Drowning Barbie

by Frederick Ramsay

“And opportunists like Ruth and me don’t exactly enhance your faith.”

  “Frankly no, you don’t, but, as we say in my line of work, we live in hope.” Blake Fisher smiled. “So, A Blessing of a Civil Marriage…I can do that for you. When?”

  “I know your weekends are busy, how about next early next week?”

  “Monday works for me, unless that is too short notice.”

  “Monday’s good. I’ll e-mail Ruth and we can get this party together.”

  “Dorothy Sutherlin is our resident festivities person. You might have a word with her.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  George LeBrun’s lawyers told him to be careful for the next few weeks, until his hearing for a new trial can be held.

  “Circumspect,” his lawyer had cautioned. “You cannot do anything that would give the law enforcement community an excuse to stop and charge you. One false step, George, and you are back in the slammer. Drive slowly, stay sober, no dope, no fights, and for God’s sake, no dealings with your former associates.”

  Circumspect was not a word in George’s lexicon, but had it been, he still might not have subscribed to it in his current circumstances. He did understand the gist of the warning, however. His attorney stared at George as hard as he dared and had made it clear that his behavior while out on bond must be squeaky clean. “Not even a parking ticket, George,” he’d said.

  Except for the trip to the mobile home park to take care of a potential problem, George had remained open and very public, his every move carefully covered with an iron-clad alibi if one were needed. Someone else drove him when he had to get about. He stayed out of sight in his rented rooms over the Road House. No one would pick up on his brief detour from this regimen at the trailer park. After all, he’d needed to plug a leak, to solve a problem, to end a potential threat. And he had.

  He held up his fingers, noticed and then dismissed the obvious need to clean his fingernails, and began to tick off his current situation; the Smut woman, dead; Dellinger, dead; but the girl still in the wind, maybe local, maybe heading to the cops and that Jew sheriff. He’d heard the rumor. Frankie Chimes’ sister-in-law said something about a new kid in town she’d worked on at the beauty parlor. The girl, she said, seemed rabbity, all jumpy and scared like, which figured, and she would be the right age. He needed someone to find her, check her out, and if it turned out she was Darla, take care of her. This close to being sprung he didn’t need the little bitch to bring that old crap up. A lot of people didn’t, in fact. If he got the girl out of the picture, a lot of high muckety-mucks would owe him a favor or two, for sure.

  But who would be available to nose her out? He spun the virtual rolodex located in the still functioning portion of his brain and searched for a name. He would follow his legal advisors and stay out of trouble, but he had work that needed doing and he couldn’t wait for permission from a suit in Richmond to do it. He needed a pair of hands and some muscle to do it for him, preferably someone who would work cheap or for product. He preferred the latter. He had access to more methamphetamine than cash.

  ***

  Sam studied her husband. She imagined she could read him like a book. Wives can, as a rule. Husbands think they can do the same with their wives but that notion, along with the one about the efficacy of having sex to settle arguments, is largely delusional. An argument is over when the wife has won it. That fact may not emerge for days, weeks, or even years, but it is the nature of the process and the only thing the sex will do, as enjoyable as it might be, is delay the inevitable.

  “So, where are we, Karl? Is the dead man your problem or Ike’s?”

  “If I had to guess, at this stage he’s mine. I won’t be able to say for certain until we get a DNA match, but it isn’t looking good.”

  “If it ends up in your lap, what do you do?”

  “Do?” Karl buried his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, what do I do? You know my options. I report it to my boss and he sends it up the ladder and if it doesn’t get buried somewhere along the way—which in the present politically charged state at the Bureau isn’t likely—it comes back to bite me. And three or four special agents with tenure, reputations, and seniority to protect are going to be in a bind. The upshot of that means, as I said, I will hear about it and my career could be in trouble.”

  “For telling the truth?”

  “No, not for telling the truth, for rocking someone’s canoe. Two of the men who worked the case back then are either agents in place or head up regional bureaus in big cities. They have bright futures in the Bureau. If the men convicted of Barbarini’s murder get a new trial and/or are released because the evidence that convicted them is too tainted to bring them back to court, careers will be compromised and that means I acquire some important enemies who will be only too happy to see that mine is too.”

  “That’s not fair. You did your job. You didn’t screw up the case, they did. I can’t believe they’d punish you for that.”

  “It isn’t viewed as punishment, Sam. I would be breaking ranks. The thugs who iced Barbarini belong in jail. In their view the fact that the investigation was a screw-up shouldn’t alter that. That would also be the unofficial consensus in the Bureau as well. It follows that since justice was done, however imperfectly, the proverbial dog should be allowed to stay sleeping. And, you are forgetting something.…”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember why I was here in Picketsville and how we met?”

  “Of course. You were on administrative leave.”

  “I was in ‘exile.’ My section chief fouled the nest and wanted me to take the fall. It didn’t happen, of course, but in the end, to keep things quiet, he was allowed to retire without prejudice and I was returned to duty.”

  “Well then?”

  “My exile and the reasons for it are still in my personnel file, Sam. If I have to label this ten-year-old case as a foul up, it will land in there, too, as the second eyebrow-raiser in it. I will be labeled as the guy who torpedoes his superiors.”

  “So? You did the right thing then and would be doing the right thing now.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay, consider this: Let’s say a promotion review board looks at two candidates. They see two identical records except one has these odd inclusions where the agent played a role in bringing a senior agent down. Who do you suppose they will select?”

  Sam clamped her jaw and shook her head. “That’s just not fair at all. Karl, they can’t do that. You could appeal and—”

  “Create a third negative entry into my file. No, I couldn’t do that.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will hope the DNA doesn’t match. Failing that I will either lie and say the cadaver in the county meat locker is a John Doe and not Barbarini, or I will tell the truth and consider what other options I may have, career-wise.”

  “You won’t lie, will you?”

  “No.”

  The two sat in silence, lost in thought.

  “Is the dead guy’s nickname really Barbie?”

  “That’s what it says in his folder.”

  “The Mob does that, doesn’t it?”

  “Does what? You mean give their people funny names?”

  “Yeah, like No Neck Noonan or Jimmy the Fish, and they’re almost always put-downs.”

  “I expect they are considered a badge of honor or something among the brotherhood.”

  “Did you have a nickname growing up?”

  “Until I outgrew my friends I was called Hedy, like some old-time movie star. Then, when I passed them at six feet-something, they changed it to Stork.”

  “Me, too, only my short person name was Barbie, like your dead guy. I got it because I was proportioned a little oddly, if you know what I mean, and sort of strawberry blonde. You grow too fast and your legs don’t fit your torso and your bumps pop out, and it was awful.
The hair darkened to red when the hormones kicked in and I really shot up. Then the peculiar body proportions started to work for me.”

  “I’m all over that.”

  They sat in silence again for a while, Sam anxious, Karl, sad.

  “Sam, do you like your job at NSA?”

  “Well, sure, I mean it has its challenges but the technology I am allowed to use is amazing. NSA is not as much fun as when I worked for Ike, but…oh well, that was then and this is now. You know what happened and I can’t complain. Shoot, at least we both work in the same town now. Commuter relationships are for the birds.”

  “Right. You know that being an FBI agent—”

  “I know, it is all you ever wanted to do since you were a kid. Yes, I know. You mustn’t let go of that, Karl. If this business with Barbarini turns out badly, you fight through it. You are a good agent. No, you are a great agent and the people in the Bureau who make decisions about who does what and where they do it know you are. You will be fine. Just do what you know is right.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. Still, this would be a nice place for a kid to grow up, wouldn’t it?”

  “Picketsville? Yeah, I guess so. But so is the D.C. area. We won’t be inside the city limits much longer. We’ll get a little house in a suburb with a good school system and…sorry, I’m being a mom before being a wife. Karl, it will be fine.”

  ***

  The problem with living the way he did, LeBrun thought, was it was nearly impossible to make and keep friends. They betrayed you, they went to jail, or they died violently. An hour of heavy thinking had produced not a single name of someone who was both trustworthy and currently available to work for him. Recruiting outside muscle was a possibility but had risks he didn’t want to take. It would be too easy to employ someone who turned out to be working for the cops undercover, or someone whose loyalty was with a rival, or someone who could be bought. No, he’d have to do the searching for the girl on his own. The lawyer said to stay clean; he didn’t say to do nothing.

  Then he thought of Jack. Perfect.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Ike pulled chairs into his office and instructed Rita to call in as many deputies as she could. “Just the ones who would be able to drop whatever they are doing and come in. I don’t want to leave Picketsville unattended.” Unlike its big-city contemporaries, Picketsville did not have a scheduled roll call before each shift change. The uniforms dispersed to assume the duties posted for them as they arrived and checked in with the dispatcher individually. Ike would talk to them if he needed to and if he happened to be on station at the time. That didn’t happen often since he is a determined “night person.” He trusted his people and, in turn, they did all they could to confirm it. Ike had been criticized by at least one accrediting agency for this lack of order and his ignorance of conventional procedure, but since his closure rate for major crimes approached one hundred percent, because he was elected, not appointed, and because Picketsville’s citizens generally approved of his performance, nothing ever came of it. Today, however, he wished he’d put the roll call practice in place. The murder of Ethyl Smut remained unsolved. Little or no progress had been made in the nearly week since the body had been found. In the meantime, another body had been added to the list of crimes to be solved and even though the recent murder and the Smut case were undoubtedly connected, until he could establish it, his caseload had just doubled.

  Movement. He wanted some movement.

  Frank Sutherlin, his brother Billy, Charley Picket, and Karl shuffled into the office and sat down. Three other deputies crowded the doorway.

  “Okay,” Ike began, “so you know, we are borrowing Karl from the FBI and he will help us wherever he can. The body found buried with Ethyl Smut has been tentatively identified as Anthony Barbarini, a New York hood murdered ten years ago by two guys, Alphonse Damato and Johnny Murphy. They are currently serving life without parole in Sing Sing. A DNA test has been ordered to nail down the ID. If the test confirms it, Karl has a problem, but we close a cold case on our books. If not, the problem of the body and making an ID reverts to us—add one more. Until then, we will let that one ride and Karl can be available for whatever we need done here.”

  Ike stacked and restacked papers on his desk, shifted around in his chair, and sipped his coffee.

  “Okay, moving on to Ethyl Smut. If I forget anything, jump in, and if you have something new to add, ditto.” He frowned and straightened up in his chair. “We started with a straightforward murder of the lady. Then, we were gifted with a second murder. A fingerprint confirmation IDs the body in the burned out trailer as Mark Dellinger. He also had dental records on file if the prints weren’t enough. I believe the two deaths, Smut’s and Dellinger’s, are connected because not to do so asks me to accept too much in the way of coincidence. I need to review everything we have on Smut and anything else even if it relates only slightly to her death. Then we connect the dots. Somehow, I have a sense we are missing something obvious but it keeps eluding me.”

  “Excuse me, Ike,” interrupted Frank Sutherlin, “but if my sources are correct, George LeBrun had a connection to both the woman and Dellinger and as yet no one has even mentioned him, much less approached him. Given his past, don’t you think we should pull him in?”

  “Noted. Frank, I want to take this chronologically. We’ll get to the town’s premier scumbag in a minute. Now, Ethyl had a daughter, Darla or Darlene, whom she abused in ways that seem inconceivable to me and I won’t detail here but you check Smut’s jacket and you’ll get the picture. The daughter is known both as Darla Smut and Darla Dellinger, depending on time and place. She may be calling herself something else by now. She will not be easy to find unless we get some help. More on that later. Anyway, she fled her mother’s clutches several years ago and until now, could not be located.”

  “Until now?” Frank said.

  “I have it on reasonably good authority that she is in the area. I don’t know for certain, but if not now, recently. That said, and given the nature of her relationship with her mother, she heads up our suspect list. I am not happy about that. My source insists she did not kill her mother and I would like to believe that, but for now, she is a person of interest at the very least.…I need more coffee…Rita?”

  Ike handed his coffee cup to Frank who passed it to one of the doorway jamming deputies. He, in turn handed it to Rita who filled it at the K-Cup machine and handed it back and the route was repeated in reverse.

  “Thank you. Next, is Mark Dellinger. He is the girl’s father. He is ex-Marine with a less than honorable discharge and an old rap sheet. He slipped off the radar ten years ago and for a moment we thought he might turn out to be the body unearthed with Smut. He has spent time in the system for a variety of felonies, some serious, some not so. He must have resurfaced recently and ticked off somebody because, as I said, we found his body in a burned out mobile home north of town. That park happens to be the Smut woman’s latest address as well. That alone would suggest his death and hers must be connected. The ME confirms he took a nine mil to the head before the trailer was torched. Striations on the slug suggest the weapon had a noise suppressor attached. Dellinger was killed midday yesterday and his unit set on fire to cover the murder. If he had a recent run-in with Smut, we have no evidence of it. We can only guess at what, if anything, transpired between those two, but you can bet your pension they at least had a conversation.

  “Finally, when we went back to the Smut woman’s trailer on our second trip to the park later the same day, as it happens, we found evidence of a struggle and a blood trail leading out the door. There were two blood types on the floor. One definitely matches hers.”

  “DNA?”

  “Not going to order DNA just yet, Frank. It seems safe enough at this point to assume we’re looking at her blood. We know someone stabbed her before dispatching her with the ever-popular ‘blunt instrument.’ So, now we know
where her murder story begins.”

  “Do we, Ike?” Frank asked. “I mean…okay, we’ll accept that the blood is hers but then what in hell was she doing in the park? Charley found the tree branch that launched her into the great beyond out there, not in her trailer. Did the same person who stabbed her conk on the head with the stick? If her killer took her there, why did he wait to finish her off in the woods and not the trailer and, finally, why finish her off with a clubbing? Why didn’t he complete the job with his knife?”

  “I can’t answer the second part, but if I remember correctly,” Karl said, “that park is off the back road that leads up to Lexington. There is a hospital and ER there. Maybe she got away from her stabber and was heading to the hospital.”

  “But why stop and wander into the woods and then get herself hit over the head? What happened to her vehicle, and then…this is the biggie as far as I am concerned…why did her killer go to the trouble to bury her?”

  “He didn’t want her found?”

  “Okay, but why would he care? She’s dead and as far as anyone knows, there was no reason to maintain the illusion that she was just missing. She was not an important player in anything, so why go to the trouble of digging a hole and dumping her in?”

  “Frank, you have a point. I wish I knew,” Ike said.

  “None of this makes any sense, Ike, unless…”

  “Unless what, Frank?”

  “Unless the stabbing and the clubbing are separate events. Look, suppose Smut had an argument with someone, let’s say Dellinger, or LeBrun. I like that one better. So, there is an argument and she is stabbed. Whoever did it either doesn’t realize what he’s done or she flees before he can finish the job.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Then she heads to the park and meets someone there and this second person whacks her on the head.”

  “Possible, Frank, but again, why? Why would she go there with a stab wound and who would know to be there when she showed up? And then again, where’s her transportation?”