What's Left is Right: Book two of The Detective Bill Ross Crime Series

by Irving Munro

  As if choreographed, the door opened and two women walked in.

  “This is Shirley Simpson, my campaign manager, and I would also like you to meet Antonella Aguilar. I think you’ve been trying to locate Antonella, so here she is.”

  Tommy looked agitated and annoyed. Marie looked shocked, and it was Tommy who spoke first.

  “You’re going to have to explain what’s going on here, Gavin. You were obviously well aware that we were looking for Ms. Aguilar and you’ve been keeping her from us. You’re interfering in the course of a murder investigation,” said Tommy, making sure that Gavin McMullen realized the seriousness of the situation.

  “Fully understand, Tommy, but give me a chance to explain and perhaps you will appreciate why I needed to do what I did.”

  “As I am sure you are aware, Antonella raised me after my father and mother divorced and when my father prohibited my mother from having any further contact with me. My father was in my life, of course, but his business interests dominated his time and it was Antonella who was primarily responsible for raising me. She is my rock.” Gavin smiled across the room at Antonella and she returned his smile.

  “Antonella was very close to my mother before she was banished from the ranch. My father was and still is a very violent man. He built an empire and he didn’t let anyone or anything get in his way. He was never violent with me and was very committed to my education and to my career, but he frequently beat my mother, and Antonella tried to help her deal with her pain.”

  “Antonella has told me over the years that things happened in the past that she cannot talk about. She is still very scared of my father, and if he thought for a minute that she might have talked about the past to a stranger, he wouldn’t hesitate in causing her physical harm.”

  “She left her job on the ranch a few years ago and bought a little house to be closer to her sister in Round Rock. Her sister has now passed and she was hoping to spend what time she had left living quietly on her own with her three cats. That’s when a man called Raul Hernandez came to visit with her.”

  “Raul Hernandez was trying to track down his birth parents, and when he told Antonella that his real name was Mike Muguara, she knew immediately why he had tracked her down. Mike’s father had worked on the ranch and she had known him very well. Mike Muguara was obviously the baby that had been born to my mother, Alyana, and the reason why my father sent her away. Mike Muguara was my half-brother.”

  “Alyana told Mike Muguara about his mother and father and the love they had for each other that began as a result of the constant beatings she received at the hands of my father. She knew that my mother’s maiden name was Reyes and that they were from Houston, and she also told him that, contrary to my father’s wishes, she would meet off the ranch with Alyana so that she could see me and let me run around in the park. While my mother was walking with me in the park, Antonella would wait with the baby in the stroller. The baby in the stroller was Mike Muguara.”

  “After Mike had visited with her, she knew that he would keep digging until he found the truth, and she became scared for her life. That’s when she called me for help.”

  “We agreed that she needed to disappear and we designed a plan to sell her house and have her relocate using a different name. Shirley agreed to help by using her bank account and PO box for communication with the Realtor. A superficial check on the sale of the property would result in a trail of the funds to Florida and the conclusion that Antonella had moved there to be closer to her son, when in reality she was still here, living in Round Rock under a different name.”

  “Given the current situation, Antonella wanted to speak with you to tell you all she knows. I agreed that I would help make that happen by setting up a meeting with you and your team. The call that Marie made to Shirley was very timely.”

  “So that’s the background, that’s why I did what I did. My father is still my father no matter what he’s done, but he is not a nice person and if he is guilty of a crime he must be brought to justice.”

  ~

  So Bill Ross had been right, Gavin was not the bad guy in this; in fact, Gavin McMullen was a good guy, a very good guy!

  “I think we should take a break and get some water and coffee. Antonella, you can meet with the officers privately in this room and Shirley and I can go get on with our work,” said Gavin.

  For the first time since she had walked into the room, a rather frail Antonella Aguilar spoke.

  “I would really like you to stay, Gavin; there are things that I’m going to tell the detectives that I would like you also to hear.”

  They got coffee and water. Shirley left and Gavin, Marie and Tommy sat together to hear what Antonella had to say.

  ~

  Antonella was very nervous and when she began to tell her story she made a couple of false starts, and then finally regained her composure after taking a sip of water.

  “I started working as a housekeeper at the McMullen Ranch in 1962 when I was just twenty years old. Garrison McMullen’s father had died a few years earlier, and after a long illness his mother passed away in the winter of 1961. He needed help in running the household and he hired me.”

  “Back then Garrison McMullen was a wild man. He was a larger-than-life figure and he was going to grab life by the scruff of the neck and build an empire. With him it was always about money and power.”

  “He would have wild parties at the ranch and he developed a close friendship with Enrique Rodriguez, who owned the Colinas Verde Ranch in southwest Texas. Enrique had five brothers, and one of them was Jimmy Rodriquez. Enrique and Jimmy would always be at the parties at the ranch.”

  “Enrique and Garrison talked about business all the time. Jimmy, on the other hand, was all about partying. When I met him he said he was twenty, but my guess is that he was a lot younger, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Jimmy Rodriguez got drunk at one of the parties and raped me!”

  “I wanted to leave, but I guess I was a slave to the money, and if I just closed my eyes to everything that went on and just did my job, life would be okay. Things did get worse, however, when Jimmy Rodriguez moved into the ranch. Garrison built a separate cabin for him and he ran everything, other than the household that I ran. He was always competing for Garrison’s affection and he saw me as competition. He would always talk about the great things he was doing on the ranch, and constantly criticized my work.”

  “Jimmy had a real run-in with Garrison one day. Garrison was looking for him and found him in the barn having sex with one of the ranch hands. I guess it didn’t matter to Jimmy, male or female; it was about domination and power. Garrison realized that he now had something he could leverage. He was sure that his brother didn’t know what Jimmy was doing with both men and women, and I used to eavesdrop on some conversations and hear Garrison often say, “Now, you don’t want me to tell your big brother, do you?”

  ~

  “Garrison McMullen met Alyana at a concert in Zilker Park. For him it was love at first sight, for her he was a larger-than-life figure, an owner of one of the largest ranches in Texas. She did love him initially, but not as much as he loved her.”

  “The beatings started soon after they were married and I would console her and bathe her to try to ease her pain. She confided in me about her feelings for a particular ranch hand, and it was during this time that I began to have suspicions about her. She was from a very good Hispanic family and her father was very influential in the community, but there was something about her that didn’t seem right. It was the way she moved and the way she talked.”

  “It was after one of the beatings when she was in the tub and I was washing her hair and dressing some of her bruises that she told me. The Reyes family had adopted her after her mother and father were killed in a house fire in Houston. The Reyes were the next-door neighbors and they applied to the courts to adopt Alyana and their application was granted. Alyana Reyes’ birth name was Alyana Parker’ the daughter of Aponi and Pallaton Parker, direct desc
endants of Quanah Parker’ the last great chief of the Comanche. Alyana was not Hispanic’ she was first nation, she was one hundred percent Comanche Indian!”

  Tommy looked over at Gavin; he was sheet white. He grabbed the glass of water in front of him on the table and with a quivering hand drained the contents.

  “I’m sorry, Gavin, I should have told you when you were young, but I was scared of your father. I’m sure that to this day he never knew,” said Antonella, the tears streaming down her face as she looked across the table at Gavin.

  Gavin had won election to be the next governor of Texas primarily by carrying the majority of the state Hispanic vote. He had a Hispanic mother, and this had been a cornerstone of his campaign. How was he going to do damage control on this?

  Gavin was still shaking and got up from the table to get another glass of water. When he returned he asked Antonella if that was it or if there was any more that she hadn’t told him. As more tears rolled down her face, she asked Gavin to sit down, that she wasn’t done.

  “I had sensed that she was not Hispanic, but I couldn’t have been sure until she confided in me that night.”

  “When you were born, Gavin, things got a little better for Alyana. The beatings subsided and Garrison was over the moon about the fact he now had a son and heir. Then he fell off his horse.”

  “He almost died. He had been riding down some stray cattle and while riding at full speed his horse stumbled and rolled forward. The immediate injuries he sustained in the fall were not particularly serious, as he had managed to roll rather than go into the ground headfirst. The main damage was done when one of the stray steers ran over the top of him. He suffered major internal organ damage that left him impotent, and from then on he walked with the help of a cane.”

  “Nine months later your mother fell pregnant again. I knew who the father was, but Garrison didn’t know and didn’t care. His wife needed to get out of the house, never to return. The father of her child was the ranch hand she had fallen in love with, Achak Muguara.”

  “Achak quit his job and he and Alyana lived in Houston, where he got a job in the oil industry. It was heavy manual work with long hours and paid poorly. She still managed to make a trip up to Austin by bus every so often to see you, Gavin, and I would pay for a hotel for her and then she would get the bus back the next day.”

  “She told me that she was going to confront Garrison and try to get him to help; after all, she was the mother of his son. She told me that she planned to leave her new baby with Tommy’s parents in Oklahoma until they got back on their feet. It was several weeks later when I heard a telephone conversation between her and Garrison. Hearing his side of the call, I heard him say for them to drive up that weekend and they could talk over it and see how he might be able to help.”

  “They arrived in an old Chevy pickup and Garrison let them in. I stayed close by and tried to listen to their conversation because I had a bad feeling about the situation. Knowing Garrison as I did, I knew that he would never help them. Never in a million years!”

  “Alyana thanked him for letting them come see him, but when he saw Achak, he flew into a rage. “You!” he screamed at the top of his voice. “You’ll never get a penny from me. You’re nothing but a two-bit whore!” Achak put his arms around Alyana and motioned her to go. Garrison dashed forward, pushed Achak out of the way, and as Alyana was falling to the ground he brought down his heavy walking stick with the solid silver ball top on her head and crushed her skull.”

  “Achak threw himself on the floor and cradled his dying wife in his arms. Garrison brought the stick down again on Achak and beat him with it in a frenzy; there was blood everywhere and two people lay dead.”

  ~

  Gavin was now in need of some fresh air. He asked Tommy to walk him outside, which Tommy did. While they were gone, Marie sat down beside Antonella and put her arm around her as she wept. “I had to tell him, I had to!” she sobbed.

  “It’s okay, Antonella, you did the right thing, you got it all out now.”

  “No, there’s more, Marie, he needs to hear it all.”

  Marie went outside and found Tommy and Gavin sharing a cigarette together. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Antonella isn’t done, there’s more.”

  ~

  Having regained some composure, Gavin returned and sat down. Antonella continued on.

  “Garrison sat in his chair and stared at the bodies for what seemed like an eternity. I was frozen to the spot. He then started yelling for Jimmy Rodriguez. Jimmy was not in the house so he came to find me. I had returned to the kitchen, pretending that I hadn’t seen anything, and he screamed at me to get Jimmy and have him come to the house and for me to stay out of the way.”

  “I found Rodriguez and told him that Garrison needed him right away, and then I stayed out of the way but managed to position myself so I saw everything that happened next.”

  “Garrison brought Jimmy into the room and when Jimmy saw the bodies he threw up. “Well, you’re going to have to clean that up as well!” yelled Garrison.

  “I want you to get the two of them back into their truck, the old Chevy in the driveway, and drive it to the cliff at the edge of the lake. Put them in the driver and passenger seats and push it off the cliff into the water. It’s a good 150 feet down; make it look like they lost control at the curve and went over the side. Make sure there are no boats around on the lake before you do it, and then come back here and get this place cleaned up.”

  “Jimmy did exactly as he was asked. That truck will still be down there at the bottom of Lake Travis.”

  “A week or so later, Garrison called Enrique Rodriguez and told him what he had done and that he needed his help to lay a false trail, as it were. He wanted to create a story that his wife and her lover had been killed in a road accident in Mexico. He wanted Enrique to work with his Mexican police buddies and build the story. Enrique did what Garrison asked, and a couple of weeks later Garrison leaked the story to the Statesman, flew down to Mexico to bring back the body of his dead wife, and buried her in the family plot.”

  “This is why I was so scared, Gavin. If Mike Muguara had continued to dig and found some connection to the truth, then Garrison would put two and two together, find out that I had met with him, and I would end up sharing the same grave as your long dead mother.”

  “Is that it all now, Antonella?” said Gavin, almost pleading that it be over.

  “That’s it all, Gavin!”

  ~

  Marie was still sitting next to Antonella and again she put her arm around her, and the seventy-year-old went limp and cried uncontrollably, the burden of secrets that she had carried over the years now lifted from her shoulders.

  Gavin sat with Tommy.

  “I’ll need to get divers out to the lake, Gavin, and if we find the wreck you know where we go from there,” said Tommy.

  “No, Detective! I know where you go from here whether you find the wreck or not! I heard what Antonella said, I will arrange for my people to have her go through it all again on camera just in case by the time a trial rolls around she is either too frail to testify or has passed. You do what you need to do to prepare to arrest my father. I need just a few days to brief my people and my supporters in the party. I know you will not like this term, but we will have to spin this in some way. Garrison McMullen is my father, but I am absolutely not like Garrison McMullen.”

  “You are not like your father, Gavin. I have seen that here today and it’s reinforced by the actions you took to try to help and protect Antonella. You have what time you need, and you call me when you are done. I won’t get divers out to the lake until we arrest your father, as that will spook him that we are already on to him.”

  “We have Jimmy Rodriguez in custody and charged with the killing of Mike Muguara. I am sure now that Garrison McMullen ordered that killing. If we can get the skeletal remains from the lake then we can match DNA with your mother’s remains and be able to finally identify that the
dead man is Mike Muguara.”

  “Let me know when you’re ready for us to move.”

  ~

  Tommy went over to the still weeping Antonella Aguilar.

  “We have to be on our way, Antonella. You have been very brave here today and your actions will see very bad men brought to justice.”

  Antonella managed to get to her feet and Tommy and Marie both hugged her. They shook hands with Gavin McMullen and then left the South Congress office to head back to Hudson Bend. On the way Tommy called the chief.

  “We’re on our way back to the office after our meeting with Gavin McMullen. We all need to meet in the conference room tonight. Can you also check if Bobby Brown can join us? What we uncovered today will blow your mind. My dad was right. Gavin had nothing to do with any of this, and I will explain it all when we get there,” said Tommy, and was getting ready to end the call.

  “We need to talk about something else in the briefing tonight, Tommy,” said the chief. “Governor Shaw has been to see me and he wants to make sure that none of this shit going down is going to stick to him. Latisha Williams is better connected in the governor’s office than we thought, and she’s been shooting her mouth off. The long and the short of it is that the governor wants this wrapped up and Rodriguez and Vivar taken down for the killing, and he wants it to end there. Latisha has spilled the beans that we may have some evidence that connects Garrison McMullen in some way. McMullen has backed Shaw with significant funding for his run for the White House and he doesn’t want McMullen tied into this thing.”

  “Well, sir, that might not be possible. I will explain when we meet. Latisha has let me down and gone back on our deal. This might backfire on her also. See you later tonight, chief,” and Tommy ended the call.

  Chapter 29: Dirty Laundry

  They were all there in the conference room and it was just after six in the evening. Tommy Ross presented his report on the meeting with Gavin McMullen and Antonella Aguilar. Bobby Brown was typing on his laptop as fast as he could and every so often shaking his head with incredulity.