To his credit, he didn’t pull out a weapon. But he was quick and nimble, this cop, and he pulled me away from the wheelchair and spun me around and said, in pure cop language: “Stop. This woman is in police custody.”
I tried to snatch myself out of his hold, but he was strong.
But there is no more determined force on the face of the earth than a retired schoolteacher with a mission of saving someone she loves, though why Eleanor would love Willette remains as much of a mystery as what happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Which is to say, Eleanor popped in behind the wheelchair and gave it a mighty shove and got clean out into the hallway, what with me holding up Young Lawman and Shalonda holding up Yelling Nurses.
Eleanor had that wheelchair a yard past the nurses’ station by the time Young Lawman broke loose of me and took off running after her. Shalonda and I ran after him. The Yelling Nurse Duo apparently decided the better part of valor was to abandon the field, and they went off in another direction, possibly looking for Security.
Young Lawman, being barely more than a kid, had a physical advantage over Eleanor, highly motivated though she was, and he jumped past Shalonda and me, blocking Eleanor and the wheelchair that contained Willette. “Y’all stop now, damn it,” he said, flushed and no doubt a tad peeved.
Eleanor shoved the wheelchair another inch or two before he grabbed her arm.
“Don’t you grab that woman,” I said.
“I’m the police chief’s wife,” Shalonda said, “and in his absence, I’m ordering you to let that woman go.” She made a commanding presence.
Young Lawman let go of Eleanor and stood still, looking like a puzzled puppy caught between a shoe he wants to chew and a memory of what happened last time he chewed one.
“As the chief of police’s wife, I command you to let Miz Willette go,” Shalonda said, her voice and posture equally bold.
“You’re not…I mean…you can’t…” Young Lawman stammered.
Well, exactly, I thought, though I admired Shalonda’s sudden claim to being the acting police chief solely by virtue of her marriage vows.
“Young man,” Eleanor said, “didn’t I teach you to respect your elders?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Young Lawman said. “And I appreciate to this good day all the help you gave me when I was foolish enough to take that Shakespeare course over to Valdosta State, but I can’t be letting you steal this woman.”
“You have a fine mind, young man. You just let the idea of Shakespeare intimidate you.”
“Yes, ma’am. Everybody sure was surprised when I got a B in that course, me most of all. But be that as it may, I can’t be letting you just take Miss Willette out of here.”
“Yes, you can, young man, I wouldn’t lie or trick you, any more than Mrs. Dupree here would. We need to get this woman transferred to another facility. Now. It is an emergency.” As she talked, Eleanor eased away from Willette, forcing the still-puzzled-looking police officer to back up. I saw at once what Eleanor was doing, as did Shalonda, who marched in beside Eleanor and both of them kept pressing the zone of personal space about Young Lawman, who kept backing up.
Every step they backed up left more and more leeway around Willette. In a second, I whipped into that empty space behind the wheelchair and started running and pushing.
When Young Lawman tried to run after me, Shalonda flat-out tackled the man.
I saw this out of the corner of my eye as I ran, glancing back while pushing the wheelchair in front of me, and I made the front door, where I nearly collided with Dr. Hodo, who, bless his heart, didn’t bother to ask questions of medical protocol this time but took over pushing the wheelchair while I bent over, gasping momentarily to catch my breath. Then I followed him to his car, where we laid Willette out in the back seat.
“You trust me?” he asked.
I stared him in the face, taking his measure. For a moment, I had my doubts. What if Willette had known something about him, some valid reason to ban him from our house all those years ago? I had to ask. “Why did my mother run you off?”
Dr. Hodo looked at me, then gazed off in the distance for a minute before he turned back to me, staring into my own eyes with his intense blue ones.
“Every year I get a Christmas card from a convicted pedophile,” he said.
What the hell did that have to do with anything, I wondered, and opened my mouth to protest this digression.
“That man, I could help. And I did. And he thanks me, every December, in that card.”
“So what in the name of—”
“But I couldn’t help Willette. Or your father.”
Oh, I thought, and considered the weight this man’s profession laid on his shoulders.
“Your mother was jealous. Jealous because your father and I went fishing. She took offense at any time he took away from her.”
Like she was jealous of me, because Delvon would rather hang out with me than her. Yeah, okay, it fit. It fit, but it was also too easy, his explanation, and I stared back at him with my own intense blue eyes. “What else?”
“I tried to suggest to her that she and her father both needed some professional help. He was drinking too much, and she was taking entirely too many tranquilizers and painkillers. You do know there is a strong family history of manic-depressive behavior on your grandfather’s side? Sometimes this can manifest itself in substance abuse.”
I sidestepped my faulty gene pool and asked, “And she refused your help?”
“Yes, to put it mildly. Then I compounded my sin. I told your father he had a problem.”
A problem with his wife.
My father’s friend from long ago. A compassionate, trained psychiatrist. Wanting to help, and being turned out of the family and the friendship as his reward. It fit what little I really knew about Willette.
It also fit one of the first lessons of my life: You don’t talk about it.
Don’t tell anyone what goes on inside. Don’t let anybody know. Bar the door. Drape the windows. Hunker down and shut up.
But mow the grass and paint the house and wear a clean white shirt to the office so everybody will think it’s all just fine.
On the surface, everything’s all right.
So, naturally, my father let Willette run off the proffered help, and covered up the mess.
I felt a sharp jab of anger at my parents. Then I shook my head to clear the feelings. And I turned back to the question at hand. Did I trust Dr. Hodo?
For a fleeting moment, it occurred to me Dr. Hodo probably had access to roofies and LSD and red ants. And that he could come and go in the hospital.
But I could conceive of no motive. And I could conceive of no evil in this man. And his story rang true to me.
So, in the end, after looking into his blue eyes, I said, “Yes, I trust you.”
“Then go help find those kids, and let me get Willette to a hospital in Thomasville.”
“Call me,” I said, already turning back to my own car.
I left Shalonda, Young Lawman, and Eleanor to sort it out among themselves.
But I had the notion that Young Lawman wasn’t about to arrest the missing police chief’s wife or his former English teacher.
He did seem like a nice young man.
chapter 53
It was simple, really: Who had killed or tried to kill whom and why no longer mattered.
We had to get the kids back.
That was all that was important. Especially now that the endangered Willette was presumably safely on her way to a hospital where someone wasn’t trying to kill her, and where, properly detoxed from LSD, roofies, and Thorazine, she might finally tell us what had happened the day she allegedly shot Ray Glenn.
So, why was I thinking about this story in a newspaper about a congressman who had sold his house in a desirable city to a big oil lobbyist? No big deal there. But then, within a year, the lobbyist sold it at a loss—an $800,000 loss. Which was unheard of in the middle of this country’s biggest housing bubble,
where the inflated prices of real estate in certain cities and states were creating both a false wealth and a growing class of the newly homeless.
And, naturally enough, the congressman had voted in favor of Big Oil in every vote since that lobbyist had purchased his house.
That the lobbyist had bribed the congressman by paying much more than the house was worth eventually got them both in some trouble.
Being a busy lawyer with things like billable hours, clients being sued, and expert witnesses to worry about, I’d more or less forgotten that story.
Till now.
Bribery. And the missing kids. If I could find the connection, maybe I could find Bobby, Becky, and Armando.
So, with connecting the dots in mind, I called Rebecca from the phone in Patti and Dan’s kitchen. Halfway through the first ring, she answered, her voice breathless and scared. “Becky?” she asked.
“Lilly,” I said.
“God, do you know anything?”
“Not about the kids, but—”
She hung up.
I called her right back.
“Listen, this is important. I’ve got to know this to help find Becky.”
This time she didn’t hang up.
“Did Simon really pay Lonnie four hundred thousand for that property?”
Pause.
“How is that—”
“I think Simon was bribing Lonnie for his vote on the resort, and somehow Simon figures Becky knows something.” Okay, the condensed version.
I could practically hear Rebecca’s brain working. “What’s Simon got to do with it?”
“I don’t know exactly, but something. Maybe he’s a cover for—”
“The resort.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me go check something,” and bam, she hung up again.
What was she checking? The ethics code for whether she could break a client confidence to save her child? I could give a quick answer on that—loosely translated, hell, yes—and if the Georgia Bar disagreed, screw ’em, and I dialed her number again.
“Becky?” she asked.
“Lilly.”
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” Bam, she hung up on me again.
Twenty minutes later, when the phone rang, I’d already chewed a hole in my lip trying to use Westlaw on my laptop, with Bobby’s slow-speed dial-up, to find the connection between Simon and the resort. “What?”
“Rebecca here. The CEO of the resort is a man named Davis Pombo.”
“So?”
“He started out as a salesman for the same drug company as Simon. They would have known each other.”
So, there it was.
Simon and the CEO of the resort, both fledgling salesmen in a pharmaceutical company as they started out on their lives of greed and crime.
“How did you find that out?”
“I’ve got Simon’s résumé, from being on the hiring board. And I did a Lexis news database search on the resort, got Pombo’s name, and researched him, and found a feature article on him that gave a bio.”
Wow, Rebecca was good.
“So, did—”
“Yes, Simon paid four hundred thousand to Lonnie for that place. I told Lonnie it wasn’t worth it, and I…I worried about fraud, but I didn’t think of bribery.”
Okay, Rebecca wasn’t that good. “Gotta go,” I said.
“Wait, I forgot to tell you, your son’s ferret is missing too,” and then, bam, she hung up again.
Now I had to explain to Shalonda why we needed to go to Simon’s place.
Naturally, Shalonda and Eleanor had talked their way around Young Lawman, and Shalonda had come back to Dan’s house, and so, here we were again.
Sitting together in a room, with trouble writ large around us. The grown-up version of all those hours we had spent in after-school detention.
The first thing I did was tell her what Bobby and Becky had told me: that Lonnie was inside Willette’s house the night Ray Glenn got shot, and had run out. She took a long time digesting this, but to her credit, didn’t try to pass off Bobby and Becky as liars or mistaken.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” I said.
“We got your momma safe, and we’re gonna find those kids, and Demetrious is gonna have a real good explanation when he comes home, you just wait and see.”
Optimistic people make me nervous, so I plunged ahead into my theory. Here’s what I told her: Simon had bribed Lonnie. Pure and simple. That purchase of Lonnie’s place, aka my grandmother’s home, was a bribe that had somehow led to attempted murder, real murder, and kidnapping.
“I don’t get it,” Shalonda said. “Why bribe Lonnie?”
That Shalonda didn’t understand why Lonnie was a great subject for a bribe suggested she still refused to see him for who he had been.
A spineless, greedy politician on the make.
Possibly a redundancy in the labeling, I thought, as I set out to explain the broad principles to Shalonda. With as much gentleness as I could, I told her that Lonnie had been a cheat all the way around.
Lonnie was the swing vote on whether the county would appoint the resort corporation as the county’s agent for development, and without his vote, the resort couldn’t use the county’s power of eminent domain. And eminent domain was, finally, the key, quite simply, to stealing Jubal and Hank’s place under the government’s power to take land for the public good, as Jubal and Hank had the misfortune to own what apparently was the gem of the future lakefront property. Eminent domain was also the key to cutting out inflated selling prices for many of the other property owners, and the cure for any other balky landowners. Especially the ones who didn’t live on lakefront property now, but would when the county finished damming up the creek and making a big lake. If the county got their property now, under eminent domain, it would be purchased at the modest, rural-farmland prices, not at lakefront prices. Given the many hundreds of acres at issue, this would make a huge difference in the cost of doing business for the planned development. No telling how many other property owners around Sleepy Lake, or north of it, where the county planned to flood twelve hundred acres, were in the same boat as Jubal and Hank.
So, yeah, there was a passel of property to be had, and having it at the cheapest price was the goal. That being using the county to help the resort gobble it up at the government’s idea of the fair-market value, plus being able to force out those like Jubal and Hank, who did not want to sell. But in order to use eminent domain under the new Supreme Court decision, local government needed to side with the resort and the developers, and offer at least some pretense of a public purpose. That meant convincing the commissioners to vote the way of the resort, and thereby become partners with it in the grand development scheme—and offer up increased tax revenue and new jobs as the public good. Overlooking, of course, that the highest-paid jobs would come from outside the county and that the increased taxes meant the locals’ own property taxes would increase.
And into this picture of greed and grab, there boogied good ole Lonnie, county commissioner and failed country singer, holding on to that key vote.
Till Simon hit the right asking price.
A $140,000 bribe.
And how better to bribe someone without leaving an obvious trail?
There were a congressman and a lobbyist who’d already figured this out.
Pay the bribee more than his house was worth, let him pocket the money, all fair and square. Shoot, Lonnie wouldn’t even have to pay capital gains tax on it if he had a CPA with a brain bigger than a pea, since that place had been his home for more than two years and would fit into the tax-exempt category.
It was actually a very clever plan.
But it was a plan that required that no one looked too closely at the transaction.
Thus, except for one small misstep and Willette’s good aim, it probably would have worked out just dandy for Lonnie, Simon, and the resort corporation.
The screwup was that Lonnie might possibly ha
ve forgotten to mention to Simon that he didn’t actually, you know, own the house and property, because he, Lonnie, the big shot, might possibly have forgotten, you know, to actually pay Willette the rest of the purchase price because he had expensive lifestyle issues. I mean, from Lonnie’s point of view, why pay a drug-addled and crazy old woman the last $65,000 when you could just fake her signature on a deed and count on the fact that she wasn’t leaving her house long enough to realize what was going on and to raise a stink? And maybe Lonnie had thrown some extra drugs her way to up the addled quotient.
What Lonnie hadn’t counted on was Willette’s contact with the outside world via modern telecommunications. And her phone list. And the fact that she wasn’t really that crazy after all. Just reclusive. What had Dr. Hodo said? Agoraphobic and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A gene pool with manic-depressive DNA. But, contrary to general appearances, not actually crazy enough not to notice when she was being screwed over in land and money.
Someone—Jubal the errand boy, Dan the dutiful son, Eleanor the friend—probably picked up on some rumors about the sale and the price, and they’d called Willette. More than likely, she’d called Simon and Lonnie. I mean, I had that phone-list notebook that showed she’d called Simon the day Ray Glenn got shot. Once she was detoxed enough, we could find out for sure, but for now, my money was on guessing Willette wanted Simon to pay her the same $400,000 that he had paid Lonnie for the house she still legally owned.
But, being the recluse she was, obviously she wasn’t a county commissioner with the power to swing a vote, and there was no reason in the world for Simon to pay her $400,000 for a place with a fair market value of no greater than $260,000.
So, obviously, Simon would want Lonnie to get clean title, and to shut Willette up.
I tossed out my theory to Shalonda.
“So, Simon’s in on it. No doubt,” Shalonda said, agreeing. “But Lonnie—”
I had held back some of my suspicions before, out of consideration for Shalonda’s feelings for Lonnie, but the lives and mental health of three teenagers were at issue now. Not to mention the missing Demetrious, mule, and ferret.
Sweetheart Deal Page 28