Murder in the Choir (The Jazz Phillips Mystery Series)

by Joel B Reed

  It was noon by the time we got to Texarkana, and I took Kruger to a little cafe in the original downtown business district that served good Cajun fare. He was fascinated when a table of young businessmen and women ordered boiled crawdads, or mud bugs, as they are also known, and the waitress poured them directly from the pot onto a sheet of newspaper in the middle of the table.

  “I’ve heard of this, but I’ve never seen it,” he said to me quietly when one of the men made a production of sucking the juice out of the heads. There was a roar of cheers when one of the young women did the same with much more flair. When she was done, she raised an eyebrow and said something to the man that brought a round of laughter and teasing by the other men.

  The new law enforcement center was just down the street from our cafe, so we walked the two blocks there. The center is unusual in a number of ways, one being that the state line runs down the middle. This joint effort required several special laws from both state legislatures before the building was occupied, and the building took several years to complete. One of the major issues which had to be resolved was jurisdiction. Under the old laws, it was foreseen that an inmate could simply cross a hallway and demand extradition proceedings before being moved back to the other side. Technically, an inmate could become a fugitive without knowing it, too.

  It took a while before we could see Louella Smith. The problem was that neither Kruger nor myself knew her last name and the jailer wouldn’t let us see their census. It took me a while to run down Denny Slade by phone, and when I finally got him, he was torqued.

  “Those dumb sons of bitches!” he said. “Just a minute. I have my copy of the arrest record.” A minute later he gave me not only Louella’s full name, but her date of birth and the report number, too. “Call me back if they give you any more shit, Jazz,“ he told me. “I’ll rip those dumb bastards a new one! We have had nothing but trouble since they went with this new center.”

  When the matron brought Louella Smith to the interrogation room, our prisoner was dressed in orange coveralls with an attitude to match. Nor did the jailer cuffing her to the table improve her disposition much. When he did, she started cursing the matron in a loud and shrill voice. “I’ll be in the observation room,” the matron told us, pointing toward the large mirror along one wall.

  When the matron left, Louella turned her attention on us. Nor did she recognize us right away. When we got across who we were, Louella turned even more surly. “What you have them peckerwoods bust me for, anyway!” she demanded, glaring at Kruger.

  Their dislike was mutual. Yet, Kruger’s way of showing it was to become very formal and very polite. “You assaulted a federal officer, Ms. Smith,” he said quietly. “You also resisted arrest. You’re here on several serious charges.”

  “That was your fault!” she shrilled. “You come to my house, busting in with no warrant! What you expect!”

  It went on that way for a while. The more strident Louella Smith became, the more correct Kruger was, which only egged her on. Subtlety was lost on the woman, and Kruger finally looked at me, got up, and left the room. “Where you going!” Louella demanded, but Kruger never looked back.

  “What with him?” Louella demanded, turning her attention to me. I didn’t respond… just sat there looking at her. That precipitated a full rampage, but after a while, she fell silent and sat there glaring at me. “Who you? The fucking Sphinx?” she said.

  It was too much. I started laughing. That inspired Louella to even greater efforts to offend me, but the more creative she became, the harder I laughed, and, at one point, I could see she was working hard at hiding a smile.

  “You’re very good,” I told her, wiping my eyes. “You’re also very smart.” She started to frown and I waved it off. “Come on, Louella. It takes a good mind to cuss that well. You’re not dumb.”

  I stopped and she took her time looking me over, evaluating her situation. “So, what is it you want, Dr. Phillips?” she asked in perfect English, and I was impressed. Hung over as she must have been, she was in complete control.

  “Dr. Sphinx,” I said and a grin came and went quickly. “All I want is some information. It won’t cost you a thing, and it can get you out of here.”

  “I see. What about the ‘serious federal charges?’” she asked, matching not only Kruger’s voice, but also his polite tone perfectly.

  “You’ve got a good talent there,” I observed. “The charges can go away, but there’ll be a price over and above your cooperation.”

  “I’m listening,” she told me. Had I not been looking right at her as she said this, I could have sworn I was hearing Kelsey Grammar.

  “You agree to thirty days in rehabilitation and six months making two AA meetings a week when you get out.”

  “Who pays for the rehab?”

  “You do,” I told her. “It’ll take you a while, but you won’t have a booze bill then.”

  She thought about this a long time. Then she sighed. “It’s more fun being Wild Louella. I don’t think I can live without drinking.”

  “A high stepper like you?” I asked. “I think you can do just about anything you set your mind to, Louella.”

  “Except stop drinking,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  “I need to know when Slide Jones got to town the day Smiley Jones died. I also need to know where he was the night before last.”

  “So you think Slide may have shot Smiley?” Louella said. Since it was more of a statement than a question, I didn’t answer. I just shrugged.

  After a moment, Louella told me she wasn’t clear exactly when Luther Jones arrived on her doorstep. It was late afternoon the day Smiley was shot, and she had been drinking all day. Her best impression was around four o’clock, and maybe a little later. I took her over this a couple of times, trying to pinpoint the time by asking about radio or television shows she might have been listening to, but there was nothing she more could add.

  Turning to the night before last, she admitted she had been in a complete blackout. The last thing she could remember was taking a drink before starting out for a dance hall about six o’clock or seven. The next thing she remembered was waking up in her own bed the next day about noon with a terrible hangover and no memory where she had been or what she had done. When she woke, Slide was at the house but he was already dressed and said he had been up for a while. She couldn’t say for sure whether he was with her all night.

  I asked for the names of the places she and Slide normally went when they were out, and she frowned, immediately suspicious. “I thought you said that was all you wanted to know, Dr. Phillips.”

  “Would you think I was doing my job if I didn’t check it out?” I asked her mildly. “I don’t know if Slide shot Smiley or not, but if he didn’t, I need to check him off the list.”

  “You know, Smiley wasn’t the saint people said he was,” she told me.

  “That’s what Slide said. Do you know that on your own, or is that based on what Slide told you?”

  “On my own,” she replied. “At least, based on what my mother told me. I asked her who my daddy was and he’s the man she named. She said she was a virgin until she met him. I was their love child.”

  I thought about that for a moment. I was convinced Louella believed that was true, and if so, I had just turned up another suspect. Or, at least, someone else with a motive. Yet, Louella Smith didn’t fit the picture of our killer that was coming together.

  “Look, I don’t want to offend you,” I said. “But do you think she was telling you the truth?” Louella nodded. “Do you think I could talk to her.”

  Her smile was bittersweet. You could, but I don’t know how much help it would be. She’s in a nursing home now. She has severe dementia. Parkinson’s.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “My dad went the same way. It was bad.”

  We were quiet for a moment. Then she began to speak without prompting, giving me the list of places I asked for earlier. When she was done, she said, “Yo
u know, I hope it doesn’t turn out to be Luther. That’s what I call him even though everyone else calls him Slide. He has lived a pretty rough life and done some bad things, but there’s another side to him. He’s a very gentle man. I’ve never seen him raise his hand against anyone, not even when he was armed. One of the reasons I’m cooperating is that I hope you can clear him.”

  I nodded and started to speak, but she continued. “I hope you’ll forgive me what I said before, Dr. Phillips. You’re a very good man, too.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” I told her, not knowing how else to respond. “It was the booze talking. Besides, I sort of like Dr. Sphynx.”

  I called for the matron, but Louella Smith had another surprise for me. She spoke to the mirror and asked Kruger to come back in, too. When he did, she apologized to him for her behavior earlier and the day before. I could tell he didn’t believe her for a minute, and Louella knew it, too. Kruger was very stiff and correct in his response in the way only a career FBI agent can bring off.

  “You didn’t think she was for real, did you?” he challenged me on our way back to the car.

  “I hope so,” I said. “Not for my sake but for hers. She has a tough row to hoe ahead of her. I hope she makes it.” Then I challenged him right back. “Are you going to take what she said and did personally, Kruger?”

  He glared at me but didn’t respond. “Come on, Kruger,” I said. “This is not about you or me or anyone else. What it’s all about is a bunch of really screwed up people doing the best they can but screwing up, anyway. All you and I are is part of the cleanup crew. That’s what they pay us to do.”

  He looked at me as if I had lost my mind, and maybe I had. Yet, the older I get the more I see people as neither good nor evil, but broken folks doing horrible things to one another in their collective insanity. That’s not to say they should get away with the things they do, for I believe we’re all accountable, including for the way we treat our prisoners. What it does say is that the longer I’m in this line of business, the more I believe punishment is useless. A person like Slide or Louella, or just about every inmate in our prisons, can take all the punishment the penal system can hand out and come back for more. So I believe we need to do something much different if we want them to change. Rigorous rehabilitation is the only thing I see which offers much hope. Nor am I a liberal. Radical is the right word when it comes to the change I see our criminal justice system needs.

  Of course, I didn’t tell Kruger all this right then. Some things a man has to learn by picking up the cat by the tail, as Mark Twain observed. “We’ll see,” I said, holding up my note pad. “She gave us a lot to work with.”

  We spent the rest of that afternoon and evening checking out what Louella had told us. The result was frustrating, not because she lied to us, but because it became obvious we could neither clear Slide nor find a glaring contradiction to his alibi. One of the bartenders we talked to was clear about the time he had seen the two the night before last. “It was six o’clock,” he said. “I came on right at six and they were the first people I served.”

  “How do you remember?” Kruger asked.

  “The lucky bastard won the roll and I had to buy their drinks,” he told us. “The shift went downhill from there. It must’ve been a full moon.”

  I didn’t think the moon was full that night, but I didn’t correct him. That was at the fourth place we tried, and our prospects were already headed south. I could sympathize. Our luck wasn’t much better. I wished the hell there was a full moon to blame. The barkeep wasn’t able to remember how long Slide and Louanne stayed before leaving his bar or if Slide was there the whole time.

  The high point of the evening came when we decided to call it quits and went to Oscar’s for their ribs. I don’t go there often, mostly because Oscar won’t let me pay when I do. The two of us go back many years to a time when I was able to do him a large favor without violating the law. So Oscar stayed out of prison and that’s not something a man forgets.

  Oscar joined us at the table and entertained us with his sharp banter until a minor crisis in the kitchen required his presence. When he was gone, Kruger looked at me and said, “That guy is about as straight as a three dollar bill.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Oscar and his boyfriend are Texarkana institutions. They go back a long way.”

  “That surprises me,” Kruger replied. “I wouldn’t have expected that kind of tolerance in a Southern town.”

  “How long have you been down here, Kruger?” I asked. He told me it had only been eight months.

  “A lot of people from other places think the Deep South is a hotbed of total intolerance,” I replied. With good reason, given the civil rights reaction that hit national news. What one doesn’t hear is about the bigotry in other places. I don’t know who the North Dakota bigotry might be against, but I’m sure there’s someone. With South Dakota and Minnesota, it’s the Indians or the whites, depending on the perspective.”

  Kruger smiled. “We look down on the whole rest of the nation.”

  “There you go. The thing is, most folk in Texarkana hate queers. That’s exactly how they would express it. Talk to them about Oscar and his buddy, however, and you’ll never hear the word used. To them, queers are perverts from someplace else. So Oscar and his partner may be gay, but they’re our gays to the people who count. The same used to be true of our black people, too.”

  “They may be niggers but they are our niggers?” Kruger asked. A couple from the table next to us looked at him sharply when he said that.

  “I wouldn’t use that term out loud around here, if I were you,” I told him. “Nor at my table. Oscar’s partner is a gentleman of color.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it?” Kruger asked.

  “Tired of what?”

  “Tired of the hypocrisy. I mean, look at the way people down here talk. You say a gentleman of color when everyone knows exactly what term you’re thinking. I swear to God, I heard someone talking about ‘the late War of Northern Aggression’ the other day.”

  “You really have a bee in your bonnet,” I told him. “That was a joke you heard, Kruger. We like to use colorful expression down here. Maybe you don’t understand that it’s considered an art form. We work at being droll.”

  Kruger shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “That was unprofessional of me.”

  “Well, kiss my Aunt Sadie’s purse,” I quipped in my most pronounced delta accent. “You were being human, Kruger. Relax, man. We’re taking our repast. You don’t have to grind diamonds with your sphincter every minute.”

  For a moment, I thought I’d gone too far. Then he smiled. “That’s a good one. I haven‘t heard that one before.”

  “Not to barbecue your sacred cow,” I said, “but did your late director not have a gentleman companion of the same persuasion as Oscar?”

  “That fact produced a lot of polished diamonds,” he chuckled. “Now it’s like the cousin families keep locked in the attic.”

  The ribs were as impressive as always at Oscar’s, and when we were done, I used Kruger’s phone to call Dee at his cellular number. When he answered on the second ring, he sounded glad to hear from me. Riding a desk with little to do doesn’t suit his disposition, and he told me he was going crazy with boredom. He did have a preliminary report from Weaver on the crime scenes and the search and some information on the rifle I found in Luther Adams’ place.

  The blacksmith shop had yielded little new except a close encounter of the wrong kind with a copperhead taking shelter for the winter. However, it was cool enough that the snake was not up to full speed, and no one was hurt, not even the snake. Weaver said he was holding the copperhead for me to interview as a material witness.

  The team did find something that looked like a strip of heavy wrapping paper which might have been used to wrap the rifle at some point. It was either treated or soaked with an oily substance Weaver guessed was Cosmoline, but the lab tests were not back on that yet. There wer
e also a number of fingerprints. Most of those were smudged from handling or age, but there was one clear print that belonged to Luther Adams.

  The serial number on the rifle produced more interesting results. There was a hit and an inquiry from the FBI office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was one of three rifles which were missing and presumed stolen from a National Guard armory in Rapid City about twenty years before. Since he had little else to do to fill his day, Dee had called back and talked to the agent in charge of the Sioux Falls office. All he found out was that the FBI was as much in the dark as we were. The weapons turned up missing on routine inventory and there was no report of burglary in the file.

  What was strange was the serial number had produced another hit, this time from the Pentagon. Yet when Dee tried to call to follow up, he was shuffled from one desk to another. Finally he hung up in frustration. Five minutes later his phone rang. The caller was a Captain Smith who listened to everything Dee had to say and questioned him about where and when the weapon was found. Yet, when Dee asked for information in return, Captain Smith politely told him that the information was classified. Nor was Captain Smith willing to leave a number where Dee could call him back.

  We talked about this for a bit. Then there was a pause in the conversation and I started to say goodbye. Yet, I had the sense there was something else Dee wanted to say. When I asked him, he told me there had been another call from Washington not long after his call from the elusive Captain Smith. It was from an old drinking buddy in the Army Dee had not heard from in years. The fellow knew my name and had asked Dee how he might get in touch with me. He left a number I could call. Yet, when Dee tried to do a reverse trace on the number, the phone company had no record of it.

  Dee went on to say he was hesitant to even pass the number along to me. “The guy’s name is McKee and he wouldn’t tell me what he wanted. Said he wasn’t sure about something and wanted to check it out with you. Apparently, he tried your home, and your wife told him to check with me.”