by Ken Brigham
“The others should be here shortly,” the lawyer said and, speaking to Rory, continued. “What do you make of Bonz’s murder, Rory? Not good PR for the alley.”
“Probably right,” Rory responded. “Probably right. Although more adventurous folks might think it adds to the cachet of the place. The alley could use a little polishing of its cachet, don’t you think?”
Shane interjected, “Who do you think could have done it, Rory? You’re more knowledgeable about this place and its history than anyone else I know of.”
“True, true, Shane,” Rory responded. “I’ve been around here a while. I’ll tell you what. I have no idea who did it, but if I was a betting man, I’d put some serious money on Jody Dakota.”
Shane was shocked, and a few seconds passed before he responded, “Jody Dakota? You mean Little Jody Dakota, the old country music personality? Why in the world do you think it he might have done it?”
“Yeah,” Rory said. “That’s right. Little Jody Dakota. He’d be high on the list in my book, although I have no idea why he would have waited so long.”
“What’s the story, Rory?” Shane asked, smiling at the unintended rhyme.
“Okay, yeah, there is always a story, isn’t there. The story goes back, oh must be close to forty years now, when they were planning that old TV show that made fun of the country music folks. Jody Dakota was all set to be the star. The show was going to be silly, and Little Jody Dakota was a novelty act. Silliness was squarely in Jody’s sweet spot. And he was looking for his big break. This would have been his ticket to the big time—national exposure, fame, maybe even fortune. At least that’s what Jody thought. And apparently, they were all ready to do the deal when the producers of the show had a sudden change of heart. They dropped Jody like a hot potato and signed up a pickin’ and grinnin’ duet out of Oklahoma City to preside over Korny Acres and its ridiculous bunch of characters, including Bonz. Turned out to be a good decision, most folks think. The show was a real hit on TV for a couple of years.”
The lawyer had propped his feet up on the table and was listening intently to Rory’s monologue; he asked, “So how does that explain fingering Jody Dakota as Bonz’s murderer?”
“Well,” Rory said, “I don’t know whether it’s true, but Jody thought that Bonz was responsible for nixing the deal for him. Jody said that Bonz told the producers that he was an unreliable and sometimes violent drunk who couldn’t be trusted. Now, fact is, that was pretty much true in those days, but I don’t know if Bonz was responsible for nixing Jody’s deal. Jody sure thought so, though. I personally heard Jody threaten to kill Bonz back then. More than once. But I figured he was just blowing off, especially since he didn’t actually do it. Well, maybe that sore’s been festering all these years, and he finally got up the gumption to go through with it.”
Shane registered the information, storing it with the accumulation of confusing data in the Devil’s Foot file in his brain. But he just couldn’t believe the case would be so easily solved. Shane had rarely seen a murder that easily solved unless there were eyewitnesses or the perpetrator was caught in the act. Crime-solving was just not that simple an undertaking in a lot of cases. Those were the cases that interested him. And in this case, there were too many unanswered questions. He couldn’t ignore the information, and he would have to share it with Hardy Seltzer. But he feared it would only reinforce Hardy’s bias, close his mind to any alternative. The mind must always remain receptive to new information until the case comes to an absolute and incontrovertible conclusion. And so far there seemed to be precious little that was incontrovertible in this case.
There were too many examples of overly anxious prosecutors, hell-bent on getting a conviction, who ignored or even concealed evidence that didn’t fit their developing story. Shane didn’t like lawyers very much. He had frequently clashed with the prosecutors when he was on the force. In his experience, once the lawyers thought they had a coherent story that they could sell to a jury, they closed their minds, and the sooner they could get to that point, the happier they were. Shane thought that Hardy Seltzer was a better detective than that, but he didn’t know for sure. And in Shane’s opinion, Hardy was already too focused on Jody Dakota. Granted, that lead had to be followed up, but there might yet be other possibilities that would emerge. Do everything possible to rule out Jody Dakota as the killer and see who was left. Shane still thought that who would be left was likely to be a woman with an odd running gait.
When Hardy Seltzer arrived back at the station, it was almost five o’clock. He was anxious to get the gun to ballistics before Peter Harvey left for the day. Harvey was the man he wanted to do the work with this gun. He was the senior guy in ballistics and exactly the man for this job. Hardy wanted to be sure that the job didn’t get shuttled off to one of the newer people and so decided to deliver it personally to Harvey.
Hardy parked the car in the garage, picked up the velvet-cloaked rare golden gun, and made his way to the elevator. He punched the button marked SB, instructing the car to descend to the sub-basement, the lowest level of the building, deep under the city’s courthouse square. That was where Harvey and his minions plied their craft.
Peter Harvey was approaching seventy now and had been in ballistics for over forty years. There wasn’t much about guns, especially handguns, that he didn’t know. Although he was uniformly addressed with great deference to his face as Mr. Harvey, a fact that he encouraged, he was known on other occasions as either Pistol Pete or Peter Gun (sans the redundant n of the old TV detective). But in person, he was Mr. Harvey, the Metropolitan Police Department’s senior ballistics expert who had earned the respect of everyone in the department from the chief on down. Harvey accepted that respect with the confidence of a man satisfied that he was the best there was at what he did.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Harvey,” Hardy said as he entered the windowless room.
Harvey was sitting at one of the several workbenches that filled the large room. He was hunched over a piece of equipment that looked like two large microscopes fused together, creating a mechanical equivalent of Siamese twins. Harvey was a small pale, balding man whose neck and head appeared to be permanently angled forward, perhaps a result of the countless hours he had spent hunched over the various pieces of equipment that were his stock in trade, staring at small pieces of metal and pondering their encoded messages.
Without looking up, Harvey answered, “Greetings, Detective Seltzer.”
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes as Harvey continued his intense concentration on whatever he was looking at under his Siamese twin microscopes. Hardy and everyone else who had any dealings with the ballistics expert knew better than to interrupt him when he was at work. In fact, Harvey concentrated so intensely on the task at hand that it was difficult to interrupt him even if you tried. Hardy didn’t try. He stood patiently by the doorway, caressing the velvet-clad rare pistol and waited for Harvey to continue the conversation. Hardy didn’t mind waiting for things that were worth waiting for.
Finally Harvey looked up from the microscope and said, “What can I do for you, detective?”
“Well, Mr. Harvey,” Hardy replied. “I may have here the murder weapon in the Bonz Bagley case. And I’m hoping that you can tell me if that’s true.”
“If you have it, there’s a good chance,” Harvey said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Harvey got up from his seat at the workbench, and Hardy walked over and handed him the gun. Harvey took it out of the velvet pouch and held it, eyeing it from all angles as he moved it about in his hand. He held it up, pointing toward the ceiling, removed the clip, eyed it, and then snapped it back in place.
Finally, Harvey said, “Could be, detective, could be. It’s indeed a Colt Hammer model 1903, and a special edition too. That fits with the slugs we got from the body.”
“Can you be definitive, Mr. Harvey?”
“Have to do ballistics to be sure.”
“Any problem with that?”<
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“Well,” Harvey said. “The only problem I can think of is the ammunition. This gun uses a very unusual kind of cartridge that is no longer manufactured. They’re probably available on the collector’s market.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Yes and no,” Harvey replied. “Assuming I can get permission to spend the money, I’m sure I can get a few rounds, which should be sufficient for the tests. But it may take a while.”
“How long?” Hardy asked.
“Probably a few days. I doubt there’ll be a hold up on authorizing the expense since the case is so high profile. Then I’ll have to locate a vendor and get the stuff sent here. I can have it done next day delivery. And once I get the ammo, I’ll give the test priority.”
“That’s great,” Hardy said. “That’s great.”
“Here,” said Harvey. “We’ll need to do the paperwork to sign the gun in. You’ll have to vouch for it.”
Harvey went to his desk near the wall, opened a drawer, and took out several forms. He laid them at a work station and motioned to Hardy, who sat down and started doing the paperwork. He was familiar with paperwork.
It was paperwork that caused Shane Hadley to ponder the significance of Jergensen’s Rare Guns’ sale of another Colt Hammer Model 1903. The rare gun dealer kept meticulous paper records of its sales, and when Shane called to inquire about this specific gun, it took John Jergensen Jr., the current proprietor of the shop, only a few minutes search through his files to identify those sales. The dealer’s records indicated that they had sold only two of the rare pistols. One was to the Nashville dealer. The other was to a small town Texas lawyer with whom they had done business on previous occasions. The two sales were within a couple of days of each other several years earlier. It was John Jergensen Sr. who had made the sales. Jergensen Sr. had died five years ago when his son took over the business. While Jergensen Jr. had no personal recollection of the transactions, he was confident of the accuracy of the records. His father was a compulsive record keeper, a trait which his son was proud to perpetuate.
Shane was of course gratified by the confirmation of the history of the gun that wound up in the possession of Little Jody Dakota, but that was just confirmation, nothing new. For some reason that he could not readily explain, Shane was even more interested in the small-town lawyer who apparently owned the gun’s identical twin. Shane’s experience told him that no information was irrelevant until proven so by thorough investigation. And it was the seemingly spurious information that most intrigued him. He recalled a quote from an Oxford science professor that went something like, “results that tell you what you already know are confirming, but unexpected results are the seeds of discovery.” Shane feared that Hardy Seltzer was so fixed on Jody Dakota as the killer that Hardy would ignore information that didn’t support his suspicions. But, Shane Hadley did not ignore information.
Shane wheeled himself over to the bar, refilled his glass of Lincoln College Sherry, picked up his laptop, and rolled out onto the deck. A dark, angry cloud hid the sun, and the alley took on an especially seedy appearance in the afternoon gloom. The gray pall that settled over the alley on afternoons like this depressed Shane. The last thing he needed was to allow into his head the encroaching darkness that might threaten to breach the wall he had built to contain the black internal cloud still lurking at the edge of his mind. He did everything he could to keep that cloud at bay but it was still there. He gathered up his sherry and computer and wheeled himself back inside.
Shane fired up the computer and clicked on the browser icon. He typed in, Archibald Stewart Reed Greensward Texas and hit search. The top match was almost perfect and routed him to a newspaper site, The Greensward Weekly, and an obituary for an Archibald Reed from a few years back. It read in part: Archibald Stewart Reid, prominent local citizen and noted criminal defense lawyer died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease at the Greensward Home for the Infirm. His health had deteriorated over the past several years. He is survived by his only child, Elizabeth Anne Reid, of Houston. There were some brief comments about his law career, but not much more. Shane thought how readily a few years of dementia could obscure whatever went before that in the public memory.
He paged back to the search screen and typed in Elizabeth Anne Reid, Houston, Texas. There were several hundred hits with the surname spelled either Reed or Reid and with the middle name with or without the terminal e. He had no idea what he was looking for but started scanning through the entries. Nothing he saw attracted his attention, and he quickly lost interest. As he closed the laptop, he was startled by a crash of thunder and the dull thud of heavy raindrops pounding on the metal roof that covered the balcony outside.
While the dark clouds shadowing the alley before the rain came threatened to depress Shane, a full-blown thunderstorm excited him. He loved to sit on the balcony under cover of the metal roof and relish the sensations—the rhythmic staccato thrum of heavy raindrops pounding the tin roof and the ozone laced smell of fresh rain. He wheeled out onto the deck and forgetting for a while about dead men, strange guns, country music has-beens, and small-town Texas lawyers, he settled back and enjoyed Mother Nature’s grand performance. He sat there, entranced by the storm, until the rain died down and he heard the throaty moan of KiKi’s Porsche entering the alley from Church Street. He wheeled back into the living room and waited for his wife. There was the familiar low rumble of the garage door, the sound of the closing car door, the mechanical rustle of the elevator. She emerged from the elevator into their living room, walked to Shane, and kissed him the warm soft kiss that daily fed his addiction to this brilliant and beautiful woman.
“I love you, KiKi,” Shane said.
“How much?” she asked, flashing her electric smile.
Shane answered, “A lot.”
Chapter 14
The protocol for the clinical study of the experimental Alzheimer’s drug, RX-01, required that each test subject have a full battery of tests before being assigned randomly to receive either a placebo or the drug. The tests were then repeated at monthly intervals for three months and a final test battery done at six months, the conclusion of the study. The placebo and drug pills appeared identical and were coded by the research pharmacy so that no one directly involved in the study knew which pill a given subject was receiving. The code was kept securely by the pharmacist and would not be broken until the study was completed or stopped for one of any number of reasons that would dictate that the study be concluded. Likewise, the test results were known only to the biostatistician who would not know which medication the subjects had received until the code was broken. That is how clinical trials of new drugs were supposed to work.
However, when Beth Bartalak analyzed the data from the first three months of the first study subject, she was positive that he must have received the active drug. There were such dramatic improvements in the tests of cognitive function it was impossible to believe that this was a placebo effect. And there were also marked decreases in the blood protein that Cy was sure was an accurate indicator of disease activity. The changes were so large that they could not be due to fluctuations in the course of Alzheimer’s; the course just never fluctuated that much in a positive direction….never.
When Beth told her husband about the results, he was as excited as she was. He was so excited that he arranged a lunch meeting with his three angel investors and reported the results to them. Beth had also been present at the luncheon, although she and Cy arrived separately; she drove into town from their home in Belle Meade, and he came directly from his office at the university.
Cy had arranged the lunch in a private room at the Capitol Grille, an elegant restaurant that he favored on the lower level of The Hermitage, a venerable downtown hotel. The hotel had been restored a few years back to the grandeur that had attracted Andrew Jackson and other historical notables as clients in another time. While Cy was not a student of Tennessee political history, he chose the venue for this meeting after giv
ing careful thought to what he thought would impress his guests.
He arrived early and looked over the room. They had set up the screen and a laptop computer was positioned beside his place at the head of the table, as he requested. He fired up the computer, took the flash drive from his pocket and clicked it into the USB port. He had made only a couple of PowerPoint slides and flashed them onto the screen to be sure things worked correctly. They did and he switched off the computer. He was happy with the arrangements.
Mitchell Rook, Rory Holcomb, and Will Hadley arrived together, and Beth was only a few minutes behind them. Cy hurried through the obligatory greetings, anxious to get everybody seated so that he could share the exciting information about the first test subject. Of course he knew that early results on a single subject without knowing for sure whether the subject was taking placebo or drug were nowhere near conclusive. But he also knew from experience that guys like these investors were inordinately impressed by dramatic anecdotes presented with enthusiasm, and he had a doozy for them.
“Gentlemen,” Cy tinkled a spoon against his glass to quiet the conversations, “and lady, I should add,” gesturing toward Beth. “I have some very good news for you. The clinical trials of RX-01 are on track and looking good so far. But the reason I asked you here today was to tell you the results from the first three months of the study in the first subject. I must preface this by making sure that you know that this is very preliminary yet, and it is data from a single subject. Also, the placebo-drug code will not be broken until after all of the subjects have completed the protocol so, technically, we don’t really know for sure whether this first subject was getting drug or placebo. However, with those caveats…”
“Damn!” Rory Holcomb boomed. “With all those conditions, I don’t see how you can be so excited. I don’t see how you can make anything out of whatever information you’ve got, no matter what it is.”