I spotted the dumb blond from the creamery in Erwin. I heard the voice coming from the front of the coffee shop before I saw her. It sounded vaguely familiar. As I waited for my line of vision to clear, I kept hoping that my dim recollection would kick-in to inform me of what I had apparently lost over the last month.
“You okay?” Starnes asked.
“Yeah, I recognize that loud voice I’m hearing,” I said.
“In this crowd you are hearing a loud voice?” she said with genuine sarcasm.
It was then that I spotted the blond lady sitting in one of those automated chairs that could do anything but make coffee. Another woman was standing in front of her. The woman had her back to our table and obstructed my line of vision sporadically. She appeared to be dancing around while the blond apparently was having a sexual experience with the chair. Among her loud laughter, deep moans, and coos of great gusto which delighted the passing crowd, I was able to remember and identify.
“See that woman in the chair, laughing louder than necessary?” I said to Starnes as I nodded my head in the direction of the distinct voice.
Starnes turned and eventually spotted the woman I referenced. She watched for a minute or so before acknowledging.
“The blond having the apparent orgasm?” she asked.
“Yeah. Who’s the woman standing in front of her with her back to us?” I said.
Starnes stared for a few more seconds and then looked at me quizzically.
“It looks like Lucinda,” she said.
“I think so, too.”
We waited to see if she would turn around. We watched the two women as they talked and laughed together. Best friends. They seemed to be having a good time. At least the blond was having a good time.
Suddenly, the blond jumped out of the chair into the arms of the woman whose back was still turned to us. Then together, as they continued to embrace, they turned and we could easily see the face of Lucinda Bradshaw. They hugged and then kissed. Mouth to mouth. Wow. Public display of affection. East Tennessee had come a long way from what I had heard.
“Who’s the blond?” Starnes asked me.
“Betty Jo.”
“Betty Jo what?”
“Didn’t get that part of the name.”
“How do you know her?”
“Surveillance. She was my source for the verification of the whereabouts of Lucinda on the night of October 28, the day that Abel Gosnell disappeared.”
“The day we have established that he most likely was killed, you mean.”
“Yeah, that day.”
“Why her?”
“I was told, and she later confirmed, that she and Lucinda are best friends and they both have high school age daughters.”
“They seem to be tighter than best friends.”
“Sometimes it happens,” I said.
“If you touch me like that, I won’t arrest you. I’ll shoot you.”
“Not very open minded are you?”
“Not about that,” Starnes said.
“You anti-gay?”
“No ma’am, I am not. Just not my cup of tea.”
“Apparently I have overlooked an angle totally unexpected,” I said.
“What angle is that?”
“I’ll let you know. I need to do some additional research.”
“Gosnell goes to trial next month,” she reminded me.
“I’ll get to it tomorrow.”
“And in the meantime?” she asked.
“Let’s follow the lovers at a safe distance to see what else there is to see.”
“Voyeur, are you?” Starnes said.
“Nah, just curious. I am detective, remember. Let’s do some detecting.”
“How about you follow them and I will go shop. We’ll meet back here in one hour,” she said and left me before I could respond. Not sure what that says about me. I would rather follow a couple of latent lesbians rather than shop. Don’t think I will assess that. We detectives have a saying – a clue is a clue is a clue. At least that could be a saying we detectives have. I decided to follow the clues in front of me.
I stayed with Betty Jo and Lucinda for the next forty-five minutes. Tailing suspects is a gift I developed as a child following my daddy around Clancyville without his knowledge. To say that I am good at it is an understatement. I made mental notes as to where they stopped and what they did. I couldn’t hear much of their conversations during that span, but now and then, Betty Jo, who was the loud one, would offer up some exclamation that was easy for everyone to hear within the range of half a football field.
Being such a shrewd investigator and a keen observer of human beings, I deduced that Betty Jo and Lucinda were, in fact, very much in love. Arm in arm, hand in hand, and occasionally, lip to lip, they demonstrated their sexual preference clearly for anyone who was watching or could see them by happenstance. As far as I could ascertain, I seemed to be the singular soul intentionally watching. Despite the conservative climate of east Tennessee, I noticed that I was the only one paying much attention to them. Besides an occasional stare when Betty Jo’s voice climbed a couple of octaves, most people were too busy looking and hurrying.
They spent more time at Jeffers Jewelry Palace than any other place. The clerks in the store seem to know them both and engaged in lively conversation with them for the longest interval. They each bought some earrings, and Betty Jo added a necklace to her purchase. When they finally left the jewelry store, Starnes phoned to remind me that it was time to go home.
“I’ll meet you in ten minutes. A little follow-up to our turtle doves and I’ll be right there,” I said.
I waited until the lovers were completely out of sight and then entered the jewelry store to test my undercover intuition and explore further my latent curiosity.
“Hi,” I said to the bubbly clerk who approached me, “those two who just left, Betty Jo and Luci, they’re friends of mine.”
“Oh, yes. They’re a hoot, aren’t they?” she said.
“Maybe two hoots,” I said.
The bubbly clerk laughed harder than necessary.
“I wanted to get them something really special for Christmas, and since I saw them in here, I thought you might be able to help me.”
“Oh, my, yes, indeed. No problem. Let me show you some of the things they absolutely adored,” Miss Bubbly moved towards a section of high priced bracelets.
“Do they come in here often?” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked and paused.
“I don’t think so.”
“No, I mean, are you joking. They like come in here every Friday night. I mean, like they’re practically an institution in this store. This is the place they come. Let me show you,” she said and walked back over to her cash register. Sometimes detectives do not have to ask many questions to get answers.
She opened the register, removed a key, unlocked a drawer, put the key back in the register, and then took out what appeared to me to be a ledger book.
“You keep a record of attendance?” I said.
“Ha, that’s funny. You’re really funny, you know. No, this is not attendance, silly. This is a record of purchases over the last six months. Like, I have every instance of a buy recorded right here. Can you believe that?”
“If you say so, I can believe it,” I said.
“You’re a hoot, you know. A real, like, live hoot,” she said. “Look at this.”
She laid the log book on the counter, turned it around so that I could read the entries, and then proceeded to show me every entry that recorded a customer’s name, a date, what they bought, and how they paid for it. So much for customer privacy.
“See that?” she said. “Every Friday night for the last six months…oops, lookie here, they missed a Friday night,” she said as she pointed to the gap in her log. I noticed the date in her column where the two ladies had missed.
“Imagine that,” I said to her as I walked out of Jeffers Jewelry Palace without buying Betty Jo an
d Luci a Christmas gift.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“That doesn’t mean as much as you think it means,” Starnes said to me.
“It means she lied to me,” I countered.
“Everybody lies.”
“Yeah, I get that. But the reason ….”
“Could be to hide the gay relationship,” Starnes said.
“Could be.”
“Could be she made a mistake. The clerk told you that they came nearly every Friday night. Betty Jo likely didn’t keep as good a record as the clerk. She forgot one.”
“Convenient one to forget,” I said.
“You’re back to that stuff about no coincidences, aren’t you?”
I smiled but said nothing.
“So what are you going to do with this info?” Starnes asked.
“Likely go irritate some people.”
“Like me.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Yes, that’s becoming steadily evident.”
“You could send me home for good.”
“Time is running out on you for this one. You better irritate some folks quickly, or it won’t mean anything.”
“Truth is truth, no matter when it comes around.”
“Might not help the innocent,” Starnes said.
“You think Cain Gosnell is innocent?”
“No. I was projecting your thinking.”
“He’s guilty of a lot, but I’m not sure about the murder of his brother.”
“The evidence points to him,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. But you don’t mind if I keep digging, do you?”
“And irritating people? No. You’re good at what you do.”
“A compliment?” I said.
“Don’t let it go to your head. You still annoy me.”
Two days before Christmas we had a snow storm. Something shy of eight inches lay across the meadow and mountains that formed the valley in which the Carver homestead rested. Spud and Nadine had twenty-five acres of good farmland according to their daughter. It was a Norman Rockwell scene the morning as we awakened to the reflected sunlight on the whiteness of the Blue Ridge Mountains all about us.
Road conditions were tricky all morning, so Starnes and I, despite my Jeep and her truck, remained steadfast in our warm environment. On a whim, I suspect, Starnes brought in some firewood and had the living room chimney going by mid-morning. Another Rockwell moment captured against the artificial Christmas tree on the table in the corner. Three presents lay under the tree.
“You remember a lot of the Christmases growing up here?” I said.
“Most, if not all.”
“You have a favorite one?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Starnes said. “I was ten or eleven and I wanted a rifle.”
“Like most girls growing up, huh?”
“Don’t be cute. I wasn’t like most girls growing up.”
“That thought had occurred to me.”
“Anyway, I wanted a rifle just so I could learn to shoot. I didn’t like hunting or killing, just the knowledge of shooting a gun was sufficient for me.”
“But your mother was against it and your father wanted to buy you the gun?” I said.
“Other way around,” she clarified.
“Really?”
“Mom was the tom-boy of the family. She could do it all, but actually chose to be the woman, the lady-like creature that everyone thought she was. Conscious choice.”
“And your dad objected?”
“Vigorously,” Starnes said. “I think Daddy said no so much it became the only word he knew whenever guns and Starnes were ever mentioned in the same sentence. But, as always, Momma won out eventually, got me the gun and I learned to shoot.”
“A rifle?”
“Yeah. It had belonged originally to my grandfather on my mother’s side. She had kept it all those years from the time she inherited it until she gave it to me for Christmas. She had kept it for the son she never had.”
“Nice gift,” I said.
“Best ever.”
“Better than a Barbie®?” I said.
“Don’t get me started. Who looks like that doll, really? Look at me. Do you see a shapely blond perfectly sculptured?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“Get real. I adored my rifle. Still have it.”
“No surprise to me,” I said and smiled at her.
Late in the afternoon, I called Rogers and asked her to do some checking.
“How much snow?” Rogers asked.
“About eight inches.”
“Is that a lot for that area?”
“Enough to slow life down.”
“Wish it would snow here,” she said.
“Wouldn’t slow you down.”
“No, but it would make a difference in traffic.”
“Since when do you concern yourself with traffic?”
“If people are off the streets, then they are in their homes. If people are in their homes, then they are either watching television or on their computers. If people are on their computers, then it presents a wondrous challenge for me to get around their incessant chatting, emailing, face-booking, and all that other social networking that goes on whenever people stay home. I long for those challenges.”
“My, oh my, aren’t you something. I shall never fully understand your reasoning,” I said.
“Nor I, yours,” she responded.
“Call me when you find something.”
“You mean if, don’t you?”
“I have every hope that you will find something,” I said.
“That intuition stuff again?”
“Make fun all you will, but it is something to be reckoned with.”
“Only if you believe in a world of spirits,” Rogers replied.
By late afternoon, the roads of the county had cleared according to the weather report that Starnes had been given when she drove into the office. I stayed at the Carver house to wait on whatever Rogers would find. Just before Starnes arrived with our pizza supper, Rogers called.
“You will never get me to cross over to the intuitive side, no matter how often your hunches bear fruit,” she said.
“Bear fruit?”
“I’m been reading the Bible again.”
“The Bible,” I repeated.
“Yeah, it’s a decent story. A little convoluted in a few places, but all in all, some good values offered and some questionable beliefs mingled with some truth.”
“You’re headed towards liberalism, you know?”
“I supposed, but I think it worth my while to read it, absorb it, and be prepared whenever I cross paths with those who use and misuse it.”
“Interesting logic. You feel the same about the Qurán, the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, and the Analects of Confucius?”
“Hey, I’ve just beginning my religious studies. I’ve absorbed The Rig Veda, The Bhagavad-Gita, and The Dhammapada. I am now working through The Holy Bible. It’s the Roman Catholic edition which has more books to read. I suspect I’ll be far ahead of what most people have done along these lines,” she said.
“Precious, you’re so far ahead of most people that we will never catch up with you. What did you find?”
“You were nearly correct.”
“Nearly?”
“I found a singular instance where Lucinda Gosnell bought 9mm cartridges two years ago.”
“But no German Luger 9mm registered in her name?”
“No, but she did purchase a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and her weapon of choice was a 9mm Luger.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Christmas Day was divided between a visit with Spud Carver in the morning and exchanging gifts with Starnes in the afternoon. Spud had regressed in his knowledge of having that vague memory of my being around. He told one of the attendants to keep an eye on me, that I was following his daughter and that I looked suspicious. He wasn’t completely wrong in his assessment.
Starnes b
ought her father some socks, underwear, and a new blanket. The socks and underwear were wrapped together and was the gift she had placed underneath the artificial tree at the house. The blanket was a late addition and she had me wrap it. It seems that Spud was complaining that the heat in the building was set too low and he couldn’t sleep at night due to what he called frigid conditions. The truth was, the building was kept somewhere around seventy degrees and I usually sweated like a day-laborer whenever we visited.
We arrived like two Magi from the East bearing gifts. Christmas Day was not one of Spud’s more lucid occasions, so the experience of being there to celebrate with him was exceptionally painful for Starnes. She had intended for us to stay for the Christmas Day lunch prepared for the residents and family members, but we left early. Her call, not mine.
Starnes was pushing his wheelchair down to hallway towards the dining area when Spud applied the brakes. He turned in his chair to face her.
“Who are you two girls again?” he said.
“I can’t do this,” Starnes said to me.
She called one of the nurses to come take her father and we both left. I chose not to ask any questions nor make any comments on our return trip to the house. The snow was still very much with us since the temperatures were hovering in the twenties and the white stuff had no where to go. I can tell you this – a white Christmas is not necessarily all that it is cracked up to be. Thank you very much, Bing.
We sat around the fire in the living room and ate leftover pizza while Starnes stared into the flames. At some point after our Christmas feast, she walked over to the green plastic tree and retrieved her gift to me. It was a soft leather back-holster she thought might make carrying my .45 a little easier. It was a thoughtful gift.
I gave her a couple of books. One was on some of the new technologies available in forensics. The other was on the role reversals between children and their aging parents. To my surprise, she left the forensic innovations on the table by the sofa. She took the other book to her bedroom to read that night.
I gave Sam a new food dish and water bowl set. Starnes bought him a couple of toys to chew on and play around with in case he got bored. I tried to tell her that Sam never got bored. Sleep was a passion for him, so as long as there was a soft spot somewhere around, he would never enjoy boredom.
When Blood Cries: A Clancy Evans Mystery (Clancy Evans PI Book 6) Page 12