Murder in the Choir (The Jazz Phillips Mystery Series)

by Joel B Reed

  There was no light showing when I got there, and I almost went back to the parsonage for better directions. Yet, there was a hint of wood smoke, and I could see faint tracks in the grass by the door. So I knocked loudly. There was no answer, and I turned and was half way back to the path when the door creaked open. I looked around just as Luther stuck his head out. He was holding up a coal oil lantern in one hand, and I saw a stout length of an oak hoe handle gripped in the other.

  When he saw who it was, Luther pushed the door farther open and waved for me to come in. I had to duck my head to enter, and I was surprised by what I saw. I found myself in a very comfortable room. Despite the outside appearance, Luther had carefully covered the outer walls with board and batten and had done the same with planks for a ceiling. The floor was made of what looked like old paving bricks laid tight against one another and held in place by sand. His bed was a simple iron Army cot covered with what looked like an old bedroll, and a rough table with two old chairs stood next to a small iron cookstove toward one corner. An old army locker at the foot of his bed apparently served as his dresser, and a small wooden crate stood by his bedside. A worn Bible lay open on it.

  Luther offered me a chair, but I told him I was just checking to make sure he was all right. I told him he had a nice place, and he seemed pleased. Then my eyes caught a familiar shape in the dim yellow light and I felt a chill run up my back. There by the door, leaning next to his length of shovel handle, was the unmistakable outline of an Army M-16.

  Luther seemed puzzled when I quickly stepped to the door and grabbed the rifle. “Is this yours, Luther?” I asked, and he nodded. Since the shovel handle was behind me, I glanced at the rifle. Even in the dim light I could see it was in very rough shape, and, when I tried to clear the chamber, the bolt was stuck solid in locked position. The same was true of the safety which was on. “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “I found it,” Luther told me. “It don’t work. Rusted shut. I tried soaking it with kersene, but dint work.”

  “Where did you find it, Luther?”

  “In one of them empty buildings. You know, next to the store.”

  Suddenly, the mystery of the missing floor boards I’d seen in the back of the blacksmith shop was solved. I pointed to the walls. “Is that where you got some of this lumber?” The way Luther nodded it was clear he did not consider this to be stealing. To him he was simply recycling what others abandoned, and I had to agree. Better it be used for a purpose than left to rot. “That’s where you found this,” I asked, holding up the rifle. “Under the floor?”

  “Yessuh,” said Luther. “I found them there, too.” He reached to the back of the table and picked up a stained cardboard box about the size of a paperback. He handed it to me, and I looked at it. Sure enough, the lettering told me it was military ball ammunition, caliber .223. It would fit the M-16. I opened the box and counted the shells. From what I could tell, there were about a dozen missing. The markings on their bases were exactly the same as the one Dee had found by the blacksmith shop.

  “I am going to have to take this with me, Luther,” I told him. “Our lab will have to look at it. It may be evidence.”

  Luther looked sad, but said nothing. He stood up and held out his hands, as if he expected them to be cuffed. “I’m not going to arrest you, Luther,” I said. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  He looked surprised and sat down. “Did you find anything else in there?” I asked him. He shook his head, but I could tell he was lying. I decided not to push him at the moment. For one thing, I was alone and without backup. I had no warrant to search nor the authority to enforce one even if I had. Yet, more to the point, I did not think even the rifle had anything to do with our case. Luther was welcome to whatever else he had found as far as I was concerned.

  “Will you show us where you found this?” I asked Luther. He nodded. “All right then, I‘ll see you tomorrow.” As I turned, my eye caught something in the shadows on the table. I reached out and picked it up. It was a military commando knife, still in the case. I pulled it out. The blade was bright, clean and sharp. I looked at Luther. “This is what you didn’t want to tell me about, isn’t it? You found this under the floor, too, didn’t you?” He nodded glumly, and I understood. The rusty gun was of no use to Luther and no great loss. The knife was a tool he could use every day and probably did. It would be a big loss.

  I slipped the knife back into its case and laid it on the table. “Well, I won’t mention this if you don’t,” I told him. “It will be our secret, between me and you. Thanks for your help.”

  Luther looked like I had just given him the moon. He jumped up and shook my hand, then insisted on walking me back to my car. The last time I saw him alive was in the rear view mirror as I drove out of town, a sad old man standing there in the rain with a lantern in his hand.

  4. Slide Jones

  There was a note from Dee waiting for me when I got back to the motel. It said something came up that required his presence in Little Rock the following day and that I would be on my own. It also gave me several numbers where I might reach him. I wondered what could be so important to pull him away in the middle of a major murder investigation, then remembered the same thing happening to me when I was at CID. More than likely it would turn out to be something that could have waited or someone who considered themselves too important getting impatient. I hoped it was not something that grew out of my crossing swords with Lonnie.

  I changed clothes and headed to the drive-in for a burger and some fries. I love fried food which Nellie never fixes at home mostly because it doesn’t love me. It plays havoc with my system, but I have trouble remembering that in the middle of a chicken fried steak. So I get my quota when I am out of town on trips like this one. That’s when I use up my quota of seltzer tablets, too.

  I swung by the county jail to drop off the M-16 I found at Luther’s place. I didn’t consider it an important piece of evidence, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the state crime lab check it out. Taking it to the county evidence locker would create more paperwork, but it would preserve the chain of evidence if the rifle or the ammunition led us anywhere. Cases can be won or lost on such decisions.

  While I was filling out the papers, the deputy in charge of the locker looked over the rifle. “Someone did a piss poor job of camouflage on this,” he remarked.

  I nodded and kept writing. Then the significance of what he said struck me, and I looked up. “Camouflage? That’s rust, isn’t it?”

  He looked at it closely, then handed it to me. “Nope. It looks like brown paint to me. Or some kind of lacquer.”

  It only took a glance in the bright fluorescent light of the evidence room to see the deputy was right. What I thought was rust in the light of Luther’s oil lamp was some kind of light brown coating smeared over the black matte finish of the bolt and barrel. I scraped it with my thumb nail and a thin sliver peeled off easily. “That’s not even paint,” I told the deputy. “It’s probably something like Cosmoline. With a heavy coat of dust.”

  I examined the rifle more closely and tried to open the bolt again. It would not move, and rattling it back and forth did not work, either. “Let me show you something,” the deputy said, grinning. I handed him the rifle, and an instant later the bolt was locked open. “There,” he said, obviously pleased with himself.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, feeling stupid.

  “There is a little catch here,” he said, showing me. “You push that, and it opens even if it’s locked.”

  I tried it and it worked. Then I checked the chamber which was clear. I held my thumb in the breech and looked down the barrel. There was no trace of rust or Cosmoline or gunshot residue, and I could see the lands and grooves quite clearly. I handed the weapon to the deputy and asked him to look and tell me what he saw. “It looks good to me,” he said. “Hasn’t been fired in a while. There’s a light coat of dust near the muzzle, so it’s been a while since it was cleaned.”

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p; “So it’s ready to go?” I asked.

  The deputy nodded. “You might need to take the bolt apart and clean the firing pin hole. Sometimes that gets crud in it and the pin doesn’t hit the primer hard enough. I think they had some trouble with that in Vietnam. Other than that, it looks ready to fire.”

  I thanked the deputy and checked the weapon in as evidence, making note of the serial number in my notebook along with the date and place I recovered it. Lab results might take a while to get back, but with the serial number, we could at least start a trace on the rifle itself. I tried to call Dee to set this up, but there was no answer on his cell. So I headed for the drive-in.

  While I was eating my burger, I wondered if I was making a mistake in not bringing in Luther Adams. The sheriff would send along a deputy to make the arrest if I asked, but I decided against it. I thought it could wait until I talked to Dee. The old man had been through enough that day and I was pretty sure he had little to do with the shooting. There might be more he could tell us, but it would take patience to get it. Nor did I see any reason for him to run. There was no place for him to go. Now I wished I had decided to bring Adams in. It might have prevented another death.

  I tried Dee’s cell phone again after supper. There was still no answer, so I left a message for him to call back at two of the other numbers he left. I didn’t know who might retrieve the messages, so I simply let him know I needed to talk to him fairly urgently. Then I changed shoes and set out on another walking tour of Nashville.

  The message light was blinking on my phone when I got back to the motel. It was Dee calling back, and I dialed the number the clerk gave me. It was not one on the list he left.

  A woman answered on the second ring and told me to wait when I asked for Dee. I wondered who she was, though her voice sounded vaguely familiar. After a few moments the woman came back on the line again and asked if Dee could call me back. I told her I was at the motel and would wait there for the call. She asked for the number and I gave it, wondering what was going on.

  Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Dee and he sounded completely exhausted. He told me I had caught him in the shower. My silence must have been rather eloquent because he laughed and explained the woman was his sister. I couldn’t remember her name, but I remembered meeting her several times in Little Rock. She was very good looking and very quiet, and she and Nellie hit it off right away.

  At that moment, I was more concerned about Dee than about the case, and I asked him if he was all right. That has to be about the dumbest question in the world. We only ask when we think something is wrong. Yet, it did get him talking. He told me things were not good at home. So he had been staying with his sister the last few months until they got things resolved. One of the issues was his work and the long hours it demanded. I thought it was little wonder Dee seemed to stressed. It sounded like his whole life was falling apart.

  I told him this and suggested he might want to consider emergency leave. Doing so is frowned on in the macho world of police work, but at this point in his career, Dee had nothing to lose.

  When I suggested this, he brushed it off, as I knew he would. Nor could I argue. I would have responded the same way. I know because I have. “What would help me most right now is closing this case,” he said. “Your message said it was urgent. What do you have?”

  I told him about Luther Adams and the rifle, and why I was reluctant to have him arrested. He agreed with my assessment, and we talked for several minutes about how to cover our choice if we guessed wrong. He suggested I talk to Kruger and see what he had to say. I agreed. That would make the decision a team choice.

  We talked for a couple of minutes more. I wanted to ask Dee what was so important for him to do in Little Rock, but I was not sure I wanted to know. Nor did he volunteer the information. So I let it go and asked whomever might be listening to watch over my friend. I am not a religious man, but things were far beyond my power to help, and I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  I called Kruger next, but there was no answer at his room. Thinking he might be at the jail, I tried there, too. The jailer told me he had seen Kruger an hour or so before I stopped by to check in the rifle. After a couple more dead ends, I gave up and left a message with the desk clerk. I asked Kruger to call me if he got in before midnight. Then I went to bed. I don’t sleep well away from home and my own bed, but that night I dropped off right away.

  * * *

  I woke early the next morning feeling rested and refreshed, and I surprised myself by singing in the shower. Then I realized something was different. I had not experienced my normal after effects of eating fast food. Whether it was the water in Nashville or the new antacid Nellie and the doctor insisted I take, I was pleased. There may be life after giving up fast food, but it’s one of the joys that makes getting up in the morning worth the effort.

  I was dressed and filling my pockets when I heard a knock on the door. I looked out the peephole and saw Kruger looking tired and worn. His suit was pressed and his shirt fresh, but he looked like he had been run through the mill. He wanted to know if I cared to join him for breakfast and we headed for the café.

  While we were waiting for our food, Kruger filled me in on what had been going on the night before and why he had not called back. The arrest of Albert Jones apparently set off a political firestorm all over the District of Columbia. For, rather than simply showing up today with her husband’s pardon in her hand, Emma Jones had made some phone calls before she talked with me. Some of them were to important people Albert had known from the early days of the civil rights movement. Needless to say, they were outraged by his arrest and they began to make calls, too. The result was that no fewer than eight senators from both political parties had called the director at home, setting off tremors up and down the chain of command.

  Even though he did not make the arrest and had tried to stop it, Kruger had spent several hours the previous night going through an inquisition. The good news was that Albert Jones had been released in the early hours of the morning, and it looked like Ken Spinks was headed for Butte regardless of his connections. The bad news was that Lonnie was taking all this very personally and blaming me, even though it was his agent who screwed up.

  Nor would this be good for Kruger’s career. Despite the fact he was the junior agent and tried to talk some sense into Spinks before it went down, he was hit by the splatter. He told me it was so bad he was seriously considering an offer from a private security group.

  When I told Kruger about Dee being called back to Little Rock the day before, he agreed it was probably over the Spinks tempest. He brightened up when I suggested we spend the day working together, and he agreed with my decision not to bring Luther in the night before. There was a potential witness he needed to interview that morning in Nashville, and we decided to talk to Luther Adams after we were done with that.

  To tell the truth, I was not disappointed to be working with Kruger rather than Dee. I love Steve DiRado like a brother, and we work together so well it is sometimes scary. I often know what’s going on in his mind before he does, and I’m sure it works the other way. Yet, I also know there’s a liability with this. We think so much alike we sometimes come to exactly the same wrong conclusions, and we can reinforce bad decisions. With Kruger, I would get a fresh perspective, and given the political minefield this case was moving across, we needed every edge we could find.

  Kruger told me the witness was a lady who believed in rising late, so we took our time over coffee and swung by the jail on our way. Kruger looked over the rifle carefully and popped the action open without a moment’s hesitation. He made note of the serial number and examined the box of shells I brought in with the rifle.

  Like the deputy the night before, Kruger mentioned having the lab check the firing pin hole for crud. Then he threw the weapon up to his shoulder and took aim at a spot high on the wall. “I love these old military designs,” he said. “I put a lot of rounds through a rifle like this in basic training.�
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  “Old?” I asked, then realized he was right. I remember when the M-16 first came out. I was younger than Kruger then. Old military design to me is the 1903 Springfield or the Garand used in World War II. I grew up hunting with a Springfield A3 my dad liberated from an unnamed source when he came back from the Pacific, but it was older than me. To Kruger, a Springfield would seem as ancient as a flintlock. I wondered how I looked in his eyes. I decided I did not want to know.

  The lady Kruger needed to interview was named Anne Smith, and she now made her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. I could tell she had lived there a long while. There were still traces of southern Arkansas in her voice, but she spoke with that soft, mellow Carolina lilt that falls so gently on the ear. I could have listened to her reading a dictionary for hours.

  Like so many other folk who grew up in Oak Grove, she had come back to Nashville for Smiley’s birthday and then taken emergency leave to stay for his funeral. She had spent the last two weeks helping the aunt who was clearing up Smiley’s estate, which was not that simple. Now she was due to fly back to North Carolina from Little Rock in three days. She was a teacher there and needed to get back to her classroom. Her principal was very understanding, but there was a limit to how long she could be gone.

  I listened as Kruger led Anne Smith through the basic questions and I was impressed how quickly he established rapport. The Bureau would lose a valuable asset if he went to the private sector, but Kruger himself would gain. To put it in a nutshell, he was out of their league, and if he stayed on, his career would be one of constant frustration. I made a mental note to bring this up with him when the time was right.

  Anne Smith told us pretty much what everyone else had said. “I grew up with Wilbur,” she told us. “He was old enough to be my daddy, but he was like a big brother to me.” She smiled. “He was like that to all the kids in Oak Grove, and we worshiped the ground he walked on.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “I cannot imagine the world without him. He was the best man I knew.”