The Violence Beat

by JoAnna Carl

  He turned to Wilda apologetically. “By then we’d all sort of adopted Lee. She was trying so hard to turn her life around. And, believe me, if Irish hadn’t helped her—hadn’t forced her into it, really—she would never have been able to.”

  Wilda nodded. “If he thought you ought to do something, he’d bully or he’d cajole or he’d threaten until it was done.”

  Dr. Willingham smiled. “That was Irish. Anyway, I was in New York when Andy was born, but Lee’s coach called me. And I called Irish out at Mickey’s house.” He opened a file folder he’d been holding in his lap. “Andrew Svenson Foster. That’s the name on Andy’s birth certificate. Irish drove down to Dallas and went to the hospital to see Lee and the baby the day after he was born.”

  He opened a file folder he’d brought along and produced a photo. It was definitely Irish Svenson. Red hair, broad, freckled face, and blue eyes. His hands looked like hams holding the tiny baby. He was grinning.

  “I didn’t see Irish that day,” Dr. Willingham said. “He talked to Lee a long time.”

  “She must have told him the details she’d been withholding, the skinny on what Coy and Guy were up to,” Mike said.

  Dr. Willingham nodded. “He left a message at the church to say thanks for the help I’d given Lee. But he said he had to go straight back to Grantham. He said he had an appointment.”

  “With Coy,” Mike said grimly.

  “It must have been,” I said. “But why? Why would he meet Coy at all? And why would he meet him at the Hotel Panorama?”

  “That’s easy,” Mike said. “He wanted to smooth things over without a scandal.”

  “Without a scandal!”

  “Right. I told you, that was Dad’s big character flaw. He was proud of his reputation, of his department’s reputation.” Mike turned to his mother. “Right?”

  Wilda frowned. “I’m afraid you are. If he could have gotten Coy and Guy to give the money back—”

  “And to resign,” Mike said. “Maybe admit guilt. Leave town. He would have gone a long way to avoid a scandal.”

  “But why meet at the Panorama?”

  “Coy had bugged Dad’s office,” Mike said. “The tech crew found the bugs this morning, still in place. Lee probably told him everything that happened in that office was recorded. Dad wouldn’t have wanted any recording going on while he laid the law down to Coy. And maybe Coy suggested they meet at the Panorama.”

  That made sense. I thought about it.

  Then Dr. Willingham spoke to Mike. “Your dad didn’t tell you anything about all this?”

  “No. The last time I talked to him, he said he had some important business matters he wanted to go over with me. He said something like, ‘There’s a blowup coming in the department, Mike. I want to get this taken care of. I may have to resign.’ But he wouldn’t tell me any details.”

  He grinned ruefully. “I’ve spent the past two years waiting for the blowup in the department. And that was why I never pushed on finding out more about his accident. I was afraid he’d committed suicide.”

  “But he didn’t give you a hint that he was in any danger?” I said.

  “He wouldn’t have been afraid of either Coy or Guy,” Wilda said. “He always thought Coy was a bully, but basically a lightweight. And he despised Guy.”

  Dr. Willingham leaned forward. “What do you think happened, Mike?”

  “I think Coy probably distracted my dad while Guy either cut or loosened his brake line,” Mike said. “That would be the simplest way to disable a car. The driver wouldn’t notice anything until he hit the brakes, and there weren’t any. And it could be made to look like an accident—almost.”

  “Almost?” I was puzzled.

  Mike nodded. “You’d have to disable the emergency brake system, too, if you wanted to make sure it worked. And having both systems go out at once would look suspicious.”

  “I guess that’s where Bo came in,” I said.

  “Right,” Mike said. “I imagine Coy and Guy followed the car to the city-county police garage. They’d want to replace at least one of the brake lines—hide the sabotage—before the state crime lab began to examine the car. They might have needed Bo to help them, but it’s more likely that he caught them at it. Either way, they convinced Bo to help them—out of fear, maybe, or even loyalty to them.”

  “Or maybe even loyalty to your dad,” I said. “One of the crazy things Bo said was, ‘I wanted to protect him!’ It could be they convinced him that Irish had been killed because of some guilty reason and that he’d be helping keep Irish’s reputation stainless if he covered the crime up.”

  Mike shook his head. “Could be. Of course, a year later, when Bo went off the deep end, Guy and Coy had to get rid of him. He probably lived six months longer man they wanted him to because he left town and hid out. But once he was in the Grantham Mental Health Center, and once Nell had said she’d still be willing to interview him, they had to act fast. Coy fell back on his skills as an undercover cop, greased his hair down, and put temporary tattoos on his arm. He stole the Salvation Army uniform. Then it was cyanide and an Almond Joy for Bo.

  “But even dead, Bo blew up their scheme. His death scared Lee so much that she made a move toward getting them arrested—instead of simply continuing to hide out.”

  “I guess I’m still thinking like a bookkeeper,” Wilda said, “but I don’t understand why the auditors didn’t catch the problem with the pension fund.”

  “The union president is probably asking that very question,” Mike said. “I don’t think they could have hidden the shortage much longer. Coy mentioned his ‘stash.’ I think they were ready to run for it, even if they didn’t find Lee and the money.”

  “Anyway, Lee called me,” I said, “and trapped herself with the tap Coy had put on my phone. And I’m not sure just why he did that.”

  “It may have been standard practice for him,” Mike said. “He’d apparently tapped any phone he felt like tapping. But Coy and Guy were able to intercept Lee after she met you, and they kidnapped her from the Campus Corner. She was desperate to hide Andy’s existence, so she told them what she’d done with the money. But they killed her anyway. One of them ran over her, hoping it would look like a hit and run. But Guy was still nervous, and he found out that we were at the Gazette.”

  “Maybe Coy told him,” I said. “I ran into Coy out at the high school when I went there looking for you. Maybe Coy followed us.”

  Mike nodded. “Anyway, one of them saw that both our cars were in the Gazette parking garage. They knew we had our heads together. Of course, whoever it was didn’t know that the line of cars nearest the building was full of tough circulation guys. When he decided to take us out, Nell and those guys ruined his plan.”

  I brought up one point that had been worrying me. “Why did Guy come by the hospital to see me?”

  Mike shrugged. “Probably he wanted to know whether or not you suspected him, Nell. Or maybe he really was going to drop cyanide in that coffee he offered you. We’ll never know.”

  I shuddered. “I’m just glad we spotted that airport limo—”

  “And got Guy killed.”

  “You don’t think it was suicide?”

  Mike shook his head. “No, I think Jim Hammond figured that one right. Coy heard Jim send a car to the airport, and he tumbled to the fact that Guy was about to be—well, questioned. Maybe stopped. Guy must have been in a very nervous state. Coy knew he’d break. So Coy dressed up in blue coveralls and a wig, got into the men’s room while you and I were looking for Guy in all the United waiting areas. Then he called the airport on his cell phone and had Guy paged. He called Guy into the restroom and gave him a pint of whisky—probably told him it would steady his nerves or something.”

  “Then Coy walked out,” I said. “I watched him go. And I had no idea it was him.”

  “We knew C
oy was an expert at disguise, thanks to his undercover days. The wig hid his face, and if he changed his walk—”

  I nodded.

  “But luck continued to run against Coy,” Mike said. “He and Guy had left Lee’s body in the high grass along Bridge Road, where the road deadends at the old bridge, thinking she might not be found for weeks. But the mowers moved in to get ready for the repair crews, and they found her within hours. Simply a fluke.

  “And that left Coy in a really hard spot. Lots of cops knew Merrilee Blakely. Somebody was going to recognize her, even though she’d changed her hair and her way of dressing. So he got ready to make a run for it. He made a quick stop to check out the receipt he’d found in Lee’s purse—”

  “And he got stuck with the kid,” I said.

  Mike nodded. “He went to his office to dump the kid and to get his fake ID from his desk drawer. And he ran into Nell.”

  We all were quiet for a few seconds.

  “It’s a sad ending,” Dr. Willingham said. “Lee had worked so hard to change—and now she’s dead.”

  “If only she would have trusted me the day we met,” I said. “If she would have waited for Mike at the Blue Flamingo, if she would have told me more—if she would have told Irish the whole story earlier.”

  “It’s easy to see why Lee distrusted people,” Dr. Willingham said. “But that distrust doomed her.”

  He might have been talking about me, I realized. The men in my life had offered me love—my grandfather, now Mike, even stuffy old Professor Tenure. Was I always going to be afraid to accept it, afraid to trust anyone?

  Dr. Willingham turned to Mike. “Irish told me he was going to make some financial arrangements about Andy,” he said. “Mike, I think he was going to explain all that to you. He wanted you to understand that you weren’t being partially disinherited arbitrarily. And I think he wanted you to have the authority to carry out his instructions if he didn’t—well, if he didn’t live to see Andy grow up.”

  “Yes,” Mike said. “With Lee gone that’s going to be more of a responsibility.”

  Dr. Willingham shook his head. “I don’t think Irish expected you to take care of Andy personally. Of course, none of us thought about Lee being killed.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Mike, finding a home for Andy is not going to be any problem at all. I can think of four couples in my church who are trying to adopt. Any of them would love and care for the little guy.”

  Mike looked inscrutable.

  Dr. Willingham juggled his file folder nervously. “One couple would be Margaret and her husband.”

  “Margaret!” Mike sounded surprised.

  Dr. Willingham turned to me. “Margaret is my daughter. She and Mike were in Sunday school together. She directs the preschool at Lover’s Lane Presbyterian, so she’s been around Andy since he was a baby. But she’s no smarter than her mother—married a Presbyterian minister. Rick has a church in north Dallas.”

  “Margaret was the best-tempered person I grew up with,” Mike said. “And she had the best sense of humor. Did Lee have a will?”

  Dr. Willingham coughed gently. “I’m her executor? And Andy’s guardian.”

  “Then the question is really up to you.”

  “My primary responsibility would be Andy’s welfare. But Lee had no family, so you’re apparently Andy’s only blood relation, Mike. I wouldn’t want to do anything without your input. But we don’t want to wait too long.”

  Mike smiled solemnly. “I know. It’s easy to get attached.”

  Andy had been playing happily with a set of cars which Wilda had brought him that morning. Now he got to his feet and brought Mike a blue one. “Uhnnn,” he said, growling out the sound effect which traditionally means a racing motor.

  “Thank you,” Mike said. He got down on his knees and ran the car back and forth on the floor. “Uhnnn, uhnnn.”

  Andy smiled approvingly. He took a red truck to Dr. Willingham. “Uhnnn,” he said seriously.

  “Uhnnn,” Dr. Willingham growled. He slid off his chair and sat on the floor, running the truck back and forth. “Uhnnn. Uhnnn.”

  I laughed, and Andy rewarded me with a sporty green car. I joined the racers on the floor, and Mike took my hand. He squeezed it. I squeezed back.

  “Uhnnn! Uhnnn!” I said.

  Keep reading for a preview of the next mystery in the Nell Matthews series

  THE HOMICIDE REPORT

  Available now from InterMix

  Mike and I were standing on a metal grille, hanging twenty feet in the air. Beyond a spidery-looking railing, duct work snaked around the ceiling, only a few feet above our heads. Heavy electrical cables hung down, looped and tangled like tropical vines. Beneath us, rows of giant cylinders extended into infinity, blasted by glaring lights that cast harsh black shadows between them. Most of the cylinders were standing on end, but some were lying on their sides, looking like a building set abandoned by some mammoth child. A flimsy-looking circular iron stairway twisted from our perch down to the concrete floor.

  “I call it the Hellhole,” I said.

  “Not a bad name.” Mike’s voice was tense. “There, way at the back—that’s where we fall off the edge of the earth and the dragons eat us up, right?”

  I laughed. “You’ve got it. You’re seeing the secret dungeons of the Grantham Gazette. All those offices, computers, and meeting rooms upstairs—that’s just a facade. The real story is down here.”

  I leaned close and whispered. It wasn’t hard to put an ominous note in my voice. “Newsprint. Paper storage. Printing presses. Ink by the barrel. All that dangerous stuff.”

  “Scary as hell,” Mike said. His shoulders were rigid, and his knuckles were turning white from clutching the iron railing. “My God, Nell! I’d hate to have to come out here all the time.”

  “Reporters don’t have much business in the storage areas, but when I was covering the violence beat I came this way a lot. This landing is a shortcut from the break room to the Fifth Street loading dock. It’s the quickest way from the newsroom to the fire department and the courthouse.”

  “It looks like a quick way to Hades.”

  I realized Mike wasn’t kidding about his reaction to the Hellhole and to our unsubstantial-looking roost above it.

  Mike is six foot two, redheaded and athletic. He’s a cop who’s earned medals for wrestling armed bad guys into submission with his bare hands. But I realized that he was scared stiff by the see-through flooring and fragile-looking railing of the little iron balcony we were standing on.

  “It’s perfectly solid,” I said. “See.” I jumped up and down.

  “Quit that!”

  I grinned. “I didn’t know you had a problem with heights, Mike. You go up that climbing rope at the gym like a monkey.”

  “Yeah, and I look at the ceiling all the way up. I’m not good at looking down. Particularly when I can see through”—he repeated the word—“through the floor I’m standing on. Not when there’s concrete down there.”

  I moved close to him and rolled my eyes. “What? We’re finally alone, and you’re not going to take me in your arms?”

  “Not unless I can do it without letting go of this pipe.”

  I ducked under his arm and came up between him and the railing. “How’s this?”

  “Probably pretty interesting to whoever that is down there in the Hellhole.”

  “Somebody’s down here?” I ducked back under his arm and moved away. I’m sure everybody I work with has figured out that Mike and I sleep together. But we try to restrain ourselves from handholding in public.

  “Nobody should be down here this time of the evening,” I said. “Nobody except Martina, and she wouldn’t be out in the Hellhole.”

  “I couldn’t see who—or what—it was. Just movement.” Mike stared into the bowels of the block-long basement.

  “I hop
e it wasn’t a rat.” I shivered. “I’ve been told they call in the exterminator once a month to keep the creepy crawlies out down here.”

  “Maybe it was my imagination,” Mike said. “The Hellhole could make you imagine anything.”

  I shivered again. I might have teased Mike about his reaction to the Hellhole, but that was because I didn’t want to admit the big basement storage area had always given me the willies, too.

  “I guess I’d better do my errand,” I said. “City editors must be obeyed. Especially by junior copy eds.”

  Three months before, I’d been moved from a reporter’s slot to the night copy desk at the Grantham Gazette, working hours two p.m. to ten p.m. A week later Mike had started an eleven p.m. to seven a.m. rotation with the Grantham Police Department. These hours made it hard for us to see each other. So we had developed the habit of eating dinner in the Gazette break room, snatching a few minutes together over pizza, hamburgers, or carry-out Chinese.

  As a result, the city editor had known where I was when she needed a message delivered. We had barely picked a table for our submarine sandwiches when she called down to the break room and asked me to find Martina Gilroy, the Gazette’s chief copy editor and head busybody.

  Martina was another creature of habit. She always took a nap during her dinner break. She did this in the only ladies’ lounge in the Grantham Gazette Building which contained a couch—a facility that happened to be in the basement. There was no phone there, and the operator couldn’t page in that particular lounge.

  Martina’s lounge was just down the stairs from the classified and circulation departments, an area that in the daytime was more populated than the Hellhole. But the quickest way from the break room to that lounge led through the big storage area and skirted the pressroom. That was the route Mike and I were using.

  “Just where did Martina go?” Mike asked.

  “The lounge is at the opposite end of the basement, near the stairs to the side door—the one that leads to the parking garage.”

  Mike pointed at the winding, flimsy-looking stairway leading down from our perch. “Martina went down those stairs?”