A Hard Death

by Jonathan Hayes

  CHAPTER 87

  Jenner needed to see Rudge, talk it out, figure out how everything was connected.

  He tried to spot Deb’s dark blue Miata among the shifting arrays of red taillights floating in front of him on the highway; he was sorry he’d agreed to her “shortcut” back. She was an aggressive driver, and, in the night and on unfamiliar roads, he’d quickly lost her.

  When he caught up, she was sitting in her car opposite the Palmetto Court, the top down. He pulled in and stared at what was left of his place. The crowds and fire trucks had departed, and the ragged paving of the parking lot had almost dried. His cabin was now an exposed, half-charred shell of a building, a ribbon of yellow crime scene tape strung limply across the porch.

  Deb tapped on his window. “You want to go in and get your stuff?”

  Jenner shook his head. “It’ll wait. I need to talk to Rudge first.”

  “You shouldn’t leave your things in there—this isn’t the best neighborhood.”

  “I don’t have anything left that’s worth much. My laptop was in the car, and that’s about it.”

  Deb headed back to the Miata, and he leaned out to call after her, “Hey, try not to lose me this time.”

  CHAPTER 88

  It was past eleven p.m. when they reached Rudge’s place, a brown ranch house on a half acre of land, roughly separated from the neighboring lots by stands of slash pine. The Taurus was in the driveway, and Jenner saw the light of a television flickering in the living room.

  Deb leaned against her car.

  “You need me, Jenner?”

  He shook his head and smiled. “I’m good. Thanks for getting me here.”

  “Where are you staying tonight?”

  Jenner rubbed his face wearily. “I guess I’ll find a hotel.”

  “You can stay with me, if you want. I have an empty room—take me a second to air it out, put out some towels and such for you.”

  “You feel like rescuing someone?”

  She shrugged. “You seem like a guy who could use a little rescuing.”

  He smiled. “I think the hotel’s a better idea. And the county can pay.”

  She hooted. “Yeah, boy—good luck with that!”

  He stepped over to her and pecked her on the cheek, smiling. “Fuck ’em—I think I’m now officially sicker of Douglas County than it is of me.”

  “Awww…” Deb made a sad face and hugged him gently, her hands on his waist to avoid his wounds. “I’ll call tomorrow, check in on you. Say hi to Rudge from me, eh?”

  He walked up the driveway and stepped onto the path. She called over to him, “Hey, Jenner! The Gulf Breeze over on the bay will give you a government rate.”

  “Thanks.”

  He was nearing the porch when she called out to him again. “Jenner? My offer still stands, okay?”

  Jenner waved, then stepped up onto Rudge’s front deck. He watched Deb climb back into her Miata, pull a tight three-point turn, then roar off down the road.

  He pushed the doorbell, heard the buzzer inside, and waited.

  There was a pair of dark wicker rocking chairs on the porch; it looked like a nice place to sit and do whatever people did around there when sitting on their porches. Drink ice tea, he imagined. Lemonade.

  Then he thought of Rudge, and thought: Whiskey.

  After a little while he grew impatient; he pressed the button again and stepped back. The blinds were drawn; the living room lights were on low, and the TV was flashing dry white and blue-gray shadows onto the blinds.

  Jenner opened the screen door and tapped on the frame.

  “Rudge! It’s Jenner.”

  He could hear the TV, but there was no sound of movement inside. No scurrying from the kitchen, no hurried flush of a toilet.

  Jenner noticed a light switch next to the doorway and flicked it. Nothing. He flicked it up and down again; looking up, he saw that the socket of the porch light was empty.

  Then he saw a bulb resting neatly on the wooden deck railing. He picked up the bulb, and, curious, shook it; the bulb was good.

  He reached up, screwed it into the slot; the bulb flickered and came on brightly, dazzling him slightly.

  Jenner walked along the deck and tapped at the big living-room window. He pressed his ear to the glass; he heard nothing beyond the TV set.

  Something wasn’t right.

  He moved quickly now, back to the door, and tapped again. He waited a second, reached down to the door knob, turned it, and pushed gently; the door swung open.

  The air inside was thick and stale, smelling of smoke and dry metal. And swimming beneath that, Jenner caught the copper whiff of blood.

  He pushed the door wide-open.

  “Rudge.” He realized he wasn’t even raising his voice; he already knew.

  He stepped inside the house.

  The living room was to his right, much of the space taken up by a bulky rear-projection TV set, a good eight or nine years old. Humphrey Bogart was onscreen; Treasure of the Sierra Madre had just begun.

  There was an ugly dark wicker sofa with cushions upholstered in a bright tropical pattern, and a pair of matching ugly chairs like the ones out on the porch. The floors were bare white tile, except where the blood had pooled.

  Rudge lay sprawled in a recliner directly opposite the TV set, tilted back, legs comfortably supported by the leg rest. The bullet had entered his temple by the orbit of his right eye; it had gone through his head, exited the back, and embedded in the wall, a gray hole surrounded by an ugly red sunburst of blood and blown-out tissue.

  His body had slumped to the right; heavy bleeding from the entrance wound had caked the right side of his face, the drying blood puddling in his lap around his right hand, which still held the revolver, and dripping onto the floor to flow across the tile to his feet. The steady dripping had spattered tiny droplets over the TV remote at the base of the chair.

  On the table beside the chair was a line of empty Budweiser cans, a near-empty bottle of Jack Daniels, and a neat row of shot glasses; one of the shot glasses had five unfired cartridges pushed into it, bullet tips down, submerged in amber liquid.

  Jenner glanced around the room. It was pretty much what he’d have expected. One wall was taken up by bookshelves filled with several hundred DVDs and a small library of film books. On the bookshelves, there were trophies, too, plaques and certificates for valorous service, stacked rather than displayed.

  In the kitchen, there were more empties stacked by the sink, mostly beer, but liquor too.

  Jenner saw the phone on a coffee table in front of one of the ugly chairs. He sat down and dialed 911. He identified himself, reported the death, indicated that the decedent was a police officer. He didn’t know the address, just that he was in Golden Palms, but the dispatcher said they had 911 call-location software, and officers would be responding immediately; he should just wait with the body.

  CHAPTER 89

  Jenner had been fired, for all intents and purposes, but it would be two days before the Miami pathologists took over, so it was up to him to document the scene. And he would do Rudge’s autopsy.

  Major Crimes still needed to interview him about the Palmetto Court bombing; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had sent an agent over from Miami, and he arrived at Rudge’s house with Bobby Bartley and another detective to conduct a joint interview.

  While Crime Scene processed the living room, Jenner sat in a metal patio chair at Rudge’s kitchen table, answering questions about how he’d found Rudge’s body—no, Rudge hadn’t been expecting him; yes, the door had been unlocked; yes, he’d just walked right in; no, he didn’t think he’d touched anything, other than putting the porch lightbulb back in—for an hour.

  They took a break while Bartley caught up with his notes. Bartley’s partner, Halvorsen, a ruddy-faced, white-blond Midwesterner, announced, “I count eight empties of Jack, twenty-two empty cans of Bud. Four full bottles of Jack, four cans of Bud.” No one said anything.

  Then Halvorse
n said, “Doc, you were with Rudge yesterday afternoon, weren’t you? What were you doing?”

  “We were visiting farms around Bel Arbre, trying to retrace Adam Weiss’s steps.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “UFL Tomato and La Grulla Blanca.”

  “That’s Chip Craine’s place, isn’t it?”

  Jenner said, “What?”

  One of the uniforms said, “Yes, sir, that’s Mr. Craine’s farm. La Grulla Blanca, that’s Spanish for the white crane, you know, the crane bird?”

  Halvorsen said, “Half the members at the Polo Grounds have estates up there. La Grulla Blanca is Chip Craine’s place.”

  Bartley muttered, “Can we just focus on today? I don’t want Dave Rudge lying here any longer than he has to.”

  They talked about what Rudge and Jenner had found, then went back to their time at Bel Arbre. Jenner told them about the tension between Rudge and the farm overseer at La Grulla Blanca. Then it was the ATF agent’s turn, another twenty minutes of what Jenner had seen, what he’d done, if he saw anyone when the bomb was thrown, noticed anything.

  The agent questioned him again about UFL Tomato, but Jenner had nothing to add. Then Richard Flanagan arrived with the morgue wagon, and the Crime Scene lieutenant let Jenner back into the living room to examine the body.

  CHAPTER 90

  They were all watching Jenner—the uniformed officers, Bartley, Halvorsen, the ATF agent, Flanagan, and Bucky Rutledge. They watched him pace the room, watched him photograph the dead detective, watched him take Rudge’s temperature, bend his arms to check for rigor mortis. Jenner knew they’d all seen or heard about the American Crime thing—they would all be thinking the same thing: this man gets cops killed.

  He ignored them, had Flanagan and Buddy straighten Rudge so he was sitting upright in the chair, and measured the height of the wound again in the sitting position. Then he squeezed behind the chair to the wall, and measured the height of the bullet impact mark on the wall, the yellow tape measure finicky clean in the riotous halo of blood spatter.

  Jenner photographed the bullets shoved into the shot glass. The table around the glass was dry, other than the blood droplets.

  He took close-ups of Rudge’s wounds, Flanagan holding the head so Jenner could see the injuries clearly. He photographed the wound from different angles, bracketing each exposure. Then he went into the kitchen, tore off a sheet of Bounty paper towels, wet it in the sink, and wiped the blood gently from Rudge’s face.

  Jenner looked at the damp towel—there was gray smudging amid the blood; he couldn’t be sure whether it was gunshot residue or just grime. He preserved the towel, in case Ballistics wanted to test it.

  It was a close-range shot: that much was certain. Not a contact wound, but close range, a cloud of little scratches, gray gunpowder residue in the skin, spreading around the hole in a three-inch circle. The pattern was neatly circular on the skin behind the wound, but in front, the scratches scattered out over the cheek and the right side of the nose.

  He looked at the revolver, a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson snubby, a typical cop backup piece—automatics jam, revolvers don’t. The short barrel meant the spray of gunpowder particles that caused the scratches would’ve spread out rapidly; Jenner estimated the muzzle was about six inches from Rudge’s face when the trigger was pulled.

  Halvorsen was holding Rudge’s revolver, examining the barrel. Jenner said, “That’s not been fingerprinted yet.” Halvorsen glanced at Bartley, then said, “Sorry, doc. You’re right.” Bartley disappeared into Rudge’s bedroom.

  Halvorsen placed the gun down on the coffee table and said, “Crime Scene can rule me out—they got my prints back in the lab.”

  He paused, looked around the room, and then continued, “But I think we’re all thinking the same thing here, aren’t we?”

  Jenner turned to him. “What am I thinking?”

  Halvorsen said, “Doc, I don’t mean to be, like…disrespectful…But you don’t know Dave Rudge like we do. He’s a great cop, and we love him like a brother, but the fact is, the Job isn’t easy, and Rudge took it serious. He had some problems—and we all do. But the fact is, he drank pretty hard.”

  “So what? He drank pretty hard—lots of cops do.”

  Bartley returned with a gray plastic gun case in his hand. He opened the case, set it on the coffee table, took the cleaning rod and the cloth, and laid them on the end nearest Rudge. The ATF agent stood and walked wordlessly out of the room.

  “Okay, Doc, this looks like an accident to me. Rudge is here, he’s cleaning his weapon. He’s had a bit to drink. He thinks he’s emptied the cylinder; he’s checking the barrel, he slips, and that’s it.”

  Bartley looked around the room. “And I think that’s what we’re all thinking, right?”

  Halvorsen nodded, the uniforms nodded, Flanagan hesitated, then nodded slowly.

  Jenner said, “If that’s what you think, you don’t understand what’s going on here.”

  “Doctor, those first pictures you took when you entered? It’s so easy to screw up and accidentally delete an image file.” He paused. “I think you missed the cleaning equipment in your first photos; you should probably go right ahead and take some new ones. I think the cleaning equipment set out like this, right in front of him, is a pretty big clue to just what happened, wouldn’t you say?”

  Jenner shook his head. “You have got to be kidding me—this is how you protect his reputation?”

  Halvorsen’s voice was firm. “You’ve been here not even three weeks, doc! We’ve known Rudge for a decade—the sheriff has known him since they were kids. Rudge is a great cop, one of the best. We’ve all got our personal demons, and if one night, in the dark of night, Rudge’s demons took him over, and he…made a bad mistake, well…he shouldn’t have to pay for that.”

  Then Bartley said, “I think this is open and shut. He’s a bit messed-up, he’s had one too many…He’s watching TV, drinking…He picks up his gun, fooling around with it…He empties the cylinder, thinks he’s emptied it completely, and it’s a complete accident. Or maybe he decides to see what it’d be like to, y’know, tempt fate, and leaves one round in. He spins the cylinder, points it at himself, pulls the trigger…”

  Halvorsen leaned in to interrupt. “We don’t want him to go out as a suicide, doc. That isn’t right. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  They were all looking at him now.

  Jenner said, “It’s not a suicide: it’s a murder.”

  Halvorsen said, “What?”

  “Someone shot him in the head, and set it up to look like a suicide or a Russian roulette death.”

  Bartley said, “How you figure that?”

  “A few things. First off, the range of fire: I put the muzzle of the gun at three to nine inches from Rudge’s face. Suicides need a guarantee: they want to be sure they’re buying a one-way ticket—they press the muzzle against their temple, or stick the barrel in their mouth. They don’t want any mistakes—try holding a heavy revolver eight inches from your face, see how confident you feel about your aim.”

  Bartley was looking unsure.

  “Another thing: he gets shot in this chair, obviously. The bullet goes into the right side of his head, exits the back on the left side, and lodges in the wall behind him.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Bullets go in a straight line; from the height of the wounds and the bullet impact mark on the wall, he was obviously shot while sitting up.

  “When people shoot themselves, typically they hold the gun to the temple, pull the trigger. Most times, the path is from right to left, a bit backward and a bit upward. But here the exit wound is lower than the entrance.

  “I measured the height of the entrance wound above the floor with him sitting vertical, the height of the exit wound, and the height of the bullet impact site in the wall, and it lines up neatly…”

  “And?”

  “He was shot by someone standing above him, shooting down.”


  Halvorsen looked at Bartley. “Bobby?”

  Bartley shrugged. “I guess…”

  Jenner said, “Okay, all right, wait. Something else. See that glass with the live rounds? You see it’s got blood droplets on it?”

  “Yes. And there’s blood drops all around it, too—it was there when he shot himself.”

  “You sure, Halvorsen? Pick it up.”

  The detective pincered two fingers and lifted up the shot glass by its rim; on the table underneath where it had sat, there were several smudged droplets of blood.

  Jenner said, “This glass was on the table when he was shot, but moved into this position afterward, probably when they put the bullets into it while dressing the scene.”

  Halvorsen said to Bartley, “What do you think?”

  Bartley picked up the gun case. “I think I should put the cleaning equipment away.”

  CHAPTER 91

  It was late, but he knew her mother was out.

  “Hullo?”

  “Lulu? It’s your papaw.”

  She was silent; he imagined her little face, stricken at the sound of his voice—this was just why he hadn’t given her a cell phone with caller ID. Besides, it wasn’t like she could complain—her mom would be upset if she knew that Lucy had her own phone, hysterical if she knew who’d given it to her.

  “Hullo, Papaw.”

  “What are you up to, sweetie? You’re up late.”

  “I’m going to bed. I just washed my face and brushed my teeth. I did my homework.”

  “Good girl.” He paused. They both knew what he’d say next.

  “So, Lucy…You were a little piggy today, weren’t you? I bet you stuffed your little piggy face at the trough.”

  Her voice was so soft he could barely hear her. “No, Papaw. I was good.”

  “Speak up when I speak to you, Lucy!” He smiled. “So, were you really good? Did you weigh yourself?”

  “I lost two.”

  He was quiet for a minute, then said, “Well, two pounds isn’t very much now, is it? From now on, I want you to text me with your weight every day.”