by Diana Palmer
“And no little kids would have to go hungry,” he said. He shrugged. His pale eyes caught hers and he didn’t smile. “Both of us know about poverty.”
She smiled wistfully. “Don’t we, though? And now your sister Gretchen’s the equivalent of a queen.”
“She carries it well,” he pointed out with a sigh. “Wealth and power haven’t changed her. She’s doing a lot of good in Qawi for the underprivileged, and the UN recently asked her to do fund-raising work for them.”
“She’ll be a natural.”
It disturbed him how much Josette knew about his family, his history. She probably knew that his father drank like a fish and had the business sense of a frog, too. Only his premature death in a corral had saved the family ranch from certain bankruptcy. There were no real secrets in his hometown of Jacobsville, Texas.
“What are we going to do about Mrs. Jennings?” Josette asked abruptly. “She’s bound to be a continuing target if the perpetrator didn’t get what he or she was looking for.”
He nodded. “If I were the perpetrator, I wouldn’t assume that something I couldn’t find was in a house, even if I torched it. I’d find a way to make Mrs. Jennings talk.”
She grimaced. “That’s not a heartening thought. Got any ideas, beyond scanty surveillance?”
“Glad you asked. You can have Mrs. Jennings move into your hotel with you for the next couple of weeks and keep an eye on her,” he said.
“Great idea. But who’s going to pay for that? Our budget won’t stand it,” she said, aghast.
“Get Grier to talk to the D.A. for you. If he takes the trouble to ask for things, they usually give it to him without any argument.”
“Grier?” she asked, knowing the name rang a bell but unable to place it.
“Cash Grier. He’s the cybercrime expert with the D.A.’s office here.” He eyed her curiously. “You haven’t met him?”
“No. They put me in the office with him at another desk and said I’d work out of it, but that’s about all they said. Well, except that I mustn’t believe everything I heard about him. He was out of the office all day.”
“You’ll hear plenty. He worked for us, just briefly, but he hated the commanding officer, so he quit.”
“That makes two of you,” she couldn’t resist saying.
He didn’t tell her the real reason he’d left the Rangers. His temporary commanding officer two years ago was the obvious one—most of the men had hated him. “Buller made a lot of enemies. He was allowed to resign, just after he lost Grier and me both at once,” he said shortly. “Damned paper-clip-counting bureaucrat. The high-ups wanted to know why we had such a turnover in this office, so after I left, the staff told them. Straight up. Buller wasn’t fired, but he was cautioned that if he didn’t voluntarily resign, he’d regret it.”
“Ouch. I guess he had skeletons in his closet.”
“Buller was the single bad apple we ever had in our outfit,” he said proudly, “and he was barely there two months, just filling in. But we all have skeletons,” he said quietly, and without meeting her eyes. He finished the last swallow of his coffee. It left a faint, pleasant bitterness on his tongue.
“Somebody has a big skeleton, and if we don’t find it, Dale Jennings is going to have a lot of company, wherever he went in the hereafter.”
He nodded. “I phoned Jones over at the medical examiner’s office, but she’s got bodies stacked up. She said the staff’s on overtime and it will be another twenty-four hours before the forensic pathologist gets to work on our DB. That means it’ll be in the morning before we get much about Jennings’s autopsy.”
“Jones.” She pursed her lips. “You wouldn’t mean, by any chance, Alice Mayfield Jones from Floresville?”
His eyebrows arched. “You know her?”
She chuckled. “She was at college with me,” she said. Her somber expression lightened just for a few seconds. “She was a great prankster.”
“She hasn’t changed much,” Brannon told her.
His salad, and hers, arrived, and so did his steak. For a few minutes they ate without speaking. Both refused dessert, and over their second cups of coffee, they got back to the subject of Jennings.
“I think that Jennings’s murder is connected to Henry Garner’s,” Josette said.
“Why?”
“Because of the amount of money involved.”
“Don’t say a word about Bib Webb,” he cautioned coldly.
“You stop that,” she said irritably, glaring at him. “Everybody, and I mean everybody, is a suspect. You have to be a law enforcement officer in this investigation. Period. You can’t afford to be prejudiced. Not in your position.”
He almost ground his teeth, but he had to admit that she had a point. “Okay,” he conceded.
Her eyes softened. “I know he’s your friend,” she said gently. “I know you don’t want to do anything that might hurt him.”
He hesitated. “You don’t know him the way I do,” he said quietly. “He loved Henry Garner. The old man was more like a father to him than his own father ever was. Bib’s father deserted the family when he was just a kid. He had to support his mother and sister before he was even out of high school. After his mother died, he looked after his sister, until she died of a drug overdose. Not one single person had ever done a damned thing for Bib—except Henry. He couldn’t even come to Henry’s funeral,” he added.
Josette nodded. She’d known that. She assumed it was guilt, of a sort.
“It wasn’t publicized, but we had to have a doctor come out to sedate him,” he added.
“Because of the grief,” she began.
“Hell, no!” he shot back. “Because he was raging like a homicidal maniac! He thought it had to be some of Jennings’s mob contacts, that Jennings had arranged the murder because he knew Henry was going to fire him. He wanted to throttle Jennings with his bare hands. It took two shots of Valium to put him to sleep, at that. And when he came around, he couldn’t stop crying for another two days. He hated Jennings.”
Josette didn’t mention the obvious, that it gave him a motive for Jennings’s death. But something about the episode unsettled her. She remembered Bib Webb’s wife, Silvia, at the funeral, dressed in a black Versace suit, smiling at the other mourners.
“Webb’s wife has very expensive tastes,” she remarked without thinking.
“Silvia lost her brother and her father just before she started going out with Bib. She was on the street and she didn’t even have the price of a pair of shoes when she was sixteen, and Bib married her.”
“That’s young to marry,” she said warily.
“He thought she was twenty. At any rate, she was old enough to be pregnant with Bib’s child,” he replied. He didn’t like Silvia, and it showed.
“I didn’t know they had a child,” she said.
“They don’t. She miscarried,” he replied. “At barely two months. She went on a shopping trip to Dallas and apparently fell down some stairs at the hotel where she was staying. She said the doctor told her she could never have other children because of the damage it did.”
Josette almost said, how convenient, but she was having enough trouble with Brannon as it was. She really couldn’t picture Silvia as a mother; the woman was too selfish.
“She’s very possessive, isn’t she?” she murmured absently. “The night of the party, she hardly let her husband out of her sight for a minute.”
“She’s like that.” He studied her, toying with his empty mug. “She was with him all evening, I suppose?”
“Actually she wasn’t,” she said honestly. “Dale went outside and I didn’t see him or Silvia for several minutes. When they came back, separately, Dale was preoccupied and Silvia’s hair was windblown. I remember that your friend Bib was dancing with a neat little brunette in a rather conservative dress, and Silvia almost made a scene over it when she saw them.”
“Becky Wilson,” he murmured, remembering Webb’s personal assistant. She was usuall
y invited to parties, over Silvia’s constant objections. “Was this before or after you talked to Henry Garner?”
“After,” she said. “I went to get some punch to drink and started talking to another woman guest at the punch bowl. A few minutes later, I looked around to see where Mr. Garner was, but I couldn’t find him. Just after that I realized that the punch was spiked. I got very sick and Silvia offered to drive me home.” Her eyes were sad. “I liked Mr. Garner. He was honest and gentle and kind. All he talked about was Bib Webb and what a hard life he’d had. He really loved him.”
“It was mutual,” Brannon said roughly. “Why were you with Garner? Wasn’t Jennings your date?” It was difficult to talk about that. At the time, when he knew from court testimony that she’d accepted a date with Jennings only days after they’d broken up, he’d been devastated.
“Dale and I were acquaintances and he needed a date for the party,” she said honestly, having decided that lies were no way to deal with problems. “I went just to make up the numbers. Dale was pleasant enough, and I didn’t know about his mob connections until that night. Henry Garner told me about them.”
“Told you what, exactly?” he asked, perking up.
“That he’d come to the party exclusively to fire Dale because of a theft at his house. He’d put something up in his safe and it had been removed.”
Brannon almost held his breath. “Bingo!” he exclaimed.
CHAPTER SIX
“I don’t understand,” Josette said, frowning.
Brannon leaned forward, his big, lean hands clasped together around his empty coffee mug. “Listen to what you said, Josette—Garner was going to fire Jennings because he thought Jennings stole something from him. What if Garner was killed not because of his wealth and its beneficiaries, but because he had evidence of some criminal dealings? What if the murderer killed him to silence him, and then couldn’t find the evidence he had?”
“Oh, that’s chilling,” she replied. “That’s really chilling.”
“It puts a whole new light on things,” he agreed. “Maybe we were looking in the wrong direction altogether at Jennings’s trial.”
“I don’t believe Dale did it,” she began.
“And I don’t believe Bib did.” He cocked an eyebrow and his eyes lost their hard glare. “Maybe we’re both right.”
She nodded slowly. Then she nodded enthusiastically. “Maybe we are!”
Brannon warmed to his subject. “Suppose Henry Garner had evidence of wrongdoing, and threatened to go to the police with it. He was killed and the murderer couldn’t find the evidence. Suppose Jennings did steal it, and hid it, figuring he’d use it for blackmail instead of bringing the culprit or culprits to justice.”
“That’s a lot of ‘supposes.’” But she began to see the light. “And Dale Jennings denied that he’d committed the murder…”
“Only at first,” he reminded her. “He denied it and then, all of a sudden, he had his lawyer plea-bargain for a reduced sentence by admitting to a lesser charge than murder one. Why?”
Her eyes brightened. “Someone offered him something,” she guessed. “Money.”
“Money. That’s a good place to start looking.” He twirled his empty mug on the table, thinking. “But if there was a payoff, why wait another two years to kill him?”
“His mother,” she said at once. “She’d just been swindled out of her life savings and was left homeless and impoverished, and an invalid. He might have contacted the perpetrator and demanded more money. This time maybe he offered to give up the evidence. Maybe he’d only asked for a moderate amount before and when he heard about his mother’s condition, he asked for more money. A lot more. For his mother.”
“Not bad,” Brannon mused. His pale eyes twinkled at her, as they had in the old days, before they were enemies. “Ever thought of devoting yourself to law enforcement as a career?”
She gave him a “duh” stare and finished her own coffee. “I think we’re onto something. Where do we start?”
“At the most likely place. Let’s find out who was in contact with Jennings in prison besides his attorney.”
She pulled a small notepad out of her purse and flipped the pages. “I have a list of his correspondents and the names of people he phoned—addresses and telephone numbers.” She handed it to him.
He gave her a narrow glare. “You should have been a doctor. Nobody could read this!”
“Everybody’s a critic,” she murmured, taking it back. “First name on the list is Jack Holliman. He lives in Floresville, southeast of here in Wilson County. He’s Dale’s uncle.”
Brannon raised an eyebrow. “Convenient, that he lives so close to the prison.”
“Probably too convenient, but we have to start somewhere.” She picked up her ticket and got to her feet. He did the same. They paid for their meals in silence before they walked back out to his utility vehicle.
Minutes later, they pulled into the long driveway of a small ranch. The fences were falling down. The dirt road was full of potholes. When they pulled up at the small house, they could see the peeling paint and missing porch rails.
As they got out of the car and started up the steps, a shotgun barrel snaked out the cracked door and there was the sound of a trigger being cocked. Josette hesitated.
Brannon never missed a step. “Texas Rangers!” Brannon announced in a curt tone, and kept walking. “If you pump any buckshot into me and I don’t die on the spot, you’ll live to regret it!”
The hammer quickly uncocked and the door opened. A little old man, bent with age and white-haired, peered at his shirt through pale blue eyes. “Yep, that’s a Ranger badge, all right,” he said in a thin, raspy voice. “Well, come in. I reckon you won’t be trying to plug me,” he added with a laugh.
The inside of the house was as gloomy as the outside. It smelled of pipe smoke and burning wood and sweat. It was hot, but the old man seemed not to notice. He sat down gingerly in a rocking chair graced by an embroidered cushion and a faded, colorful afghan. He motioned his visitors to the only other two chairs in the room, cane-bottomed and flimsy-looking with cushions that looked as if they hadn’t ever seen soap. In fact, so did the old man.
“We’re looking for Jack Holliman,” Brannon said, easing down into the chair and leaning forward, his steely-gray eyes unblinking.
“That’s me,” the old man said heavily. “I guess you came about my nephew, Dale.” The old man grimaced. “Hell of a way for a man to die, warn’t it?” he drawled. “Shot like a dog in an alley. He was the last family I had, except for my sister.”
“Dale Jennings was your only nephew?” Josette asked.
“Yep,” he said. “My kid sister’s only child. His pa’s been dead since he was ten. His ma couldn’t fix what his pa did to him.” His pale blue gaze dropped to the worn rug on the floor. “His pa was always in some sort of trouble, right up till the day he died. He taught the boy how to break the law.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill your nephew?” Brannon asked quietly.
“No,” he said at once. “I know they all said he killed that Garner fellow, but I never believed it. Dale might forge a check or steal a credit card, something like that, to get money for his ma, but he never would have killed anybody. He was the sort who’d stop to help a hurt animal and give everything he had on him to pay a vet to save it.”
“I know,” Josette said quietly, and without looking at Brannon. “He and I were acquaintances,” she elaborated. “I never thought he was a murderer, either. Now I want to know who killed him. If you can think of anything that might help us track down the person who shot him, we’d be grateful.”
The old man pursed his thin lips and nodded slowly. “I wrote to him in prison. He was a bad letter writer, but he did send me a card last month. I’ll get it.” He got up with obvious pain, grimacing as he went to a small table and opened the drawer. He pulled out a card-size envelope with his address on the front and handed it to Josette.<
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She opened it. The card, a landscape, was written in bad handwriting. The note was very brief, mostly asking about the old man and recalling the last time he’d been to see him, before he was arrested for Garner’s murder and a horseback ride he and the old man had taken to a bubbling spring in a pasture.
“He never stopped talking about that last time we rode together,” he recalled sadly. “I remember he brought his own saddle, had it made special, so he could ride when I did.” He smiled sheepishly. “Since I got down with my hip, money’s been tight. I kept two horses, but I only had the one saddle.” He sat back down with a sigh. “Still got the one he brought,” he recalled. “It’s fancy, even got hand-tooled saddlebags.” He shook his head. “He always loved this old place, loved the country. He stayed in town to look after my sister, when she was so bad sick. He might have been wild, but he always looked after his mama. Would have left the ranch to him, if things had been different. I just sold off my horses last week. I guess I’ll sell the saddle as well. Nobody needs it anymore.”
Brannon turned the card over in his hands and then passed it over to Josette.
“I can’t get in touch with my sister,” the old man said. “Not since she told me about Dale. Would go to the funeral, but there ain’t nobody to drive me. She said she’d call me up and tell me about it, after. But now I can’t call her. The phone at her house is disconnected. Is she all right?”
Brannon and Josette exchanged wary glances.
He looked so frail that they hated telling him.
“She’s all right,” Josette said at once. “But her house caught fire and burned. She has a nice place now, in a retirement village. I’ll get her telephone number, or one of her neighbors’, and send it to you.”
He sighed wearily. “Thank you, girl,” he said in a defeated tone. “Looks like everything’s going. Never thought getting old would be like this, that I’d be so crippled I couldn’t do anything for myself.” His pale eyes met Josette’s. “Don’t take life for granted, young lady. Squeeze every drop out of it, while you can.”