“On a cop killer who shot her first.”
“It’s the pictures, Jack. You don’t get it, do you? The public didn’t see Evelda Drumgo shoot John Brigham. They didn’t see Evelda shoot at Starling first. You don’t see it if you don’t know
what you’re looking at. Two hundred million people, a tenth of whom vote, saw Evelda Drumgo sitting in the road in a protective posture over her baby, with her brains blown out. Don’t say it, Jack—I know you thought for a while Starling would be your protégée. But she’s got a smart mouth, Jack, and she got off to the wrong start with certain people—”
“Krendler is a pissant.”
“Listen to me and don’t say anything until I finish. Starling’s career was flat-lining anyway. She’ll get an administrative discharge without prejudice, the paperwork won’t look any worse than a time-and-attendance rap— she’ll be able to get a job. Jack, you’ve done a great thing in the FBI, the Behavioral Science. A lot of people think if you’d pushed your own interests a little better you’d be a lot more than a section chief, that you deserve a lot more. I’ll be the first one to say it. Jack, you’re going to retire a deputy director. You have that from me.”
“You mean if I stay out of this?”
“In the normal course of events, Jack. With peace all over the kingdom, that’s what will happen. Jack, look at me.”
“Yes, Director Tunberry?”
“I’m not asking you, I’m giving you a direct order. Stay out of this. Don’t throw it away, Jack. Sometimes you’ve just got to turn your face away. I’ve done it. Listen, I know it’s hard, believe me I know how you feel.”
“How I feel? I feel like I need a shower,” Crawford said.
CHAPTER
5
STARLING WAS an efficient housekeeper, but not a meticulous one. Her side of the duplex was clean and she could find everything, but stuff tended to pile up—clean unsorted laundry, more magazines than places to put them. She was a world-class last-minute ironer and she didn’t need to primp, so she got by.
When she wanted order, she went through the shared kitchen to Ardelia Mapp’s side of the duplex. If Ardelia was there, she had the benefit of her counsel, which was always useful, though sometimes closer to the bone than she might wish. If Ardelia was not there, it was understood that Starling could sit in the absolute order of Mapp’s dwelling to think, as long as she didn’t leave anything. There she sat today. It is one of those residences that always contains its occupant whether she’s there or not.
Starling sat looking at Mapp’s grandmother’s life insurance policy, hanging on the wall in a handmade frame, just as it had hung in the grandmother’s farm tenant house and in the Mapps’ project apartment during Ardelia’s childhood. Her grandmother had sold garden vegetables and flowers and saved the dimes to pay the premiums, and she had been able to borrow against the paid-up policy to help Ardelia over the last hump when she was working her way through college. There was a picture, too, of the tiny old woman, making no attempt to smile above her starched white collar, ancient knowlege shining in the black eyes beneath the rim of her straw boater.
Ardelia felt her background, found strength in it every day. Now Starling felt for hers, tried to gather herself. The Lutheran Home at Bozeman had fed and clothed her and given her a decent model of behavior, but for what she needed now, she must consult her blood.
What do you have when you come from a poor-white background? And from a place where Reconstruction didn’t end until the 1950s. If you came from people often referred to on campuses as crackers and rednecks or, condescendingly, as blue-collar or poor-white Appalachians. If even the uncertain gentility of the South, who accord physical work no dignity at all, refer to your people as peckerwoods—in what tradition do you find an example? That we whaled the piss out of them that first time at Bull Run? That Great-granddaddy did right at Vicksburg, that a corner of Shiloh is forever Yazoo City?
There is much honor and more sense in having succeeded with what was left, making something with the damned forty acres and a muddy mule, but you have to be able to see that. No one will tell you.
Starling had succeeded in FBI training because she had nothing to fall back on. She survived most of her life in institutions, by respecting them and playing hard and well by the rules. She had always advanced, won the scholarship, made the team. Her failure to advance in the FBI after a brilliant start was a new and awful experience for her. She batted against the glass ceiling like a bee in a bottle.
She had had four days to grieve for John Brigham, shot dead before her eyes. A long time ago John Brigham had asked her something and she said no. And then he asked her if they could be friends, and meant it, and she said yes, and meant it.
She had to come to terms with the fact that she herself had killed five people at the Feliciana Fish Market. She flashed again and again on the Crip with his chest crushed between the cars, clawing at the car top as his gun slid away.
Once, for relief, she went to the hospital to look at Evelda’s baby. Evelda’s mother was there, holding her grandchild, preparing to take him home. She recognized Starling from the newspapers, handed the baby to the nurse and, before Starling realized what she was about, she slapped Starling’s face hard on the bandaged side.
Starling didn’t strike back, but pinned the older woman against the maternity ward window in a wrist-lock until she stopped struggling, her face distorted against the foam and spit-smeared glass. Blood ran down Starling’s neck and the pain made her dizzy. She had her ear restitched in the emergency room, and declined to file charges. An emergency room aide tipped the Tattler and got three hundred dollars.
She had to go out twice more—to make John Brigham’s final arrangements and to attend his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Brigham’s relatives were few and distant and in his written final requests, he named Starling to take care of him.
The extent of his facial injuries required a closed casket, but she had seen to his appearance as well as she could. She laid him out in his perfect Marine dress blues, with his Silver Star and ribbons for his other decorations.
After the ceremony, Brigham’s commanding officer delivered to Starling a box containing John Brigham’s personal weapons, his badges, and some items from his ever-cluttered desk, including his silly weather bird that drank from a glass.
In five days Starling faced a hearing that could ruin her. Except for one message from Jack Crawford, her work phone had been silent, and there was no Brigham to talk to anymore.
She called her representative in the FBI Agent’s Association. His advice was to not wear dangly earrings or open-toed shoes to the hearing.
Every day television and the newspapers seized the story of Evelda Drumgo’s death and shook it like a rat.
Here in the absolute order of Mapp’s house, Starling tried to think.