My thoughts were interrupted by the ring of the phone. I motioned for Mom to keep her seat, and I grabbed the receiver from the wall. Susan recognized my voice.
“Can you talk a second? I’m between rounds.”
“Hold on.” I turned to Mom. “I’ll catch it in the office.”
She took the phone, ready to hang up when I came on the extension.
I closed the office door behind me. “Okay, Mom.” The kitchen line clicked off.
Susan said, “I telephoned Sheriff Ewbanks last night. The dispatcher took my name and said he’d track him down. Ewbanks called me back about midnight.”
“Was he surprised to hear from you?”
“Hard to say,” she said. “He was too angry.”
“At you?”
“At NEWSCHANNEL-8. The station broke the story about my father and the gun.”
“Did he think you called them?” I grabbed a pencil and started jotting words on my notepad—Cassie and Ewbanks.
“No. He wanted to know if any reporters had tried to reach me earlier. I said I’d only heard from my father.”
“Did he say anything about your picture being in Calhoun’s wallet?”
“He didn’t. And I couldn’t bring it up since I’m not supposed to know about it.”
“But you told him about Calhoun.”
“How I met him in New York and then how he followed me to Asheville. I volunteered the information about the gun.”
“What did he make of that?”
“Not much. He thanked me for contacting him.”
“So that’s that for now,” I said.
“That was that for last night,” she said. “This morning at six I got another call requesting me to go to Walker County for fingerprints. I told the officer I had two surgeries scheduled and that I couldn’t get there till early afternoon.”
The word fingerprints went on the pad with an underline. “I guess they just want to rule you out,” I assured her.
“You want to have dinner this evening?” she asked. “I’d like to talk.”
“Fine. Where?”
“My place. Just bring your appetite.”
We agreed on five-thirty. After I hung up, I realized I hadn’t told Susan about my conversation with Cassie. Just as well. I had more questions for Susan’s aunt, and I wouldn’t be asking them over the telephone.
Freddy and I spent the morning preparing Claude McBee’s body. Uncle Wayne met with the family, which had now grown to eight plus local Baptist preacher Calvin Stinnett. A funeral by committee. While Freddy and I pumped Claude full of embalming fluid, Wayne walked the entourage through the casket displays, encouraging the financially strapped family to choose from the lower-priced models without insinuating that they couldn’t afford the deluxe solid mahogany costing more than a room full of furniture. A compassionate funeral director protects mourners from emotionally overspending and makes them feel good about their economical choices. Uncle Wayne knew how to do that better than anyone.
By lunch, both the burial plans and Claude were in good shape. Visitation would be Friday night with the funeral at Crab Apple Valley Baptist Church set for one on Saturday afternoon.
After devouring a bowl of Mom’s beef stew with Wayne and Freddy, I told them I needed to drive to Asheville for office supplies. The thermometer had risen into the mid-forties and road conditions posed no problems. I could run by Office Depot and still be at the TV station by two. Cassie Miller would begin her day with an unexpected interview.
The studios and offices for Channel 8 perched halfway up one of the ridges surrounding Asheville in nearby Buncombe County. Higher above, on the ridge crest, the transmission tower rose majestically into the clouds, flashing red warnings along its vertical shaft of interlaced steel. Officially, the station was WHME-TV, “Where Heaven Meets Earth,” but the days of cable television and the hard-fought competition for local news viewers made such a picturesque slogan obsolete. Now it was simply NEWSCHANNEL-8, one word, the be-all, end-all mantra glorifying the six o’clock newscast. Cassie had told Susan that’s where the station made one third of its money. “Where your treasure is, your heart will follow,” the scriptures say. News was the heart of Channel 8, and Cassie Miller was the heart of the news.
I parked in a visitor’s spot along the iron picket fence which protected the employees’ cars and the millions of dollars of equipment rolling around in the LIVE-EYE vans. Channel 8 didn’t have a helicopter, but that was about the only piece of glitzy hardware missing from its news-gathering arsenal. I grabbed my cell phone from the charger on the jeep’s dash and clipped it to my belt. When in Rome, at least look like a Roman. No one in this communication citadel would take me seriously unless it appeared I needed to be constantly in touch with someone.
Security was tight at the visitor’s entrance. I entered one set of doors, and a receptionist behind a thick window asked if she could help me. Another set of glass doors barred access to the lobby until I could assure this electronic gatekeeper that I had legitimate business within.
“I’m Barry Clayton. I’m here to see Cassie Miller.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“Yes,” I lied. “She called me last night.”
A buzzer sounded and the doors automatically opened. I was surprised they hadn’t thought to add celestial music. The lobby was richly furnished with a large mahogany coffee table, burgundy leather sofa, and two matching wing chairs. On the walls, numerous award plaques and statuettes basked in the reverential glow of spotlights positioned in the high ceiling. The photographs of network celebrities mingled with those of the local wannabees who were either on their way up or on their way down.
I turned to the receptionist, whose desk was now clear of the bulletproof glass of the airlock.
“I’ve notified the newsroom,” she said. “Please have a seat.”
Before I could sit down, a young man entered the lobby from the far end. He wore a headset around his neck and carried the unplugged jack in his hand. “Did you just get here?”
“Yes.”
“Come with me, sir.”
Impressed with the NEWSCHANNEL-8 efficiency, I followed my guide down a hall and through huge, wooden, double doors marked STUDIO B. We walked behind three cameras aimed at a living room set. The walls and fake fireplace were draped in Christmas ornaments, and an artificial tree in the corner shone with miniature white lights. A woman who looked vaguely familiar sat in a chair opposite two men. One of the men wore a clerical collar. An empty chair beside them had a microphone draped over its back.
A voice boomed through an invisible speaker, “Get him in place and miked. We’ve already got color bars. Rolling tape in forty-five seconds.”
The woman stood up, and our confused faces must have mirrored each other. “Who are you?”
“I’m Barry Clayton.”
“Did Dr. Elbertson send you? Isn’t he coming?”
“I’m here to see Cassie Miller.”
“But this is ‘Pastors Face Your Questions.’” Her eyes searched the studio beyond the glare of the lights. “Sid,” she yelled sharply. “I told you to meet Dr. Elbertson in the lobby. From Long Creek Baptist Bible College.”
“Barry, what the hell are you doing?” Cassie strolled onto the set as if it were her own living room. She was no more than an inch or two above five feet, barely higher than the cameras. Her dark pants suit hung loosely on her thin body, and she wore no jewelry other than gold hoops sparkling in her ears. Her short hair was shoe-polish brown and framed against a strong-boned face which revealed her sixty-one years only when it wrinkled in a wicked grin. She spoke to the reverends. “I’m sorry. He was supposed to come straight to the newsroom, but he’s a Pastors Face Your Questions groupie and has a thing for Charlene.”
The host, who I gathered was Charlene, flushed crimson. “Cassie. Really!”
“It’s the price you pay when you’re into public affairs, Charlene, dear. You are the best at public affairs. I’ll ta
ke care of the moonstruck boy for you.” She ceremoniously escorted me from the studio, and then broke into laughter as soon as we were in the scene shop and out of earshot. “That’ll chap Charlene all day. She’s such a god-damned prima donna.”
Cassie didn’t say anything else until she closed the door to her office. She motioned me to a chair and plopped down behind her cluttered desk. “Okay, why are you here? What’s going on?”
“You know more than I do. Who’s Sammy Calhoun?”
Cassie leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk and lightly touching the tips of her fingers together. Her eyes widened with the curiosity bred into every good reporter. “Why don’t you ask Susan?”
“For the same reason you called me last night,” I said sharply. “I want to know what’s going on, and the answers might be ones that I’d prefer to learn without Susan having to tell me. She and her father are too distracted and distraught to handle both a police investigation and the press leaks that are flooding your newsroom.”
“You really like her, don’t you,” she said. “Not exactly the match made in heaven, a surgeon and an undertaker.” She paused and smiled. “On second thought, it could be convenient. Okay, I’ll tell you about Sammy Calhoun, but you didn’t learn it from me. I think Susan is in love with you and prefers to keep private what is an embarrassing relationship from the past.”
“I’m just trying to understand how to help her. A skeleton doesn’t give me much to work with.”
A shudder rippled through Cassie’s body and I remembered the skeleton had once been a flesh and blood person to her.
“First of all, any mistakes Susan made were aided by my own stupidity,” Cassie said. “I had lived in Manhattan over thirty years when Susan came to the city. I took her on as a project.”
“Project?”
“Turn the mountain girl into a New Yorker.” She shook her head at the absurdity of her quest. “I was very proud of my niece. She’d not only left the hills like I had, but she was entering a prestigious medical school at twenty-two. My feminist battle flag proudly waved over my protégée, and I waltzed her around to impress as many of my friends as I could. One of them was Sammy Calhoun.”
“A private detective?”
The question must have carried a judgmental tone because Cassie scowled at me. “You’re an ex-cop,” she stated. “You know you make or break a case by getting information. Sammy was smooth and ingratiating. That was how he worked his sources. I didn’t stop to think that’s how he would work my niece.”
“She fell for him?”
“Like he was Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Susan had never had time for a boyfriend, not that her looks wouldn’t fetch a passel of guys with their tongues hanging out. She was focused on getting into med school. Sammy cut through all that at a time in her life when she began to look around. I had helped open her eyes and then put the wrong object in front of them.”
“Was he abusive?”
“No. Sammy was a user. Not drugs, people. Within three months, they were living together. Susan was carrying a full course load and waiting on him hand and foot. He’d turned my feminist charge into a school girl doting on a man ten years older.”
I had difficulty imagining Susan as fawning over anyone. Her independent mind was the defining trait of her personality.
“He must have been something.”
“Sammy was that all right. I guess he finally ran into someone he couldn’t charm.”
The intercom on the credenza behind her desk buzzed. “Cassie,” said a man’s voice.
“I’ve got someone with me,” she said, and punched a button blocking further interruptions.
“Did they break up before she left New York?”
“I gathered the relationship started to cool the last year of med school. When Susan came back to Asheville for her residency, Sammy had already returned to his old haunts. I used him on a few assignments. He was a good investigator. Knew surveillance and had all the latest high-tech gadgets.”
“How’d he wind up here?”
“Looking for work. Sat in the very chair you’re in now and spun me this sob story about how he wanted out of the New York rat-race. I’d been down here about six months and I gave him a sympathetic ear. He told me he’d walked in on a convenience store robbery a block from his apartment and when the gun smoke cleared, he’d killed the armed holdup man and the store owner’s eleven-year-old daughter who ran through the crossfire.”
“Jesus, that’s every policeman’s nightmare.”
“Yeah, and I bought it. So, I gave him an assignment to tail a road paving contractor we’d heard was a little too successful. Two days later Sammy showed up in this office with glossy photos of some good ol’ boys walking out of a hotel in Charlotte. Sure enough, the guy had met three of his competitors and a bid supervisor for the Department of Transportation. They were screwing the taxpayers out of millions on overpriced work. I paid Sammy an advance for his services and he went through Dumpsters, phone logs, checkbooks, and whatever else it took to expose the scheme. The bid-riggers never knew what hit them.” Cassie smiled, savoring the memory. “Sammy was good.”
“And he reconnected with Susan,” I said, getting back to what interested me.
“I think he tried. I warned her he was in town, and she told me she could take care of herself. I believed her.”
“Did you think Calhoun went to Texas?”
“That’s what I heard. Figured it was as likely a possibility as anything. I wasn’t giving him any more work.”
“Why not? You said he was good.”
“The son of a bitch lied to me. That story about the holdup and the dead girl. It was a crock of shit. A friend at CBS called to congratulate me on the bid-rigging story. I gave Sammy credit and said I was glad he’d bounced back from the tragedy. It never happened. My friend said Sammy skipped New York after he tried to blackmail a mobster with information he’d collected for a client—playing both ends of the game for the biggest payoff.”
“You think he could’ve been hit down here?”
“I doubt it. Sammy would’ve wound up in cement, not some mountain graveyard.” Cassie thought a moment. “Sammy would’ve appreciated that. He was always talking about how people overlook the obvious. Said that’s what made him a good investigator.” A bittersweet smile crossed her lips. “Hidden in a graveyard. Like that Poe story, ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Who’d look for a body in a cemetery?”
“Was he working on anything here that would get him killed?”
“I don’t know. The last I heard from Sammy was a voicemail he left pitching a story. Really big he claimed. Something about sex in the criminal justice system.”
I knew enough about news ratings to know that was a potent combination. “Sounds like a winner.”
“Sammy said it would make the bid-rigging scandal look like a Sunday morning, feel-good puff piece. But by then, I’d had it with Mr. Sammy Calhoun. I erased the message and put one of our reporters on it instead. He sniffed around the courthouse and jail but nothing came of it. And I never heard from Sammy again.”
I leaned forward in my chair, intrigued by the possibility that Sammy Calhoun had gone up against something he couldn’t control. “Susan said she loaned him the Colt twenty-five a few days before he disappeared. Any reason that’s not true?”
“Sammy had a license to carry in New York. He owned several pistols.”
“Maybe they weren’t small enough.” I thought about the remains in the grave. “Calhoun always wear cowboy boots?”
Cassie looked surprised. “Cowboy boots? He liked Gucci street shoes.” She mulled the implications. “A twenty-five would slip in a boot, wouldn’t it?”
Before I could answer, a sharp rap came from the door and a man stuck his head in. “Sorry. I couldn’t get through the intercom.”
He didn’t look sorry at all. A mischievous smile came through his neatly trimmed brown beard. I recognized him as someone I’d seen on TV.
; “That’s because I didn’t want anybody to get through the intercom,” snapped Cassie. “I’m busy.”
The intruder looked at me and shrugged. “Okay, but I thought you’d want to know Mr. Darius needs to see you at three. In his office.”
“Fine. Now I know. Close the damned door.”
As the latch clicked, I heard Cassie whisper, “Asshole.”
Cliff Barringer. I placed the face with the name thanks to Cassie’s ranting the night before. Barringer had broken the story of Calhoun and tied Walt to the gun.
“Who’s Darius?” I asked.
“The station owner. Nelson Darius is the one person I have to listen to when it comes to running this department.” She looked at her watch. “I wonder which advertiser we’ve pissed off now.”
She glanced down again. I sensed I’d have her attention for only a few more minutes.
“I’m afraid I’m not much help,” she said. “All I can do is speculate.”
“There’s no speculation that Sammy Calhoun was buried in that grave in the spring of 1997. If it wasn’t something he was working on and it wasn’t from New York—”
“I can’t say that for sure,” she interrupted. “I was thinking hypothetically. A dead body trumps a theory.” She snatched a pen from a chipped mug and wrote something on the back of her hand. “Hard to lose a hand,” she said. “I’ll call my friend at the network and see how seriously Sammy pissed off the mob.”
“What about the bid-rigging scandal? Any motive there?”
Cassie pursed her lips and thought for a few seconds. “The case hadn’t gone to trial yet, and the Charlotte prosecutor was mad that Sammy had left.”
“Charlotte?”
“It’s where the conspirators met. The indictments were issued there.”
“So Sammy was a star witness?”
“He was to testify how he got the evidence.”
“Did the case fall apart?”
She shook her head. “No. The prosecution had Sammy’s deposition and I took the stand to tell how I’d hired Sammy and seen all of his evidence firsthand.”
Grave Undertaking Page 9