by George Wier
THE DEVIL TO PAY
A Bill Travis Mystery
GEORGE WIER
Copyright © 2013 by George Wier
Published by
Flagstone Books
Austin, Texas
The Devil To Pay—A Bill Travis Mystery
Second Kindle Edition
March 2013
ISBN‑13: 978-1481982023
ISBN‑10: 1481982028
Cover lake photograph Copyright © 2005
by Cindy Haggerty
Cover demon image Copyright © 2008
by Ronald Hudson
Both images courtesy of bigstockphoto.com
All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.
The Bill Travis Mysteries:
The Last Call
Capitol Offense
Longnecks & Twisted Hearts
The Devil To Pay
THE DEVIL TO PAY
A Bill Travis Mystery
DEDICATION
For Sallie, as always.
PROLOGUE
Phil Burnet retired as curator from the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco, Texas on his sixty-third birthday, having filed early for his social security benefit. His mind was made up to settle down and do what he had for thirty-five years sworn before God and family he would do: fish all day, every day, until he died. He had proclaimed on more than one occasion that when they found his dead body with his old cane-pole in his stiff hand, they shouldn’t bother trying to remove it, but instead weight his body down and shove him on into the water. He’d be much happier that way and it would balance the books between himself and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for all the fish he was to have taken during the intervening years, for which he had planned on the round number of forty—forty years of catching, cleaning and frying his own supper. His grandfather had lived to be 102, and he was aiming to best him.
Phil Burnet went fishing that first Saturday after his retirement dinner and was never seen alive again.
*****
The Colorado River is a thoroughly dammed and level-controlled waterway after it meanders its way down from the high North Texas plains to become Lake Travis. Below the broad lake dam is a spillway where the waters again begin to resemble a very broad river that snakes its way for miles through West Austin suburbs for the upwardly mobile and affluent in the high hills to become what is locally known as Town Lake, recently renamed Ladybird Lake after President Johnson’s widow.
The waterway and shores of Town Lake have been sculpted over time into a large city park with stands of native trees, hike and bike trails and picnic areas, much of the funding for which was gleaned through the influence of the long-lived former president’s wife.
On a Saturday afternoon, exactly one week to the day after his first and final foray into his retirement pastime and at a time optimum for city residents to enjoy the tranquil lake, Phil Burnet put in an appearance again. Phil Burnet was thoroughly dead. Dead did not come much deader.
The discovery of the body was ultimately attributed to one Perry Reilly, a local, who had taken his canoe and his new young and beautiful insurance associate out onto the water for a little “quality time.” Perry was a womanizer. This he knew and couldn’t help. His father had been a womanizer. His grandfather had raised three different families during three different eras, and if family rumors were true, had fathered other children that did not show up on the family tree charts kept by the estimable elderly family hens. So, for Perry Reilly, the blue blood had run true. Angela Thompson was beautiful, she was unattached, she was an associate, and she was twenty-five years his junior, which, according to Perry’s moral compass, made her fair game.
He was alternating his paddle strokes along Barton Creek toward Town Lake and occasionally pointing at something on either bank in order to distract Angela long enough to hopefully catch a fleeting glance near where her legs joined beneath cotton athletic shorts and the brownish shadows began there in the narrow gaps. Angela Thompson wore baggy clothing when not in the office. It was the style, and today Perry approved.
Angela peered into the waters, intently.
“Perry. Stop. Hold a sec.”
“What is it?” he asked. He had almost added a ‘darling’ on the end of his question, but training took hold and saved him.
“It’s... Tell me what that is.” Her voice had become no more than whisper. Her brows frowned, her eyes squinted. She pointed.
“Lean back for a second. We both can’t look at the same time. This thing will tip over.”
She looked away, opposite side, and closed her eyes.
Perry looked over the side and saw something down there: eight, ten feet down, possibly more. The shadows and the light did strange things in deep water. Shapes melded and blended and anything could look like anything, this he knew. But he also knew that what he was seeing was what was there.
He swore under his breath.
There was movement for a moment down there, an upward drift of something. It looked like a hand with a single extended finger, pointing at him in accusation.
“Perry?” Angela said, distress in her voice. He looked. Her eyes were still shut and she was squeezing them tight.
“Hush, now,” he said.
There was a quick flick of motion down there and something black and round darted away toward the shadows beneath the trees overhanging the wide creek. A turtle. Biggest mother he had ever seen. The lake was full of the beggars.
Perry Reilly then did the bravest thing he had ever done in his entire life. He reached into his shirt pocket and removed his cellular phone.
“I gotta make a call,” he said.
CHAPTER ONE
Walt Cannon stopped by my office on a Monday morning at about the same moment that the portal gates of hell opened up and black things began slithering forth.
My name is Bill Travis. I’ve got a home and a wife full of children and have no business with trouble, or at least I shouldn’t. I could have tried telling that to Walt Cannon and a lot of good it would have done me.
“I need your help, Bill,” Walt said.
“Have a seat, Walt,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t. Walt is likable, though. He’s a lean and muscled fellow, a tad over six feet in height and carries an air of authority about him even when he isn’t in uniform, which at the moment he was. Looking at Walt’s face is like looking back a century into the seamed face of an Old West cattle drover. In his younger years Walt would have made a good Marlboro Man.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
And so he laid it out about Phil Burnet and his retirement and his vanishment and return. Perry Reilly’s name came up when I asked who had found him.
“Perry’s my business neighbor,” I said. “The insurance office right next door.”
“Right,” Walt said. “I didn’t even think about you, Bill, until I walked out of his office and looked this way. It’s been awhile.”
“It’s been awhile,” I said, recalling barbecue dinners beneath the shadow of a large metal sculpture on Walt’s ranch.
“A lot happens in a year.”
“That’s all too true. Why me, Walt? I can get my partner Nat to keep your books. Hell, maybe even cook ‘em—” I looked at his face. “Just kidding,” I said. “I can advise you on the stock market, maybe, as in get out while you can. But really, why me? I don’t have a license to investigate. Legally, I can’t even ask questions. What
gives?”
“Because,” he said, and paused. “First, it’s not my investigation. It’s being handled by the locals as a simple murder case, even though any Ranger has, by tradition, jurisdiction anywhere in the state. On this one I dare not go very far myself.”
“Then why were you talking to Perry?” I asked.
He sighed, uncrossed his legs and shifted in his chair. This was it. The mule was about to get the two-by-four right between the eyes. I leaned back in my chair and stared at him across my disheveled desk.
Walt looked at his hands. They were reddish, rough and leathery. His knuckles appeared to have knuckles.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said, and I allowed the silence that followed to linger. I wasn’t about to speak.
“Bill, there are some folks in the Ranger Service that are pretty sure. . . They think. . . Aw hell. Might as well spit it out. They think I killed Phil Burnet.”
*****
I remembered one time Walt telling me about a kid who had said to him: “I heard you’re a Texas Ranger?” Walt replied: “That’s right,” to which the kid replied with another, damning question: “What position do you play?”
There’s little romance in any line of work. A job, I have found, is a job. But for some men and women their job is their life. That’s what I was thinking about when I asked Walt Cannon the question that no one else I know would have been brazen enough to ask: “Did you, Walt? Did you kill him?”
“No,” he said slowly, if ‘no’ can be said slowly. “But I would have. I sure as hell wanted to.”
And then somewhere I felt a black door opening.
“I suppose,” I said, “you need to tell me more about Phil Burnet.”
CHAPTER TWO
Despite the “one mob—one Ranger” myth, Texas Rangers work both closely together and with the various other law enforcement agencies in their geographic zones. Traditionally (and technically) a Ranger has jurisdiction anywhere in the State of Texas, but in the real world a Ranger has a specific zone, be it a geographical area of several counties, or an area of specialization. For instance, there are Special Rangers who have the same legal powers as a regular Ranger, but whose job may entail the investigation of cattle rustling (which still occurs in Texas in this age of technology) or railroad or oil and gas issues. Wherever money changes hands, some insist that it go, unearned, into their own, which can draw the kind of attention even the most reviled personality would find unhealthy—I know of no sane man who would want to be on the receiving end of a Ranger’s ire.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet a number of Rangers in my forty-odd years of life. I’ve shaken hands with Ray Martinez, the former Austin Policeman who was credited with bringing down Charles Whitman, the University of Texas Bell Tower sniper, back in ‘66. Ray is a judge now, but he still holds his Ranger commission. Another Ranger once helped me out of a scrape during my college years, but we won’t go into that! And then a few years ago, I bumped into Walter Cannon, who was trying to penetrate a group styling themselves as revolutionaries against the Texas Government. They’d wanted Texas to secede from the Union, and were bent on doing the job from the inside. Walt showed up at a propitious moment, and he was not too keen on taking prisoners when the gunfire began.
I had wondered, though, about the inner workings of the Rangers, and there, in my office, I got chapter and verse from Ranger Walt Cannon. We got down to business and to the answers to some of my real questions.
Walt put out his Garcia y Vega cigar in an old ashtray I had found for him. I don’t smoke, but occasionally I’ll have a client who does. Ashtrays are the one item I can never bring myself to throw away.
“One of a dozen of us might have killed Phil,” Walt said. “I tried myself to get him fired the first time about fifteen years ago, but he was too well-connected, too much on the inside.”
“Why would you do something like that?” I asked. Walt sipped the coffee and bourbon I had poured for him. I wanted him at ease. Also, I wanted his tongue loose.
From the outer office I could hear Penny, my secretary, clattering away at her computer keyboard, but I doubted it was office business. Penny had been working on a romance novel for the last few months. I knew about it, she knew I knew, and we had a tacit consent thing going on about it that was mildly amusing. I believed, though, she had a bit of a guilty conscience about it. I’d read snatches of her prose. She was pretty good, if you like torrid romance novels.
“Because,” Walt interrupted my little chain of thought, “you don’t suffer a traitor to continue in your midst, if you can help it.”
“Traitor?”
“Mayhaps you’ve heard of Dewey Bingham?”
I whistled.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Dewey was a friend,” Walt said, his voice no more than a whisper.
Dewey Bingham was an appointee of former Governor Ann Richards as a liaison between the Texas Governor and the President of Mexico, the closest thing to an ambassador that an individual State can have. Dewey was killed in a house fire during the investigation of the ties between a Mexican drug gang and various South Texas county officials. The news had made state and national headlines. The cause of the blaze that took Bingham and his family from this world was summarized succinctly on the Harris County Fire Marshall’s report by one damning word: “Arson”.
“You don’t think a mild-mannered museum curator had anything to do with a house fire, do you?” I asked.
“You mean, did he strike the match himself? I’ve always thought maybe so.”
“That was a long time ago, Walt,” I said. Wrong thing to say.
“Bill,” he said and paused for effect, a long, slow turn of his head from the skateboarders out the window to face me directly and fix me with his stone-cold and sober steel-gray eyes, “time is what I’ve been biding. And now I don’t have to do that anymore.”
“But wouldn’t you like to know?” I asked. “I mean, know for sure.”
“Know what?”
“Who killed Dewey Bingham. And who killed Phil Burnet, since it wasn’t you.”
“I don’t know. I don’t see that it really matters.”
I sighed, leaned back in my chair.
“Then what do you want, Walt?”
This time he didn’t pause.
“I want something I’ve never had and never really cared for before now,” he said. “Something I was missing.”
I waited.
“I want a little recognition from my friends before I retire. A little...”
“Respect?”
He nodded, however faintly.
“Okay, Walt. You’ve got my respect, for what it’s worth.”
“Well, hell. Thank you, Bill.”
“I mean it,” I said. “Say, you still live in that little trailer house on the outskirts of Manor when you’re in Austin?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll come see you on Saturday. Maybe you can get the grill going and put by a six pack of Shiner.”
“Fine,” he said.
Walt stood, wincing as he did.
“It’s not age, is it?” I asked.
Walt smiled a thin, pained smile. “No,” he said.
And in light of later events, I found myself wishing I had probed him a little further on that.
“Do what you can, Bill,” he said, pausing at my office door. “But one way or the other, there’ll be hell to pay.”
CHAPTER THREE
My first stop was a walk next door to the Perry Reilly Independent Insurance Agency.
Inside his office the lamps were low and there was no one around. Then I heard an abrupt sound, not unlike a slap, and then a very red-faced and upset girl came through an open doorway, didn’t bother to greet me, reached under a desk for her purse, donned a suede jacket and hurriedly jostled past me and out the door. She was young, very attractive and was biting her lower lip.
The front door slammed shut.
Perry emerged from the same ha
llway. One side of his face was scarlet.
“Oh. Bill,” he said.
“Lost another one?” I asked.
“An associate,” he said. “Difference of opinion.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I need a drink. You?”
“It’s too early for me, but don’t let me hold you back,” I said.
“She was a teaser,” Perry said, then opened a cabinet door and pulled out a half-empty (or half-full, depending) bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label.
“They all are, Perry. At least for you.”
He paused. I waited for a comeback, but then he fished out a tall shot glass and topped it off.
“Health,” Perry said, and downed it in one wallop.
Perry had gone through more secretaries than any man I knew. Several years back he’d gone through a divorce after one of his former secretaries sued him. Afterwards, for a time, he’d employed only male receptionists and runners, but it looked as though the old Perry was back. Some things never really change.
The shot glass slammed back on the desk. He poured another.
“Why are you here, Bill?”
“Walt Cannon. And the body of a certain museum curator.”
“Oh hell. The fellow’s dead, Bill. He went fishing and he ended up dead.”
“Anybody tell you the cause of death?”
Perry downed another tall shot. I waited while he gasped and his blood thinned. The bottle and shot glass disappeared back inside the cabinet.
“Bullet to the brain.”
“The fish must be getting touchy,” I said.
Perry laughed. “Come on in my office and sit yourself, Bill.”