by Diana Palmer
Luxury sedans were parked up and down the driveway. Harley’s pickup truck wasn’t in the same class, but he didn’t seem to feel intimidated. He parked on the street and helped Alice out of the truck. He was wearing evening clothes, with a black bow tie and highly polished black wingtip shoes. He looked elegant. Alice was wearing a simple black cocktail dress with her best winter coat, the one she wore to work, a black one with a fur collar. She carried her best black evening bag and she wore black pumps that she’d polished, hoping to cover the scuff marks. On her salary, although it was a good one, she could hardly afford haute couture.
They were met at the door by a butler in uniform. Harley handed him an invitation and the man hesitated and did a double take, but he didn’t say anything.
Once they were inside, Alice looked worriedly at Harley.
“It’s okay,” he assured her, smiling as he cradled her hand in his protectively. “No problem.”
“Gosh,” she said, awestruck as she looked around her at the company she was in. “There’s a movie star over there,” she said under her breath. “I recognize at least two models and a Country-Western singing star, and there’s the guy who won the golf tournament…!”
“They’re just people, Alice,” he said gently.
She gaped at him. “Just people? You’re joking, right?” She turned too fast and bumped into somebody. She looked up to apologize and her eyes almost popped. “S-sorry,” she stammered.
A movie star with a martial arts background grinned at her. “No problem. It’s easy to get knocked down in here. What a crowd, huh?”
“Y-yes,” she agreed, nodding.
He laughed, smiled at Harley, and drew his date, a gorgeous blonde, along with him toward the buffet table.
Harley curled his fingers into Alice’s. “Rube,” he teased softly. “You’re starstruck.”
“I am, I am,” she agreed at once. “I’ve never been in such a place in my life. I don’t hang out with the upper echelons of society in my job. You seem very much at home,” she added, “for a man who spends his time with horses and cattle.”
“Not a bad analogy, actually,” he said under his breath. “Wouldn’t a cattle prod come in handy around here, though?”
“Harley!” She laughed.
“Just kidding.” He was looking around the room. After a minute, he spotted someone. “Let’s go ask that woman if they know your employee.”
“Okay.”
“What’s her name?” he whispered.
She dug for it. “Dolores.”
He slid his arm around her shoulders and led her forward. She felt the warmth of his jacketed arm around her with real pleasure. She felt chilled at this party, with all this elegance. Her father had been a banker, and he hadn’t been poor, but this was beyond the dreams of most people. Crystal chandeliers, Persian carpets, original oil paintings—was that a Renoir?!
“Hi,” Harley said to one of the women pouring more punch into the Waterford crystal bowl. “Does Dolores still work here?”
The woman stared at him for a minute, but without recognition. “Dolores? Yes. She’s in the kitchen, making canapés. You look familiar. Do I know you?”
“I’ve got that kind of face,” he said easily, smiling. “My wife and I know Dolores, we belong to her church. I promised the minister we’d give her a message from him if we came tonight,” he added.
“One of that church crowd,” the woman groaned, rolling her eyes. “Honestly, it’s all she talks about, like there’s nothing else in the world but church.”
“Religion dies, so does civilization,” Alice said quietly. She remembered that from her Western Civilization course in college.
“Whatever,” the woman replied, bored.
“In the kitchen, huh? Thanks,” Harley told the woman.
“Don’t get her fired,” came the quick reply. “She’s a pain, sometimes, but she works hard enough doing dishes. If the senator or his wife see you keeping her from her job, he’ll fire her.”
“We won’t do that,” Harley promised. His lips made a thin line as he led Alice away.
“Surely the senator wouldn’t fire her just for talking to us?” Alice wondered aloud.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Harley said. “We’ll have to be circumspect.”
Alice followed his lead. She wondered why he was so irritated. Perhaps the woman’s remark offended his sense of justice.
The kitchen was crowded. It didn’t occur to Alice to ask how Harley knew his way there. Women were bent over tables, preparing platters, sorting food, making canapés. Two women were at the huge double sink, washing dishes.
“Don’t they have a dishwasher?” Alice wondered as they entered the room.
“You don’t put Waterford crystal and Lenox china in a dishwasher,” he commented easily.
She looked up at him with pure fascination. He didn’t seem aware that he’d given away knowledge no working cowboy should even possess.
“How do we know which one’s her?” he asked Alice.
Alice stared at the two women. One was barely out of her teens, wearing a nose ring and spiky hair. The other was conservatively dressed with her hair in a neat bun. She smiled, nodding toward the older one. She had a white apron wrapped around her. “The other woman said she was washing dishes,” she whispered. “And she’s a churchgoer.”
He grinned, following her lead.
They eased around the curious workers, smiling.
“Hello, Dolores,” Alice called to the woman.
The older woman turned, her red hands dripping water and soap, and started at the two visitors with wide brown eyes. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” she asked.
“I guess you’ve never seen us dressed up, huh? We’re from your church,” he told her, lying through his teeth. “Your minister gave us a message for you.”
She blinked. “My minister…?”
“Could we talk, just for a minute?” Alice asked urgently.
The woman was suspicious. Her eyes narrowed. She hesitated, and Alice thought, we’ve blown it. But just then, Dolores nodded. “Sure. We can talk for a minute. Liz, I’m taking my break, now, okay? I’ll only be ten minutes.”
“Okay,” Liz returned, with only a glance at the elegantly dressed people walking out with Dolores. “Don’t be long. You know how he is,” she added quickly.
Once they were outside, Dolores gave them a long look. “I know everyone in my church. You two don’t go there,” Dolores said with a gleam in her eyes. “Who are you and what do you want?”
Alice studied her. “I work for…out-of-town law enforcement,” she improvised. “We found your car. And the man who was driving it.”
The older woman hesitated. “I told the police yesterday, the car was stolen,” she began weakly.
Alice stepped close, so that they couldn’t be overheard. “He was beaten to death, so badly that his mother wouldn’t know him,” she said in a steely tone. “Your car was pushed into the river. Somebody didn’t want him to be found. Nobody,” she added softly, “should ever have to die like that. And his murderer shouldn’t get away with it.”
Dolores looked even sicker. She leaned back against the wall. Her eyes closed. “It’s my fault. He said he wanted to start over. He wanted to marry me. He said he just had to do something first, to get something off his conscience. He asked to borrow the car, but he said if something happened, if he didn’t call me back by the next morning, to say it was stolen so I wouldn’t get in trouble. He said he knew about a crime and if he talked they might kill him.”
“Do you know what crime?” Alice asked her.
She shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. Nothing. He said it was the only way he could protect me.”
“His name,” Alice persisted. “Can you at least tell me his name?”
Dolores glanced toward the door, grimacing. “I don’t know it,” she whispered. “He said it was an alias.”
“Then tell me the alias. Help me find his killer.”
She drew in a breath. “Jack. Jack Bailey,” she said. “He said he’d been in jail once. He said he was sorry. I got him going to church, trying to live a decent life. He was going to start over…” Her voice broke. “It’s my fault.”
“You were helping him,” Alice corrected. “You gave him hope.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes. But there are worse things than dying. How long did you know him?” Alice asked.
“A few months. We went out together. He didn’t own a car. I had to drive…”
“Where did he live?”
Dolores glanced at the door again. “I don’t know. He always met me at a little strip mall near the tracks, the Weston Street Mall.”
“Is there anything you can tell me that might help identify him?” Alice asked.
She blinked, deep in thought. “He said something happened, that it was an accident, but people died because of it. He was sorry. He said it was time to tell the truth, no matter how dangerous it was to him…”
“Dolores!”
She jumped. A tall, imposing figure stood in the light from the open door. “Get back in here! You aren’t paid to socialize.”
Harley stiffened, because he knew that voice.
“Yes, sir!” Dolores cried, rushing back inside. “Sorry. I was on my break…!”
She ran past the elegant older man. He closed the door and came storming toward Alice and Harley, looking as if he meant to start trouble.
“What do you mean, interrupting my workers when I have important guests? Who the hell are you people and how did you get in here?” he demanded.
Harley moved into the light, his pale eyes glittering at the older man. “I had an invitation,” he said softly.
The older man stopped abruptly. He cocked his head, as if the voice meant more to him than the face did. “Who…are you?” he asked huskily.
“Just a ghost, visiting old haunts,” he said, and there was ice in his tone.
The older man moved a step closer. As he came into the light, Alice noticed that he, too, had pale eyes, and gray-streaked brown hair.
“H-Harley?” he asked in a hesitant tone.
Harley caught Alice’s hand in his. She noticed that his fingers were like ice.
“Sorry to have bothered you, Senator,” Harley said formally. “Alice and I know a pastor who’s a mutual friend of Dolores. He asked us to tell her about a family that needed a ride to church Sunday. Please excuse us.”
He drew Alice around the older man, who stood frozen watching them as they went back into the kitchen.
Harley paused by Dolores and whispered something in her ear quickly before he rejoined Alice and they sauntered toward the living room. The senator moved toward them before they reached the living room, stared after them with a pained expression and tried to speak.
It was too late. Harley walked Alice right out the front door. On the way, a dark-eyed, dark-haired man in an expensive suit scowled as they passed him. Harley noticed that the senator stopped next to the other man and started talking to him.
They made it back to the truck without being challenged, and without a word being spoken.
Harley put Alice inside the truck, got in and started it.
“He knew you,” she stammered.
“Apparently.” He nodded at her. “Fasten your seat belt.”
“Sure.” She snapped it in place, hoping that he might add something, explain what had happened. He didn’t.
“You’ve got something to go on now, at least,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I have. Thanks, Harley. Thanks very much.”
“My pleasure.” He glanced at her. “I told Dolores what we said to the senator, so that our stories would match. It might save her job.”
“I hope so,” she said. “She seemed like a really nice person.”
“Yeah.”
He hardly said two words the whole rest of the way to her apartment. He parked in front of the building.
“You coming back down to Jacobsville?” he asked.
“In the morning,” she said. “I still have some investigating to do there.”
“Lunch, Monday, at Barbara’s?” he invited.
She smiled. “I’d like that.”
He smiled back. “Yeah. Me, too. Sorry we didn’t get to stay. The buffet looked pretty good.”
“I wasn’t really hungry,” she lied.
“You’re a sweetheart. I’d take you out for a late supper, but my heart’s not in it.” He pulled her close and bent to kiss her. His mouth was hard and a little rough. “Thanks for not asking questions.”
“No problem,” she managed, because the kiss had been something, even if he hadn’t quite realized what he was doing.
“See you Monday.”
He went back to the truck and drove away. This time, he didn’t wait for her to go in and close the door, an indication of how upset he really was.
Six
Harley drove back to the ranch and cut off the engine outside the bunkhouse. It had been almost eight years since he’d seen the senator. He hadn’t realized what a shock it was going to be, to come face-to-face with him. It brought back all the old wounds.
“Hey!”
He glanced at the porch of the modern bunkhouse. Charlie Dawes was staring at him from a crack in the door. “You coming in or sleeping out there?” the other cowboy called with a laugh.
“Coming in, I guess,” he replied.
“Well!” Charlie exclaimed when he saw how the other man was dressed. “I thought you said you were just going out for a drive.”
“I took Alice to a party, but we left early. Neither of us was in the mood,” he said.
“Alice. That your girl?”
Harley smiled. “You know,” he told the other man, “I think she is.”
Alice drove back down to Jacobsville late Sunday afternoon. She’d contacted Rick Marquez and asked if he’d do some investigating for her in San Antonio, to look for any rap sheet on a man who used a Jack Bailey alias and to see if they could find a man who’d been staying at a motel near the Weston Street Mall. He might have been seen in the company of a dark-haired woman driving a 1992 blue Ford sedan. It wasn’t much to go on, but he might turn up something.
Meanwhile, Alice was going to go back to the crime scene and wander over it one more time, in hopes that the army of CSI detectives might have missed something, some tiny scrap of information that would help break the case.
She was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a green sweatshirt with CSI on it, sweeping the bank of the river, when her cell phone rang. She muttered as she pulled it out and checked the number. She frowned. Odd, she didn’t recognize that number in any conscious way, but it struck something in the back of her mind.
“Jones,” she said.
“Hi, Jones. It’s Kilraven. I wondered if you dug up anything on the murder victim over the weekend?”
She sighed, her mind still on the ground she was searching. “Only that he had an alias, that he was trying to get something off his conscience, that he didn’t own a car and he’d been in trouble with the law. Oh, and that he lived somewhere near the Weston Street Mall in San Antonio.”
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “You got all that in one weekend?”
She laughed self-consciously. “Well, Harley helped. We crashed a senator’s fundraiser and cornered an employee of his who’d been dating the…Oh, damn!” she exclaimed. “Listen, your brother will fry me up toasty and feed me to sharks if you tell him I said that. The feds didn’t want anybody going near that woman!”
“Relax. Jon was keen to go out and talk to her himself, but his office nixed it. They were just afraid that some heavy-handed lawman would go over there and spook her. You share what you just told me with him, and I guarantee nobody will say a word about it. Great work, Alice.”
“Thanks,” she said. “The woman’s name is Dolores. She’s a nice lady. She feels guilty that he got killed. She never even fussed about her
car and now it’s totaled. She said she loaned him the car, but he told her to say it was stolen if he didn’t call her in a day, in case somebody went after him. He knew he could get killed.”
“He said he wanted to get something off his conscience,” he reminded her.
“Yes. He said something happened that was an accident but that people died because of it. Does that help?”
“Only if I had ESP,” he sighed. “Any more luck on that piece of paper you found in the victim’s hand?”
“None. I hope to hear something in a few days from the lab. They’re working their fingers to the bone. Why are holidays such a great time for murders and suicides?” she wondered aloud. “It’s the holidays. You’d think it would make people happy.”
“Sadly, as we both know, it doesn’t. It just emphasizes what they’ve lost, since holidays are prime time for families to get together.”
“I suppose so.”
“We heard that you were going out with Harley Fowler,” he said after a minute, with laughter in his deep voice. “Is it serious?”
“Not really,” she replied pertly. “I mean, I ask him to marry me twice a day, but that’s not what you’d call serious, is it?”
“Only if he says yes,” he returned.
“He hasn’t yet, but it’s still early. I’m very persistent.”
“Well, good luck.”
“I don’t need luck. I’m unspeakably beautiful, have great language skills, I can boil eggs and wash cars and…Hello? Hello!”
He’d hung up on her, laughing. She closed the flip phone. “I didn’t want to talk to you, anyway,” she told the phone. “I’m trying to work here.”
She walked along the riverbank again, her sharp eyes on the rocks and weeds that grew along the water’s edge. She was letting her mind wander, not trying to think in any conscious way. Sometimes, she got ideas that way.
The dead man had a past. He was mixed up in some sort of accident in which a death occurred that caused more deaths. He wanted to get something off his conscience. So he’d borrowed a car from his girlfriend and driven to Jacobsville. To see whom? The town wasn’t that big, but it was pretty large if you were trying to figure out who someone a man with a criminal past was trying to find. Who could it be? Someone in law enforcement? Or was he just driving through Jacobsville on his way to talk to someone?