“She don’t have nothing!”
“As your wife, she will. They can garnish all her future earnings.”
“Well, I don’t give a damn about the money. But to put her through that for spite—”
“How long were you planning on waiting to marry this girl?”
“I know it can’t be right off. But we’re getting pretty itchy, you know.”
Rusk could imagine the girl in question being very itchy to tie the knot before her “soul mate” got distracted by another sweet young thing in another restaurant somewhere.
“You should also be prepared for a lot of anger on the part of your kids.”
He had Barnett’s full attention now.
“They’ll be made painfully aware that you’re abandoning their mother for a younger woman, and they’ll know who that woman is.”
Barnett was sullenly shaking his head.
“Do you think Luvy will make an effort to integrate your new love into the life of the family?”
“She’ll scream ‘harlot’ or ‘Jezebel’ every time she sees her. And you’re right about something else. Luvy’ll do everything she can to poison the kids against me. She’s already told me she wished I’d drop dead from a heart attack. Says she’s praying for it every night.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I swear on the Bible. She says it’s better for the kids to think I’m dead than gone off to leave them.”
“But you’re not leaving them, Carson.”
“Try telling that bitch that!” Barnett screamed, coming up out of his chair. “Goddamn it, I’m sorry, Andy. Sometimes I get so damned frustrated, I could just…”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Rusk let the silence stretch out. Now that Barnett’s anger had reached critical mass, it wasn’t going to cool anytime soon.
Rusk stood up and rolled his chair around his desk, then arranged Barnett’s chair so that it faced his—very close, too. The big oilman stared at him with obvious curiosity, even suspicion, as though wondering if Rusk might be queer.
“Please sit down, Carson. I want to talk to you, man-to-man.”
This was a language Barnett understood. He turned his chair around and straddled it, his big forearms inches from Rusk’s face.
“What I’m going to say may shock you, Carson.”
“No, you go right ahead.”
“I’m guessing that a man like you has come across some unusual situations in your business.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well…difficulties.”
“That’s for sure.”
Rusk nodded soberly. “Some difficulties, I’ve found, are solvable by conventional methods. While others…others take some creative thinking. Extraordinary measures, you might say.”
Barnett was watching him carefully now. “Go on.”
“I’ve handled a lot of divorces. Hundreds, in fact. And a few of those cases had some similarities to yours.”
“Really?”
Rusk nodded. “And some of those cases, well, they just broke my heart. More than once I’ve watched a liberal-biased judge take away half a man’s lifetime earnings—or more—and then stop him from seeing his own children to boot—the children he brought into the world! When you see that…well, it feels almost un-American, Carson.”
“You’re right!”
“I know I’m right. And after I’d seen enough of those cases, after fighting down in the trenches for a client and watching it all come to nothing…well, a thought would come to me.”
“What was it?”
“I thought, ‘God forgive me, but how much of a mercy would it be for this man—and for these kids—if one of the parties to this goddamn court battle was to just disappear?’”
Barnett’s mouth was open like that of a teenage boy watching a stolen porn film, and his eyes were gleaming. Rusk could almost see the idea sinking into the slow gray cells behind those eyes. He dared not look away from Carson Barnett; he held his eyes with almost evangelical fervor.
Barnett swallowed and looked down at the carpet between them. “You mean—”
“I mean what I said. No more, no less. If a vicious and unforgiving person was doing their utmost to stop a person they supposedly loved—a person with whom they had had children—from even seeing those children, and also trying to take away everything that person had worked for all his life…well, then, it just seemed like almost divine justice if some force—fate, maybe—were to intervene to stop that from happening.”
“Jesus,” Barnett said quietly. “You said a mouthful there.”
“I don’t say this to many people, Carson. But you’re in a desperate situation.”
The big man looked up with dark animal intelligence. “Has something like what you talked about ever happened? I mean, has the other person just…disappeared?”
Rusk nodded slowly.
Barnett opened his mouth to speak again, but Rusk stopped him with an upraised hand. “If that idea intrigues you, you should never come back to this office again.”
“What?”
“You should go to the Jackson Racquet Club the day after tomorrow at two p.m. and ask to take a steam bath.”
“I ain’t a member,” Barnett said awkwardly.
Rusk smiled. “A ten-dollar guest fee will get you in.”
“But—”
He put his left forefinger to his lips, then stood and offered Barnett his right hand. “Carson, if you want to get a divorce, I’ll be happy to represent you. Given Luvy’s attitude, it could take a year or more to resolve everything, but I promise I’ll do my best for you. And as you said, you could give her twenty-five million dollars, and you’d still have a lot of money.”
Barnett was opening and closing his mouth like a man in mild shock.
“A guy like you, a guy who’s made and lost several fortunes, money probably doesn’t mean the same as it does to a guy like me.”
“I ain’t as young as I used to be,” Barnett said softly.
“That’s true.” Rusk smiled. “Time works on us all.” He rolled his chair back behind his desk.
Barnett was watching him like a man who had thought he was sharing space with a dog, then discovered that his roommate was a wolf.
“You take it easy now,” Rusk said. “Don’t let her get you down.”
“The Jackson Racquet Club?” Barnett murmured.
“What’s that?” Rusk said. “I didn’t hear you.”
Barnett’s eyes flickered with comprehension. “Nothing. I was just mumbling.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The oilman looked at Rusk a moment longer, then turned to go. When he reached the door, Rusk called after him, “Carson?”
When Barnett turned back, he looked exhausted.
“I don’t think you ought to share this with your future bride.” And then, in the truest moment of their meeting, Rusk added, “You never know how things will go down the road.”
Barnett’s eyes widened, then he hurried out of the office.
CHAPTER 21
Chris pedaled past the Little Theater, then turned his Trek onto Maple Street and pumped hard up the long slope toward the Natchez Cemetery. Soon he would break out onto the bluff, with miles of open space to his left and the pristine cemetery on his right.
Chris had prescribed a lot of antidepressants in his career, but he had never experienced depression. He’d read deeply on the subject and asked the most penetrating questions he could to patients, but until today he’d had no true inkling of the condition those patients had described to him. Plath’s metaphor of a bell jar seemed strikingly apt: he felt as though all the air had been sucked out of his life, that he was moving in a vacuum, and that his actions, whatever he might choose to do, would have no meaning or positive consequence in the world.
Tom Cage, as perceptive as ever, had noticed Chris’s dazed mental state and told him to take the afternoon off. Since Thora had left for the Delta
before daybreak (despite having promised to take Ben to school), his only remaining obligation—barring evening rounds—was to deliver Ben to the birthday party at the bowling alley at 4 p.m. And even that could be handled by Mrs. Johnson with a single phone call.
After leaving the office, Chris had driven home, suited up, and without really intending it had begun a ride from Elgin to the Mississippi River. He’d covered fifteen miles in thirty-six minutes—a record time for him—yet he felt neither tired nor elated. He felt like a machine endowed with the capacity for thought. Yet he did not want to think. With a rogue wind blowing out of the west, he wanted only to crest the hill and hit the breeze shooting up the face of the two-hundred-foot bluff that lined the Mississippi River.
Ten seconds after he hit Cemetery Road, the vast river valley opened up on his left. He knew then that he would not sidetrack and ride the cemetery, as was his habit, but rather continue past the shotgun shacks that lined the road beyond the cemetery and ride on to the Devil’s Punchbowl, the deep defile where notorious outlaws had dumped the bodies of their victims in past centuries. He was staring so intently over the endless miles of Louisiana cotton fields on his left that he almost slammed into a car that had turned broadside across the road.
Chris braked so hard that he nearly went over the handlebars. He was about to start screaming at the driver when she jumped out and started screaming at him. He stood with his mouth hanging open.
The driver was Alex Morse.
She looked as though she hadn’t slept for days. Her voice was shockingly hoarse, her eyes ringed with black, and for the first time since he’d met her, she appeared to be out of control.
“Why haven’t you been answering my calls?” she shouted.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Because I already know what you’re going to say.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say, goddamn it! Something terrible has happened! Something I couldn’t have predicted in a million years.”
Chris pedaled up to her open door. “What?”
“One of the husbands that murdered his wife tried to commit suicide last night.”
This took Chris aback. “Tried how?”
“Insulin overdose.”
“He’s still alive?”
Morse nodded.
“In a coma, right?”
“How did you know?”
“I saw that a lot during my residency. People try insulin because it offers hope of a painless death. More times than not they wind up in a permanent vegetative state. Was he diabetic?”
“Yes. Two injections per day.”
Chris looked toward the river. “Could have been an accidental overdose.”
“I don’t think so. But then I don’t think it was suicide either.”
He said nothing.
Morse took a couple of steps toward him, her eyes boring into his. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Chris replied.
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“Didn’t feel like working. Why don’t you think it was suicide?”
She studied him as though unsure whether to drop the issue of his mental state. “The guy’s name is William Braid. He’s from Vicksburg. His wife suffered terribly before she died. If I’m right, and Braid paid for her murder, then we have two possibilities. One, Braid was so consumed by guilt that he couldn’t stand to live with himself one more day. Some local gossip supports that scenario. But a couple of his close friends say Braid’s ego was so big that he could never kill himself.”
“Go on.”
“It could also be that whoever Braid hired to murder his wife—Andrew Rusk, for example—decided that an unstable, guilt-ridden client was an intolerable liability. Especially now, with me poking around.” Morse looked up and down Cemetery Road. “How hard would it be to put Braid into a permanent insulin coma?”
“Child’s play compared to giving someone cancer. Think of the Klaus von Bülow case. Same thing.”
Morse’s eyes flashed. “You’re right. Only in this case, there’s no family to get pissed off. So by putting Braid into a coma rather than killing him, the attacker greatly reduced the amount of police scrutiny on the case.”
An ancient pickup rumbled by, spewing blue-black exhaust from its tailpipe.
“You look terrible,” Chris said. “Why haven’t you slept?”
“I drove to Jackson last night. To see my mother. They had to put her into UMC again last night. Her liver’s going. Kidneys, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’s close to the end this time. Tons of edema…she’s heavily sedated now.”
Chris nodded. He’d seen it many times.
“It’s weird,” Morse said. “Put me on a plane, and I can sleep from wheels-up to the arrival gate. But hospitals…I can’t do it.”
She seem to expect him to make conversation, but Chris didn’t know what to say.
“I did sleep in my car for a couple of hours,” she added.
“Sounds risky.”
“Not really. I was in the parking lot of your office. I was still asleep when you left.”
He felt a prick of guilt.
“I figured you might come out here,” she went on. “I’ve followed Thora when she ran out here.”
“Look, Agent Morse—”
“Would you call me Alex, for God’s sake?” Exasperation colored her face, darkening the scars around her right eye.
“Okay. Alex. I’ve heard everything you’ve told me, okay? I’ve seen what you’ve shown me. I know what you want me to do. I’ve even thought a bit about the feasibility of inducing cancer in human beings. But I didn’t feel like listening to any more about it today. That’s why I didn’t answer your calls.”
Her expression had changed from exasperation to something like empathy. “What do you feel like doing?”
“Riding.”
She turned up her palms. “Fine. Why not?” She nodded at an approaching car. “But we should get off this road. Where were you going from here?”
He didn’t want to mention the Devil’s Punchbowl. “I was going to do some sprints in the cemetery, then sit on Jewish Hill for a while.”
“What’s Jewish Hill?”
Chris pointed to a thirty-foot hill topped with marble monuments and a tall flagpole. The American flag was shamefully weathered, even tattered at the ends of the stripes. “Best place to watch the river go by.”
“I can’t ride with you today,” Alex said, nodding at the empty bike rack attached to her rear bumper. “Could we just take a walk in there? I won’t even talk if you don’t want me to.”
Chris looked away. Could she walk beside him without bringing up her obsession? He doubted it. And talking to Alex Morse would certainly drive him deeper into depression. Yet, oddly enough, she was the only person who might remotely understand what was eating at him. “We’re liable to run into people who know me in there, believe it or not. A lot of people run in this cemetery.”
Alex shrugged. “If we do, tell them I’m a doctor from out of town. You and Tom Cage are thinking of bringing in a new associate.”
Chris smiled for the first time in many hours, maybe days. Then he mounted his bike and pedaled slowly toward the nearest cemetery gate, a wrought-iron monster attached to heavy brick pillars. The whole cemetery was filled with beautiful ironwork from another age. Alex drove through the open gate and parked her Corolla on the grass. Chris chained his bike to her rack, then led her down one of the narrow lanes that divided the tall and silent stones.
They walked some distance without speaking, penetrating ever deeper into the cemetery’s interior. Like much of old Natchez, the cemetery had a classical Greek feel to it, thanks largely to the Greek Revival architecture favored by Anglophile cotton planters before the Civil War. Confederate dead were buried here, and also many Americans of national reputation, but the graves of the common people had always interested Chris most.
&n
bsp; “Look,” he said, pointing toward a dark stone covered with moss.
“Who’s buried there?”
“A little girl who was afraid of the dark. She was so afraid that death would be dark that her mother buried her with a glass lid on her coffin. Little steps lead down to the tomb. The mother would go down there every day and read to the dead child from her favorite book.”
“My God. When was this?”
“About a century ago.”
“Can I see her?”
“Not anymore. They finally had to block it up, because of vandals. Assholes come out here all the time and destroy things. I wish I had the time to sit out here for a few nights in a row. I’d kick the shit out of anybody who tried to desecrate this place.”
Alex smiled. “I believe you.”
She took the lead and started up a lane that sloped toward the high ground over the river. “You said you’ve given some thought to my cancer theory.”
“I thought you weren’t going to talk about that.”
“You opened the conversation.”
Chris heard himself chuckle. “I guess I did.” He walked on for several yards, then said, “I’ve been doing a little reading in my oncology texts between patients.”
“What have you learned?”
“I was right about the complexity of the blood cancers. We don’t know what causes ninety percent of them. We do know that most of them have different causes. They can tell that from the changes in various blood cells, and by other factors like tumor-suppressor genes, cellular growth factors, et cetera. This is bleeding-edge medicine we’re talking about.”
“Was I right about radiation?”
“As far as you went, yes. You could definitely cause a whole spectrum of cancers with radiation. But”—Chris held up a forefinger—“not undetectably. You fire gamma rays into somebody without a qualified radiation oncologist directing the beam, you’re going to have severe burns, skin rotting off, vomiting around the clock. Even with qualified personnel, you get serious side effects from radiation therapy. And I’m talking about minimum doses given to cure people.”
“But it’s possible with enough expertise,” Alex insisted. “Did you come up with any other options?”