Deep South Dead (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 1)

by Charlotte Moore

  “’Cause he was screwin’ Tamlyn, and he got some crazy idea that Madison was his baby and that I owe him some money. It sounded like he was giving Tamlyn some money, but if he did I never saw any of it. Hell, I couldn’t make sense of half what he said.”

  Taneesha absorbed that, and worked on staying on Skeet’s wavelength. He was blunt, so she was blunt.

  “Why’d you hit him?”

  Skeet sat silently for a minute as if he were choosing his words.

  “You know,” he said, “Tamlyn and me weren’t getting’ along real good at all. The baby was about the only thing keeping us from a divorce. She needed a lot more money than I could make. Hell, she spent a lot more money than I made, but this is between me and you, right?”

  Taneesha nodded, saying nothing but remembering the house full of stuff, the expensive clothes.

  “How do you think it’s going with Sam, him bringing up his little girl?” Skeet asked.

  “It’s going good, Skeet. You can do it.”

  “Well, I hope so, ‘Neesha.”

  She waited.

  “I’m gonna tell you how it happened,” Skeet said. “Jaybird came around to the visitation, and I was thinkin’ that was kinda nice of him to show up. He even looked sad when he was talking to the others, but then when he got up to me, and I was holdin’ Madison he was just stopped talkin’ and stared at the baby and looked back and forth from her to me, and he went white-faced, and then he just left. And then about five minutes later he came stormin’ back in and came up to me and said something like ‘You and me gotta talk right now. Outside.’ Real low, like he was some kinda tough guy. I was thinkin’ it was gonna be something about the rent or getting the car out of that shed or some crap like that, so I gave Madison to Miz Sikes and went outside with him and…” his voice was getting to be a monotone.

  “Soon as we got out by ourselves, he started saying all this crazy stuff about how he wasn’t gonna pay another red cent, and how he wanted all his money back or he was gonna take me to court for extortion, and I said, “Mr. Jaybird, I don’t know what in the hell you’re talkin’ about.”

  “And he said something like what kinda fool did we take him for, and then he said, ‘Anybody can tell that baby’s yours, not mine.’ “

  Almost without thinking, Taneesha braced herself.

  “He said that the baby was yours,” she repeated.

  “Right. And that it wasn’t his. So I asked him what he meant by that, and he got up in my face and said, now here’s exactly what he said. He said, ‘That. Lying. Whore. Tamlyn. Told. Me. That. Was. My. Baby.’”

  “Is that when you hit him?” Taneesha asked.

  “Yeah,” Skeet said. “It was just kinda automatic, ‘cause of what he called her. You know, I kinda half thought back when she was working for him that something might be going on, but then she got pregnant and wanted to quit working there. I guess he must have gotten the idea it was his.

  Taneesha felt a headache coming on, right between her eyes.

  “I think I broke the son of a bitch’s jaw,” Skeet said, almost off-handedly.

  They sat in silence.

  “Do you believe she told him it was his baby?” Taneesha asked.

  “Jaybird Hilliard’s drunk more than he’s sober,” Skeet said. “But I don’t know why he’d make that up. It makes him look like as big a damn fool as it makes me look.”

  Taneesha nodded.

  “Anyway,” Skeet said, “I went down to the post office this morning and got into that P.O. box of hers I didn’t even know she had, and it was stuffed full of credit card bills, like it must be over $5,000 for God knows what, and there was a letter from First Southern saying we were overdrawn, and, wait a minute, I gotta go in the house and get something for you.”

  When he came back, he handed over a letter-sized envelope addressed by hand with no return address. Inside there were three hundred dollar bills. Taneesha looked at the postmark.

  “It was mailed Monday from right here in town,” Skeet said matter-of-factly. “If that’s’ some of Jaybird Hilliard’s money he paid to support my baby that he thought was his, and I want you to give it to Sam and tell Sam to talk to that son of a bitch Hilliard about it, because I don’t want it, and I don’t want Tamlyn’s name dragged through the mud either. I ain’t gonna stay in this town with Madison if people start talkin’ ‘bout her mother. I’m hopin’ maybe y’all can get him on Miss Mae-Lula’s murder and let it go at that, but tell him he better stay clear of me.”

  Taneesha took the envelope.

  “I’ve been wonderin’ who she would’ve let in at night,” Skeet said in a flat tone. “Strikes me it could have been Jaybird Hilliard.”

  “Well, we’ll have to talk to him,” Taneesha said, “but here’s the thing, Skeet. If he was coming in and out of your house, he would have seen Madison before. I got the impression from the way you just told it that he just saw the baby for the first time at the funeral home.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I thought it out that way, too, but then, I got to thinkin’ that maybe he didn’t notice the baby lookin’ like me until he saw me holdin’ her, cause I don’t think him and me have laid eyes on each other in over a year, and he probably never noticed me particularly anyway. Or maybe he’s hard up for money and he thought maybe I had some.”

  He lit another cigarette.

  “Who else have you told about all this?” Taneesha asked.

  “Nobody,” he said. “I wouldn’t even of told you if it wasn’t for the fact that I want y’all to put his sorry ass in the electric chair.”

  Taneesha started to point out that electric chair was a thing of the past in Georgia, but it didn’t seem like a point worth making under the circumstances.

  “If he did it, we’ll find out,” she said, as she got up to leave, “and if he didn’t we’ll find out who did, but you need to stay out of it, Skeet. You got to put your baby first. I know you’re mad, but you got to remember you’re the only parent Madison’s got.”

  Skeet lit another cigarette.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Right now, I don’t feel that strongly one way or the other about it. I just want to get the damned funeral over with, and get my Thunderbird out of that damned shed of Jaybird Hilliard’s. He can burn down the house and everything in it as far as I’m concerned, but I need that car out of there, and the keys are gone and I can’t get a locksmith until Thursday.”

  He was gnawing at a new problem like a dog with a bone.

  Anything to keep him busy, Taneesha thought. Anything to get him out of that flat state of mind he seemed to be in. At least he sounded ill-tempered talking about the problems with the car. Like he cared.

  “I can take the hardware off and get the shed door open, and maybe try to get the door unlocked with a coat hanger,” Skeet went on. “but then I still got to get tires on it and get it somewhere I can show it to sell. There sure isn’t enough room here. We’re blockin’ each other in three different ways already.

  “Tell you what,” she said, “How about I get Bub Williston to come to help you with the car? He’s real good at getting doors open , and his daddy can get you some tires. One or the other of them can probably hot wire it. They’re geniuses with cars. Sam says they could have made a lot of money being car thieves. I’ll get him to call you.”

  Skeet almost grinned.

  “You can move it down to the courthouse parking lot if you want to. It’ll be safe there”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, coming to life a little more. “It sure wouldn’t hurt to have some help, and you’re right about ol’ Bub. He’s got some respect for cars. But I don’t want it down at the courthouse, where all those TV and newspaper people can get into my business.”

  “So you got a better place?” Taneesha asked.

  “You know,” he said, “I just thought of something. I think I do know a place, but I gotta ask.”

  Taneesha was on the radio to Sam by the time she was a block away from
the house.

  “Cell phone time,” she said. “Lots of stuff. You might want to pull over.”

  Less than a minute later her cell phone rang, and she pulled over as she picked it up.

  Chapter 16

  SAM LISTENED. THEN HE TOLD TANEESHA to get back to taking the day off.

  “Call Bub and ask him to keep an eye on Skeet,” he said. “He can tell him I said to do it. Jaybird’s down at Lake Blackshear, and I’m about to call Anne Marie back and tell her not to tell anybody else where he is.”

  “You don’t need me for the funeral escort?”

  “We can manage without you. Shelley set that up yesterday and I told her you were way into overtime and I wanted you off. I appreciate what you did this morning. You’re getting really good at getting people to talk.”

  It was 25 more miles to Lake Blackshear.

  Sam found Jaybird sitting in a rocking chair on the rickety front porch of the old cabin Anne Marie had called the lake house. The commissioner had a blue-black puffed-up bruise on the left side of his face and a beer in his hand . There were two empty cans on the floor. Sam joined him and sat down in the other rocker.

  “You look like hell,” Sam said, “Did you see a doctor about that jaw?”

  “Tooth nock ow,” Jaybird muttered, barely opening his mouth. “Deer ran ow in fronna me. Hadda slam breakth. Ya wanna beer?”

  “No. I didn’t come down here to drink beer and listen to you lie, Jaybird. I know that you went over to the funeral home last night and called Skeet’s late wife a lying whore. I know you accused him of extortion and acted like he had done you some injury by having a baby that was his own baby. I know he knocked you down. We got to talk about this whole thing, Jaybird.”

  “You didn’t tell Anne Marie all that crap, did you?”

  The commissioner stopped worrying about his missing tooth.

  “It’s not my place to tell your wife about your personal life, Jaybird. Course, by lunchtime, everybody in town’ll know that Skeet Borders hit you, so I imagine somebody’ll mention it to Anne Marie. I just came down here to talk to you in private like I did the other day.”

  “Well, maybe I need your help, because I’m not paying him one red cent more,” Jaybird said, half covering his mouth with his hand. “And if he hits me again, I want him in jail for assault. That’s not my baby and he knows it’s not my baby. Anybody would know that’s a Borders-lookin’ baby.”

  “Why’d you think it was your baby?”

  “Cause Tamlyn told me it was,” Jaybird said. “It was out-and-out fraud, and as far as I’m concerned, if he doesn’t have the money, you can tell him her estate owes me over $10,000, and I’ll take him to court if I have to.”

  “Use your head,” Sam said. “Any estate of Tamlyn Borders is probably in the hole $10,000. I don’t think Skeet knew a thing about that money, and even if he did, you haven’t got any kind of signed contract, have you?”

  “No, hell.”

  “And you aren’t going to take anybody to court anyway, ‘cause Anne Marie’ll kill you if she gets wind of this mess. Best you’re gonna do is get the $300 back that was in her P.O. box. Skeet turned it over to Taneesha this morning. I’ll get it to you Monday if you say it’s yours.”

  “Yeah, sure it’s mine.”

  “And you just assumed that Skeet knew all about it,” Sam said.

  “Well, she told me he did. Look, Sam, I was tryin’ to be responsible. I thought that was my baby. She told me that he couldn’t get her pregnant, said they’d been to the doctor and he didn’t have sperm because he had mumps when he was a kid, and that’s why he was gon’ know it wasn’t his. You seen that baby?”

  “Yeah, “Sam said, “It’s his. Why’d you go to the visitation?”

  Jaybird took a long swallow and dropped the beer can on the floor with the others.

  “Well, the girls in the office all wanted to go. Not that any of them liked her that much, but she had worked for us and you know how women always want to be drama queens if there’s a drama going on anywhere, so they said they were going in a group and then I figured I might as well go, you know, out of respect, and,”

  Sam shook his head wearily.

  “Well, hell,” Jaybird said, getting up awkwardly. “I hadn’t ever seen the baby but once when she brought it in the office, like two weeks old, and I thought maybe I’d take a look. Honest to God, Sam, it hit me hard hearin’ about Tamlyn bein’ killed that way and that baby in the house that way. I thought that was my daughter, and I wanted to see what she looked like. I got to thinking, maybe, you know, if Skeet couldn’t take care of her or didn’t want her since she wasn’t his, me and Anne Marie could adopt her, or something like that. Not that I was going to tell Anne Marie that she was mine. I was thinking more about how Anne Marie always wished we had a little girl, and maybe I could talk her into it.”

  “I take it you were out of your mind when you got that idea.”

  “I guess it was a dumb-ass idea. Lemme go get another beer.”

  “How about I make some coffee for you instead?” Sam asked.

  Jaybird rolled his eyes and left.

  When he came back with his beer, he was a little weepy.

  “Sam, you know I love my two boys, and I here I was thinking this was my kid, too, and who was going to look after her? And how would she turn out with those Borderses and Sykeses. And then I saw what that baby looked like now that she’s old enough to look like somethin’ and she’s no Hilliard. She doesn’t even look like Tamlyn that I can see. Just 100 percent Borders. Man, she made such a good case for that baby being mine, I mean I’ve been going over and over it in my mind, and I didn’t know anybody could lie that good. “

  “Maybe she didn’t know for sure whether it was yours or Skeet’s, until after the baby was born,” Sam said.” When’d you two agree on that child support thing.”

  “After she found out she was pregnant,” Jaybird said glumly. “She came in my office sayin’ that Skeet was gonna kill her but she was gonna have to tell him, ‘cause she wasn’t gonna have an abortion and then it all went on like a month or more and she’s saying she’s scared to tell him, hasn’t told him yet, and it was movin’ on, Sam. And I tell you that kind of thing can practically give a man a heart attack. I mean she was getting’ thick around the middle, and one point she’s sort of hintin’ around that she thinks I ought to divorce Anne Marie and she ought to divorce Skeet and we ought to get married..”

  “You didn’t lead her into thinking anything like that, did you?” Sam asked.

  “You think I’d leave Anne Marie? No way. That woman’s an angel from heaven. It wasn’t that serious to me with Tamlyn. She was real flirty and next thing you know…”

  Sam waited.

  “Well, anyway, it was just foolin’ around that got serious all of a sudden. Anyway it goes back and forth, and then one day Tamlyn comes in to talk to me again, and she’s kind of smiling and sniffly and she tells me she got up the nerve and told Skeet the whole thing and he was mad at first, but he told her he knew how much she wanted a baby . She said he told her he had always felt bad that he couldn’t get her pregnant, and that he still loved her and wanted to stay married, and she could keep the baby, as long as I paid to support the baby and she quit working for me.”

  “You never talked to Skeet about any of this?

  “No. Sure as hell didn’t want to either.”

  “You paid her in cash?”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t exactly write a check out of office account, Sam, and Anne Marie looks after the money at home.”

  “How much?”

  “For starters, she got $100 a week when she was pregnant, cause she said she couldn’t get a job pregnant, and we kept her on payroll so she’d have the health insurance. She went to the Martha, that’s my bookkeeper, herself and said the doctor said she had to have a lot of rest, cause she kept, you know, spotting or some kind of mess, you know women, and she was going to have to quit, but could we keep her on the insu
rance, like she’d do some typing at home or something? And then Martha came to me, and I said Okay. She came by on Fridays and picked up her paycheck and picked up a little work to do at home, and they had a surprise baby shower for her one time. Then as soon as she had the baby, and I started payin’ her the $300 every week, I told Martha to stop the $100 a month and let Tamlyn know we were droppin’ the insurance, and she told Martha fine ‘cause Skeet had changed trucking companies and he had coverage for them.”

  “You see Skeet in all that time?”

  “Nah, I woulda crossed the street not to. Thank God we don’t go to the same church or anything.”

  “Absolutely,” Sam said with an edge in his voice, “Thank God. And I don’t guess Skeet’s out at the country club much either. Anything going on with you and Tamlyn since the baby was born?”

  “No, that stopped stone cold the day she told me she was pregnant, and it wasn’t that many times before that. Maybe three, four.”

  “Where’d y’all get together those times?”

  “Their place that I rent to ‘em. You know, Skeet was on the road a lot.”

  He finished his beer and tossed it on the floor.

  “You ever thought he mighta done it? Looks to me like he coulda had good reason.”

  Sam rocked slowly.

  “Skeet was in Maine that night. What I want to know is where were you?

  “Dammit, there you go again,” Jaybird said. “I was at home in my bed. Where else would I be?”

  “God only knows,” Sam said. “You got anything here but beer?”

  “Yeah,” Jaybird grumbled. “There’s some bottled water in the fridge. Help yourself. Anne Marie’s always thinking I’m going to get dehydrated cause the tap water tastes like catfish down here.”

  There was a half-empty 12-pack of beer in the refrigerator. Sam opened the six remaining cans and emptied them into the sink. He spotted an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels on top of the refrigerator and found some scotch under the sink. It seemed a pity to pour it all out, so he took it to the back door, and threw it as far as he could into the woods.