Felonious Jazz

by Bryan Gilmer

  She knew she was a good mentor for him, and that she had his respect. She liked him better and thought he was smarter than most of the firm’s attorneys, so it was hard for her not to treat him like one, or even show him favoritism over them. He moved so easily among people.

  Not like her louse of a husband – the term “estranged” flashed into her head. Since Davis wasn’t in the right position in her life for her to think of as the kind of man she’d like to marry next, she thought of him as the sort of man she wanted Jacob to become.

  Sarah saw her old ambition in Davis Swaine, remembered how much more hopeful and less encumbered she’d felt at that age, wished she were still at that point in her life where she was rounding 30 but had never married, wished she’d had backbone enough not to rush ahead in the first halfway serious relationship she’d stumbled into after realizing her job didn’t warm the bed at night. She’d swung from having impossible standards for men to impossibly lax ones.

  She looked down at her Jacob, sucking on his pinky and ring fingers, dozing a little there in his carseat. At least she’d met the biological deadline for having the kid, and being a mother was the most amazing feeling. But she was soon to be divorced, a single mom. What could you do? The man had just turned out to be kind of a louse. She hoped her own genes predominated in Jacob.

  She chewed the sandwich – kind of cold by now – and looked at her phone. Davis should be getting there pretty soon. And she couldn’t wait to hear this one.

  Twelve

  The address was actually just two doors down from the Reuss home in Mill Run, not three, Jeff realized, a brick two-story with a three-car garage. TV trucks lined the curb, the stalks of their microwave transmitters stretching into the air. Three stations’ reporters stood so each of their photographers could pan for a shot of both houses. Jeff remembered the discomfort of spending all day slathered in makeup.

  An assistant producer looked out from one of the vans, where she sat at a bank of tiny monitors. “You from the Progress? Save you the trouble. Not home.”

  “Thanks,” Jeff said, and waved. Funny to be mistaken for a reporter, and it made him realize he didn’t see Caroline around. She must have come and gone already. “I’m gonna go press the doorbell just so I can tell the boss I did.”

  Jeff noticed a couple of the TV cameras focusing on him at the Hegwoods’ front door. He pressed the doorbell button, and it reminded him of ambush interviews he had done for Nine On Your Side.

  The chimes clanged. No one answered.

  On his way back toward the street, he peeked through the garage windows. A boat rested on its trailer next to a pickup truck that had vinyl lettering for a contracting company, “Ridgeline Construction.” He memorized the phone number. The third slot, closest to the doorway inside, where a family sedan or SUV probably parked, was empty.

  He tried knocking on the doors of a couple of neighbors, but apparently no one was home in the middle of the afternoon – except maybe the nanny of the guy Sarah knew, and if so, she wasn’t answering the door. Jeff sat in his car and called the number from the side of the truck. He had the family’s name from the Sheriff’s Office: Dean and Cathy Hegwood. A country-sounding older woman answered at the business and asked how she could help him. He used his full Southern accent and asked to speak with Dean.

  “He ain’t here today, sweetie,” the lady said. “They’re on their way up to the lake, at his daddy’s, to bury that cat this evenin’.”

  “That’s why I was callin’,” Jeff said, hoping to be mistaken for a subcontractor or something. “I just heard about that. Think I could get him on his mobile?” He composed a phone number on the spot and recited it to her.

  “Lord, no, baby. That must be an old number.” She gave him the real one. “He’s probably got it turned off, though. If you want, I can tell him you called.”

  Jeff smiled to himself. “I was thinkin’ of another boy’s number, maybe. ’preciate it. Just tell him J.D. called and I’m thinkin’ about him.”

  Jeff called the cell number. A woman answered, probably Cathy. She sounded like she’d been crying. Children fussed in the background.

  “Miz Hegwood? I was sorry to hear ‘bout your cat.”

  “’preciate that. Who’s speakin’?”

  Jeff identified himself as an investigator looking into the Mill Run Estates pet killings. The whole community felt for the family, he told her, because a lot of people knew what it was like to lose a pet. “Ms. Hegwood, are y’all still going to bury Porcupine this evenin’?”

  “Sure are. We’re in Raleigh picking up the body right now. They just got done with the autopsy. We’re gonna have a little funeral for him, mostly for Britney and Jason, up at their grandma and grandpa’s.”

  “I wonder whether you’d feel all right about letting me come up there and talk to y’all. I need to speak with y’all as quick as I can.”

  The line was quiet for six seconds. “All right. Just don’t let any of them TV reporters follow you.”

  Jeff felt a little strange using the techniques he’d cultivated to interview families of human murder victims to investigate a cat’s demise. For today, that was his gig in Rocky Falls. He got directions to the grandparents’ house, about 40 minutes northeast in Vance County. She said they’d be there by 6.

  Jeff meandered to the TV gaggle to listen to their reports. They all started promptly at 5, so he knew the pets were the lead story on all three channels. From what he could hear with everyone narrating at once, they were just cribbing from the P&L story about the dog and sticking to the news release about the cat. When the pretty faces stopped talking, Jeff peeked into the WTVD van to watch the station’s video clips on the monitor: a couple of random people from the neighborhood had told the camera they were “real frightened” and wondered, “Who would do that to somebody’s pet?” Standard 2-inch-deep TV news.

  * * *

  Jeff followed the directions from Highway 54 to the gravel driveway with a mailbox marked “Hegwood.”

  The drive wound through maples, birches and poplars to a house with wrap-around screened porches on both stories. Past it and down a steep slope, he could see a dock with a canoe at the shore of the man-made lake, a valley flooded to make a drinking water reservoir. It was cool and dark back in these woods and smelled like composting leaves and pine trees, the kind of place he’d like to spend a week of vacation. He parked next to the gold Honda Accord he figured went in the empty slot in Dean and Cathy Hegwoods’ garage.

  Jeff could see several people on the downstairs porch near the front door. When he was halfway up the steps, a little girl, about 4, pushed open the screen door for him.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said. “You must be Britney.”

  She had been crying. Her lower lip jutted in a grief-stricken pout. She clutched a stuffed bunny tightly enough to strangle it.

  “I’m very sorry about your kitty.”

  She nodded, wrinkled her chin and threw both arms around Jeff’s left leg. He patted her head and smoothed her wispy, blonde hair as she sobbed. Now emotion welled in his throat. He gently stepped back from the girl and looked to the adults, who seemed near tears themselves watching her.

  “Britney,” the man who must have been Dean said, “come over here by Daddy.”

  The girl went to her father and hopped onto his lap, and he folded her against his chest with one huge, callused hand. Jeff followed her and shook Dean’s other hand. He looked about 40, muscular, with a buzz cut and muddy brown work boots. “You must be Dean Hegwood, sir. J.D. Swaine.”

  Dean nodded. An older man, Dean’s father, looked at Jeff and said, “I ain’t too sure ’bout all this. Tell us again what you told my daughter-in-law.”

  Jeff explained that he was investigating the case. The old man looked dubious, but Cathy Hegwood said, “We ought to do what we can to help them catch ‘em.” The little boy, Jason, sat cross-legged at her feet.

  Dean Hegwood said, “I done talked to four men from the she
riff’s department.” He pronounced it “shurfs.” “Let me take a look at your badge.”

  Jeff gave Dean the surprised look he had practiced on dozens of people. “Oh, I don’t work in law enforcement. I’m a legal investigator. I work for the Reusses, the other family down the street that lost their dog.”

  “That’s my boss man, pretty much.” Dean looked at his mother. “Mama, take the kids inside the house, please, so we can talk with J.D. here. I reckon he wants some money.” Dean set Britney’s feet on the floor, and Cathy patted Jason on the back to underscore her husband’s directions. The grandmother took their hands and promised them a cookie.

  “No, sir,” Jeff said. “I’m not here after money. I just need y’all’s information. Go on and call your boss, if you want to make sure I’m working for him.”

  When the front door shut behind them, Dean looked at Jeff and lowered his voice, and Jeff could sense he now believed him. “I ‘magine me and Mickey are in the same boat, so I’ll play along, and maybe you’ll wind up helping us. But two things: You don’t tell the kids nobody killed Porcupine. He’s been sick, and they just think he went on and died. That’s how it stays. We didn’t even tell them nobody broke in the house, ‘cause we was afraid they’d get scared. Britney come across the cat in the living room. And she seen all that writin’. Thank the Lord she’s too little to read it.”

  Jeff nodded once.

  “Two, we ain’t gonna answer any bunch of questions until after their little funeral. That’s why we come up here. That, and to get away from the reporters. This is important to my wife and to my kids first and foremost. So you wait around here with us if you want to, but behave. ’Cause if I see you doin’ something I don’t like, I’ll toss your butt out of here.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Hegwood nodded. “Baby, go in and tell them they can come back out, if they want, and get me and Jeff here some iced tea, please.”

  She stood without a word and went to do it.

  “Sheriff’s Office said they stole your guns,” Jeff said. “Sounded like a nice collection.”

  Dean’s cheek twitched at the thought of it. He glanced toward his dad, the only other person on the porch now.

  Dean’s dad said, “They’re lucky they didn’t break in while Dean was there, or he would have used one or two of them guns on ‘em.”

  Jeff shifted his weight and re-crossed his legs.

  “Damn straight,” Dean said, then toed a nail head sticking up from the deck board in front of his chair. “They got ‘em all: a couple of ol’ flintlocks, my grand-dad’s single-shot .22, an Army .45, an SKS …” Jeff knew it was a Chinese knockoff of the Russian AK47 assault rifle. “And they took my shotguns and pistols and all the rifles I hunt with. Fifteen guns in all. What the hell did that writing mean, you reckon? ‘Guns kill innocent animals,’ then they kill my kids’ pet.’”

  “That’s a damn good question,” Jeff said, happy for the opening. “You said Porcupine had been sick?”

  “Yeah, diabetes and kidney disease and every other damn thing, seemed like. I ‘magine we spent eight or nine thousand dollars on him, little bit at the time, and lately he was doin’ fine. Then somebody breaks in to steal from us and does him in. Ain’t that a bitch?”

  So the same burglars had apparently killed two animals on the same day, three houses apart owned by two people in the subdivision construction business, and both the pets had been sick and received expensive treatments. If you figured in the graffiti, it seemed like the kind of crime someone committed to make a statement, maybe some kind of radical anti-sprawl organization. But what organization looking to gain sympathy would kill a child’s pet?

  Dean’s father interrupted these thoughts. “They didn’t even get the Bible verse right.”

  “They didn’t?” Jeff asked.

  “Daddy’s a preacher,” Dean said.

  “Gospel of John, chapter ten, verse 10,” the old man said, and closed his eyes. He had a giant wave of white hair swept back over his right ear. “‘The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy; I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’ See, that was Jesus talking, showin’ he wasn’t like the evil thief that comes to destroy. The robber left out the ‘but for’ and used it like the whole thing was talking about the thief, sayin’ that the thief wasn’t there to steal or kill or destroy. I hate when people twist the words of the Bible to their own use.”

  If he was like the preachers Jeff had known growing up, Jeff bet he mostly hated when other people did it. But his clarification of the scripture verse was interesting. Now that Hegwood pointed it out, Jeff remembered the “but for.” John 10:10 had been a Memory Verse in Sunday School at Bellhaven Baptist Church when he was a child.

  The front door opened again, and everyone re-joined them. Jeff accepted a tall glass of tea from Cathy and finally took a seat, on the porch swing. It was good tea, as tannic as a young Napa cabernet and as sweet as a Popsicle. The group fell silent.

  At five ’til six, Dean walked down to the driveway and opened the trunk of the Accord. He took out a cardboard box like the ones pet stores send new puppies home in. He looked inside, rearranged Porcupine’s body, and then carried the box to the side yard. Jeff fell into the procession of mourners that spilled down the porch steps. Dean’s father brought up the rear, his Bible in one hand, a long-handle shovel in the other.

  The little funeral service grieved Jeff. He watched Britney and Jason peer into the top of the cardboard box. They reached down and petted Porcupine’s still form again and again. They seemed to believe enough strokes might refill the cat’s body with life.

  Jeff remembered his grandfather lying in state at the funeral home the previous year, how Jeff had briefly thought he’d seen the dead man’s chest rising and falling, an illusion caused by the slight motion of Jeff’s own breath and his rapt stare.

  Dean Hegwood gently pulled the children’s arms from the box and lowered it into the hole.

  The things the burglars were doing made some kind of sense inside their own minds, Jeff realized. Yet whoever would make children suffer like this was thoughtless or evil. And people who would do it while casting themselves in the role of Jesus were crazy – and dangerous.

  As he walked back to the driveway to his car, a heavy determination tightened Jeff’s forehead. This time, he wasn’t just billing hours to a client who could pay them. He would find whoever this was and stop them.

  Thirteen

  Jeff was back in Raleigh by 8:30 p.m., exhausted from thinking about the case and making no headway. He got close to his new place. A homeless guy shuffled down the amber-lit sidewalk. Jeff stopped at an all-night corner store that sold beer with regard mainly to giantness of container and extreme concentration of alcohol, but he was able to find a civilized six-pack, a microbrew called Carolina Blonde from Charlotte.

  He drove one more block to the two-story beige brick factory building he’d bought from a bankruptcy trustee for just $150,000 – including its contents – because no one else bothered to bid. The place had been built in 1939 to house Capitol Pastries, one of the few industries in Raleigh besides producing, packaging and selling legislative bullshit. The company sold donuts to Eastern North Carolina diners and groceries until Winston-Salem-based Krispy Kreme put it out of business in the late ’60s. The building had stood unused for decades.

  On the corner of the flat roof stood a 20-foot, porcelain-enameled donut, brown with white frosting and faded rainbow sprinkles. The Capitol Pastries name had once been superimposed in orange neon letters along the upper and lower arcs of the outsized treat. Jeff was getting a historic preservation tax credit for the four grand it would cost to restore the sign. It would be a great way to tell people how to find the house: Party under the giant neon donut.

  The building was lined with tall, metal-mullioned grid windows on both levels – about 2,000 panes of glass. Jeff had hired a company to replace missing panes and clean the sur
viving ones. He was still waiting for the first rock from some carload of jackass kids riding through on their way home from a teen club. A jackass kid like he’d been …

  Jeff pulled into the alley and yanked the Audi’s parking brake. He pulled a padlock key from his wallet and loosed the chain looped through a set of temporary plywood doors. He’d had construction workers demolish this section of brick wall for a garage door. He drove the Audi inside, pulled the straps of the backpack with his clothes over one shoulder and threw a massive industrial switch.

  Five rows of gymnasium lights in the ceiling – the ones with good bulbs – came on with a hum. He smiled and rode the freight elevator upstairs. On the top floor, he threw another big switch and lit that whole level.

  The place had the clean, earthy smell of fresh drywall compound. New partition walls went halfway to the 20-foot ceiling, describing a couple of bedrooms and huge bathroom. A floor-to-ceiling wall would eventually divide both the upper story and lower story in half, making two apartments upstairs and one apartment and a shared garage downstairs. Jeff would live in this end of the upstairs, and he hoped to cover the mortgage by leasing out the other two lofts.

  He envisioned stainless appliances and granite countertops and kitchen cabinets. Somehow, it all made him feel lonely. He stashed five of the six beers in the mini-fridge that now squatted in the kitchen area and plugged his cell phone charger into the same outlet.

  He shucked off his business clothes and piled them in a spot where they wouldn’t get covered with fine, white drywall dust. He changed into shorts and sandals from the backpack and pried the top off the Carolina Blonde.

  Looking through the 50 running feet of windows across the main living area, Jeff could see the spectacular Raleigh skyline view and pick out his office window in Wachovia Capitol Center. He tried calling Ashlyn but got her voice mail.