Deadly Ruse
Page 7
“Jordan!” She hustled after the kid and was out of sight before I had a chance to thank her.
After ringing Mr. Chatwood’s doorbell a third time the only response I’d gotten was from a yapping Chihuahua that kept leaping halfway up the screen door snapping its teeth like it was determined to rip out my throat. Damn good thing Great Danes weren’t born with that disposition.
I turned and started down the steps when a hulking man in his late seventies or early eighties decked out in dusty overalls and a sweat-stained straw hat came ambling around the side of the house. He looked past me at the irritated overgrown rat.
“Hush up, Sugarbunch, this good man don’t mean Daddy no harm.”
Sugarbunch ceased fire and pressed her gray muzzle against the screen. The low growl told me she didn’t fully take Daddy at his word just yet.
“Chester Chatwood,” the man said, extending a beefy hand as he grunted up the steps into the shade of the porch. “Call me Chet. And don’t mind Sugarbunch. She never bit nobody in all her sixteen years. She’s just gotten a little overprotective of me since my wife passed away last year.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, shaking Chet’s hand. “Mac McClellan, nice to meet you sir.”
“Same here, Mac. What can I do you for?” he said and chuckled at his little joke.
I pointed at the house across the street. “The young lady living there said you were friends with the Todds.”
Chet took off the hat and fanned himself. “Sylvie’s right. Me and my Angie were real close with Ted and Mary. Say, you care for a beer? It’s hot as Satan’s cellar working in that garden out back.”
I declined the beer but accepted Chet’s offer to sit in one of the twin high-back rockers near the door. I peeled off my sport coat and made myself comfortable. A couple of minutes later Chet returned with two bottles of Miller High Life. Sugarbunch took up her vigil behind the screen door just in case I tried anything unseemly.
The other rocker groaned as Chet took a seat. He held out one of the bottles. “Sure you won’t join me?”
What the hell. I grabbed the bottle and twisted off the cap. “Thanks.”
Chet rocked slowly in the chair and swigged down a healthy dose of Miller. “Say, Mac, what you wanting to know about Ted and Mary?”
I slipped Frank’s card from my shirt pocket and flashed it to Chet. “I’m with Hightower Investigations, out of Destin, Florida. What can you tell me about the fire?”
The pleasantness faded from the old man’s weathered face. “Is that what you here for? This some kind of insurance business?”
“No, sir, this has nothing to do with insurance, not directly anyway. I’m just trying to find out all I can about what happened. It might concern their daughter Rachel.”
Chet’s already-wrinkled brow furrowed deeper. “Rachel? Why, she was like a granddaughter to me and Angie. Such a sad, sad thing, her passing just a few months after the fire that took Ted and Mary. It broke our hearts.”
“So you knew about her plane disappearing in South America?”
“Oh, yeah. Rachel used to write us when she found the time. That missionary work kept her real busy.”
I took a sip of beer while I got my thoughts together. “I checked with the Waxahachie Daily Light this morning. They didn’t have any articles on Rachel’s disappearance in their files, not even an obituary.”
Chet let out a deep sigh. “Reckon that’s my fault, me and Angie’s. You see, we were the only family Rachel had left. Ted and Mary adopted her. Sweet thing used to call us Granny and Gramps. After a few months went by and we hadn’t heard from her, we called the mission in Florida she worked for. They told us about her plane going missing.”
Chet covered his face with his hands for a moment before continuing. “Me and Angie wouldn’t let ourselves believe Rachel was gone. We kept holding onto the hope that she would turn up at any time. We put her on our church’s prayer list and trusted that the Lord would work a miracle.” He paused and sighed again. “Reckon it just wasn’t God’s will, is all. Anyway, time just seemed to slip away. Never did get around to having a proper memorial service for her. But who knows, maybe that miracle will happen yet, Lord willing.”
The last thing I wanted to do was open up old wounds for a man who’d just lost his wife, but I needed to find out what I could while I had the chance. I hoped Sugarbunch wasn’t the only family Chet had left. If I blew his image of sweet Rachel, he might need more comforting than that overgrown rat could provide.
I took my coat from the armrest, slipped out the envelope, and found the beach photo. I handed it to Chet. “Is that Rachel on the right?”
Chet took the photo and squinted at it. He moved it farther away until it was at arm’s length. A smile slowly spread across his face. “That’s our Rachel all right. Only, her hair is different. She must’ve dyed it. Rachel was the prettiest little redheaded gal you ever saw.”
Bells and whistles went off in my head. Redhead? The woman I’d bumped into at O’Malley’s was a redhead. Unfortunately, I hadn’t gotten a good look at her face. But the Rachel in the photo was on the petite side, nothing like the well-stacked lady at O’Malley’s. Plastic surgery? If Wes Harrison had changed his looks, why not Rachel? Chet’s voice snapped me back to the present.
“Say, Mac, this fellow next to her looks familiar somehow too, but I can’t place him.”
“Does the name Travis Hurt mean anything to you?”
“That’s it!” Chet damn near shouted. The bottle of Miller slipped from his hand and clattered to the porch deck, rolling and spewing what little brew was left. Sugarbunch resumed her imitation of a yapping four-legged pogo stick.
“That boy gave Ted and Mary nothing but trouble all through Rachel’s high school years,” Chet said after he’d convinced Sugarbunch he wasn’t in imminent mortal danger. “They did everything they could to keep him away. But he wouldn’t quit pestering the poor girl; kept coming around all hours of the day and night till they finally got a restraining order on him. He wound up getting throwed in jail, but even that didn’t stop him. Rachel wouldn’t give him the time of day, but he kept snooping around like a buck in rut. Never seen such a hardheaded punk in all my born days.”
I resisted the urge to say I doubted the time of day had anything to do with what Rachel was giving Travis. Instead, I spent the next ten minutes giving Chet the gist of the case, including how Rachel and Hurt claimed to be siblings while living in Florida, and how the whole fatal boating incident seemed to be springing more and more leaks. I even brought up the possibility that Rachel might somehow be involved in the scam, if that’s what this mess turned out to be.
Chet’s face turned red and his nostrils flared. “You got no right saying that,” he said. “What makes you so all-fired sure her plane didn’t crash in the jungle like that missionary fellow said? Rachel was a martyr for the Lord, and you’re sitting here sullying her good name. Thank God Angie’s not around to hear such trash.”
PI rule number one: When you’re trying to get information from a subject’s neighbor, especially a close friend of the subject, don’t piss him off.
“I apologize if that’s how it came across, Chet. I’m not trying to trash anybody. I don’t have any real proof that Rachel’s involved, just a gut feeling. Remember, Rachel and Travis Hurt claimed to be brother and sister, and you know that’s a line of bull. That photo was taken just a few months after the fire and just before the boating accident. And then two weeks later Rachel’s plane disappears. That sounds more than a little fishy, don’t you think?”
He shook his head. “That’s not like our Rachel, not at all. I don’t know how or why she met back up with that scumbag, but there’s no way she would’ve done anybody wrong. She was a fine Christian girl, got her education at the Assembly of God College just a few blocks yonder,” he said, lifting his hand with his thumb pointing behind him like a hitchhiker. “Him and Rachel must’ve just run across each other somehow, is all.”
The old man rocked and shook his head again. “Best I remember he was in jail at the time. No, wait... seems like he’d got out and left the state before that happened. Who knows? It’s hard to keep track of things after all these years. Besides, the fire chief ruled it was an accident. Nothing fishy about that.”
“What about the funeral, did you get a chance to talk to Rachel then?”
“’Course we did. Rachel stayed right here with me and Angie when she flew back home for the funeral. I told you she was like our granddaughter. She stayed long enough to settle up with the insurance company and put the property up for sale with a real estate company. Then she went back to her mission work.”
Before I could come up with another question, Chet shifted in his chair and looked me in the eye. He was close to tears. “Never crossed my mind that would be the last time we’d ever see her.”
CHAPTER 10
The flight back to Tallahassee on Palm Sunday was uneventful except for a little teeth-rattling turbulence somewhere over Mississippi or Alabama that prompted us to buckle up and a few passengers to mouth silent prayers. The prayers worked. The wings stayed put, and we landed safely around five p.m.
When I got home that evening I grabbed a cold beer and started to punch in Kate’s number. My finger stopped in midair. How the hell was I going to tell her that Eric Kohler was really Travis Hurt and that he and his “sister” Rachel had been lovers? I called Frank instead and filled him in on the rest I’d learned from Chet Chatwood.
The Todds were well-off financially, but not showy with their money. Ted and Mary chose to live in the same house and neighborhood that Ted had grown up in, although they could’ve done much better for themselves. Todd owned a Ford dealership in downtown Waxahachie that he sold around the time Rachel graduated from high school in the early nineties.
According to Chet, the Todds were generous almost to a fault. They supported many charities including, among others, the Good Shepherd Children’s Christian Home and the Assemblies of God University where Rachel had graduated with a degree in World Ministries and Missions.
While in high school Rachel had developed an itch to learn to fly. The Todds agreed to pay for flight lessons as an incentive for Rachel to excel in her studies, and—Chet Chatwood let this little contradiction slip almost as an afterthought later in our conversation—that she have nothing more to do with a certain Mr. Travis Hurt.
“Here’s the kicker, Frank. Chatwood remembers that Ted Todd had a sizeable life insurance policy to ensure Mary and Rachel would be well taken care of in case he kicked the bucket. And, he was worth a few million from his auto business. Chatwood’s not sure how much, but he says he recalls Todd saying he planned to leave half to Mary and Rachel, and half to charity.”
“Not a bad incentive for Rachel and Travis Hurt to hook back up and lay some plans,” Frank said.
“Damn straight. Something bugs me, though.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s hard to believe that Rachel could be so coldhearted. From everything I heard, the Todds were nothing but loving and generous to her.”
“Love is a powerful emotion, Mac. Stir in a few million bills and it can become downright overpowering.”
“Good point. I’d bet my next retirement check that Rachel and Travis never stopped seeing each other, except for when he was in the slammer. And once Rachel got her driver’s license it would be easy for them to get together instead of Travis sneaking into the neighborhood.
“Another thing,” I said. “I doubt it’s a coincidence that Rachel landed a job with Sacred Word Missions in Pensacola not long after Kohler aka Hurt moved to Destin. We’re talking, what... less than fifty miles away?”
“Yeah, but we still don’t have a motive other than the insurance and inheritance, which very well could be a coincidence. We need more, Mac.”
“Okay, why were Rachel and Hurt passing themselves off as brother and sister?”
“No clue. It still rankles me that Katie was friends with those jerks.”
“Join the club.”
“Let’s go another route, Mac. Let’s assume the guy Katie saw that night at the theater was Wes Harrison. What does that prove?”
“That Wes Harrison is still alive.”
“Right. But where is Travis Hurt? Where is Robert Ramey?”
I slugged down some beer. “You said ‘assume.’ So now you think Kate was imagining things?”
“I didn’t say that. What I am saying is that so far we have no crime, no motive, no nothing except our speculation that Rachel Todd and Travis Hurt knocked off her adoptive parents for the insurance and inheritance money. We’ve got no proof, Mac. For all we know Harrison and the others might all have drowned in the gulf and Rachel could be a skeleton inside a plane wreck somewhere in the middle of the jungle.”
I drained the beer and headed to the fridge for another. “What about the redhead I bumped into at O’Malley’s? We know now that Rachel was a natural redhead. That could’ve been her with Harrison.”
“Jesus, Mac, just how many redheads do you think there are in this country? Ten, a hundred, a hundred thousand?”
“Okay, I get your point. But it’s not impossible. It could’ve been Rachel. With a boob job and some really high heels.”
“Get some sleep. And be careful how you break the news about Hurt and Rachel to Katie. She’s already on thin ice over this crap.”
“I thought you might tell her, Uncle Frank, being the old friend of the family that you are.”
Frank snorted. “It’s your case, Mac. Good luck and good night.”
Thirty minutes later I’d polished off a third beer and was pouring Dewar’s over a tumbler of ice when my phone rang. I checked the caller’s number. It was Kate.
“I missed you,” she said. “When did you get back?”
“A few minutes ago. Missed you, too. Want some company?”
“Only if you don’t mind driving to Destin tonight. What did you find out in Texas?”
“Not much,” I said, hoping Kate wouldn’t press the subject. “We’ll go over it later. What’re you doing in Destin? I thought you had to work tomorrow.”
“I asked Linda for some time off. I found something that might be important, Mac.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Kate let out a deep sigh. “I decided to drive to my parents’ house this morning and go through some of Wes’s things.”
I felt my hackles rise and took a hefty swallow of Scotch. The guy had supposedly been dead for a dozen years, yet somehow the mention of his name still goaded me. “Wes’s things? What are you doing with Wes’s things?”
Another sigh. “How do I put this? Okay. At the time of the accident I had a key to Wes’s apartment. After the accident I kept a watch on the apartment for a couple of months until the lease ran out.”
“You paid the rent?”
“Yes. Actually, my name was on the lease, too. ”
I took another big swig of Scotch. “So, you two were living together?” There was a long pause. “Earth to Kate.”
“No, not really. I’d stay over sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You never mentioned that little fact.”
“Dang, Mac, don’t be jealous, I didn’t even know you existed then.”
“I’m not jealous,” I said, lying through my teeth as I poured a refill.
“Yes, you are. I was twenty-three, get over it. If you’re looking for a virgin I suggest you start hanging around a middle school.”
“Ha ha. So, what’s this important thing you found?”
“When the lease ran out I boxed up a few of Wes’s things and stored them in my bedroom closet. I never got around t
o looking through the boxes—his personal items, I mean. But seeing him at O’Malley’s that night, I got to thinking there might be something he had that could help us with the case.”
Visions of Kate sitting on the closet floor swooning over photos and other crap she and Wes had shared together grated through my mind. “Can we get to the point? I’m bushed from the trip.”
“See! You are jealous.”
“Christ on a crutch, I’m tired. What did you find that’s so all-fired important?”
“Never mind.”
Kate said it quietly, but I knew her well enough to know she was really pissed. “Look, I’m sorry,” I offered in the most appeasing voice I could muster. “I’ve been on the go all weekend, and the flight back home was a little hairy. What did you find?”
“A Crown Royal bag.”
“A Crown Royal bag?” Christ, what could be so damn important about a Crown Royal bag? “With an unopened bottle inside, I hope?”
“No, it was full of diamonds.”
I brewed a thermos of coffee and was out the door and on my way to Destin by seven-thirty the next morning. I waited until eight and gave Frank a call. I scooped him on the bombshell Kate dropped in my lap last night. We made plans to meet at his office at eleven.
Kate greeted me with a less-than-enthusiastic hug and kiss when I arrived at her parents’ house around ten. I followed her into her bedroom where several cardboard boxes of various sizes were spread around the floor and on her bed. There was also a metal filing cabinet standing just outside the closet.
“I found the diamonds in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet,” Kate said, handing me the small purple Crown Royal bag. “They were at the back of the drawer behind a stack of files.”
The bag was damn near full of diamonds like Kate had said, and they dazzled the eye when I poured the contents onto the bedspread. I started counting, but Kate cut me short.
“Two hundred and seventy-eight,” she said. “I counted them three times.”