Bill Hopkins - Judge Rosswell Carew 01 - Courting Murder

by Bill Hopkins

  “Just be involved for this one thing, okay?” When he didn’t say anything, Tina said, “Please? Just this one thing? The tire track? Promise?”

  “Damn it, Tina, two people were murdered. They were human beings with lives that they wanted to live. Frizz needs my help.”

  The beginnings of a pout started on Tina’s face. That morning, Rosswell had made Hermie pout, and now he was making the sweet Tina pout.

  “Tina… .” Words mixed up in his brain. He wanted to please her but he also had a duty to the legal system. Yes, he was a judge and not a cop. But he needed to help preserve law and order. What better way to do his duty than to catch the murderers of the two people? Murderers? Did I say murderers? I’m assuming again. “Tina, I can’t promise you anything.” He didn’t like the expression on her face. Pouting, glaring, the whole nine yards, plus a couple of other yards. “Except that I love you.”

  “I love you, too, but that’s not what this is about.”

  “Let’s do this. Take the tire impression and we’ll talk to Frizz when we get back to town.”

  “Deal.”

  They rejoined Ollie. Tina whipped out a tape measure and laid it alongside the tire track. “Wow. Three feet of good track. Where’s your camera?”

  Rosswell grabbed the Nikon. “Reporting for duty.”

  “I need a million pictures taken from every possible angle. From way down low to as high up as you can reach. Left side, right side, all around the town. I need a lot of ninety degree angle shots to make sure there’s no distortion. And keep that tape measure in every shot. Every picture may wind up in a courtroom in front of a jury.”

  Ollie whistled. “Damn, you’re good, Miss Tina.”

  Rosswell patted Ollie’s shoulder, causing him to flinch. “When Tina Parkmore speaks, you best listen.”

  “I’m talking right now.” She bent down by the tire track. “See this jagged edge?”

  Ollie and Rosswell peered over her shoulder. A whiff of her perfume improved the scene. Nibbling Tina’s ear crossed Rosswell’s mind as a good idea, until he realized that Ollie wouldn’t appreciate the subtlety of such a gesture.

  She used the tape measure to point. “The tires are wearing unevenly. That’s what’s making the lightning zigzag in the track.” She stood, glancing backward and forward. “My best guess is that this tire track is going forward. Here’s the direction of travel.” She indicated with her toe. “It’s a 16-inch tire.” She handed the tape measure to Rosswell. “That’s my best guess. I’ll know more when I run the crown depth and the tread pattern.”

  Rosswell filled Ollie in on the description of the silver car, such as it was, that Hermie had given.

  Ollie stuffed his hands in his pockets. “In other words, we have to track down every midsized silver car with 16-inch tires that has one tire wearing unevenly in a lightning-shaped zigzag.”

  Tina gave the two a thumbs up. “True enough.”

  Rosswell said, “That narrows it down to only a couple of hundred or so.”

  Ollie said, “I can do that.”

  She pointed to the camera. “Does that thing do video?”

  Rosswell said, “Yep.”

  “I need video,” Tina said. “And when you find the car and the big driver, all you have is a car with a big driver, not a suspect. Get to it, Rosswell.”

  Rosswell glanced up the hill and caught a double glint of light. Binoculars.

  Some hunter checking out good hunting sites for the fall deer season.

  Chapter Seven

  Monday night

  After a leisurely supper with Tina, who’d afterwards begged off to go home and clean up, Rosswell returned to his home in Marble Hill around dusk. He checked the mailbox, located where the end of the brick walkway met the street. The heat of the day radiated from the tin roof of the old house, the rising warm air riffling the leaves of the trees surrounding the place. He lived alone, snug as a clam in his white clapboard Victorian. The paint job he’d given the two-story house four years ago was still holding up. He’d owned the place since the day he was sworn into the bar.

  He flicked on every light on the ground floor. Being alone was bad. Being alone in the dark was worse. A hot wind had arisen, making the ancient house creak and groan. Another storm brewed in the western sky. The swing on the wide porch, painted the traditional Dixie Gray, squeaked in the wind.

  He’d called Tina after he found her letter in the mailbox. “Hey. Are you busy?”

  She had a way of talking to him and exhaling at the same time, imitating Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield or one of the other old- time movie sirens. “Of course I’m busy. I’m always busy. You wouldn’t want a lazy girl, would you?”

  “I guess you’re too busy to come over here?”

  “Never.”

  He sweated, the heat in his body rising steadily. “Are you pure as the driven snow?”

  “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted,” she said in her best Mae West imitation. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

  He set the letter on a kitchen shelf. Rosswell planned to open it when he worked up his courage. Tina, he’d convinced himself, was fixing to dump him, regardless of how she’d just talked to him. He hoped he’d survive until she arrived. Tina sometimes told him that he exhibited a depressed nature. Yes, he admitted to himself. He did look on the dark side at times. This was one of those times. Women didn’t write real snail mail letters nowadays unless they were fixing to dump you.

  True to his nature, waiting for Tina gave him time to think about the doom he’d faced before she came into his life. Doom, he thought, is best confronted in the cold examination room of a doctor’s office.

  He sat in a doctor’s office last winter, pondering that it was winter outside and it felt like winter inside. Why do American guardians of the thermostats for public places keep them set at 5 degrees cooler than comfortable? When he blew out his breath to see if it condensed, it didn’t. He fidgeted, the crinkly paper on the examining table bunching under his butt. Thankfully, he had his clothes on, making the paper crunching less uncomfortable.

  Waiting for the doctor, his acid reflux stomped and roared, adding to his misery. The gastric distress hadn’t led him to seek medical help. Symptoms that had earlier forced Rosswell to the clinic were fatigue, bruising for no apparent reason, a wound that wouldn’t heal, fullness when he hadn’t eaten, and his bones hurt. Those weren’t symptoms of acid reflux and he knew it. Test after test followed.

  His inspection of the grotesque wall posters depicting the human skeletal, muscular, and circulatory systems was interrupted. Without a knock or other notification that his privacy was being violated, the door opened and the doctor marched in, carrying a thick folder. Rosswell studied his nametag. Hakim Al Serafi. He’d never met the doctor before.

  “The news is not good,” Al Serafi said, his accent faintly British. No chitchat here. Rosswell admired that. He hadn’t come for tea and crumpets. Today, he’d come to learn the results of the series of painful tests he’d endured.

  Rosswell said, “Tell me.”

  For all the emotion he displayed, Al Serafi’s Arabic features could’ve been chiseled from desert obsidian. “Leukemia.” He took a fountain pen from a pocket in his white lab coat and wrote on Rosswell’s chart, studying the paper with a face adorned by heavy, black eyebrows and a goatee of the same color and density. Then he began talking, his midnight dark eyes never leaving Rosswell’s face.

  On hearing the scary word spoken over him like an evil benediction, Rosswell’s brain shut down, missing most of the technical gibberish the doctor spouted.

  Rosswell’s brain also kicked into a cherry-picking tour of his mind, a process that usually happened when he tried to sleep. Awake, sitting in front of a physician who rattled off symptoms, treatment options, stages of the disease, ad nauseam, he envisioned himself on a merry-go-round, waiting for an insane clown to knock him upside the head when his turn came. There were no brass rings in his future, only knocks in the hea
d. Maybe one solid knock.

  Throughout his life, Rosswell had committed important things to memory. Every World Series winner since 1950. The constellations visible from Honolulu at the winter solstice. The smells of eighty-three different substances he’d identified blindfolded in a psychology class at Mizzou, a record that had yet to be broken. He also remembered a quote from Moby Dick where Ishmael said:

  Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

  The universal thump headed his way. Flying at supersonic speed. No, not faster than the speed of sound. Faster than light speed, it aimed for him. Unswerving. Unstoppable.

  Unbidden, the memory of Rosswell’s first true love, long dead, surfaced in his brain. Especially the memory of Feliciana’s eyes. They’d been gray. No, not gray. Silver. He recalled a snippet of a poem or a song about drowning in the eyes of a lover. He could’ve done that in Feliciana’s eyes. How many times had he stroked her face during love-making, smelling the heat of her body, and felt himself drowning in those glorious eyes? The times couldn’t be numbered.

  On a bitterly cold and foggy night, he’d gotten drunk. Feliciana was the designated driver. On their way home, a grain truck ran a stop sign and smashed into the driver’s side—her side—of the car. Feliciana died instantly. Last night, as he’d done a thousand nights before, he woke to the sound of metal grinding into metal with the shriek of a banshee. Rosswell hadn’t killed her. But he felt like he was a murderer. After the wreck, he indulged himself with a year of intoxication, until he awoke one morning in a pool of vomit. He struggled onto the wagon and hadn’t fallen off since.

  Al Serafi droned on until Rosswell shot his hand, palm out, towards the doctor’s face. “Stop.” A rude gesture, to be sure. Rosswell couldn’t blame himself for being rude during the delivery of a death sentence. “Don’t say another word.”

  Al Serafi blinked. “Yes, I will stop.”

  “Get to the bottom line.”

  “Bottom line?” Al Serafi was clearly unfamiliar with the idiom. “What line is that?”

  “How long do I have to live?”

  Al Serafi flipped open a pair of tiny reading glasses and consulted the chart. “This is the best guess.” He flipped pages. “Yes.” Flipped more pages. “Yes. Yes.” More pages. “Yes.”

  “Can you give me your best guess today?” Al Serafi stopped flipping. “Yes. You’re an otherwise healthy man, thirty eight years of age. Average weight for a male of one dot six five meters.” Al Serafi stopped, appearing to be counting on his fingers. “That’s five feet and five. The only other major health problems you have are poor vision and reflux. I’d mostly say a year to five years, unless you find a bone marrow donor. There are procedures now that make this marrow business almost as easy as donating blood. Your lifespan may be possible for indefinite then. There is also the experimental gene therapy that turns your own blood cells into the little assassins who hunt down and destroy the cancer cells.”

  “What a bunch of crap.”

  If Al Serafi was offended, he gave no indication. “There are many social agencies to help in these matters.” He handed Rosswell a pamphlet. “You perhaps must talk with someone.”

  “Social agencies?” That sounded like a place to get social diseases. Talk with someone? Who could Rosswell talk to? He had no lover, no wife, no child, no brother, no sister, no father, and no mother. Who was his closest relative? He couldn’t remember. How about a friend? He couldn’t imagine discussing something like his impending death with Frizz. That friendship was professional, not personal. Judges in small towns don’t make friends easily. Everyone always wants something from you, especially free legal advice. That made him standoffish.

  Rosswell faced a stark fact that cold winter’s day: He was alone in the world.

  He said, “I pay tax dollars to a bureaucrat who will help me feel good about dying?” The paper under his butt scrunched and crackled with his movements, growing more agitated by the second. “I don’t need a social worker. I don’t need a bureaucrat.”

  “Bureaucrat?” The physician sounded puzzled.

  “Hell, Dr. Akim, I’m a bureaucrat. I wouldn’t want to talk to me if I were dying of some nasty disease.”

  “It is Hakim Al Serafi.”

  Rosswell studied the name tag again. “Sorry.” He teetered on more confusion. “I’m trying to put all this together.”

  “You are not limited to bureaucrats. Do you have some religious counselor you can talk with?”

  “Religious counselor?”

  “You can talk with some religious counselor to help you understand that your pathway may take you to death.”

  “Pathway? I don’t have any religious people in my life. Maybe I need some.” Scooting around on the cold examining table hurt even though he was clothed. “Where did you go to medical school?”

  Al Serafi withdrew a stethoscope from his coat and hung it around his neck. “St. Bartholomew’s and Royal London School of Medicine & Dentistry.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Judge Carew, my credentials have nothing to do with your prognosis.”

  Rosswell warmed to the man. The guy didn’t have the bull crap aura most doctors did. Most physicians expected their patients to fawn on every word that fell from their mouths without question. Even in court, when a medical doctor testified, Rosswell sensed an underlying superiority that most physicians assumed over laypeople.

  “Dr. Al Serafi, I’m trying to put your diagnosis into a box so I can examine it.”

  “That is understandable.”

  “Will you be here if I need to talk with you?”

  “I’m on loan from St. Mark’s in Cape Girardeau.” He slipped the tiny eyeglasses into a shirt pocket. “They have not enough hands here, but I am only temporary. I go back to Cape soon.”

  “Telling people news like this is hard.”

  Al Serafi’s cellphone beeped. “Not as hard as getting it.” Without removing his eyes from Rosswell, he reached down and cut off his phone.

  Rosswell was the same person he’d been when he walked in the clinic, although now the powerful words of doom had been spoken, sealing his fate. Until that second, he’d not noticed the strong smell of rubbing alcohol in the room. Even that can set off a drunk like me. From his pocket, he drew a couple of Rolaids, hoping the chalky mint taste would distract his cravings. The taste didn’t alleviate anything.

  “Doctor Al Serafi, I refuse to give in to the monster living in my body. I’m going to kill it. I want to start chemo or whatever you need me to do immediately.”

  “I like your attitude.”

  Feliciana had kept her black hair cut short. Nonetheless, Rosswell had loved running his fingers through the tight curls on her head. That action had aroused him, and it often made her moan with pleasure.

  Now, no more Feliciana to comfort him.

  It was time to leave, go home, and search the attic for Malachi, the teddy bear he’d slept with until he was ten years old.

  But that day he didn’t go home to the attic. Instead he dragged himself to the sheriff’s station, searching for Frizz. He wasn’t there. Tina was there.

  “What’s wrong?” she said the instant she saw him.

  Rosswell told her. Later that night she invited herself to share his bed.

  Waiting for Tina now, Rosswell rummaged in the pantry. Behind a ten-pound bag of grits, he discovered a bottle of booze he’d stashed there months ago. Scotch. His favorite kind of liquor. He fetched it down and rested it, still swathed in a brown paper bag, on the Benchwright dining table. There the elixir waited, sitting on a table that resembled an Industrial Revolution worktable t
hat had set him back a thousand bucks. If Rosswell gave in and the doctor found out, Al Serafi would scold him for drinking. Tough crap. It was his body, not Al Serafi’s.

  Rosswell pulled a heavy chair out from the table and sat. He hunkered there, unmoving, staring at the bottle for a long time, the booze just out of reach. He clicked on an antique-style radio to provide companionship. He had a decision to make. A decision about the bottle.

  A newscaster on the radio rattled on.

  “… United Nations sent a strongly worded letter advising …”

  “… prices stabilized after plunging …”

  “… largest contract ever for a first baseman …”

  Maybe one more shot of booze for old-time’s sake. Or maybe a couple. Maybe the whole bottle. Maybe he should get drunk as a jackass on Sunday, then explain to Tina that he was an alcoholic and would always remain an alcoholic. She needed to search for someone better. He’d cuddle up with his bottle and remain blissfully unconscious until he died. No teddy bear needed.

  “What a load of crap!” Had he said that aloud? Yes, he had. He slapped himself for self-induced stupidity. Suffering from leukemia? Check. Alcoholic? Check. That didn’t relieve him of responsibility. The pity party blew up, and he steered himself toward what he needed to be doing— solving a murder.

  He cut off the radio and began talking to himself. Talking to himself, he’d learned, helped him solve problems. Rosswell stared at the distressed wooden floor. Walking to the kitchen island, he rubbed his hand over the bluish-gray granite of the island, noting that the depth of the shiny top seemed to change when he changed position. When the angle of his eyes changed, the light reflected a different color in the granite, giving the illusion of depth.

  He reasoned with himself. “There was a murder. Two people. One woman. One man.”

  Rubbing the tabletop with his hands soon coated it with a glistening sheen of palm sweat. He folded his hands together and made a steeple with his forefingers. He placed the steeple on his lips and gazed again, almost in a hypnotic trance, at the floor.