Snapshot

by Lis Wiehl

  Stanley walked toward the black town car idling in the parking lot. He needed to get back to Miami anyway. There was a situation there he needed to resolve once and for all. As he wove through a stand of bushes, he felt the buzz of his cell phone in his pocket.

  “Marcus,” Stanley said, wondering why his nephew and company VP was calling when he was supposed to be in a meeting.

  “Some information came in that you’ll want to hear.”

  “What about?” he asked without slowing his pace.

  “I got a call from a contact at the Texas State Prison. You must have set this up before I came in, because I didn’t know anything about it. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Leonard Dubois?” Stanley asked.

  “Yes, yes, exactly. You’ll have to update me when you get back, but apparently Dubois is scheduled for execution.”

  “I know that.”

  “Okay, well, the contact also spotted correspondence from Dubois to a retired FBI agent. Name is … let me see here.”

  “Special Agent James Waldren.”

  “Yes.” Marcus didn’t hide his surprise.

  “What else?” Stanley asked.

  “That’s all I know. Who is this FBI agent and what does it have to do with you?”

  “It’s a lesson, my boy. A lesson to always tie up loose ends.”

  “O-kay,” Marcus said with a long pause. “Should something be done?”

  “Something will be done, but I also have that other matter to attend to in Miami. I’ll fly home today. Call the pilot and make the arrangements.”

  “Sure,” Marcus said, and Stanley could hear his nephew’s curiosity. The boy really needed to build a tougher exterior. Sometimes he was transparent as glass. That was never good in business, gambling, or relationships.

  Stanley leaned against the outside of the car, feeling the rumble of its engine through his back. He could see his daughter waving to the crowd as they cheered at the closing of her speech. The execution of Dubois was less than two months away. Gwen’s election was in six.

  “You don’t want me to do anything?” Marcus said.

  “I’ll be there tonight.”

  This was a loose end. Stanley notoriously wrapped up all loose ends, but in this instance he’d been young, and everything had gone wrong. Now it was coming back to haunt him. It could haunt his daughter as well, could end her political future. Stanley wasn’t about to let that happen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dallas, Texas

  James Waldren stared at his phone, pushing at different buttons and shaking his head.

  “Want some help?” Rosalyn said from behind the wheel of the car. Her eyes bounced to him and then back to the road.

  He squinted to study Rosalyn with her quirky green glasses and dark hair caught up with brightly colored pins in a loose bun. She chewed on a piece of gum with a vengeance.

  “Lisa wants me to text her a picture, but I hate this phone.”

  “You hate every phone.”

  “Not the one at home on the wall.”

  “Because the one at home is over two decades old, and you only like technology if you don’t have to learn it, which means no technology. Am I right?”

  He chuckled, and she said, “Why are you staring at me?”

  “How did you know that?” James had thought almost those exact words. He’d begrudgingly learned how to turn on a computer and how to use e-mail and search engines. They were helpful, he had to admit. But all these text messages and video chats and sending pictures, it was too much. He’d nearly returned a flat-screen TV because of the complicated remote.

  “You’re easier to read than you think,” she said with a wink.

  No woman had ever said that to James. Not his ex-wife or his daughter or the few women he’d dated after his divorce or his former secretaries, who were now called personal assistants though he never understood why. What was so demeaning about being called a secretary? Now perfectly good positions were renamed. Secretaries were executive assistants, stewardesses were flight attendants, and housewives were homemakers or domestic engineers. He didn’t understand, but perhaps that was why the women in his life claimed he was always disconnected—except for this eccentric woman behind the wheel.

  “I’m dying to hear how the call went. Will I be meeting your daughter soon?” Rosalyn asked with her usual inflated enthusiasm.

  James shifted in the seat. “Lisa is about to go on vacation. We’ll see what happens …” His voice trailed off. He hadn’t told Rosalyn the main reason he wanted Lisa involved—to keep her close. The last time he started digging around about the Benjamin Gray shooting, the threats had pulled him back. Threats had never slowed him down until his daughter was the target.

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy. Really. It would’ve been a great way to spend time together.”

  “Well … that’s not what I was doing,” he mumbled, knowing Rosalyn had envisioned a touching reunion. He did wish to know Lisa better, as long as they could start with a clean slate. Why rehash a past that couldn’t be changed?

  “Whatever you say,” she said. “But, hey, before I take you home, I need to stop by the office real fast. I want to show you something.”

  James closed his eyes, ready to be in his own abode. He wanted something hot to drink and needed to review something from his files.

  “You’ll be glad that we did,” she said slyly, but James wasn’t convinced. For the next twenty minutes, Rosalyn chatted about her car acting up and how the mechanic said a mouse had chewed up the wiring.

  “It cost me almost four hundred bucks, and I still might have a mouse running around in here. Why do I have three cats?”

  James made the appropriate concerned responses as his mind replayed the conversation he’d had with his daughter.

  Rosalyn parked in front of a small office nestled in the back corner of an old brick building. On the door, a sign read “Rosalyn Bloomquist, Private Investigator.” Beneath the words was a caricature of Rosalyn with Texas-sized hair and horn-rimmed glasses, holding a giant magnifying glass.

  The first time James had walked into this office after agreeing to a preliminary meeting, he’d been certain he wouldn’t help this amateur. As a retired special agent from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation with awards and commendations and, yes, one black mark on his record, there was no way he’d work as a consultant to this wannabe, no matter how bored he was in retirement.

  He had sat across from Rosalyn at her antique white desk wanting to laugh at the absurdity of the moment.

  But then Rosalyn had proceeded to impress him. She was quirky, bordering on weird, but she was sharp, understood the law, and had a keen sense of knowing how to get information. Her father had been an agent, her brother was a detective in Chicago, and she had retired from a police force outside of Houston to open her own PI agency.

  Now James followed her inside to her office in the very back of the building. She moved around her antique desk, pulling a stack of papers from her overflowing side table. She dropped the papers onto the desk in front of him and waited with an expectant look.

  “What are these?” He picked up the stack and flipped through the copies.

  “I found it.”

  “You’re going to make me guess when I’m this tired?” James asked wearily.

  “I won’t make you guess. What have you been searching for?”

  James sighed. She was going to make him guess.

  “Evidence to free Leonard Dubois.”

  “No, not that. The other thing. The historical item?”

  James grabbed the pile of papers. “You found the key?”

  “No, not the key, but the other half we needed to find. Oh, I’ll just tell you.” Rosalyn shook her head as if completely exasperated with him. “I found the Kennedy cabinet.”

  “It’s not at the JFK Presidential Library?”

  “No. It’s in a secret vault in Washington, DC. If we can find the key, now you’ll know where to find
the cabinet. Then you can open all its secrets.” Rosalyn had a flair for the dramatic.

  James flipped through the printouts, then rubbed his forehead. This all sounded like a rabbit trail to him.

  “We have no clue where the key is located. And we don’t even know if there’s a connection to the Benjamin Gray case.”

  “But once we get the key, we’ll know where to find the JFK cabinet. It’s progress. The key is worthless without the cabinet.”

  James grinned at her enthusiasm. “You did good work, you’re right.”

  “Darn right I did. What exactly did your daughter tell you after the man was shot?” Rosalyn used her patient voice with him.

  “She doesn’t recall much from that day now. But I remember on the day of the incident, she saw my old partner.”

  “What exactly did she say?”

  James hated to remember this part of the incident, when he’d scooped his little girl into his arms, fearful that he’d feel blood or hear more gunfire. He’d wanted to wrap her safely against his chest where nothing could harm her.

  “She pointed behind me and kept calling for Uncle Peter.”

  “So Peter was directly in line with where the shooting occurred. Peter told you about the key and the cabinet. Peter could have cleared this all up if he were still alive.”

  James didn’t want to talk about Peter. He didn’t want Rosalyn on the train of thought that Peter might be involved in the shooting.

  Rosalyn studied him as she spoke.

  “We have numerous possibilities here. Benjamin Gray might have been in the center of a shootout between two other people. He might have been shot by mistake. Or he was the intended victim and the shooter was injured or the shooter shot someone else. Or someone protecting Gray was injured. We need to explore all of these.”

  James knew she was right, but the effort seemed beyond what was really necessary. Right now they needed to find the evidence to free Leonard Dubois before his execution.

  “And then, of course, we need to explore the other element. The key.” Rosalyn sat on the edge of her desk. Her rapid-fire thoughts drove him crazy at times.

  “Yes, the key,” James repeated, feeling the weariness of a long day creep over him. Why had he confided so much in Rosalyn? James had never told anyone else about the key or his gut feeling that the shooting of Benjamin Gray had some tie with the Kennedy assassination or Oswald or politics or something much higher up than what was going on in Fort Worth, Texas. He had some leads on it, but they’d been shut down cold.

  A strong cup of coffee sounded incredibly desirable at the moment, making him question why he’d given it up. He wondered if he had any at home and what had become of his coffeepot.

  “I’ve been doing research on objects owned by JFK and Robert Kennedy, also Jackie and the children in case they inherited something out of the norm. I’ll keep you posted on that.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “Back to the shooting. I highlighted all the places in those newspaper printouts where another shooter was mentioned. All said that he was white. And the white cops ignored them because everyone was black.”

  “Sounds like 1965,” James grumbled. “But how does any of this get us hard facts to free Dubois? That’s the important question. I know you’ve picked up a scent in all this, but we’re going in a lot of directions. Everything is hearsay. Why don’t we work the hard evidence?”

  “This is how I do it, you know that. I gather all the pieces, even those that don’t appear useful or relevant, and I put the pieces together. That’s why I’m good.” Her grin was laced with both humor and arrogance.

  He grimaced. She was good, he had to admit.

  “Let me catch up on sleep and read through all of this. Can I please go home now?”

  “Yes, just one more thing,” Rosalyn said, sitting in her desk chair instead of heading to the door like he’d hoped.

  “What is it?” James said with a sigh.

  “I think you’re being followed.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dusk had fallen over Boston Harbor. The yachts, visiting vessels, and sailboats docked in the bay right up beside the high-rise buildings reflected lights like stars across the darkened waters.

  From her upstairs office in Moakley Courthouse, Lisa stared out the window, phone cupped in her hand. The hallways and offices that made up the US District Attorney’s Office were quiet, with nearly everyone gone to their homes throughout the Boston area.

  Lisa had promised her father a return phone call, but with the press conference, final paperwork to submit to the court, and numerous calls and visits from Radcliffe’s victims who wished to thank her for putting the man away, the afternoon had slipped by.

  If she was honest, though, Lisa knew she had avoided the call, watering the plants in her office and stacking new case files. Piles of the latter waited in stacks on her desk, with those nearest her right hand organized into the highest priority. The ones on the floor were the least urgent. She’d skimmed through every stack, even those on the floor, as evening deepened, until her father’s texts beeped onto her phone.

  She clicked them and found two images from long ago. Fort Worth 1965, Dad had written after the pictures.

  Lisa tried to zoom in for a better view, then sent them to the printer sitting in the corner of her spacious office. The printer hummed and flashed as it spit out the black-and-white pictures.

  Lisa set the grainy printouts over an open file about mail fraud. She leaned forward to study her four-year-old self in the snapshot. Her blond hair was cut short after she’d tried to trim it herself. She was sitting on a short cylindrical seat of concrete with another little girl beside her. The other child had deep dark skin and wore a white dress.

  In the second photograph, the black girl was approaching Lisa, studying her curiously. In the background Lisa could see the civil rights parade with onlookers facing away from the two little girls. Two women sat near them, one with a large white hat on her head. The photographs were compelling in their contrasts, especially considering the year and location, and full of stories anxious to be told.

  She dialed her father’s house number, and he answered immediately.

  “So you can send text messages after all,” she said.

  “I had to get help. So it really worked?”

  “I received two photographs and printed them. They aren’t the best quality, but yes, it worked.”

  “That’s interesting.” Her father sounded more surprised than pleased.

  A frame sitting on her desk caught Lisa’s eye. She didn’t keep recent pictures of her son at the office, just as she didn’t write anything personal or share photos over social media. Her job brought enough disreputable characters into her life to make it wise to take precautions.

  John was nine in the picture and wore his rugby uniform. His smile was as wide as the Grand Canyon, and it made her heart ache now with missing him. That ache turned cold as she thought of her father choosing to miss out on such an amazing kid. Yet now he wanted her help.

  “Tell me about the case and what you had in mind for me to do.”

  “Sure, let’s get right to it. First, do you remember anything new from that day, anything you might have told me or that you saw?” Dad’s voice grew louder, as if he was pressing the phone against his mouth. Lisa pictured him in the old kitchen, maybe leaning over a list of handwritten leads or a file folder from the investigation.

  “I don’t remember much of anything. Nothing that would help acquit someone on death row, if that’s what you’re asking. I was, what, four or five?”

  “Four,” Dad said. “Do you remember the little girl in the snapshots?”

  “Vaguely. I remember talking to a little black girl. She might have been the first black girl I’d ever met.”

  “Benjamin Gray was killed right in your line of sight. I’d hoped that you or she might have seen something. I wish I could find her.”

  Lisa hadn’t known the shooting was that
close to them. But if she couldn’t remember, why did her father think this other girl would remember something after all these years? And how would he ever find her?

  “Do you have any leads?”

  “Just the photographs. It’s a stretch, I know. I have a lot of other information, but I don’t know how to get any of it to you.”

  There it was again. Dad wanted her to go to Dallas. A sudden heaviness came over her. This entire thing sounded like a wild-goose chase. Most likely the right man had been convicted of the killing, but for some reason, her father was revisiting something from his past.

  “Dad, I just can’t come out right now. Let’s see what I can do from here.”

  “Why don’t you start by reading up about Benjamin Gray and the man convicted of the crime? His name is Leonard Dubois.”

  “I can do that.”

  “When do you leave for your vacation?”

  “I’m not sure. I was waiting until the Radcliffe sentencing before booking flights. I’d like to go see Mom or go to London.”

  “Ah, okay. That might be good for you, especially to be out of the country.”

  “Why is that?” Lisa was beginning to really worry about her father. One second he wanted her help, the next he sounded relieved that she’d be leaving the United States. This from the dad who had once discouraged her from a student exchange program in Europe.

  “Just that it’s nice to get away. That’s what I meant.”

  Lisa could tell that there was more to it.

  “I’d be going to see my son. You know, your grandson, John?”

  “Is that where he is? That’s nice. Well, I’ll call you tomorrow. Is that enough time to do some research?”

  Lisa clenched her teeth to control the anger building in her chest.

  “Sure. Talk to you then.”

  Later, in the emptiness of her house, Lisa ate green curry straight from the square takeout box while standing at the granite counter. The late news aired on the television, but she watched with little interest even as they replayed pieces of her press conference. A legal analyst gave her thoughts on Radcliffe’s sentence, and the segment was longer than most other news being covered.