by Ken Brigham
“Makes sense to me,” she said.
Chapter 22
Hardy Seltzer maneuvered the LTD into a vacant parking spot in front of the long low building with a corrugated steel façade displaying a sign that read Williamson County Shooters Club in large black letters.
When Hardy had called Shane to arrange a time for them to meet, Shane had assigned Hardy two tasks. Task number one was completed. On his way out of town, he had gone by the coroner’s office and obtained a copy of the report of the Bagley autopsy. He didn’t see why Shane wanted it. There was no doubt about the cause of death and, according to Dr. Jensen, there were no other findings that had any relevance to the murder. But, Hardy, charged now by his chief to follow up on Shane’s ill-defined theory, did as Shane instructed.
Task number two was proving something of a challenge. Although Shane had given Hardy the address of the shooting club, locating it wasn’t easy. As always on the rare occasions when Hardy was called on to travel south of town, he had taken Franklin Road, US Highway 31, the old road that exited the city toward the south and continued through Brentwood and Franklin, meandering through the low hills on to Pulaski, Ardmore on the Alabama border and then to Birmingham and points south. The interstate would have been quicker, but Hardy favored the views from the old highway.
Hardy drove out of town past the turnoff onto Curtiswood Lane that circled around through a leafy neighborhood of pretentious homes including the governor’s mansion and next door the place where the civic-minded matron, Sarah Cannon, lived with her husband and her alter ego, the Grand Ole Opry comedienne Minnie Pearl. A little further out he passed the surprisingly modest bungalow where Hank and Audrey Williams had once lived when Hank wasn’t on the road drinking himself to death. It may have been in that house where the lyrical genius translated his firsthand experience with the pain of addiction and a stormy relationship into the poetry, a resonating homage to the pathos of cold and cheatin’ hearts, that was the richest and most durable part of the country music canon.
Hardy had then worked his way through the growing traffic of Brentwood, the once quaint village that was in the process of exploding into a sprawling haven of the nouveau riche. Hinckley Hollow Road turned off US31 between Brentwood and Franklin. Hardy had seen the road sign and made the left turn onto the two-lane blacktop. However, the shooters club was located on a dead-end road named, inexplicably, Carpenter’s Run, that was supposed to be a right turn off Hinckley Hollow Road. There were several roads that branched to the right and none of them were marked with road signs so that Hardy had made several false excursions into the depths of Williamson County before he hit by a sheer process of elimination on what was apparently Carpenter’s Run, an uninviting one-lane gravel road that ended at the front of the Williamson County Shooters Club.
Hardy got out of the car and entered the building to confront a small wiry man with a large grape colored birthmark that started near the center of his forehead and spread purple pseudopodia across a significant portion of his completely bald head. He wore army fatigues of the outdated olive green variety, and stood ramrod straight behind a low counter immediately opposite the entrance.
“I’m Clem Horsely,” the man said, leaning across the counter. “How can I help you?”
“Yes, Mr. Horsely,” Seltzer responded. “My name is Hardy Seltzer and I’m a detective with the Metro Nashville Police.”
Horsely smiled broadly and said, “What have I done that brings our little operation to your attention, detective. You say Nashville police? I didn’t think you city cops did business in Williamson County.”
“No, no,” Hardy responded. “My interest has nothing to do with your operation. But you had a customer I am told who interests us in a murder investigation, an Elizabeth Reid. Do you remember her?”
“Woman seems to be attracting a lot of attention for such a quiet sort,” Horsely answered. “Some guy called just the other day asking about her.”
“Yes, that would be my associate Shane Hadley. We’re working together on the case. So you remember this Elizabeth Reid?”
“Oh, yes. Couldn’t forget that fancy pistol she brought in to test fire. Like I told the other guy, Hensley was it? Like I told him, it was a really rare gun. First one I ever saw in the flesh so to speak. She came in a couple of times and fired a few rounds. Excellent shot. Quiet though. Didn’t want to talk about the gun or anything else as best I could tell.”
“What did she look like?”
“Small woman, but muscular. Looked like an athlete of some sort, maybe a runner, slim like runners get, but solid. At least that’s how she looked to me. Dark hair. Good looking but not pretty if you know what I mean. I’d bet she’s a tough cookie but she didn’t look like a killer to me. Too distracted. A sort of vacant look about her, now that I think about it.”
“My associate said that she signed into a log of some kind.”
“Yep. I make them all sign in. She paid cash so all I got was her name in the logbook.”
“Would it be possible for me to get a copy of her signature in the book?”
“Sure, bud,” Horsely replied. “I’ve got a little Xerox back in the office.”
Horsely took a large ledger-like book from behind the desk and started thumbing through the pages.
“Here it is,” he said. “It’ll just take a minute. I’ll just copy the page where she signed.”
Horsely disappeared toward the back of the building.
At long last, Hardy had completed task number two. He took the photocopy of the page from the logbook and after looking to be certain it contained the signature of Elizabeth Reid, folded the sheet lengthwise, placed it in his inside jacket pocket, thanked Clem Horsely and bid him goodbye.
“No problem,” Horsely said. “Anytime.”
Hardy left the Williamson County Shooters Club, cranked up the LTD and headed back toward town for his rendezvous with Shane at his Printers Alley flat.
As he drove north back toward the city, Hardy thought about the previous day.
Although he still believed that Jody Dakota was probably the guilty party in this case, he didn’t feel the sense of satisfaction that he usually felt when he was happy with the solution to a murder case. Turning over an airtight case to the DA for prosecution always caused him to feel a complex blend of satisfaction and relief with maybe some other sensations that he couldn’t define very well. But, he wasn’t feeling any of those things. Regardless of what he thought was the truth, the case against Jody Dakota was certainly not airtight. Hardy liked doing his job successfully and worked hard at it. But he thought the chief and the DA had moved too precipitously. It had happened before when a murder got excessive publicity. No detective really liked to get that assignment, the high profile murder. Too many people looking over your shoulder, second-guessing everything, speculating. But, Hardy was at least satisfied that he had done his job until the Bagley case was taken out of his hands. He had done what he could do.
After leaving work early the previous day, Hardy had driven up to the Dew Drop Inn where he had sat at the bar talking with Marge Bland and nursing his way through a couple of Bud Lights, stretching out the time. He sat there making idle conversation and ignoring the press conference featuring the police chief and the DA that was showing on the TV over the bar. Marge glanced up occasionally at the TV but the sound was turned down and she seemed more interested in talking to Hardy anyway. At least that was what he thought.
However, when the familiar figure of X Coniglio appeared on the screen, Marge turned up the sound.
“Old X always puts on a show,” she said. “Let’s see what he has to say.”
What X had to say, the parts that stuck in Hardy’s mind, were that detective Hardy Seltzer, whom he mentioned by name, was a particularly offensive member of the police force, and then the attorney’s final bombast, “heads will roll”. The possible connection between himself and a rolling head was not a pleasant thought for Hardy.
The only possibly positive result of
X’s tirade was that the inference that Hardy might be in mortal danger seemed to soften Marge Bland’s attitude toward him. She seemed, in fact, genuinely concerned. And when Hardy, having established that she was working the early shift and would get off work about six, suggested that the two of them have an early dinner together at Sole Mio just down the street, she immediately agreed. Nothing earth-shaking had occurred at dinner but it was a very pleasant interlude for Hardy in what had been, of late, a less than completely pleasant period in his life. On parting, they agreed, without specifying a time and place, to repeat the experience. Hardy felt surprisingly good about that.
Hardy parked the car in the garage below the police headquarters, removed the copy of the page from the shooters club log from his jacket pocket, put it in the folder that contained the autopsy report and got out of the car. He decided that he would walk directly over to the alley without going back to his office since it was very close to the time that he had told Shane he would be there.
The warm day was overcast and the air had the humid feel that often comes before a thunderstorm. There was a soft breeze and Hardy was aware of the pleasant sensation of the warm wet breeze caressing his face.
Hardy wondered what Shane had in store for this little project. No doubt he would have a specific idea of how to go about things. That was fine with Hardy. He felt authorized to go along with wherever the reactivated ex-detective was headed and also Hardy would be interested in how Sherlock Shane, given his head, would proceed. It would be an interesting ride regardless of the final destination. And, if Shane’s theory was right and could be proven, it would be a truly satisfying and hugely informative experience. Hardy felt that at this point it was a no-lose situation. That is, unless X Coniglio’s well-known and considerable political clout was sufficient to make good on his now very public threat. Hardy refused to think about that. He had no idea what he would do if he could no longer do this job.
“Hi-ho, my man,” Shane called from the balcony as Hardy approached. “You look remarkably chipper today given the threat of X Coniglio’s guillotine poised above your neck. Come on up.”
“Thanks for reminding me, Shane,” Hardy answered, recalling for some reason Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum short story that he must have last read when he was classmates with Marge Bland at North High.
To his surprise, when Hardy exited the elevator into Shane’s living room, Shane greeted him without a glass of sherry in his hand. Hardy occasionally wondered if Shane had a serious drinking problem. It didn’t seem that way. Even though he was almost never without the glass of sherry, Shane never appeared the least bit intoxicated. Maybe the glass of sherry was a prop, like some men—in Hardy’s experience mainly traffic cops, small-town sheriffs, and the grimy bail bondsmen who hung around the courthouse—always held a cigar in their mouths that was never lit. Maybe Shane didn’t actually drink that much, although Hardy would not have been surprised to discover that Shane drank excessively, given his disability. Had he shared Shane’s fate, Hardy suspected that he may well have chosen to drown himself in a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Have a seat, my man,” Shane said, gesturing toward the sofa that fronted the fireplace. “We have work to do.”
“Here’s the material you asked me to get for you,” Hardy said, handing the manila folder to Shane.
“Very good, Hardy. Did you encounter the character at the shooters club?”
“Yes,” Hardy answered, but didn’t elaborate.
Shane paused expecting the detective to say more.
After a lengthy pause, Hardy continued, “Let’s have at it, Shane.”
Hardy took a seat opposite where Shane had parked himself in front of the couch.
Shane said, “I would repeat my habitually refused offer of a glass of sherry, but unfortunately my supply of the golden elixir is exhausted at the moment, a situation that is obviously of considerably more concern to me than to you. Ah well, the situation will be remedied shortly.”
“Thanks anyway,” Hardy replied.
“So,” Shane got down to the business at hand, “I have concluded that we must, as a matter of utmost urgency, find out everything possible about Elizabeth Anne Reid, sole heir of the deceased Archibald Stewart Reid of Greensward, Texas. Are you free to travel, Hardy? Could you make a trip to Texas if that were deemed important?”
“As far as I know I’m free to travel,” Hardy responded. “But Texas wouldn’t be high on my list of possible destinations.”
“I agree, my man,” Shane replied. “But an investigation often leads one into places that left to one’s own devices, one would not choose to go.”
“You can say that again,” Hardy replied, hoping that Shane would not take him literally which he didn’t.
“I have started the inquiry,” Shane said, “by attempting to identify potential sources of information. And, with the invaluable assistance of the information cloud, I’ve made some progress there. Greensward, Texas is located in Pinellas County and the sheriff of that county is one Barret, known locally—I suppose inevitably given the region’s proclivity for assigning unimaginative nicknames—as Bubba, Teasdale. He has been the sheriff there for several decades and thus may be familiar with the lawyer Archibald Reid and perhaps even remembers the man’s daughter. If you do not think it improper for me to identify myself as a legitimate agent of the metropolitan police, I will place a call to him and see what I can find out.”
“I don’t see a problem with that,” Hardy answered, awaiting his own assignment which was bound to be imminent.
“Then, we need information from Elizabeth Reid’s sojourn in Houston,” Shane continued. “Do you have any connections there that might be of use?”
“Not really,” Hardy replied. “But I can contact the police there and possibly find somebody who’s sympathetic to a murder investigation in another city. As you no doubt know, even big-city police, maybe especially them, are sometimes sympathetic with the plight of their professional brothers in other cities.”
“Excellent, excellent, my man,” Shane replied. “This is where we’ll start, but if we encounter obstructions, you should be prepared, I recognize against your preference, to make a trip there.”
Hardy didn’t respond but he seriously doubted that the chief would approve the expenses for such a trip unless they had more reason for it than Hardy was aware of at the moment.
“One more thing,” Shane said.
He opened the folder that Hardy had given him and retrieved the copy of the page from the shooters club log. He ran a finger down the list of names, stopping at the name of Elizabeth Reid inscribed in meticulously neat script.
“It occurs to me,” he continued, “that if the person who signed this log was really planning a murder at the time of her visits to the shooters club, she might not have used her real name. However, it strains credulity to accept this as coincidence. We know from the copy of Archibald Reid’s will that you so kindly obtained earlier…”
Hardy remembered the difficulty he had had convincing the police in Texas to go to the trouble of getting a copy of the will and faxing it to him. But they had done it and much more quickly than he had expected.
“…that there is, somewhere, an Elizabeth Reid who inherited a gun of the very rare type that killed Mr. Bagley. And we know with reasonable certainty that a woman who signed that name in the Williamson County Shooters Club log possessed such a gun. The rarity of the gun makes it highly unlikely that there are two women by the same name who own identical such weapons. And, if there were two female owners of such a gun with different names, it seems even more unlikely that the woman who test-fired the gun at the shooters club would have randomly chosen to sign the name of the Texas woman who just happened to own an identical gun. I conclude that they are the same woman. But, if so, why can’t we locate her in Nashville? There is a possibility that she has somehow evaded having her name and personal information captured in any of the available databases, but I doubt it.
>
“Perhaps there is another explanation,” he continued. “Suppose that Elizabeth Reid of Greensward, Texas married while living in Houston and subsequently moved to Nashville. And further, if she did not wish to sign her actual married name in the shooters club log, perhaps she signed her maiden name which she may have thought, and correctly so it turns out, to be difficult to connect with her in our city.”
“So,” Hardy responded, “an interesting theory but mainly conjecture, don’t you think?”
“Right,” Shane said. “It is conjecture at this point. But you, Detective Seltzer, are going to obtain the information that will make it at least plausible conjecture. From your Houston contacts, assuming you can persuade them to cooperate, you need to find out everything possible about Elizabeth Anne Reid from Greensward, Texas during her sojourn there—what she did, where she worked, any associates who knew her, and especially whether, and if so when, she moved from there to Nashville. But, you will also persuade your contacts to search the marriage records there to find whether anyone by that name was married during the appropriate time frame and if so the name or names of the groom, or grooms, since it is quite possible that there will be more than one such marriage. The name is not that uncommon and Houston is a large city.”
“Okay,” Hardy replied, “I’ll do what I can. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“Ah, detective,” Shane responded, “my hopes are forever up. You should try that approach to life, you know. It works reasonably well…even without the wine.”
Chapter 23
“So, Mitchell,” Dom Petrillo said. “Here’s what I’ve been able to find out about the neurologist Katya Karpov.”
Rook had called Petrillo the previous day and given him Dr. Karpov’s name and Petrillo had set about using his considerable resources to research the woman. The two men now sat in Rook’s unique corner office in the Batman Building. Each of them having finished a cup of espresso that Rook prepared with careful attention to the ritual that he believed added to the pleasure of the drink, Petrillo opened the conversation.