I had to wonder if we were ever going to get back to their past encounters with Bishop Alexander. So, to move things along, I said to the husband, ‘Your wife was going to tell us about past incidents where Bishop Alexander was rude to Bobby in front of y’all. Other than the one before winter break.’
‘Rude?’ Missy – I couldn’t imagine a more inappropriate name for this woman – Dunston said, still standing, arms akimbo, furrowed brow intact. ‘Rude isn’t the word! David! Tell her the word!’
‘Ah …’ her husband started, but she cut off anything he might actually have said.
‘Disgusting is one word! Inexcusable is another word! How about depraved? David, don’t you think that’s a good word?’
‘Well, yes—’
‘I think it’s an apt word! Depraved! That’s what he was!’
Luna, still standing, waved her hands downward. ‘Shall we all sit for a while and calm down—’
‘I’m calm! How dare you insinuate that I’m not calm!’ Mrs Dunston shouted.
David moved to his wife and drew her down on the couch, her large bottom (yes, I’m a bitch) leaving no room for him to sit anywhere but on the dog-hairy throw.
‘Could you tell me as well as you can remember the details of those other encounters?’ Luna asked.
‘I just can’t!’ Mrs Dunston said, fanning herself with her hand. I’d been thinking about doing the same thing since we walked into the room but felt it would be rude. Rudeness no longer seemed an issue.
‘Mr Dunston?’ Luna asked, looking at the husband.
‘Well,’ he started, then was silent for what seemed an eternity, although maybe less than a minute. ‘Every time we saw him, ah, Bishop, he, ah, was saying mean things to Robert.’
‘Such as?’ Luna pressed.
He shrugged one very frail shoulder. ‘Ah, well, he’d call him names.’
‘In front of you?’ Luna asked.
David Dunston nodded his head but said nothing.
‘Names,’ Luna said. ‘Such as?’
‘Ah, I don’t know, you know, like stupid—’
‘He called him a worthless piece of you-know-what!’ Mrs Dunston supplied. ‘And he said that if he didn’t do what he – that horrible boy – told him to do then he’d regret it.’
‘Uh-huh,’ David Dunston agreed, nodding at his wife.
I was beginning to see that Bobby Dunston might have a physical resemblance to his mother, but his flunkiness he got wholeheartedly from his dad.
‘Oh, he said so many horrible things, with David and I right there to hear them! I can only imagine what he said to Robert when we weren’t there!’
‘How many times did you witness these encounters?’ Luna asked.
Missy Dunston looked to her husband. He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said into the void. ‘But they’ve been friends – if you want to call it that! – since last year. So several times, although he never actually came by to meet us or anything! We just saw him when he wanted something from Robert! Which seemed like always!’
Again, David Dunston nodded his agreement.
‘And you found this more than unpleasant, I would assume,’ Luna said.
‘Oh, goodness, yes! I could have killed that—’ Missy Dunston stopped and looked at her husband.
He turned from her and looked at Luna. ‘That’s just a, you know, expression.’
‘What about you, Mr Dunston?’ Luna asked. ‘How did you feel about the way Bishop Alexander talked to your son?’
‘Ah, well, ah, I, you know, didn’t like it. Much.’
I was ready to leave. I didn’t think Missy Dunston would go to the physical effort of doping my son and killing Bishop. I mean, the stabbing alone would wind her. And David – well, I’m sure he’d have to ask his wife’s permission to kill a roach in the silverware drawer.
I gave Luna a look and a head nod toward the front of the house. She read me like a book. She stood up and said, ‘I want to thank both of you for your time. You’ve been very generous. And, Mrs Dunston, thanks for the water. We should be heading back to Austin.’
‘David, get me the phone!’ Missy Dunston said. ‘I have to call Robert now!’
‘Honey, he may, you know, be in class?’
‘Just hand me the phone! And see these people to the door!’
We all left as quickly as we could.
Graham was pretty sure his mom knew what he’d been up to in the bathroom of his dorm room. She had an eye for stuff like this. He noticed when he’d gone in the room with Bishop’s mother that one of the cabinet doors underneath the sink had been left open. He’d glanced inside then and saw something that looked interesting. He wasn’t able to grab it at the time because the mother wanted to go and he knew Champion was just outside the door. But when he’d gone back with his mom and Champion, he’d felt he had to find out what it was. It was a wad of paper stuck behind the back of the closed drawer. He’d got down on his hands and knees and carefully extracted it, sat on his butt on the floor and spread the paper out, pressing out the wrinkles. It was an economics test. He’d had no idea what that meant. He was pretty sure Bishop had an econ class last semester – he’d heard him bitching about the prof – but why would he hide it? Or had he? Had it just got stuck behind the drawer somehow? But that was Graham’s drawer it was stuck behind. How had it got there? And why hadn’t Graham noticed the drawer hadn’t closed all the way? Mostly, he’d thought, because nothing much closed all the way in the dorm room – drawers, cupboards, closet doors. It was an old dorm. And he rarely cared about things like drawers shutting, etc. His mom could testify to that.
So, why was that test paper stuck behind his drawer? What did it signify? Then he’d decided he’d been in the john too long. That cop would come busting in any minute, so he’d got up off the floor, wadded the test paper back up and stuck it in his pocket. And gone back into the room to listen to his mom and the cop snipe at each other.
Now he sat in his motel room, looking at the paper he’d once again pressed out on his bed. It was still just an econ test. Miranda was in the bathroom of his motel room, and, coming out, she noticed the paper on the bed.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
Graham shrugged. ‘Something I found in the bathroom back at the dorm,’ he said.
She sat down on the bed and looked at it, turning it so that it faced her. ‘It’s an econ test,’ she said.
‘Yeah, duh. I sorta noticed that.’
‘Where did it come from?’
‘I just told you – the bathroom—’
‘No,’ Miranda said, ‘I mean how did it get there?’
‘I guess Bishop dropped it or something—’
‘It’s not graded,’ she said.
‘Huh?’ Graham offered.
She pointed at the top of the page and turned the paper around to Graham. ‘Look. No grade. And all the answers.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘Jeez, I thought I was messing around with a bright boy. My mistake,’ she said, as sarcastically as his mother, Graham thought. Maybe he should reconsider this relationship.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’re beginning to remind me of my mother.’
Miranda smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘I mean, you’re just as sarcastic and know-it-all as she is!’
‘Again, I say thank you. But let me point out what you seem to be ignoring here: this paper is not graded; this paper has all the answers on it. This paper is the prof’s test. I’m guessing that somehow Bishop got hold of the test answers before taking the test. Am I getting through to you?’
‘Can it, Mom,’ Graham said. She just grinned in response. ‘So Bishop was stealing test answers. This does not surprise me. He was pretty stupid – he’d have to cheat to pass anything.’
‘Test answers are a big business, you know,’ Miranda said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. I’m thinking this might have something to do with why somebody offed him.’
/> Graham looked at her, then down at the paper. ‘You think we should go tell my mother and Luna about this?’
Miranda grabbed the paper, stood up and headed for the door. ‘Ya think?’
THIRTEEN
When I came out of the bathroom, Graham and Miranda were sitting on Luna’s bed, with Luna, and all three were staring at a piece of paper on the bed spread.
‘What?’ I said.
‘We think we know why Bishop was killed!’ Miranda said.
‘Hush,’ Luna said. ‘There’s another thread to pull, that’s all.’
I got down on my knees by the bed to look at the paper. I would have preferred to sit on the bed but there was no room. I looked at it for a long moment, sighed, and said, ‘OK, I don’t get it.’
‘It’s an economics professor’s test, with the answers. The one the prof or the T.A. keeps for grading purposes. See? The answers are all here in the same font as the test itself,’ Miranda said.
‘OK,’ I said, still not fully understanding.
‘Graham found it stuck behind the drawer in his dorm bathroom!’ Miranda said.
Light dawned. OK, so my horny son wasn’t going in there for condoms. Did I need to buy some for him? Should a mother do that? Did Miss Manners have an answer to that one?
‘Where did you get it?’ I asked. Graham hadn’t taken economics yet and wasn’t interested in taking it, as far as I knew.
‘I think Bishop stuck it behind my drawer,’ Graham said. ‘That’s the only thing I can think of.’
‘And this is significant because?’ I asked.
‘Test answers are a big business on campus, y’all!’ Miranda said, obviously getting a little miffed that no one found this as significant as she obviously did. ‘And Gretchen Morley had something she wanted to give back to Tina Ng but Tina told her to keep it! Like maybe other tests?’
‘We don’t know that,’ Luna the wet blanket said.
‘It seems to fit,’ I said, to which Miranda threw up a fist for me to bump. I did it, but grudgingly.
‘Like I said,’ Luna said, ‘it’s another thread to pull.’
‘So maybe we should start pulling?’ I suggested.
Luna sighed. ‘You’re not going to like what I have to say. Any of you. But,’ she said and sighed again, ‘we need to bring Champion in on this.’
She was right: none of us liked that one little bit.
Champion was sitting at his desk in his cubicle staring at his computer screen. He was thinking about maybe playing solitaire. It would get him just as far on the case as everything else he seemed to be doing. Not to mention he couldn’t find the Pugh kid. Or Luna. Or the mom. He was thinking of getting the Texas Rangers on it, send them to Podunk wherever, the place where they came from. He only wished he could remember the name of the burg.
This whole thing was his wife’s fault. His ex-wife. Since the divorce he couldn’t concentrate. Or maybe it was since his source of nookie had dried up. He was obviously horny. Every woman he saw seemed to have a neon sign on her head that said, ‘I’ve got one!’
Champion sighed. If it wasn’t for his wife – ex-wife – he’d be able to concentrate on the case at hand. He had a kid murdered. A very unpopular kid. Maybe two people in the whole world liked the kid, and one of ’em wasn’t even his own mother. But he wasn’t really sure about Morley. She was mad at him but did that make her hate him? And Bobby what’s-his-name. Could he really have liked that little scumbag with everything the vic said to and about him? So maybe nobody in the world, including his own mother, liked him. Champion was beginning to be pretty damn sure that, had he known the kid when he was alive, he too wouldn’t have liked him. Hell, even dead he didn’t like him very much.
Everybody had a motive. But only Graham Pugh had the opportunity. If, and that was a big if, he hadn’t been roofied.
The bullpen was emptying out. He was almost the only one left. But then he didn’t have anywhere to go like the rest of the department. He currently lived in a rented mobile home in a trailer park where he was pretty sure half the residents he’d arrested at one time or another also lived. He really didn’t want to go there. And he didn’t want to go to his favorite cop bar because, let’s face it, some asshole would want to talk about the case. If he went to another bar and set the precedent of drinking alone, that could start a whole new problem. He’d seen his own father go down that road and it was paved with sorrows.
His best friend, another cop stationed out in the boonies, was married with kids and, although his friend kept telling him his wife herself had invited him out to dinner, Champion didn’t really believe it. The wife was more a friend of Champion’s wife than his.
Trying to clear his mind of extraneous bullshit, he decided maybe he should go by that motel where the Pughs and Luna were staying and stake it out. He’d already talked with the desk clerk and they hadn’t checked out, and the kid’s car was still parked in front of one of the rooms so they’d be coming back. He was sure of that. He decided to be there when they did.
We were still debating – OK, arguing – about whether or not to bring Champion in on what we’d found when there came a hearty knock on the door. Hearty being another word for aggressive. The four of us looked at each other, then at the door. There was another knock.
Then a voice. ‘Luna, I know you’re in there! You and the Pughs! Open up!’
‘Well, I guess that ends the debate,’ Luna said, standing and going to the door.
‘No, it doesn’t!’ I whispered loudly.
She opened the door and Champion pushed into the room.
‘Where’s your warrant?’ I demanded, standing up, hands on hips.
‘Don’t need one. Luna invited me in.’
‘She did not—’ I started but Luna interrupted.
‘Yes, I did,’ she said, and closed the door behind Champion.
‘Shit,’ I said in my most ladylike way and flopped down on the bed. I noticed my son was looking at the floor and Miranda had her hand on his arm while shooting daggers with her eyes at either Luna or Champion – or probably both.
And so Luna told him what we’d been up to, leaving out the part about going to San Antonio, and showed him the test paper. And, of course, explained its possible dire meaning.
‘So you’re saying this Ng woman – whom I’ve met and can’t imagine her big enough to stab anyone to death, not to mention a fully grown man – and Morley are running a test business, and what? Alexander wanted in?’
‘Yes!’ said Miranda, jumping up. ‘Don’t you see? Bishop would do anything for a buck, right? So this scam was perfect for him. He probably bought a test through Morley then figured why should she get the big bucks when he could get in on the score? So—’
‘Does she always talk like that?’ Champion asked, looking at Graham.
He shrugged. I noticed my son hadn’t said a word since Champion came in the room. I wanted to take him in my arms and rest his head on my shoulder but knew that would be the last thing he’d want. He’s a big boy, I kept telling myself. A grown man, sort of.
‘Talk like what?’ Miranda demanded. ‘I’m just telling you the lay of the land—’
‘You watch a lot of cop shows, don’t you?’ Champion asked.
‘I’m serious!’ she shouted.
Champion couldn’t hide that awful, shit-eating grin of his as he said, ‘I know that you are.’
‘Who’s your supervisor? I want your badge number!’ Miranda shouted.
Luna walked over to her and encouraged her back on the bed next to Graham. ‘He’s just yanking your chain, honey,’ Luna said.
‘But this is serious!’ Tears sprang up in Miranda’s eyes, threatening to spill over. ‘He wants to arrest Graham and he can’t! He just can’t!’ At which point the threatening tears were no longer a threat – they were as real as the sobs that accompanied them.
Graham took her in his arms and held her. ‘It’s gonna be all right,’ he cooed. ‘I know it’s gonna be all right.’
‘Look, kid,’ Champion said with a sigh, sitting down beside me on the bed and leaning his elbows on his knees as he stared across at my son. ‘I’m beginning to get a hint that maybe you didn’t do this. And I kinda hope that you didn’t. But I have nothing to prove it. This test answer crap – is it for real?’
‘Seems to be,’ Graham said, while Miranda sat up to stare at Champion.
‘So Ng and Morley and maybe others have this thing going selling test answers to the unwashed masses,’ Champion said while Graham and Miranda nodded. ‘And maybe the vic buys one from either his girlfriend or the Ng chick. How am I doing so far?’
‘Very well,’ Miranda said.
‘OK, so, being the money-grubbing asshole that he is – excuse me, was – he tries to weasel his way into their scam.’
‘Yes,’ Miranda said.
‘So why don’t they share?’ Champion asked. ‘You say there’s a lot of money in the racket.’
‘Because,’ Graham said, ‘Bishop wouldn’t want a share. He’d want the whole thing, or at least the lion’s share of it. He was a greedy bastard.’
‘So I’m beginning to see. Blackmailing his own mother.’ Champion shook his head. ‘Of course, she raised him so she probably got what she deserved.’
‘So how do we prove any of this?’ Luna, the pragmatist, threw in.
‘First,’ Champion said, ‘we go for the weakest link.’
‘Gretchen Morley!’ we all said in unison.
Champion stood up. ‘Y’all have to stay here. Me and Luna will take care of—’
‘Not on your life!’ Miranda said, jumping up.
‘Sit!’ Champion ordered.
‘Hey, I’m not a dog, you know!’
‘Do it anyway!’ Champion said.
‘You can’t talk to me—’ the girl started but Luna jumped in.
‘Miranda,’ Luna said, standing next to Champion, ‘we have to do this by the book. If we find something, we need to keep a chain of evidence. If she spills her guts, we need to Mirandize her, and we can’t have non-police personnel in the room. This could cause a conflict at trial – if it ever goes to trial.’
‘Oh, it’s going to trial!’ Miranda said.
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