The Judas Murders

by Ken Oder

  Her eyes widened. “Well, jeez Louise! Jest keep your drawers on!” She jumped up and hustled through a door behind her desk.

  The Chihuahua continued to bark at Karson, his fierce blind stare aimed slightly to the left of him.

  “He’s from Mexico,” the smiling old lady said loudly. “That’s why he don’t like coloreds.” Karson had no interest in asking what in the hell she meant by that.

  She looked down at the crazed Chihuahua lovingly. “My late husband drove him all the way back from Tijuana for my fifty-fifth wedding anniversary present.”

  “How thoughtful of him.” Karson stepped back to dodge foam spraying from the dog’s writhing mouth.

  The old lady’s smile widened. “His name is Jesus,” she said, using the Anglicized pronunciation.

  Karson gave her a tight smile. “That would have been my first guess.”

  * * *

  Dr. Creasy Ashburn’s office was in a rear corner of the building next to an operating room. It was a ten-foot-square windowless box with a Virginia Polytechnic Institute diploma and framed photographs of American bulldogs hanging on the wall behind the desk. The same hideous cat-piss-scented, lime-green carpet that polluted the lobby graced the floor.

  Ashburn, a short, balding man in his fifties with a flap of wavy brown hair that he raked over his bald spot every thirty seconds and a plastic face that twitched and crinkled into contortions as he talked, leaned back in a swivel chair with his size-twelve boots propped on his desk. Karson sat across from him.

  “We kinda got off on the wrong foot here,” Ashburn said. He pulled on the lapels of his white lab coat. “I apologize for Libby. She’s my neighbor’s kid. I let her sit at the desk in the lobby to give her something to do, you know, as a favor to my neighbor. I know she’s underage, but it’s legal, see, cause she’s a volunteer. I don’t pay her, which is a good thing because she’s dumb as the wad of Juicy Fruit she never stops chewing.” He held his hands up in the air. “I would never hire a minor. Never have, never will. Swear on my mother’s—”

  “I don’t care about the girl. I’m investigating a case involving succinylcholine. Do you stock that drug?”

  Ashburn raked his hair and scrunched his eyes down to little slits. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Answer my question. Do you have a supply of that drug?”

  “I’m not the only one,” Ashburn said defensively. “Lots of veterinarians use it. It’s a muscle relaxant for surgery, and sometimes we euthanize an animal with it.”

  “Who manufactures your succinylcholine?”

  “Used to be Pfizer, but a salesman came through here last fall and offered us a good price to switch over to a company in Switzerland.”

  “Sandoz?”

  Ashburn flinched. “How do you know the name?”

  “Did Dr. Randall Hotchkiss ever buy succinylcholine from you?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with buying drugs from a company in Switzerland, is there?”

  “Answer my question. Did Dr. Hotchkiss buy succinylcholine from you?”

  Ashburn’s eye twitched. “No. Far as I know, Doc Hotchkiss never owned a pet.”

  “You’re sure no one in your outfit gave him that drug?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” Ashburn pulled at his ear and raked his hair. “Listen, the reason these drug questions make me kinda nervous is I got in trouble long time ago when I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Cole knows all about it.”

  “I don’t know about it and I’m the one sitting here. Answer my question.”

  Ashburn looked like he might cry. “Well, I had a girl working for me long time ago.” He flinched again. “Now, she was over eighteen, so don’t get your dander up.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Well,” he whined, “she started selling my painkillers to high school kids. I didn’t know anything about it till I caught her on the way out the door one night with codeine and hydrocodone in her purse.” Ashburn held up his hands again. “I called the law right away. Cole arrested her. Judge Blackwell sent her up the river for a year.” Ashburn dropped his hands into his lap and grimaced. “Thing is, see, The Daily Record ran articles about it for a week. The bad publicity cost me a passel of customers. After that mess, I put my drugs under lock and key. Nobody has access to them except me.”

  “You’re sure you’ve never given or sold succinylcholine to anyone.”

  “I’m sure.” Then he flinched for the third time in the meeting, and his mouth, both eyes, and one of his cheeks twitched violently. “Well, there’s Percy, but that’s a different situation.”

  “Who’s Percy?”

  “Percy McDibble. He’s an old boy lives over in Tinker’s Mill. We’re partners in a dog breeding business. American bulldogs.” He pointed at the photographs behind him.

  “Did you sell succinylcholine to him?”

  Ashburn spread his hands out like an umpire giving a call of safe to a base runner. “It’s all legal and aboveboard. I supply him with drugs for the business: vaccinations, antibiotics, and the like.”

  “So you supply him with succinylcholine?”

  “Well . . .” Ashburn looked uncomfortable.

  “If I have to tell you to answer my question one more time, I’ll throw the book at you for little Miss Juicy Fruit. It’s illegal to employ her without a permit whether or not she’s paid.”

  “It is?” Ashburn whimpered.

  “This is your last chance, Mr. Ashburn. Did you give succinylcholine to this man, McDibble?”

  Ashburn held up his hands. “All right, all right.” He let out a long breath. “One of Percy’s dams had cancer a couple years ago. I couldn’t save her. I gave him ketamine and succinylcholine to put her down. He had enough left over to euthanize a dog for a friend. I have to charge fifty dollars to cover the cost of pet euthanasia, but Percy did it for his friend for free. There’s nothing illegal about it.” He hesitated. “Far as I know, at least.” He took a deep breath. “Thing you need to understand is Percy has a soft heart.”

  “What’s that have to do with succinylcholine?”

  “Well,” Ashburn said, raking his hair with a trembling hand. “People who can’t pay my fee started going to Percy a few years back. He asked me for more ketamine and succinylcholine, and I sold it to him.”

  “How much did you sell him?”

  Ashburn swiped his hand across his mouth. “He’s got enough on hand to put down a dozen dogs.”

  “All of the succinylcholine you sold him was manufactured by Sandoz?”

  Ashburn shrugged. “Yeah.” He crunched his face into a pile of wrinkles. “It’s because Sandoz is a foreign company, isn’t it? That’s what’s got the law on my tail. Swear to God I had no idea it was illegal to buy drugs from a foreign outfit. I thought they were on the up and up.”

  “Where is McDibble’s dog breeding operation?”

  “Tinker’s Mill, on the corner of Horsehead and that dirt road that goes up to the top of Bald Eagle Mountain.”

  Karson stood.

  Ashburn looked up at Karson fearfully, as though he expected him to slap the cuffs on him. His eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know it was illegal. You’ve got to believe me.”

  Karson suppressed a smile. Finding the source of succinylcholine almost made up for Jesus and the Juicy Fruit girl. Almost, but not quite.

  “Thank you for your help, Mr. Ashburn.” Karson stepped over to the door and looked back at Ashburn. “I’ll come back next Wednesday. You have until then to get a work permit covering the young lady.” His smile widened as he walked out the door.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Provocation

  March 9, 1967, Thursday morning

  That same morning, Cole sat at his desk looking at his outline of a theory about the murders of Hazel Emley and Betty Lou Mundy. Betty Lou and Randy became lovers five years ago. Leland found out she was having an affair with someone and l
eft her. She went to Reverend Chatham for counseling; she and Leland reconciled; and she broke off the affair with Randy. He began to drink heavily when she rejected him, and his wife left him, either because of his excessive drinking, because she found out about Betty Lou, or both.

  After Randy somehow convinced Betty Lou to take up with him again last summer, Reba ran into Leland at Carter’s Tavern and he gave in to temptation. When Betty Lou discovered the affair between Leland and Reba, she blamed her mother for poisoning all their future relationships with men. The affair drove her over the edge and she enticed Randy to help her kill her mother. Randy gave Hazel an overdose of succinylcholine and rushed her body to the undertaker to make certain the murder would not be discovered. He and Betty Lou then had a falling out for some unknown reason. Randy followed her home from Kelly’s Place February 19 and tried to convince her to take him back. They argued at her front gate. She pulled the Baby Browning on him. They struggled for control of it, and he shot her, either accidently or in anger.

  Cole leaned back into his lumbar pillow and looked over the outline again. It all made sense except for the timeline. Betty Lou left the preacher’s house on Christmas night only a few hours before Hazel’s death. The preacher had the impression she’d discovered Leland’s affair with Reba that day. If that was the case, she would have decided to kill Hazel and convinced Randy to help her only that night, but Randy would have needed at least a day’s advance notice to acquire succinylcholine from an unconventional source.

  Cole was puzzling over that problem when Frank Woolsey showed up at his office door. “Finished working with that photograph of Betty Lou you gave me,” he said, his waxed moustache twitching. “Let’s talk at the table. I need to spread out my work.”

  Cole carried his lumbar pillow over to the chair at the head of the conference table and sat down. Frank sat to his left and placed before them the original photograph and several enlargements.

  “Rupert Dilbey figured out the photograph was taken with a Kodak Flash Bantam camera,” he said, “a popular model in the forties. The photographer used Kodak 828 film. There are only six photo shops still operating in southwestern Virginia that were in business fifteen years ago, and we checked with all of them. None of them keep sales records that far back, but a few of them still employ people who were working back then. I spoke to all of them. No one remembered a particular sale of that kind of camera or developing the photo of Betty Lou.”

  “So we’ve hit a wall,” Cole said.

  “Yep, so I fell back to trying to identify the house where the photograph was taken. This is the clearest enlargement Rupert could manage.” Frank pushed an eighteen-by-twelve-inch photo across the table and handed Cole a magnifying glass. “You can see the headboard has a reddish-brown stain. The bedpost is hexagonal with a sphere at the top, about the size of a baseball. The enlargement blurs the images behind Betty Lou, but you can make out a pale blue wall with a big crack in the plaster that starts out at the corner near the ceiling and runs along a jagged slant toward a door.”

  Cole used the glass to follow the path of the blurred crack and held the magnifying glass over the door. It was closed, its wood stained dark. Hanging on a hook on the back of the door was a bulky garment.

  “I’m guessing that’s a closet door,” Frank said. “Looks like a winter coat hanging on a hook on the outside of it.”

  Cole squinted at the photograph. The enlarged image was grainy, but the garment hanging on the door was discernible, a winter coat, jet-black in color, heavy fur, long enough to come down to midcalf on a tall person. The coat looked familiar to Cole. While he stared at it, a memory of that coat flashed across his mind’s eye and a tingle went up his spine.

  “If we knew where to look for that bedroom,” Frank said, “we might be able to make a match. Of course, by now the bed may be long gone, the wall repainted, the crack repaired.”

  Cole set the magnifying glass on the table, stunned. The pieces of the puzzle of Betty Lou’s murder all came together in a matter of a few seconds. It was as if Cole had been wandering around in a dark room and he suddenly found a light switch and turned it on. “I’ve been played for a fool,” he said.

  “What?”

  Cole stood and went to the file cabinets. He found the old musty folder he was looking for in a bottom drawer. He opened it, checked the date of death, and read Randy Hotchkiss’s report.

  “What are you looking at?” Frank said.

  Cole went back to the table, put the photograph of Betty Lou Mundy in the evidence pouch, grabbed his hat, and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Frank said.

  “Down the right path, for a change.” Cole headed out to his patrol car.

  * * *

  An hour later, Cole stood on Bessie Tilden’s front porch looking through the screen door. Bessie sat hunched over the piano, her hands crab-walking across the keys, her foot tapping the pedals off rhythm. She played in fits and starts, the tune slowing, dying out, beginning again, then faltering. Cole barely recognized the song, a disjointed, slowed-down rendition of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He waited until he was certain she’d finished. Then he knocked.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. Her hands lay idle on the keys. She looked up at the array of family photographs on the wall above the piano and sighed.

  Cole rapped on the screen door a second time. “Excuse me, ma’am. It’s me, Cole Grundy.”

  She wiped her eyes, got up off the bench with difficulty, and hobbled to the door. She frowned at Cole. “I don’t want to talk about Leland.”

  She’d aged considerably in the few days since he’d seen her. Her face sagged more and she stood more humpbacked. Tear tracks had cut rivulets through the heavy coat of rouge on her cheeks. She wore a loose-fitting purple blouse with green ruffles and bright yellow slacks with huge red roses over the thighs. He had always thought she had eccentric taste in clothing. Now he wondered if she was trying to create a false sense of gaiety, or if her loud outfits might even represent the outward vestiges of a growing madness.

  Dreading the conversation to come, he took a moment to harden his resolve, and then said, “You lied to me, ma’am.”

  She bowed her head, her chin quivering.

  He opened the screen door and stepped inside. He guided her to the sofa and helped her sit down.

  He sat in the rocker and withdrew the evidence pouch from his pocket. He opened it and spilled the photograph on the coffee table.

  She glanced at it and winced.

  “Tell me again how you found this picture, ma’am.”

  She balled the leg of her slacks in her fist and looked out the window. Her lips parted and then closed. She swallowed. “I . . . I found it . . .” She drew in a deep breath and seemed to gather what little strength she could manage. “It was on the kitchen table. Inside his Field and Stream magazine.” She looked at Cole vacantly. “He loved to hunt and fish, you know.”

  “Leland?”

  She appeared to be lost for a moment and then seemed to regain her presence of mind. “Yes, of course. Leland.”

  “Where was Betty Lou when you found the picture?”

  She hesitated, and then put her hand to her eyes. “I think she . . . Someone came to the door, I think.” She dropped her hand to her lap. “Yes. Someone knocked on the door and she went into the living room to answer it.”

  “Who was at the door?”

  “I don’t remember. A delivery man, I think.”

  “Last time you told me she went into the living room to answer the telephone.”

  She looked down at her fist and kneaded her slacks. “Maybe it was the telephone. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago and I was upset . . . It . . . it was such a shock when . . .” She ran her hand across her brow. “Must we talk about this?”

  Cole blew out a short heavy breath, wishing there was a less painful path to the truth. He picked up the photograph and held it up to her face.

  She turned away.r />
  “Look at it, ma’am.”

  “No, please.”

  “Look at it,” he said sharply.

  Her head turned slowly and her tortured eyes settled on the photo. “See the bedpost in this photo, ma’am. It’s reddish-brown with a sphere on top. Do you know anyone who owns a bed with a post like that?”

  Bessie turned her head away and closed her eyes. A tear bumped its way down the crevices of her cheek.

  Cole set the photograph on the table. “You didn’t see any headlights out by the gate the night of the murder, did you?”

  She let go of her slacks and clasped her fists together in her lap. “There was a big dark car—”

  “No, ma’am. I believed you when I was here before, but I know better now. There were no headlights. There was no car. You made that up. You lied to me.”

  She didn’t look up.

  “Based on your word, I thought a man I knew killed Betty Lou, but he didn’t kill her. He didn’t have anything to do with her murder.”

  She looked down at her hands and said nothing.

  Cole stood and went over to the piano. He took one of the framed photographs off the wall, came back to the sitting area, set the frame on the coffee table, and sat down in the rocker.

  “That’s a pretty picture of you in front of Monticello, ma’am. When was it taken?”

  “Nineteen thirty or thereabouts,” she said weakly.

  “That’s a handsome skunk-fur coat you’re wearing in that picture. Where’d you get that coat?”

  “Milton gave it to me back in the twenties.”

  Cole was quiet for a while and then said, “That morning you found me on Leland’s porch, the morning of the murder, you wore that same skunk-fur coat. Do you remember that, ma’am?”

  She didn’t respond.

  Cole pressed on. “Those skunk-fur coats were popular when I was a little boy, but they fell out of favor long ago. You’ve got the only one left I know of.”

  She donned a wan smile. “It’s torn at the seams and worn and frayed, but I can’t bring myself to throw it out. It brings back so many fond memories.” A faraway look came across her face. “We were so happy back then.”