SAFELY BURIED Chapter 36: There Was an Accident

I crossed the lawn in front of the Judge’s den, giving his windows a wide berth even though the drapes were drawn. The room was quiet, and I thought no one was there until the Judge shouted, “Damn it, Frank! Damn it! What the hell got into you?”

I peeked through one of the narrow panels alongside the door and saw Lillian coming down the stairs in a robe and slippers. When she got closer, I tapped softly on the glass and showed my face. She was startled to see me. She stopped and seemed to debate whether to let me in. Then she hurried past the den and opened the door a crack.

“Phil, what are you doing here this time of night?” she whispered.

The Judge bellowed, “Lillian, who’s there?”

I said, “I have to see the Judge.” I pushed the door open slowly but firmly and stepped into the hall.

“What happened to you?” Lillian exclaimed. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry, Lillian,” I said, brushing past.

“Who’s there?” the Judge roared again.

“It’s Phil Larrison,” Lillian called back.

The Judge’s wife appeared in a long nightgown at the head of the stairs, her hair a fluffy cloud around her face. She stopped in the middle of a yawn and stared down at me.

I stepped into the den. Frank Brandon was standing in the middle of the room, glaring at me with a baffled and fierce expression. He looked like a train wreck. His shirt was bloody, his hair disheveled, his tanned face slick with sweat. Doug Brandon was slumped on the leather sofa with his head back, staring at the ceiling. He jerked upright as I entered. Judge Brandon sat at his desk in a red silk robe over his pajamas. Coils of gray hair sprouted on his chest. His forearms lay flat on the blotter pad, and his brows wrinkled as he peered at me. His large, startled eyes made him look like a fish that had just been pulled out of a pond.

Frank blurted, “What the hell are you doing here?” He looked at Lillian as if she must be to blame.

“Sorry to barge in on you, Judge,” I said. “I guess you know what happened tonight.”

From behind me, Lillian said, “What? . . . What happened?” She squeezed past me into the den.

The Judge stared at her miserably.

Doug said, “I’ll take care of this,” and started to get up to take care of me.

The Judge raised a hand. “Sit down, Doug, and keep your mouth shut.”

Lillian raised her voice: “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Why don’t you tell her?” I said to Frank.

“You bastard,” he muttered. His left jaw clenched hard, puckering the cheek.

I heard Beverly Brandon coming through the hall. I moved out of her way as she entered the room. “What’s wrong, Jack?” she said softly.

“Sit down, Bev,” her husband replied. “You too, Lillian. Please. Sit down.” He gestured toward the sofa and chairs.

The women sat next to Doug on the sofa.

With a grim frown, the Judge rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he stopped rubbing, he seemed to have woken from a bad dream. “I’m sorry to tell the two of you this,” he said to Beverly and Lillian, “but Frank says Ralph is dead.”

Beverly gasped. “Oh dear God, no.” She clutched Lillian’s arm. “What happened?”

Lillian stared at the Judge. His eyes shrank from hers. She whirled toward her uncle.

“That damn Boofey killed him,” Frank said.

Lillian hardly moved. Her head made a barely perceptible shudder. Her eyes burned into Frank Brandon’s haggard face.

“He killed him with a shotgun,” Frank added.

Beverly’s mouth fell open, and a low moan came out. Stunned, she began to waver back and forth. Lillian put an arm around her grandmother’s broad shoulders and squeezed her tightly. The touch seemed to release Beverly’s tears. She began sobbing and gasping for air.

Lillian cast a disgusted glance at Frank. “It’s all your fault my father’s dead.”

“Like hell,” Frank shot back. “Blame Boofey. Boofey killed him.”

I tossed my two cents’ worth in: “Yeah, Boofey killed him, but you failed to mention that the three of you broke into his house. It’s too bad the Boofeys weren’t in the bathroom. You could have given them the same treatment you gave Wayne and Cheryl Garth.”

“You shut your damn mouth,” Frank yelled.

Doug made a little snort, almost a laugh. “He’s asking for it.”

“Shut up, Doug,” Lillian said. “You’re as bad as he is. I hope you both rot in hell.”

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Frank said. “We did what we had to do.”

The Judge roused himself from a stupor. “That’s enough!” He shook his head. “Ralph never should have gone with you tonight. None of you should have gone there. Boofey’s a career criminal. What did you expect to happen?”

“Boofey’s dead, and so’s his wife,” Doug said with a cocky sneer. “Like Frank says, they shot first. They got what they deserved.”

The Judge glared at Frank. “Is that true? They’re both dead?”

Doug said, “I got both of them. It was self-defense.”

“It was self-defense all right,” I said, “but it was the Boofeys who were defending themselves. The three of you broke into their house. You had pistols with silencers. It was supposed to be another execution, just like the Garths.”

“How the hell—where were you?” Frank demanded.

“Outside. In the yard. I wasn’t alone either.”

The Judge hung his head.

Doug stared at me, his eyes a dark threat. The tip of his tongue slid from side to side between his lips.   

The Judge gripped the front of his chair between his legs and rocked slowly forward and backward. “Do you know what Boofey and his wife were up to?” he asked me. He searched my face as if feeling me out, hoping for understanding or sympathy.

“Yes I do,” I told him.

“You know he was a blackmailer?” He uttered the word with contempt. His eyes went on searching.

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “He learned about the PCBs after the Garths were murdered. Wayne Garth found them in the cave where they were hidden. I doubt if Boofey ever saw the drums. But he did know about them, and he saw a copy of a letter Garth wrote demanding that the chemicals be cleaned up. That’s where Boofey got the idea to blackmail the owners of the old county dump.”

“He knows,” Frank said, pacing again. He came toward me with fists clenched and stopped inches away from my face. “You bastard, sneaking around here all the time, sucking up to Lillian.You’re as rotten as Boofey.”

“Ralph is gone,” Beverly said, no longer crying. “Jack, our son is gone.” Forlorn, shell-shocked, she gazed at him across the room.

“Yes, Bev,” the Judge said.

Lillian pressed her cheek against the side of her grandmother’s head.

With a long, loud breath, Doug stood up and said, “I need a beer.”

“You do not need a beer,” the Judge snapped. “This is not a party.”

“Dad,” Frank said, “we did the right thing. There’s only one way to deal with a blackmailer.” When the Judge did not answer, he went on, “If we’d given him the money he wanted, someday he would have come back for more. You know that. He had to be stopped. We did what we had to do.”

Judge Brandon lapsed into thought, and the room fell silent. For a minute or so no one said a word. Then the Judge proclaimed, “Mistakes have been made,” using the passive voice to minimize responsibility. “Big mistakes. My sons never should have gone into the hazardous-waste business.” He glared at Frank. “They lacked expertise.” I suddenly realized it was not a soliloquy. He was talking to me. “But no one appreciated the seriousness of the problem back then,” he continued. “No one knew how difficult and how expensive it was to dispose of toxic chemicals. My sons thought if they stored the drums in the cave, out of the weather, they would be all right. The drums stood on solid rock, so even if they leaked, the liquids would be contained.”

“That’s what you think,” I said. I knew I sounded snarky even as the words were still in my mouth, but I could not stop myself.

The Judge was not accustomed to having his opinions treated with disrespect. Flaring, he said, “You are correct. That is what I think. But those barrels have not harmed anyone. They’ve been safely buried in the cave for years.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Judge,” I said. “But what about Wayne and Cheryl Garth? They weren’t blackmailers, but they were murdered.”

The Judge said, “That was another mistake. The chemicals should have been cleaned up, as they wanted.”

Frank nearly shrieked, “We couldn’t afford that. It would have bankrupted all of us. It would have cost millions to clean it up, tens of millions.”

“Nevertheless. . . .”

Frank said, “They were blackmailers. It was just a different kind of blackmail.”

I looked at him and said, “It was cheaper to kill them than pay for the cleanup, huh?”

“They were dirt,” he said. “Pot-smoking drifters.”

The Judge seemed to drift away.

“They were nothing but scum,” Frank said.

“At least they didn’t murder anyone,” I said.

Frank looked straight into my eyes. “No one would have got hurt if they had minded their own business.”

“Is that a threat? Am I next?” I said. “The truth is no one would have got hurt if you had disposed of the chemicals properly.”

A soft, lilting moan escaped Beverly’s lips.

The Judge said, “Lillian, take your grandmother upstairs.”

“No,” Beverly said. “No.”

There was a tense silence. When no one else spoke, I said, “Who murdered the Garths, Frank? Was it you, Ralph, and Doug, or just one or two of you?”

“You bastard,” Frank said. “We didn’t ‘murder’ anybody. Like Doug said, it was self-defense. We were under attack. They were trying to destroy us. We had to do something.”

Doug spoke up again: “What proof is there that anyone in this room ‘murdered’ somebody? It could be argued that the Garths were killed by someone in their line of work. The police think their deaths were drug-related.”

“What about the Boofeys?” I said.

“If they shot first, it certainly sounds like self-defense,” said the Judge.

“The woman shot first,” Doug said. “Then I shot back.”

“Be quiet please, Doug,” the Judge said, less harshly this time. To me he said, “With regard to what happened tonight, you claim to be an eyewitness, but you say you were outside the house when the Boofeys were killed. If Ralph and Frank were the victims of a blackmail attempt, it is conceivable that they thought they could scare the blackmailers off with a show of force and the situation spiraled out of control when the Boofeys began shooting.”

“We covered this already,” I said. “My question was ‘Who murdered the Garths?’ Remember?”

Lillian, who had maintained a stiff silence, finally broke down. “Tell him, Frank,” she blurted out. “And don’t try to blame it on my father, now that he’s dead. Tell him who murdered the Garths. Tell him it was you and Doug. Tell him!” Her last two words, deep and hoarse, sounded as if they had been ripped out of the flesh in her throat.

Frank barked, “Shut up.”

It was Beverly’s turn to comfort Lillian, whose body was being convulsed with sobs that made no sound.

A sorrowful grimace passed over the Judge’s face. “Mistakes were made,” he muttered somberly. He stared into space as if lost in thought. “I take responsibility. We never meant to harm innocent people. We thought we had a perfect place to store the drums. We believed the landfill cave was secure. But now you say the chemicals are leaking out. We did not anticipate that. We should have, but we didn’t. That was our mistake. But it’s an error that can be rectified. We can still get rid of the drums—I mean dispose of them properly. Four blackmailers have died, the Garths and the Boofeys, but—”

“I don’t think the Garths were blackmailing you, Judge.”

“They were not good people. You know that, Phil.” He leaned forward on his desk, reasoning, not quite pleading. His skin seemed translucent, a sheet of waxed paper over a brown and purple map.

I said, “All they wanted, as I understand it, was for the chemicals to be cleaned up.”

Beverly Brandon sniffled and stared at me with a hapless frown. She looked as if she had aged ten years in the last ten minutes.

The Judge said, “You know, Phil, if you put these things in your paper, you destroy the good name of a family that has done many beneficial things for this county and this part of the state. Think about that. We made mistakes, but I think it’s fair to say that over the years the Brandon family has helped many many people. We’ve always tried to help people who were less fortunate than ourselves.”

I shifted my weight from one leg to the other and rolled my shoulders slightly. “What are you asking?”

“Just that you think about what I said.”

I sensed a tacit hint that I would not regret it if I did what he asked. “What about the skeleton in the cave? I said. “Am I supposed to think about that too?”

Beverly moaned. “Oh dear God.” Judge Brandon recoiled as if I had insulted him. His nose became sharp and flinty. Frank swung around toward him as if asking for permission to break my neck. Doug’s face was fire-engine red. Lillian’s eyes stared at me in fear. I wondered if all of them knew about the bones.

“It’s a child’s skeleton,” I continued. “It’s in another cave, some distance from where the chemicals are. My guess is—and I think it’s a pretty good guess—it’s what’s left of a boy who supposedly ran away from the Good Shepherd Home.”

Hunched over in his chair, Frank began nodding slowly. “I get it now,” he explained to the others. “He was in the caves, just like Garth.” Without turning around, he asked, “How’d you get in?”

“You can read about it in the paper,” I said. “Right now I’m interested in whose bones are in that cave.”

A cloud of hopelessness engulfed the room. I went on without mercy: “I’ve been told that Chuck Martin used to take kids from the so-called Good Shepherd Home to other places, including a pedophile professor’s house. I’m wondering if he ever brought any of the kids here as well.”

The Judge smacked his open hand on the desk and glowered at me. “Are you calling me a pedophile now, Mr. Larrison?”

“What was his name?” I said. “Was it Barry Wilson, the boy who ‘ran away’ from the home?” I paused a moment and looked at Judge Brandon. “No, sir, I’m not calling you a pedophile,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if Chuck Martin brought some kids here to play with someone else, Scott maybe. Did Scott kill the boy?”

Beverly sat bolt upright. “Stop it,” she begged.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Brandon,” I said, “but this has got to come out. The police should be able to identify the remains, either through dental records or DNA. I don’t know if they’ll be able to prove the boy was ever brought here, but I have a hunch someone will talk.”

“It’s not true,” Beverly wailed, pounding her fists on her lap. “How can you say such awful things?”

Frank turned and shouted, “You won’t get away with this. You think you can walk in here and say anything you please, even call us perverts. You’re nothin’ but a two-bit reporter for a two-bit paper. What does Wylie pay you for the shit you dish out—twenty thousand? You’re not even worth that. Look at you. You look like a pig. You stink.”

“Let me take him outside,” Doug said.

The Judge slumped in his chair. The folds in his old skin looked like wax dripping from a candle. His head drooped, and his arms lay on the chair as if he were about to be electrocuted. “We wanted to help the children,” he said. He seemed hypnotized. “We thought it would be good for them to spend some time in a nicer place. Most of them were poor kids from the wrong side of the tracks. When we lived in town, Chuck Martin would pick them up at the Good Shepherd Home and bring them to our house so they could play with Scott. Scott needed someone to play with. We thought it would be good for him as well as them.” There was a long pause. I thought he had finished speaking. Then he added, “But one day there was an accident.”

“Dad, don’t go there,” Frank said.

“What kind of accident?” I asked the Judge.

“One of those terrible things that happen sometimes.” He paused. “I’ve been quiet for too long,” he said as if still in a trance. He paused again. Then, in a feeble voice that I could barely hear, he said, “Scott and his friend were watching a cowboy movie on television, and then they went down to the basement to play.” His chin began trembling. “It was just an accident, a terrible, terrible accident.” His eyes brimmed with tears, and he coughed to keep from crying.

Beverly said, “They were only playing, Mr. Larrison. Scott didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Lillian, whose face was a gray mask, squeezed her grandmother’s hands.

Beverly went on: “Scott was so big for his age. We should have known better than to let him play with such a small boy. But they were the same age.”

“Scott’s still playing with small boys,” I said. “I’ve seen the kind of games he plays. What happened?”

Frank said, “What’s the matter with the two of you? You want this in the paper?”

“Was he drowned in the pool?” I asked Beverly.

She shook her head. “We didn’t have a pool at our old house. He was—”

The Judge completed the sentence for her: “—hanged by the neck.”

I said, “If it was an accident, why didn’t you report it to the police instead of putting out the story that the kid ran away from the home?”

“That’s what we should have done,” the Judge said. “But I was afraid Scott would be put away for the rest of his life. It was my fault, no one else’s.”

“You had Scott’s best interest at heart, Dad,” Frank said. “The mistake was letting him see the light of day. I should have put a pillow over his head the day he was born.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Judge Brandon said. “He’s your son. He’s a Brandon. He’s one of us. And he has a right to live as full a life as possible.” He looked at me and opened his hands, as if for understanding. “We tried to make it up to the boy’s parents. They were dirt poor, and they had three or four other kids. They went along with the story that the boy ran away. He actually had done that a couple of other times.”

“After playing with Scott?” I asked.

He gave me an angry glance but tolerated my question. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. In any case, the story was that he had run away and was never found. We helped the parents as much as we could, but the father was a drunk. He was in jail more than he was out. But I got him a job with the county highway department.”

Beverly said, “We did our best.”

“They didn’t care,” Frank said. “The father’s a drunken thief, and the mother’s a whore.”

“So you feel it didn’t really matter if they had one less kid?” I said.

“It didn’t seem to,” Frank snapped.

The Judge swiveled sideways and stared at his reflection in the window. “All I ever wanted to do was work for the public good . . . make Meridian County a better place . . . keep my family together. . . . I never wanted to hurt anyone. But I made mistakes.”

His fingers jittered against the edge of the desk, and his head shook. He pulled open the middle drawer, dug through some papers, and brought out a gun.

Beverly yelled, “Jack! No!”

My insides sank. I thought he was going to kill me, but in one continuous motion he raised the .38 revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger.

The loud report shattered the air. The Judge slumped in his chair. His arm fell to his side, and the gun thumped on the floor. A crimson stream of blood ran down his cheek onto his robe.

Beverly ran screaming to his side and wrapped her arms around his head as if trying to stop the bleeding. The Judge’s mouth hung open. His crazed eyes stared blankly.

Lillian buried her face in her hands.

Frank looked at me and said, “You damn bastard, you did this.”

“You killed him,” Doug said to me. “You as good as murdered him.”

A roar came from the doorway. “Papaw!” Scott charged into the den like a bull. “Papaw hurt!” He knocked Lillian aside with his shoulder and grabbed the Judge’s arm. “Papaw!” He tried to make the Judge stand up.

Lillian said, “He can’t get up, Scott.” She tried to pull her cousin away.

“Uppp,” Scott bellowed. “Uppppp.”

Frank Brandon sat rubbing his forehead, squeezing the skin to the middle. Doug Brandon stared at me with the eyes of a rattlesnake ready to strike.

I watched the dismal scene for a couple of minutes. Then I went outside and called Sheriff Eggemann. I felt as dry and crumbly inside as a hollow tree. Through the window I could hear Scott howling.

While waiting for the police to arrive, I called in the story to the Gleaner.