chair with an orange vinyl back and seat. The color clashed with the pink petunia pattern on the slipcovered easy chair in which Butts sat. He grunted when Sam thanked him.

“DeGheyn,” said Sam in answer to her question. “Sam.”

Her eye strayed from him to the ceiling, the cobwebs there, and she repeated the name, mouthing it carefully. “De-Gin.”

“Well, more ‘Da-
Geen
.' Long
e.
Rhymes with ‘beguine,' if you remember that old song.” Sam smiled.

As if she didn't quite trust his pronunciation, she asked, “Just how do you spell that name?”

“D-E-G-H-E-Y-N.”

That floored her; she stopped her rocking, then picked it up at a rather reckless speed, all the while shaking her head. “That ain't no American name. What kind of name
is
that, anyways?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Dutch.” Sam smiled, offered his cigarettes around. She shook her head, but her son-in-law took one, his eyes still clamped to the swimming greeny-blue of the TV. They'd both forgotten he was a policeman, apparently. “It's a funny spelling, all right. And even funnier, it's
really
supposed to be pronounced without any
g
sound, and with a long
i
—‘Da-
Hine
.' You'll appreciate why I use the G.”

She just shook and shook her head in wonder at the vagaries of oddly spelled names. “Hine?
Hine?
Well, I never did hear any name so peculiar that don't sound like it's spelt!” She shook her head in wonder. “Yes, I most certainly
do
appreciate you use the
G.
You American?” Her eyes narrowed.

“Born-and-bred U.S. of A. So was my mother and father. It was my great-great-great-grandfather that was Dutch.” Sam had no idea if this was true; the origins of his name were lost in the
swirling mists of the Atlantic crossing. What he had discovered was that it was the name of a famous Dutch painter, but looking at the picture on the Butts wall of a twelve-point buck, gold antlers painted on black velvet, he thought he'd leave that detail out. Yet Mrs. Grizzell seemed satisfied by this, for she nodded and smacked her lips. Sam went on: “And I'll tell you, it's annoying—I mean, when I hear someone pronounce it who's
read
it, or just looks at the name on my desk. I have to keep correcting them.”

Soul mate,
her eyes said. Oh, she knew all about
that
problem. “Carl, shut that damn thing off. I never could make out what those fools was doing, anyways.”

Butts made no move, beyond mumbling something about “the damned fools.” He referred to her as “Ma Gris” as if his mother-in-law were a French perfume.

Sam had seen five minutes now and then of this soap because it was Florence's favorite. Walking through the living room, coming or going out, he'd picked up bits and pieces. Now he said, pointing his cigarette at the screen, “I think
she's
supposed to be in love with that doctor there. Only he's married. That's what she's tearing her hair out about.”

“Floozy,” said Ma Gris, rocking, arms crossed, hands holding her elbows.

“It ain't
her
causing the trouble,” said Butts, topping another tallboy. “It's
him
—it's that intern or whatever. Want a Bud?” He held up a can and Sam thanked him kindly. Butts tossed it to him. “Bunch of assholes, anyway.”

“So shut it
off.
I wish to talk to Mr.—” Carefully, she said “DeGheyn,” as if the word were a delicate china cup that might crack under the weight of the two syllables.

Sam did not want the set shut off; it might provide him with an opening. Inclining his head toward the women who were rabbiting away near the nurses' station, he said, “Now, that one looks like that woman on ‘Dynasty.' ”

Ma Gris's head swiveled round to the screen; her eyes narrowed
to slits, as if even this were a suspicious statement. “What woman's that?”