Bill Hopkins - Judge Rosswell Carew 01 - Courting Murder

by Bill Hopkins

  “Candy,” Ollie said, “pull up a chair and sit your pretty butt down here.”

  For a moment, Rosswell assumed that Candy, she being of the feminist stripe, would clobber Ollie with her backpack. Instead, she sat between Ribs and Ollie, and tee-hee’d like a teenager, although she had to be around the same age as Ribs, Nadine, and Johnny Dan.

  “Here you go, boys.” She handed each of the three men a dark fudge brownie wrapped in wax paper. Rosswell’s disappeared in a millisecond. Candy’s sweet baked goods were famous.

  “Thanks,” Rosswell said. “That tasted angelic.”

  Ribs asked her, “You holding up under this heat driving that green buggy all over town?”

  “It’s not green,” she said. “It’s chartreuse. And there’s no problem since it’s not snowing or cold. That’s a good thing. You have to search for silver liners in black clouds.”

  “Linings.” Ollie enjoyed correcting people. “You have to search for silver linings.”

  She tilted her head to one side, her face full of puzzlement. “Why did I say that? I need to check my journal. Must’ve heard it somewhere.” Candy laid a hand on Ollie’s arm. “It’s hotter than blue bonfires out there.”

  Candy made goo-goo eyes at Ollie. Rosswell hoped she couldn’t see him pulling a forefinger across his throat, signaling Ollie to cut off any more nasty remarks. She apparently had difficulty remembering clichés. No one, especially Ollie, should make fun of her for that. Rosswell found it refreshing that she couldn’t remember threadbare phrases.

  With a tiny wave of his forefinger, Ollie signaled that he’d seen Rosswell’s command. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Ollie said to Candy. “Where have you been?”

  Ribs said, “You ever been to Piggott, Arkansas?”

  Candy said, “Can’t say that I have.”

  Ollie forced the conversation back his way. “Candy, weren’t you out of town for a couple of days this last week?”

  Ribs said, “Ernest Hemingway lived in Piggott, Arkansas, for a spell. I seen the house.”

  Ollie quoted Hemingway. “‘A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl’.”

  Rosswell said, “What the hell does that mean?”

  Ribs said, “I don’t know nothing about birds.”

  Ollie said, “You’re an Indian. You’re supposed to know all that nature stuff.”

  “I,” Ribs said, “been busy with other stuff.”

  Candy scooted her chair closer to Ribs. “I’ve just been hanging at my own house. Reading in the air conditioning. No one wants me to fix their hair. Think I’ll retire.” She rubbed her forehead. “Leastways, I think that’s what I’ve been doing. Things are so jumbled up sometimes. I misplace things. Too much on my mind.”

  Is Candy starting to have memory problems?

  Candy asked Ribs, “Are there more flies this summer than there were last year?”

  Ribs steadied the coffee cup he held halfway between the table and his mouth. “Can’t say as I’ve counted them.”

  Candy said, “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’.”

  Rosswell recognized the line from William Butler Yeats’ poem about the end of the world. What he didn’t recognize was its relevance.

  Ollie took Candy’s hand. “Are you feeling all right?”

  Ribs said, “Maybe she’s been counting flies in the heat.”

  Rosswell noticed that Candy, her hand under the table, was rubbing Ribs’s leg. Did Ollie notice? Was Candy doing Ribs and Ollie? If she was, then Rosswell prayed that it wasn’t both at the same time. He didn’t want to fantasize about that scenario.

  Two things happened then. First, Johnny Dan walked in the restaurant. Next, when Ribs saw the mechanic, he threw two dollars on the table, and left through the back entrance without a word of farewell. Rosswell pondered whether these two events were connected when his phone buzzed. Before he could say hello, Frizz said, “You better come to the hospital.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tuesday afternoon, continued

  “Tina?” Again, Rosswell leaned over her bed. The sheriff’s call said that Tina had awakened from the anesthesia. No nurse and certainly no city cop was going to throw Rosswell out. “Can you hear me? I’m here.” Her hair had been freshly washed. He pressed his cheek against the side of her head, letting her hair tickle him.

  “Rosswell,” she said. “Water.” She opened her eyes. The afternoon sun shone through the windows on the most glorious vision he’d seen in years. “You okay?”

  He helped her sip through a straw. “Yes, I’m fine.” He set the glass down and kissed her cheek. “I’m fine and you’re fine. You’re too cute for words.”

  She blushed. “Don’t feel fine. Won’t feel fine ’til we go to our special place.”

  “You’ve got one hell of a hangover from the anesthesia.”

  “We’re okay,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  Rosswell stroked her face. “I love you.”

  “Someone shoot me?” A scowl crossed her face. “Your house?”

  “Yes. A bullet grazed you.” Rosswell took her hand. “Are you in pain?”

  “Frizz … arrest?” Her law enforcement training forced her to think about justice before self. “Who?”

  “We don’t know who did it.” Some liquid in a bag hooked to a tube dripped into her veins. Although it was probably the same painkiller they’d dripped into Rosswell’s veins, he worried that she wasn’t getting enough. Again, he asked, “Are you in pain, Tina?”

  There was no answer. She’d fallen asleep, a natural, healing sleep. The nurse tapped him on the shoulder. Time to go. This time, he left without being an asshole.

  Frizz met him in the hallway. “I talked to the doctor earlier.”

  “And?”

  Frizz searched his pockets for his car keys. “Why do they make all these keys look the same?” He flipped through a wad of keys on a circular metal holder. “Everything’s going to shit.”

  Frizz and Ollie fell into the same classification when it came to having a direct and simple conversation. That classification was IRRITATING AS HELL. Rosswell didn’t prompt the sheriff, hoping he’d get to the point quickly. Frizz’s observation that everything was going to hell wasn’t encouraging.

  After riffling through about a hundred keys, the sheriff said, “The doctor wants to keep her overnight.”

  “That means she’s going to die.”

  “Damn it, Rosswell, that’s not what that means.” He jiggled his keys, the metallic clicks resounding in the sterile hallway of the hospital. “It means he thinks she had a reaction to the anesthesia, and he wants to be careful. He’s just not sure. Probably doesn’t want a malpractice suit.”

  “Then he better be finding out. I’m going to move her to St. Louis or Memphis or some other place where they know more.”

  “It’s a minor gunshot wound and a drug reaction, not… .” He didn’t finish his sentence but Rosswell knew he was going to say It’s not cancer. “They can handle gunshot wounds here. This is hunting territory, remember? She just needs to rest. I took a deputy off the search who’s coming in to spell Junior in a little bit.”

  They walked to Frizz’s car. In front of the hospital, a herd of Harleys roared up and down the street.

  Frizz said, “You need to quit.”

  “Quit what?”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want anyone else hurt.”

  “Whatever you say, Sheriff.” An explanation shouldn’t be necessary, yet if he wanted Frizz to be straight with him, then he needed to be straight, if not to say redundant, with Frizz. “I nearly got Tina killed, but all I’ve done so far is talk to a bunch of people who didn’t help me one smidgen. I literally do not have one single clue about these murders.”

  “You didn’t almost get Tina killed. The person who shot her could’ve killed her. Fortunately, your house
was dark, and the shooter didn’t have a night scope or was a lousy shot or both. I assume.”

  “You’re right about one thing. I can’t take any more chances. I love Tina more than anything in this world.”

  “I know that. It’s written on your forehead. You act as goofy as a teenager around her.”

  Rosswell borrowed Mabel’s words. “Never hurts to be clear when you’re talking to someone.”

  “Then you have to do what’s right.” Frizz slid behind the wheel of his patrol car. “It’s your hide. And Tina’s.”

  Rosswell didn’t watch him go. Instead, he drifted back to Tina’s room. He told the nurse he needed to sit by Tina’s side. The nurse relented.

  “Tina?” There was no reaction.

  He pulled up a chair, sat next to her bed, and scooted close to her face. “I love you.” She sighed, but didn’t open her eyes. He brushed a stray bit of her hair away from her face. “I’m sorry. I’ll never put you in a bad situation again.” One kiss. Her lips were dry, yet sweeter than a honeycomb. I should write love songs.

  “Tina, I promise I’ll never do anything that might hurt you.”

  He sat silently for a while, thinking again, working things out in his brain. Playing detective was just that. A game. He’d had no training in police work. The only thing he knew about law enforcement techniques were what he’d heard in the courtroom. Even then, those descriptions were sanitized, cleaned up by the prosecutor to make the cops look good. The seminars he’d attended about investigating crimes were merely a series of stories by different cops who’d done the right thing or sometimes the lessons they’d learned from doing the wrong thing. Rosswell now didn’t know what the right thing was.

  To think that Ollie and he could search a death scene that had been flooded and then interview people without even knowing who the victims were was a joke, bottom line, and a bad joke at that.

  He needed a soda. A Coke with caffeine struck him as a good idea. He fished in his pocket for change.

  The ring.

  The ring added to the truth of what a lousy detective Rosswell was. Had there been any fingerprints or DNA evidence, he’d destroyed it when he first found the ring and stuck it in his pocket. Instead, he’d been carrying it around without a thought to its significance.

  “Judge Carew?” Father Mike had found him. “May I come in?”

  “Please do.” He put the ring in his pocket. “I need company.”

  “How’s Tina?”

  “She’s stoned out of her mind.”

  The priest grinned. “I’ve dealt with people in that condition before. I’ll keep praying for her.” Father Mike traced the sign of the cross on Tina’s forehead. “Judge Carew, there’s something you and I need to discuss.”

  “Here?”

  “Why not?” The priest pointed to Tina. “It concerns her.” He fetched a quarter from his pocket, commencing his coin trick routine. “Do I have your permission to speak?” The quarter disappeared.

  “Go right ahead.” He stood and offered his chair, which the priest refused. Rosswell remained standing. “Let’s hear what you have to say.”

  “I ran into Frizz out there. He’s desperately in need of help right now, but he says you can’t help him with the murders. You’re a judge, not a police officer. He said you wouldn’t be the judge. Some kind of legal technicality that I confess I don’t understand.”

  That made Rosswell feel better. There were parts of his secret knowledge that Father Mike couldn’t understand. Lawyers enjoy making the law incomprehensible, just as theologians enjoy making religion incomprehensible.

  Rosswell said, “Frizz is right. If it hadn’t been for me, Tina wouldn’t be in that hospital bed.”

  “Do you think you have control over that?”

  “I don’t know if I have control over it, but it’s a fact. Frizz doesn’t think I have the slightest idea what I’m doing.”

  Father Mike said, “We discussed all that. You, Tina, everything. He disagrees with you.”

  “Disagrees about what part?”

  “He thinks you know what you’re doing. What I meant, however, was you wrongly thinking that Tina is in that bed because she was helping you.”

  “Father Mike, someone tried to kill her while she was in my house at my request after I asked her to help me investigate this case.”

  “If you had not asked her to help you, would she still have come over to your house?”

  Rosswell slumped into the chair by the bed to ponder his answer. Turning to view Tina, he watched the most beautiful woman in the world snoring. The heart monitor read-outs pumped along in regular, strong patterns. Her chest rose and fell rhythmically. Twitching every few seconds was her only movement. She’d spoken to him earlier. She’d asked him if he was okay. She’d recognized him.

  The priest’s words stunned him.

  Of course, she would’ve come over. This situation wasn’t the same as Feliciana. I hadn’t voluntarily disabled myself with alcohol and called on Tina to rescue me. Tina had come to my house of her own free will. And, when she got there, I wasn’t drunk. I was being shot at.

  There was a wheeze in Tina’s breathing. God, Rosswell prayed, don’t let her get pneumonia. He pulled the sheets up to her neck. Fear, or perhaps sick realization, rolled around his mouth.

  “Yes,” Rosswell said. “She would’ve come to me.”

  “Then what must you do for her?”

  Once again, Rosswell was the student parked at his desk, regarding his instructor with awe, fear, and, yes, dislike. He didn’t want this burden thrust on himself.

  There was no stopping it. The epiphany bloomed inside his head. There was only one course of action. He formed a plan to catch the murderer so the legal system could exact its punishment. First, he’d find the bodies, and then he’d narrow the list of suspects so Frizz could go after only two or three possible bad guys. Maybe four or five.

  That would repay his putting Tina in danger.

  No, Father Mike hadn’t talked him out of that notion. He’d never believe that his actions hadn’t nearly caused Tina’s death. She could still die regardless of what the doctors were saying about her condition. He needed to prepare for her death. If it was a minor problem, she wouldn’t be in the hospital.

  Father Mike said, “She’s not going to die.”

  Holy crap. He’s reading my mind.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen this before. It looks worse than it really is. Think of it as her giving in to exhaustion.”

  Rosswell withdrew the ring from his pocket. “I need to go see Frizz and give him some evidence. We’ll need it to solve the murders.”

  “No, no, no.” Father Mike smiled and did a thumbs up. “You miss my meaning completely. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “You don’t have to be a cop. One of my parishioners called me a few minutes ago. After Frizz left here, he went back to the station. That’s when it happened. Frizz made an arrest. The murders have been solved!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tuesday afternoon, continued

  At the sheriff’s station, pandemonium reigned, with the press and jubilant citizens besieging the place, celebrating the capture of a dangerous murderer. Actually, it was one reporter for The Marble Hill Tattler, the local weekly newspaper (one page of news, seven pages of advertisements), and Ollie, who always enjoyed an arrest if it wasn’t his. Both were standing outside, chit chatting. That sufficed, in Bollinger County, for pandemonium, especially in the current heat wave and humidity boom.

  Several Harley riders, including Purvis, circled the courthouse square in the late afternoon sun. Whether they were pleasure driving or snooping around on the goings-on at the local cop shop was some- thing Rosswell couldn’t figure out. Although it didn’t matter when he thought of the money they were spending which, in turn, the government taxed. After all, his salary was paid out of tax dollars.

  Rosswell pulled Ollie aside. “Who did Frizz
arrest?”

  “You left Tina’s side to come over here to gossip?”

  “Ollie.” Rosswell stopped for a couple of seconds. “Listen, she’s basically sleeping off a big drunk. Junior Fleming is there and a deputy is supposed to come in later.”

  “Junior Fleming? The city cop? He’s incompetent. He couldn’t lose his virginity in a whorehouse.”

  “There are also two security guards at the hospital. There’s nothing I can do for Tina. Besides, she’s not in danger. I’ll bet whoever shot us has split for Mexico or Canada.”

  They stood between the American flagpole and the Missouri flagpole. The flags hung limply in the still air. Still air on hot and humid days often presaged savage storms.

  The reporter, a girl who didn’t appear to be over nineteen, stood at the ready, her sharpened pencil circling above her skinny journalist’s notebook, in case someone said something quotable. Around one wrist hung a tiny Canon camera, in case someone did something worth remembering. Tapping her pencil against the notebook, she sounded like a woodpecker urging Ollie and Rosswell to hurry up and say or do something interesting.

  Rosswell repeated, “Who did Frizz arrest?”

  “Candy Lavaliere. She confessed.” Although the petroleum smell lingered, the daily Vaseline coating of his bald head had by then evaporated from the heat. He rubbed his head. Ollie appeared on the verge of tears. He wasn’t celebrating this arrest. “She’s important to me.”

  The wind picked up, clinking the grommets of the flags against the flagpoles and blowing grit in Rosswell’s eyes, making him appear on the verge of tears. There were no clouds in the sky. He assured himself no storms were brewing.

  Astonishment hit Rosswell. He recalled Candy making eyes at Ollie while at the same time she was rubbing Ribs’s leg. Candy’s libido must soar to the moon. Is she lusting after everybody in town?

  “Ollie, is she your girlfriend?”

  “What kind of stupid question is that?”

  “Why was she arrested? Does Frizz really think that she killed two people in cold blood?” Candy Lavaliere, a sexual addict and a double murderer? That didn’t even begin to compute.