The Judas Murders

by Ken Oder

  Cole leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped together. “This photograph of Betty Lou,” he said. “There’s a coat hanging on a closet door behind her. You can’t see it too good with the naked eye, but we put a magnifying lens on it. It’s a big old black fur coat, ma’am. It looks an awful lot like that skunk-fur coat Milton gave you back in the twenties, the one you wore the morning of the murder when you found me on Leland’s porch.”

  She clasped her hands in her lap, looked down at them, and sat very still.

  A tractor droned faintly in the distance and then grew louder. Cole looked out the window and watched it roll down the hill, a blond teenage boy wearing a denim jacket and jeans, jouncing along on its seat. The tractor passed the house and the sound of its engine faded away below the Mundy property.

  Cole gave Bessie a few moments to come to terms with the fact that he knew what she’d done and then said, “How’d you get your hands on Betty Lou’s gun, ma’am?”

  She didn’t reply for a long time. Then she said in a voice so soft it was almost inaudible, “I took it out of her purse.”

  “When was this, ma’am?”

  “That last night, a Saturday night.” She took a tissue out of her pants pocket and dabbed her eyes.

  “Before Leland came home?”

  She nodded.

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “She came over here on Saturday nights those last few weeks, crying and drunk, smelling like a distillery. Said she had to talk to someone or she couldn’t go on. She claimed Leland had been cheating on her with her sister.” Bessie shook her head and scowled. “The nerve! Accusing Leland of being unfaithful after what she did with . . .” Bessie trembled, then went still, and stared off into space.

  “What happened that last night when she came over here, ma’am?”

  Bessie wiped her eyes with the tissue. “She sat at my kitchen table, crying and carrying on about her sister and Leland. Her purse lay open on the table with a little gun inside it. I didn’t hear anything she said after I saw it. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.” She paused for a long time. Then she said, “I’d been careful for twenty years not to come anywhere near a gun. I couldn’t even trust myself around my kitchen knives when Betty Lou was here, but that night, that little gun lay right there within arm’s length, and before I knew what I’d done, I reached out and took hold of it and hid it in my lap under the table while she sat right there, too drunk to notice.”

  “But you didn’t shoot her at that time.”

  “No, I didn’t.” She looked at Cole and then down at the floor. “I didn’t want you to find her body in my kitchen.” She wept softly.

  He gave her a little time before he asked, “What happened that morning when she came home?”

  There was a long pause while Bessie stared at the tissue in her lap, squeezing it with both hands, her knees pressed together. “She usually came home from her carrying-on around five. I waited up for her, watching from my window. When I saw her headlights pull into the driveway, I went outside and walked along the road to their gate. She parked under the carport, like always. When she got out of her car and walked around toward her front door, I called out to her, ‘Come out to the road. I’m hurt. I need your help.’” Bessie shook her head back and forth slowly. “When she came through the gate, I pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger. It made a little snap-bean noise.” She swiped her hand across her brow. “After so many years of thinking about it, it was over in only a few seconds.” She wept feebly again.

  Cole watched her cry, feeling bad for her. When she stopped crying, he said, “Did you wipe your fingerprints off the gun, ma’am?”

  Another long silence and then, “I didn’t want to get caught. I wasn’t worried about the punishment. I’m old and broken down and I don’t have much time left anyway.” She looked at Cole, her face flushed. “It’s the shame I didn’t want to face. The shame of people finding out she stole Milton from me.” She let out a long breath. “I wiped the gun off with my coat sleeve and dropped it on the ground beside her and came back here and called your office.”

  Cole could see in his mind’s eye what happened after that. Leland came home after Betty Lou was murdered, like he told Cole. He found her corpse in the yard. Probably grieved over her. Embraced her so that her blood got on his shirt. Saw the gun lying beside her. Maybe he picked it up thoughtlessly because he was in shock or maybe the idea of killing himself sprang to mind when he saw it. For whatever reason, he pocketed her little gun and went to the porch and sat there until Cole came along and drew him out of his trance. His misery got the best of him and he put the gun to his head.

  Cole looked at Bessie, her shoulders slumped, her fists balled around the tissue. A heartbroken old woman who deserved pity, but the law wouldn’t look upon her in that light. Her actions were damning. Premeditation, lying in wait, elaborate efforts to conceal her guilt. First degree murder, an open and shut case.

  “I need to look around the house, ma’am. You wait here.”

  He got up and walked through the kitchen and down a hallway to the master bedroom. A four-poster bed with a canopy stood against the wall.

  He found a smaller second bedroom across the hall. He went inside and stood beside a double bed. Its arched headboard was reddish-brown. Its bedposts were hexagonal, crowned by a sphere the size of a baseball. A crack in the plaster on a pale blue wall ran in a jagged line from an upper corner to a dark-stained door, faded with age, with a hook on it. On the hook Bessie’s skunk-fur coat hung just as it did in the photograph twenty years ago.

  Cole looked down at the floor and sighed. The sheriff’s office file about Milton Tilden’s death reflected that he died on July 16, 1947, at the age of sixty-four. Randy Hotchkiss’s report said Bessie found him in bed at eleven o’clock in the morning after returning from grocery shopping. The cause of death was a massive coronary arrest. The file shed no additional light on the circumstances surrounding his passing.

  Cole considered those circumstances. He wondered if Milton suffered a heart attack while making love to Betty Lou. He wondered if Bessie came home from grocery shopping to find Milton’s corpse in the bed in the spare bedroom instead of the master. He wondered if Milton was dressed in his bedclothes or naked. He wondered how much time had passed after Milton’s death before Bessie found the photograph of Betty Lou in Milton’s Field and Stream or in his True Detective or in some random hiding place, a locked desk drawer, a box in the attic, or a bedside table drawer in that spare bedroom.

  Cole went out to the living room.

  Bessie sat on the sofa, staring into the distance.

  “I’m afraid we’ve got to go into town now, ma’am.”

  She looked at Cole. “What will they do with me?”

  Cole couldn’t look her in the eye and tell her the truth. She was an old lady with a mountain of provocation. Judge Blackwell would likely be lenient, but she couldn’t escape serving time in prison, and even a short sentence would be the same for her as the death penalty.

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  She gave him a pleading look. “I resisted temptation for twenty years. That ought to count for something, don’t you think?”

  Twenty years was a long time to live next door to a woman who’d slept with a man you’d loved all your life. A woman whose nude photograph your husband took with your Kodak camera in your spare bedroom fresh off a lovemaking fest, a photograph you hid from everyone while you pored over it every day for two decades.

  “I hope it counts for something, ma’am.”

  He took her arm and helped her stand.

  She looked up at him, a perplexed expression on her face. “You want to know the worst part of it all, Cole?”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “It still hurts.”

  “Some types of pain never go away,” he said with sand in his voice.

  He guided her out the door and closed it behind them.

  Chap
ter Thirty-Two

  The Trailer Park

  March 9, 1967, Thursday noon

  While Cole was driving Bessie Tilden to headquarters, Ray Middleditch headed over to Hukstep’s Trailer Park to scout Reba Emley’s trailer for the contract’s last hit.

  He was looking forward to getting this cursed project behind him. Back in December when he considered his approach to the first hit on Hazel Emley, his plan was to smother her with a bed pillow to make it look like she died of natural causes, as Boss requested. Homicide by suffocation wasn’t the perfect crime. A good medical examiner could find signs of foul play—pale lips and nose, minor hemorrhaging under the flesh of the face, flecks of blood in the lungs—but Ray thought it was his best alternative until he saw a newspaper article about a lethal drug that disappeared from the victim’s corpse almost immediately after death. Because the drug was untraceable, poisoning by an overdose appeared to be the perfect crime. A minimal amount of medical research informed him where he could purchase it without raising suspicion and how to administer a fatal injection.

  On Christmas night he parked his truck down the road from the old lady’s shack and knocked on the door, pretending to be an out-of-town john, horny for a woman his own age. From the looks of the old hag, she hadn’t plied her trade for years and she was skeptical of his offer, but a wad of cash warmed her up. When she took off her clothes to do the deed, he held her down and plunged the needle in her hip. She struggled against his restraint for a short while and then went limp. Her breathing gradually slowed and then stopped. The drug worked as advertised, a quick trip to hell, less than five minutes from injection to the devil’s furnace.

  He was searching for a bed gown to dress her up so she looked like she died in her sleep when a car drove up outside. There was no back way out, so Ray drew his gun and hid in the bedroom closet. Betty Lou Mundy stormed into the bedroom, drunk and crying. When she saw the old lady lying naked face down on the bed, she apparently thought she was asleep. She grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her, and shouted angrily at her. Ray was considering killing Betty Lou then and there, but within seconds, another car arrived and Doc Hotchkiss staggered in, also drunk.

  He seemed alarmed when he saw Betty Lou roughing up the old lady. He pulled her away from the corpse and leaned over it. He ran his hand over bruises on the old lady’s back and arm and then put his fingers to her throat. He straightened up and looked at Betty Lou fearfully. “You’ve killed her,” he said.

  Betty Lou denied it, but he didn’t believe her. Ray gleaned from their back-and-forth that they’d had an affair, she’d broken it off, and Hotchkiss had followed her there to beg her to take him back. He was certain she’d murdered the old lady because she’d told him in the past that she hated her and wanted her to die. “I’m Papa Bear,” he pleaded over and over again. “I’ll protect you. Call the sheriff’s office. They’ll call me to take care of the body, and I’ll fix it so no one will ever know what you did.”

  She refused at first, but Hotchkiss finally convinced her the sheriff’s office would think she killed the old lady, whether or not she had, unless he shielded her from suspicion. He rolled the old lady over on her back and placed a blanket over her, and they left the shack together.

  Ray scoured the place to make sure he’d left no sign of his presence and then fled.

  That first chaotic hit had set the tone for the whole project. Some random killer got to Betty Lou only hours before Ray could take down Leland, nullifying weeks of preparation and prompting him to eliminate Bowie, which dropped in Cole Grundy’s lap a bonus corpse and a crime scene that could lead to Ray.

  Then came Ballard and his pit bull. If Ray hadn’t remembered Hotchkiss from the night at Hazel’s shack, he would have died from the mauling. Then, of course, after he forced Hotchkiss to treat his wounds, he had no choice but to kill him, handing Cole another corpse. He staged it as a suicide with the poisonous drug, hoping Cole wouldn’t investigate, but transmissions Ray intercepted over the scanner told him his ruse was unsuccessful. To make matters worse, he’d learned that morning from a communication between Toby Vess and dispatch that Ballard was still alive, unconscious in the intensive care unit at Dolley Madison, his prognosis uncertain.

  A bad result, but curable. Security in hospitals was lax, and there was no radio talk about posting a guard on Ballard’s door. If Ballard didn’t expire on his own, Ray could pay a quick visit to the hospital and finish him off without much risk.

  But first he had to deal with Reba. Eight miles from Fox Run in Saddleback Cove, Ray turned off Whiskey Road into Hukstep’s Trailer Park. Thirty-four trailers were spaced closely together along both sides of a horseshoe-shaped dirt road with access to Whiskey Road.

  Ray drove toward the first bend in the road where Reba’s trailer sat on the outside of the horseshoe. A white-haired old woman wearing a winter coat came out of the shabby gray trailer next door. Ray slowed to watch her. A middle-aged man wearing a felt hat and an overcoat steadied her walker as she struggled across a concrete pathway toward a black Lincoln. The man looked at Ray’s truck, the lenses of his glasses glinting in the sun. Ray waved to him, playing the role of a friendly neighbor, and the man waved back.

  Ray eased the truck forward and stopped in front of Reba’s little trailer. Its two-toned aluminum glistened in the sunlight, the bottom half pale green, the top white. Three windows faced the road. Kitchen, living room, and bedroom windows, he guessed. The front yard provided no cover for an approach. No trees, no shrubs.

  He urged the truck along to the next trailer, a new double-wide. A carport over the driveway sported two large stickers facing the road, one with a Confederate flag, the other with red letters on a blue background: NRA.

  Ray drove to the top of the horseshoe, pulled off the road short of a telephone pole, and looked up at the floodlight mounted on it. Old man Hukstep had staked three telephone poles topped with floodlights along the dirt road, two about fifty feet inside the access points to Whiskey Road and a third at the top of the horseshoe. At night, the floodlights would illuminate every inch of the dirt road, leaving Ray no place inside the park to hide his truck.

  He looked back at Reba’s trailer. It was no more than fifty feet from the pole at the top of the horseshoe. In the dark of night, the trailer would be well within the wash of its floodlight. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and sighed. Floodlights, no cover, and a gun enthusiast living next door.

  He looked around. The telephone pole stood in a patch of weeds between two trailers. A path ran from the pole into a pine forest that bordered the back yards of the trailers on the outside of the horseshoe. No vehicles were parked in the driveways of the trailers on either side of the pole or near those on the other side of the road. He saw no one around and no movement in the trailer windows.

  He got out of the truck, crossed the path from the pole into the trees, and then picked his way through the woods around the backside of the park until he came up behind Reba’s little lot. Her trailer sat fifty feet from the forest’s edge. The backyard was as barren of cover as the front except for a car shed, open in front and closed in on the other three sides. The trailer had four windows along the back, the one on the end smaller than the others; a bathroom window, he guessed.

  He stared at the windows pensively. He could set up on the edge of the woods and fire at Reba when she walked past a window, he supposed, but he didn’t like it. The windows were small. She’d be a moving target. He’d get one shot. If he missed, he’d have to run.

  He looked at the shed. In the dark late at night, he could walk from the trees to the shed and from there to the trailer without being seen. The trailer was narrow. If he stood just outside her bedroom window, her bed would by necessity lay within ten feet of his gun, but the bedroom window looked a little too high to give him a level shot from the ground. He would need a boost.

  He looked around the yard. His eyes fell on a metal folding chair just inside the open end of the shed.

&nbs
p; The trailers on each side of Reba’s looked vacant for now. He had seen the old lady leave her trailer, and the NRA member’s carport had been empty. He should be able to approach the shed without being seen.

  Ray crossed the yard and stepped inside the shed. The chair leaned against the wall under a window. It was covered with dust and spider webs. He cleaned it off with his kerchief and lifted it. Not too heavy to carry to the trailer with his good arm. He unfolded it and stepped up on it carefully. It held his weight. He put it back where he found it and returned to the woods.

  Back in the truck, he sat behind the wheel and ran his hand over the bandage on his arm. It didn’t hurt. His arthritic knee was another story. Even the short walk over flat terrain had inflamed it, and it throbbed.

  He withdrew the Cutty Sark from the glove compartment. Two big swallows. Then two more. He leaned back in the seat and relaxed to give the whiskey time to do its job.

  Despite the floodlights, this hit ought to be easy enough. He had done his research on Reba in November. She worked as a secretary for a State Farm agent in Jeetersburg, and she was always home by eight on weeknights. Lights out by midnight. She would be asleep when he approached. She would never know what hit her. The only issue that worried him was that he didn’t want to park his truck under the floodlights.

  The whiskey kicked in and the pain eased.

  He put the bottle back in the glove compartment, started the truck, drove around the horseshoe to the other access point, and pulled out onto Whiskey Road. A quarter mile from the park, he found a copse of cedar trees beside the road with a clear space behind them. He eased the truck into a shallow ditch, accelerated gently out of it, and drove around behind the cedars. The cedars were thick. In that spot his truck would not be visible from the road.