Not Forgotten

by George Lee Miller

  “I always wondered how a guy like you that has a problem with authority ended up in the Marine Corps.”

  “I had something to prove,” I said.

  Kelly sensed that she had strayed into territory that I wasn’t ready to talk about with her. She didn’t press it. We finished lunch listening to the clanking of silverware against plastic trays and the laughter of college students who didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When I got back to my pickup, the infamous North Texas wind was sandblasting the pavement and filled my eyes and nose with red grit—a byproduct of converting the prairie to dry farmland. I took an antihistamine as a preventative measure, then drove out on Broadway Street past a half dozen Baptist churches. In ten minutes, I had crossed the state highway and the city limit sign. I was looking for the Buena Vista Mobile Home Village—the trailer park listed as the last known address for Valerie Martin. She was the coed who filed sexual harassment charges against Danny Allison last year, then changed her mind.

  I found Buena Vista and stopped at the neglected plywood sign. The advertised good view to the south was a red haze of wind-blown cotton fields. To the north stretched the Texas Panhandle. It was characterized as an uncharted, inhospitable ocean of grass to the Spanish and any American settlers searching for a homestead. So flat, ranchers used to say, that if you stood on an apple crate you could see the Canadian border. I was sitting in my four-wheel-drive pickup and could only see as far as the dairy farm across the barbed-wire fence. I was raised on a ranch and didn’t need to roll down my windows to know what the giant mounds behind the milking sheds were made of.

  There was only one road in and one road out. No need for the GPS. I got a few curious looks from the older inhabitants who were resting in the shade of their retractable porch awnings and rocking away the hot afternoon. They were probably immune to the dairy stench. It seemed an odd place to find an acquaintance of the very affluent Allison family, but then Marissa had been a complete surprise too. I wondered if there was a pattern to Danny’s pick of female companions, and if so, what he was looking for.

  I found the number on the mailbox and parked my pickup in the gravel driveway. The mobile home was a single-wide with a worn wooden porch that was missing a few railing boards. The loose awning flapped in the wind. Other than that, someone mowed the small patch of grass out front and the junk in the driveway was kept to a minimum. I had lived in worse places. I waited to see if there was movement behind the windows, but there was nothing. I made my way to the door and knocked.

  When no one answered, I knocked again. I could hear a medium-sized dog barking just inside the door but no sound of human activity. It was Sunday afternoon. Maybe Valerie worked weekends or was honoring the Sabbath. I had passed enough Baptist churches to easily accommodate the entire population of Lubbock. I clopped back down the wooden porch steps and spotted an older lady wearing a red apron over a flower-print dress crossing the street toward me. She looked like she’d just hurried home from church to pull a pot roast out of the oven. As she approached, I remembered to smile really big.

  “Do you know Valerie Martin?” I asked.

  She seemed a little nervous. “Oh, she moved out at the end of last year. November, I think. She got an apartment in town. I still have the forwarding address. She was getting monthly checks in the mail. Didn’t want to miss any. I think it was financial aid.”

  I told her I was from the university and needed to ask Valerie a few questions. It only took a minute for her to shuffle over to her trailer and find the forwarding address. If every trailer park had a friendly neighbor, the private eye business would be a snap.

  The address she gave me was in a much newer residential area. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from the dairy farm, but a world apart. I went back through town and turned north toward the country club. When I found the condos, it looked like they couldn’t have been over a year old. There was a gate out front with a bored-looking guard checking the license plates on cars going in and out. I pulled up beside him and rolled down my window. He had a droopy gray mustache that obscured his lips. With a little wax he could probably enter the facial hair competition with the Germans in San Antonio, but then he would have to take a bath, and I didn’t think he wanted to do that.

  “Howdy, I’m Valerie Martin’s brother, Tom. It’s her birthday today, and I drove up from Austin to surprise her. She’s in thirty-three-oh-four.”

  He stared at me and chuckled. “Her brother?” he asked, like he knew more about Valerie than I did. “I’ll have to call.” He was thin, and his breath smelled of cigarette smoke and vodka masked with peppermint candy. His once-white undershirt below his brown security guard uniform was yellow with age and frayed on the edges.

  “It’s a surprise, Doug.” I read his name off his nametag. I took out a twenty, folded it in half, and held it between my fingers, palm up. “I’ll sneak you some cold beer. What d’ya say?”

  I knew I had him with the beer offer. He buzzed me through the gate, and I cruised around the corner following the signs to thirty-three-oh-four. The complex had two pools. One on each end. I counted thirty units, all with a private garage and a patio that opened toward a tree-covered center park. The units were two stories and put together with terra-cotta bricks, dark wood trim, and shake shingles. There were tennis courts between the pools and several wooden picnic tables under the trees. It was quite a step up from the trailer park across the fence from the dairy farm. If Valerie was getting financial aid, she wasn’t using it to pay for school. That or she had won the lottery.

  I found the number and parked behind her garage.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday. If she was a student, she could be home studying. This was the first week of classes. I knocked. Bare feet slapped on tile behind the door. I got out my private investigator credentials and held them up to the peephole. The door opened, and a strikingly pretty young black woman squinted against the bright sunlight. I understood why Doug hadn’t believed my story.

  “What’s this about?” she asked. Judging by her appearance and her disheveled hair, she was not an early riser. She was petite and had on a man’s oversized white T-shirt, which looked slept in.

  “Valerie Martin?” I asked.

  She looked at my forehead and hesitated with her hand on the door like she regretted opening it. “Yes.”

  “My name is Nick Fischer.” I smiled and tried to sound apologetic. “I’m a private investigator hired by the university to follow up on sexual harassment cases.” I had her attention.

  She stood straight and focused on my ID. She was nervous and self-conscious of the thin T-shirt. “I don’t have anything to say,” she blurted out.

  “Ms. Martin, if you’d let me come in, I just have a few questions about—”

  “No.” She cut me off. “There’s nothing to it. I already explained. I can’t talk about it.”

  “Please, just—”

  She slammed the door in my face. It wasn’t the first time someone had done that, and it wouldn’t be the last. I didn’t push it. If she wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t talk. Walking back to my pickup, I thought about her last line. I can’t talk about it. Did she mean she didn’t want to, or was she prevented from doing so by a legal agreement? I suspected the latter.

  I checked the handle on her garage door to see if it was open. It was. Why lock it when Doug the security guard was on duty? What I found was a new BMW. White with cream leather seats. I wasn’t a car guy but guessed it was worth north of fifty grand. How did Ms. Martin go from a trailer park overlooking a dairy to a luxury condo and a Beemer while going to school and working at a bar?

  I waved to Doug on my way out. I knew he was looking forward to a cold beer on a hot day, but I had things to do. I searched the work history Kelly had found for Valerie and drove to her last known place of employment. It was a bar near the university named the Library, as if university students ne
eded an excuse to go to a bar. I was expecting a trendy, upscale nightspot where frat boys met sorority girls and jocks wore tight jerseys to show off their muscles. Maybe Danny stayed late one night and offered Valerie a ride home after work.

  From the outside, the Library didn’t look like much. It was in an older part of town across the street from a car dealership. Parts of the street were still paved with red brick. The sign on the outside said they didn’t open until seven on Sunday, but the door was unlocked. I went inside and paused to let my eyes adjust to the dark and to soak up the air conditioning. The North Texas air was less humid than San Antonio, but it was hot enough in September that it didn’t matter. A hundred degrees was a hundred degrees no matter where you stood on the planet.

  Once my eyes adjusted, I saw a collection of used books against the back bar. The place had the feel of an old high school library but smelled like hops and orange peels. It was the kind of place I wouldn’t have minded spending a few hours in, but I had work to do. For six months after I got out of the Corps, I called the VFW in San Antonio home and spent most of the time at the bar with my lips wrapped around a Jack Daniels bottle. That was before I moved back in with Grandpa and started to make the transition back to civilian life.

  The bartender wore a Pink Floyd T-shirt and a manbun. He didn’t look up until I tapped the little library bell on the counter. He looked young, hip, and annoyed.

  “We’re closed,” he sneered.

  “I just wanna ask you a few questions,” I said.

  “We’re a little busy getting ready for opening. Why don’t you show yourself out?”

  I flashed my private eye credentials. “It’s about an employee.”

  He glanced at my license while he pulled a tray of shot glasses out of the washer behind the bar. “You a cop?”

  I wanted to say I was Rodney Dangerfield, but I knew he wouldn’t get it. Nobody was impressed by a private eye anymore.

  “Private investigator,” I said. Manbun was getting on my nerves. It had been a long day following a short night, and I still had a six-hour drive back to San Antonio. I wanted to grab his trendy ball of hair and slam his left ear on the counter, but I figured he would shit himself and call the cops, so I flashed my best disarming smile instead. I was working on my people skills.

  “I’m not asking much. Answer a few simple questions, and I promise not to slice off your topknot with my Buck knife.”

  He looked puzzled, trying to figure out if I was kidding or not. I stopped smiling and held his gaze. He seemed to notice my scars for the first time. He decided I was serious.

  “All right, all right,” he stuttered. “Fuck, dude. What d’you wanna know?” He backed off a few steps down the bar.

  “Does Valerie Martin work here?” I asked as politely as I could.

  A female coworker poked her head out of the back room. “Everything kosher out here?”

  Manbun looked at me. I smiled again.

  “Yeah, no problem,” he said.

  She ducked her head back inside.

  He placed another tray of dirty glasses in the washer. “No, man. She left a year ago. Bitch said she didn’t need the job.”

  “Not a happy ending?”

  “She left on Thanksgiving weekend. Busy time. Home game. We had to cover for her.”

  “Were you friends before that?”

  “I wasn’t her type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “Rich,” he said. He didn’t have to spell it out. I knew the type. Every university town had gold diggers. It cast doubt on her accusations, but since she dropped the charges no one would ever know the truth.

  “One more question. Do you know Danny Allison?”

  He shook his head. “Look, I’m sorry about being an asshole. I’m working double shifts and classes just started.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. Everyone had an excuse for being a jerk when they were called on it. I laid a twenty on the bar and walked out.

  I hopped back in my pickup and found the state highway leading south. I had a pretty good idea where Valerie Martin got her money. I couldn’t prove it, of course, but it wouldn’t take too much digging. I would put Skeeter to work on it. Paying hush money didn’t make Danny Allison guilty of murder, but it established a pattern of behavior.

  The last stop on my list was Lamesa, sixty miles south of Lubbock. It was where Valerie grew up and where her mother still lived and worked at the local café. I called ahead and found out the mom was working until eight.

  The little town of Lamesa was on the red-dirt flatland halfway between Lubbock and Odessa. In other words, in the middle of nowhere. It looked like any of a dozen other half-abandoned towns in the flat expanse of North Texas, like a movie set for The Last Picture Show. I found the café on the main highway where Bunny Martin, Valerie’s mother, worked. I wondered if she would be as tight-lipped as her daughter about the relationship with Danny Allison and if Mom was benefiting from the same windfall Valerie enjoyed.

  The inside of the café was cozy and air conditioned. There was a highway patrolman perched on a counter stool. His girth on top of the metal pedestal resembled a mushroom with a cowboy hat. There was a group of teen girls in the corner booth snickering like teen girls do while their faces were glued to their smartphones.

  I took the management’s advice and sat myself at a table in the far corner of the room, away from the teens and the mushroom. A plump woman with ebony skin walked out of the back room wiping her hands on a towel. She looked to be about the right age to have a twenty-something daughter. Her hair was short and sprinkled with gray. She wore jeans with tennis shoes and a tank top. She had once been a beauty like her daughter, but it seemed that part of her life was over. When she brought me a glass of water, her eyes were blank and checked out.

  She added silverware wrapped in a paper napkin to my table. Her name tag read Bunny. There was no last name. I wondered if her mother had given her the name or if she had adopted it in order to work at the café. I smiled and waited for her to make eye contact. It took her almost a minute to look up at me.

  “Well?” she said. A jarhead with a few scars didn’t faze her. I could have been a Hell’s Angel with a bloody machete on a date with the Queen of England and she would have still tapped her foot impatiently like we were keeping her from the other customers.

  “How’s the pie,” I said, pronouncing it pah, trying to sound local and friendly, but she took it the wrong way.

  “We’re out of pah,” she insisted.

  I looked over at the slice of key lime Mushroom was shoving in his face.

  “He got the last piece,” she said.

  “Just coffee.”

  She grabbed a pot from the warmer behind the counter that had probably been going since breakfast and sloshed stale coffee into my cup.

  “How’s Valerie,” I said. That got her attention and curiosity.

  “You know my daughter?”

  “Sure, Valerie Martin. She’s doing well. I saw her new BMW.”

  “You must have the wrong girl. My Valerie drives an Escort.”

  “Did she show you her new condo?”

  She was getting annoyed. “Look, you got the wrong girl. My daughter lives in a trailer park west of town. She’s a student. Studying business marketing. She works at a bar on nights and weekends.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “She’s busy with school. Doesn’t get down here much.”

  The university was sixty miles away. I had just driven it in under an hour. I was starting to understand where some of Bunny’s bitterness came from. I didn’t ask any more questions. She didn’t want to talk about her daughter.

  I ordered a sandwich to go so that I wouldn’t have to stop again before I got back to San Antonio. I avoided the day-old coffee and bought a bottled water from behind the counter. Valerie’s mom didn’t say goodbye or have a nice day. When the glass door closed, I noticed sh
e was head to head with Mushroom. They’d have a good laugh about what I’d said. When she got off work, Bunny would be thinking about her daughter. She would try to call.

  Valerie wouldn’t answer.

  Nobody involved with this case seemed to be willing to talk.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sam and I crossed the river at the Eagleland Drive trailhead behind the high school and jogged north. At that point, the river was contained in concrete banks and lined with trees and overgrown grass, but the trail was paved and well lit. Ever since the Sosa shooting, I’d been using alternate routes for my evening run. Now that the Allison name had shown up in both murder cases I hoped to solve, I would crank the precaution level up to eight which meant checking my backtrail and always packing my .38. In a few blocks, the rough grass turned into a manicured park that received more regular maintenance. The air was still and hot, as usual. I was thankful that the African dust seemed to have settled after sundown.

  When Sam and I hit our six-mile-an-hour pace, I started thinking about what I’d learned so far. Danny Allison fit all the requisite criteria. He had means, motive, and opportunity. He also had a history of harassment, and unless I was way off base, he had paid off at least one woman to buy her silence. Had Marissa wanted money? Would the baby have jeopardized his inheritance?

  What I needed was proof that he was the father of Marissa’s child. That would require a DNA sample from Danny to match the fetal DNA from Marissa’s autopsy. Kelly had agreed to run the sample though the rapid DNA test at her lab. The only problem was, how was I going to get a sample of Danny’s DNA? I doubted he would give it to me voluntarily. That left me with trying to convince Peterson he had probable cause to get a court order or squeezing a sample out of him myself.

  I felt a punch on my arm that spun me to the ground in midstride, followed by a muffled pop. I knew instantly what it was. My brain processed sniper fire. The whiff from another bullet flew near my head. I recognized the suppressed rifle noise. It was the same compressed-air pop that took out Sosa.