Graveyard Fields Read online

  “Is that normal procedure around here? Ask questions at gunpoint?”

  “If the occasion calls for it. What did Byrd do after he questioned you?”

  “He got the call about the couple being found dead in Maggie Valley. It seemed to genuinely surprise him. It surprised the hell out of me too. Then he took me to the station, and I sat handcuffed in an interview room alone for a couple of hours. Then Diana came and Byrd let me go. She drove me back to the cabin.”

  Dale arched his eyebrows.

  “Why did she come to fetch you?” he asked.

  “I thought maybe she liked me, but now I’m pretty sure she thought I could lead her to the keys.”

  Dale let that statement hang in the air for a moment. I could tell he was trying to process all the information I’d given him. There were a bunch of dots, and he and I were both trying hard to connect them all. Problem was, we were forming different pictures.

  “What about Cordell’s car?” I said.

  “They towed it down from the parkway this morning to process it. And I’ll save you the trouble of asking—there weren’t no fucking gold hidden in the trunk.”

  “Was there anything in it?”

  “A few gallon-sized Ziploc bags and a couple of receipts from some motel near Savannah. They was also one of them prepaid debit cards you can get at Walmart. We checked it, weren’t no money on it.”

  I imagined Cordell putting some of the gold bars in the Ziploc bags and driving down to Savannah to sell them. He wouldn’t want to be carrying around cash, so a prepaid debit card would make sense.

  “What about Cordell’s phone?”

  “Ain’t never found it. Wasn’t on his body and we didn’t find it in the car. Whoever shot the man probably slung it in the bushes or kept it, which would be pretty fucking stupid.”

  “It wouldn’t be stupid if they needed his phone to get to the people he was selling the gold to.”

  Dale shook his head. “You really are a fucking idiot, you know that?”

  “Did you look in the Land Rover?” I asked. “And that cargo box on the roof?”

  Dale nodded. “The Land Rover was clean,” he said. “And that cargo box was empty. Okay? Are you satisfied now?”

  I wasn’t, so I peppered Dale with questions for another ten minutes. I wanted to know what had been found at the house Cordell was renting and if there was any chance the two campers who’d found his body at Graveyard Fields could be involved. But according to Dale, the house was clean and the two campers were local guys who were beyond suspicion.

  “Looks like the same gun was used in all three killings,” Dale said. “We found a nine-millimeter casing near Cordell’s body, and that hippie couple both had nine-millimeter shells lodged in their skulls.”

  “Have you determined when Jeff and Becky were killed?” I asked. “I mean, were they already dead the night you and I went to Cordell’s house?”

  Dale nodded.

  “The ME says they’s killed that same night. Now, whether it was before or after you were up there snooping around ain’t no one sure. That’s one of the reasons Byrd brought you in to the station.”

  “One reason? What was the other?”

  Dale hesitated a moment, then grinned. “To search the cabin,” he said.

  That made perfect sense. While I was sitting handcuffed at the station, some deputy had been digging through my stuff. Then, between Dale vouching for me and the cabin being clean, Byrd had let me go.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “You and numbnuts here are going back to the cabin,” Dale said. “And Davis, you stay out of this. You have no authority to go sniffin’ around, ’cause whenever you do, I’m the one who ends up with his ass in a sling.”

  I didn’t like the idea, but I was in no position to argue. “So what are you going to do?”

  Dale kicked the dirt, then seemed to make a decision.

  “I guess I’ll make a quick look for Diana.”

  “Her last name is Ross,” I said. “Her name is Diana Ross.”

  Dale squinted. “Like the singer?”

  Floppy opened the Igloo cooler and pulled out a Coors Light.

  “That’s funny,” Floppy said. “They don’t favor a bit.”

  36

  As Dale tore off in his patrol car, I climbed back into Sally and took my place on the cooler. Floppy dragged himself into the driver’s seat and fumed.

  “I ain’t never liked him,” Floppy said. “Even when we was kids, he was a butthole. He’s just a bigger butthole now.”

  I pictured Dale as a kid, chubby and obstinate, sitting in the back of a classroom, tired from “all this learnin’ bullshit.”

  I looked over at Floppy.

  “Listen to me carefully. You need to tell me the truth. Did your grandfather really find some gold?”

  “He sure as heck did!” Floppy said.

  “And you’re convinced Junebug and Byrd stole it?”

  Floppy nodded like a bobblehead doll. “Yessir! My granddaddy never told a lie. Even ’bout that UFO.”

  “If Junebug and Byrd stole the gold, why are they still here?” I said. “Why wouldn’t they have taken off to the Caribbean and lived like kings?”

  “Well now, they’s a couple of reasons for that. First, they was just boys when they stole that gold, so they couldn’t do much with it. I guess they hid it and made a pact to not touch it or tell no one about it until they got older.”

  “Yeah, well, they got older, and it still doesn’t seem like they ever spent any of the money.”

  Floppy cackled. “You ain’t from around here. You don’t understand these people. Do you think Junebug wants a yacht or a big mansion? You think Byrd wants anything other than being sheriff? Maybe they had big dreams when they was kids, but when they grew up, them dreams changed. Plus, even if they did want to spend it, it ain’t that easy. You can’t just roll a wheelbarrow of gold into a bank and tell ’em you want to trade it for cash. They squirreled away that gold way back when, and it’s stayed squirreled away. I guarantee you that. By the way, did you know squirrels …”

  * * *

  The ride back to the cabin took fifteen minutes. Without a bungee cord to hold me down, I’d told Floppy to keep Sally under forty if possible. During the ride I ignored Floppy’s ramblings and thought about Byrd and Junebug. Two old friends who’d grown up together and then gone in separate directions, Byrd toward law enforcement and Junebug toward a few decades at the paper mill.

  But the idea of either of them having access to a cache of gold was ridiculous. If the gold did exist, it had most likely been hauled off by the military just after the plane crash. And if the military hadn’t recovered all of it, then what remained was still scattered across the face of Cold Mountain. Or it had been until an amateur treasure hunter named Lester Cordell got lucky and stumbled onto it.

  * * *

  When we arrived at the cabin, I thanked Floppy for the ride and apologized for getting rough with him.

  “I wasn’t kidding about knowing martial arts,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

  I nodded, then stepped out of Sally. Before I closed the door, I reached in and slapped the top of the cooler.

  “I may get you to install one of these in my Mercedes.”

  Floppy beamed. “You just tell me when, buddy. I can do it.”

  * * *

  Inside the cabin I grabbed a beer from the fridge and took a seat at the kitchen table where I’d sat with Floppy and Diana not much more than an hour earlier. I thought about Diana and shook my head. The more I thought, the more it shook. The angel on my shoulder was heartbroken, but the devils were relieved. They knew things weren’t going to change after all.

  * * *

  I opened the laptop and found two new emails, one from the Indian pharmaceutical company and another from the Nigerian prince, once again asking for my assistance in getting millions of dollars out of his country. I thought about emailing him back and telling him I could us
e his help getting millions of dollars in gold off a mountain, or out of a locked chest, or more likely out of thin air.

  I pulled up Facebook and wasn’t surprised to learn I was still friendless. Since I now knew Diana’s last name, I searched for her page. I found it, but it was private. I went to the brewery’s Facebook page and took another look at the photos posted by customers. I found the image I’d already seen of Diana leaning against the bar; I now figured the guy next to her with his back to the camera was most likely Cordell. I studied the other photos closely. Before I’d just been hoping for a glimpse of Diana, but now I was looking for anything that might shed some light on where she’d gone.

  I pressed the arrow button on my laptop to cycle through the photos. I’d gone through ten or more when I heard the angel whisper, Go back. It was like when a word pops into your head and you’re not sure why. Then you look down and see the word on the cover of a magazine sitting on your coffee table. You read the word without even realizing it, but your unconscious picked it up. I pressed the back arrow to find what my unconscious had spotted.

  It took a minute, but I found what I was looking for in a photo taken from somewhere near the brewery’s entrance. I didn’t see Diana in the photo, but in the top left corner, near the bar, I could clearly make out Cordell. I thought this was what my unconscious had picked up, a small image of the man I’d been trying to find for the past week. Keep looking, the angel whispered. So I did. I scanned every pixel of the photo until I finally found it. A man sitting at the bar, turned in Cordell’s direction, a long beard flowing like a waterfall from his chin.

  * * *

  While the devils stoked my temper, the angel worked at calming my nerves. The guy with the beard was a friend of Diana’s, so it was natural he’d show up in a photo taken at her bar. What bothered me was the fact that Diana was friends with a guy who looked like a psychotic hobo and walked around with a handgun tucked into his jeans.

  Fuck Diana, the devils said.

  That had been my original plan, but the devils were now talking about something completely different. Diana was just another person I’d trusted without question. It made me think about my friendship with Dale. If I looked through his photos, would I find a picture of him and Floppy standing arm in arm next to a chest full of gold?

  * * *

  Diana was a thorn in my side, but I also had another concern: Perry. Not hearing back from him was fraying my nerves. I’d been hoping he’d send an email that would convince me my accusation was ludicrous. An email that would persuade me he’d had nothing to do with the shooting and that his owning a gray Audi was purely a coincidence. But his silence was eating away at that hope.

  I was beginning to feel certain about what had happened. There had never been any Internal Affairs investigation. Greg had never been under any suspicion. Perry had removed all of those Pelican cases before the police and EMTs arrived. He’d probably told me IA was involved to convince me that the affair was out of his hands. The shooter would never be found, no charges would ever be filed, and Perry would swear to me he’d tried his hardest but the situation was beyond his control. And I’d be left thinking everyone in the Charleston PD was crooked except for my good friend Perry.

  But now he would have to make sure the curtain wasn’t pulled back. And idiot that I was, I had given him directions to the cabin along with an invitation to show up anytime.

  Deep down I still held on to a tiny glimmer of hope that I was wrong. So far, relying on hope hadn’t helped me accomplish very much. But I wasn’t quite ready to completely give up on it.

  There was a sudden rap on the door. I jerked around so fast my beer toppled over and covered the table in beige foam. The door opened and Floppy stepped in with a sheepish look.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” he said.

  I took a few deep breaths and tried to get my heart rate back into double digits. Then I grabbed some paper towels and went to work on the foam.

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” I said.

  Floppy frowned.

  “Why? Are you busy with something?”

  “No, I mean I don’t think it’s possible that you can … just … never mind.”

  Floppy took a seat.

  “Hey, I’ve been sitting out there in Sally thinking,” he said. “I like to think about things and try to work them out in my head. I do this transcendental meditation stuff. You ever heard of that? A lot of celebrities do it. Some really smart people do it too. Anyways, there’s something real important I need to show you.”

  I sighed. So much for spending a quiet evening alone waiting for an old friend to show up and kill me.

  “Fine,” I said. “Show me.”

  Floppy shook his head. “It don’t have it with me. It’s back at my trailer. I can drive you up there.”

  I wasn’t going to climb back into Sally, not even if the passenger seat was full of good beer.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll follow you.”

  * * *

  A half an hour later I pulled into the dirt lot in front of Floppy’s garage. When I stepped out of the Mercedes, Floppy dragged himself over to me and looked around as if we were about to make a drug deal.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  I trailed Floppy through a maze of junk until we arrived at the steps of a teal-green trailer. Floppy hopped up the steps with his good leg, then turned and gave me a steely glare.

  “Now, I don’t normally let people into my home,” he said. “I got things in here I don’t want people to see. My business ain’t nobody else’s business, you know what I mean?”

  I looked around at the menagerie of rusted appliances, broken furniture, and car parts.

  “I got it. Your business is your business.”

  Floppy hesitated another moment, then unlocked the trailer’s door and walked inside.

  When I entered, my jaw hit the floor. The trailer was crammed from floor to ceiling with junk. Books, folders, magazines, old VHS tapes and DVDs. On the floor sat cardboard boxes overflowing with newspapers and five-gallon buckets full of golf balls, aluminum cans, and silverware. It was like a thrift store having a garage sale inside a flea market.

  “I’m a collector,” Floppy said, moving a cardboard box off a worn orange sofa. “Here, sit down. Sit right here and look forward; don’t be looking around at my things. Sit still and I’ll be right back.”

  Floppy vanished into a back room and returned a few minutes later with a black velvet pouch about the size of a paperback novel. I knew immediately what it was, but I didn’t want to believe it.

  “Now what I’m about to show you, I ain’t never showed nobody,” Floppy said.

  He untied the end of the pouch, reached inside, and slowly removed a bar of gold.

  “When Granddaddy first opened that trunk, he took out this one brick and hid it under his mattress. Then that night, Byrd and Junebug tore off with the rest of the gold. Granddaddy kept this brick under that mattress all them years, then gave it to me the day before he died. He never knew what to do with it. Just like Byrd and Junebug don’t know what to do with it. That’s why I’m telling you that gold ain’t never been spent. It’s still out there wherever them two hid it.”

  “Did you ever show this to Lester Cordell?” I asked.

  “Heck no! I told you I ain’t never showed it to nobody.”

  Floppy slid the bar of gold back into the velvet bag and then started limping nervously around the obstacle course he called a living room. “Well, except Tanya. I showed it to her one night when she’s up here and we’s drinking.”

  I cocked my head.

  “Tanya, remember? She’s the one with the bear paw tattooed on her titty. The massage therapist. I shouldn’t of showed it to her, but we’s drinking and I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought she’d keep it secret, but then she goes and shows up here the next night with her roommate, asking me to show the gold to ’em. But I was smart. I told ’em it was a joke. That it weren’
t nothin’ but a piece of iron I’d sprayed with gold flake.”

  “When was this?”

  Floppy looked up as if the answer might be written on the water-stained ceiling.

  “Uh, last summer sometime.”

  “Do you remember the roommate’s name?”

  “Let me think. It was weird. Like tropical or something.”

  When Floppy couldn’t find the answer on the ceiling, he scratched his head.

  “Dang it, I can’t remember. But let me tell you, she had a set of titties on her that put Tanya’s to shame.”

  “Something tropical. Like Daiquiri?”

  Floppy grinned from ear to ear.

  37

  Twenty minutes later I was in the parking lot of El Bacaratos.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Dale yelled through the phone.

  “Did you find Diana?”

  “Ain’t no one seen her. I got her address and rode up to her house. Big ole place up by the country club in Waynesville. Nobody was home.”

  “Did you get a search warrant?”

  Dale laughed. “Based on what? You and Floppy are the only people claiming Diana stole them keys and ran away, and you two ain’t exactly the most reliable motherfuckers on the planet.”

  I was disappointed but not surprised. “Well, here’s something else you’re probably not going to believe.”

  Dale was uncharacteristically silent while I told him about my visit to Floppy’s. It wasn’t until I reached the part about Tanya bringing Daiquiri to the trailer that Dale finally let out one of his signature snorts.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  I looked around the parking lot. “I’m at my office.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  * * *