by George Wier
“Bee is awake, and Hank’s talking with her. I’m thinking that a close call like this is going to seriously alter their relationship. She shouldn’t have been out there. I had no idea she had followed us.”
“You couldn’t have known,” he said. “We had all of our attention ahead of us, and almost none of it behind. But that’s all hindsight now. There are a few people here to see you.”
“And who might that be?” I asked.
“What’s left of the Trinity Trio. They’re out there in the main lobby. I wouldn’t let them come back. I’m thinking of arresting one of them. Man, I am sorely tempted, although I’m not sure of what to charge her with. Conspiracy? I don’t know. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Since her husband’s dead and she’s lost one of her best friends, I think her conspiring days are all done.”
“You’re talking about Loraine,” I said.
“Yeah. Care to talk to them?”
“Maybe, just maybe, this time I’ll let them talk to me, and I’ll just listen for a change.”
“Sounds fine,” he said, and stood.
“You need any help getting up?”
“Nope,” I said. “If I start asking for help, I’m afraid I won’t stop.”
“Fine then. Let’s roll.”
*****
It wasn’t apparently good enough for Gray that we had a corner of the rather large hospital general waiting room to ourselves because he requested from the hospital staff and was given access to a small and very private consultation room. I followed the two women and Gray inside and took a seat in the plush chairs there. A colorful, yet otherwise nondescript spray of flowers that never grew in East Texas emerged from a twisted vase while pictures of native flowers hung on the walls. A landline telephone sat on a tiny end table close by.
“First of all,” Tanya said, “we’re sorry.”
“Yes,” Loraine stated. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she kept herself together well. “I’m very sorry. For everything.”
I nodded.
“You see,” Tanya said. “This all started a very long time ago.”
“That’s right,” Loraine continued for her. “In fact it was the early 1980s. Tanya and Millie and I all went to Trinity together. We were all suite-mates there. But there was a fourth girl. Her name was Gladys. She came from a poor family and only just made it there on a scholarship. While she was there, a series of tragedies struck her family. Her father was killed in an industrial accident down near Houston. There was a gas leak and an explosion that took out the whole neighborhood. Anyway, Gladys lost her father. Within a month, her mother committed suicide. There wasn’t any money to pay for the funeral, and the three of us helped all we could, but it was so awful. Gladys had to drop out of school. We knew that she was going to sink down to the bottom in life, and there was nothing we could do to help her. And that’s when...”
“That’s,” Tanya said, “when we made the pact. It was Scarlett O’Hara all over again, only we didn’t realize how stupid it was at the time. We decided that no matter what, we wouldn’t be poor. We would scratch and connive and do anything short of murder to make sure that we ended up on the better side...the wealthier side of life.”
“That’s right,” Loraine continued. “So we formed an...association. We made certain promises. Even though two of us were from a completely different town—I’m originally from Katy, Texas, and Tanya is from San Angelo—we promised that we wouldn’t live any more than twenty minutes away from each other. So we all moved to Carter after we graduated.”
“That’s right,” Tanya said. “I married Billy Tasker because he was young and full of life and he was well on his way, he just needed a little push from someone.”
“And I married a big, larger-than-life bully who wanted to be a law man. I pushed him to become the Sheriff, and he made it. But Millie married a rancher, and she made him a United States Senator.”
“Together,” Lorraine continued, “we pushed these three men to the top, and to make money. Lots of it.”
“That’s right. We conspired together in all things. It became a contest among us—who could push their husband the farthest to become the most.”
“It looks like Millie may have won. But then, a few years ago, something began to go wrong.”
The two lapsed into silence.
I nodded. I had decided I wouldn’t dare speak.
Finally, Tanya picked up the dropped ball and ran with it. “Millie became fascinated with military hardware. All kinds of things. Her husband would get prototypes of things, somehow. They started as demonstrations out on the property. People would report shots fired, loud booms, outright explosions. One time, one of those booms brought in a report from the seismic people, and a whole flurry of reporters came down. The military hushed them all up with a press release that a part had fallen off of an aircraft flying over, but I don’t believe it for a minute. After that, I guess Millie and Jack learned to be selective in what they tested.”
Loraine had been watching Tanya all along, listening to her, likely making sure she didn’t gloss over anything important. In the first pause, Loraine plunged back into the one-sided conversation. “And then Abner came along. We knew he and Millie were an item. That they were cheating on Jack first behind his back, and then, later, almost right out in the open. But Millie was crazy for him. She couldn’t get enough. He was her drug on the market.”
“That’s right,” Tanya said. “They just went batshit crazy together. It was all over town. Everybody knew. He wasn’t only driving up and down in that Mustang of Paul’s, he was driving around town with her beside him, as if he owned everything. That’s when I went to see Jack. I should have taken Loraine along with me, but I wanted to use what I knew to get ahead. You know, the old rivalry between the three of us. So I confronted Jack in his office. I told him I wanted a loan to restart the Smudge Pot. He refused. I would’ve done anything to get ahead, and so I attempted...blackmail. I told him that I would expose Millie’s indiscretion to the press, not only here in town, but in Washington.”
I waited.
“And that’s when he pulled the gun on me. You see, he came at me. It wasn’t enough for him that he had the gun, but he was screaming at me. He kept screaming, ‘No you won’t!’ and he called me a bitch and every foul name in the book. He got right up in my face, so I grabbed the gun and wrestled with him for it. And it went off. It was his gun, not mine. But I ran and I took the gun with me.”
“I only want to know one thing,” Loraine said, and instead of turning to Tanya, she looked directly at me. “How did my husband die?”
Gray Holland spoke: “He died saving Amos Kepner’s life. There was an explosion. At the last second, Paul shielded Amos with his own body. He knew what he was doing when he did it.”
“So, he was a hero after all.”
“That he was.”
“Are you going to charge me with anything?” Loraine asked. “If you do, I won’t defend myself. After this, it’s not like I would get a fair trial in Atchison County anyway.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think this is your chance for a fresh start. Loraine, most people are too busy trying to become something that they forget that it’s perfectly okay for them to simply be.”
“What did you say?” Tanya asked, suddenly intensely interested.
I repeated it. Then, “Why don’t you start all over with your life, Loraine. And you too, Tanya. Neither of you are too old to do that. In fact, I don’t know that anybody really ever gets to old to change.”
The two lapsed into silence.
Gray finally said, “Neither of you have asked how Mildred Carswell and her husband died.”
“No,” Tanya said. “I guess we didn’t.”
“I sure want to know,” I said. “I believe I was on the ground at the moment you all stormed the house. I could barely see you through all the smoke, but I figured that you and every deputy you had charged all three entrances to the house at once.”
/> Gray nodded. “That’s right. We did. After it was all over, we found Senator Carswell tied to his own bed, bound hand and feet. Someone had cut his throat.”
“Oh my God,” Loraine said.
“And Millie? Abner?”
“They went down together,” Gray said, “like Bonnie and Clyde. Just like Bonnie and Clyde.”
*****
After Loraine and Tanya left the hospital and I was back in my room—in which I would stay for at least the next twenty-four hours—Gray took the chair by the bed, sat his cowboy hat on the small dresser close by, and folded his hands together in his lap.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t you want to know about the money? The thousand dollar bills?”
“Damn right I do,” I said, suddenly interested. It was the one question that I had thought would never be answered.
“I had a friend in the Treasury Department track them down. Where they came from, where they ended up, what, officially became of them, the whole nine yards.”
“Crap. Now you have to tell me.”
“They came from right here in Carter. The First National Bank. You know, the Carter First National Bank was chartered in 1911. That was a hell of a year, you know, because—”
“Wait. Enough with the history lesson,” I interjected. “How did the money end up in a paper bag in a storage locker on a lot owned by Mildred Carswell?”
“She was selling armaments to the bank president. Apparently the money was what was left from when the bank formed. Back in 1967 or so, when those new bills came in the back door from the Federal Reserve, the fellow running the bank latched onto them and never let them go. Apparently, you never saw many thousand dollar notes, even back then. About a week ago, they went out the same back door in downtown Carter. Normally, they would have been redeemed by the Federal Reserve and crossed off the books, but apparently the old man—the father of the current one, that is—had a fetish for large notes. Now, the bank president—the son of the late bank president, just by the way—never really liked banking to begin with. He bought a shipment of rocket launchers from Millie and Abner. The way I have it figured, it was going to be their ‘go to hell’ money. I found a note to the Senator among Millie’s effects, after we shot her and Abner full of holes. The note essentially told him to where the senator could take his viagra and shove it.”
“Grover Cleveland,” I whispered to myself.
“Huh?”
“Nevermind. Well, I’ll be damned. And you have the bank president under arrest?”
“I do. The rockets are being returned to Fort Hood, where they apparently belong. You see, he’d already taken delivery of them. But you intercepted the money before Abner could come get it. He could’ve taken the keys to my car after he hit me in the head, but instead he struck out on foot. I have no idea why, except that guys like him have little capacity to think things through very well.”
“Hell,” I said. “We probably passed him on the highway.”
“I think those conniving women, working cross-purpose to each other, managed to cut one another off at the knees. Both Loraine and Tanya knew that money was there. They knew the banker was buying arms. They also knew that Abner would go directly there to collect his money, and they wanted you to intercept it first, then have Loraine’s husband, the Sheriff, swoop in and collect it.”
“You know. I think you’re right. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Gray asked.
“That’s a hell of an awful lot of knowing. The simplest explanation is that they did know it was the right storage locker because they knew all along where things changed hands. I think they were just playing the odds and came up all sevens.”
“Shoot. I hadn’t thought of that. Tell you what.”
“What?”
“Shut up and go to sleep, Bill. I’m powerful tired and this chair is as good as any. Wake me up when the sun goes down, will you?”
I laughed. “Sure enough.”
EPILOGUE
H ank and I didn’t talk much on the way home from Carter, Texas, nor did he reach for the radio knob. I left it alone as well and bided my time in silence, allowing the miles to drift past as the undulating, sandy loam landscape with its verdant loblolly pine forests gave way to oak and yaupon, black walnut, bois d’arc and cedar, and finally black dirt farmland. At one point I noticed Hank raise a hand to wipe at his eyes, and wondered if they were tears.
Earlier that day I’d collected my fifty-thousand dollars from Bee’s safe and put it back in the Frye leather bag. Her assistant was there to let me in, open the safe, and give me access. Bee and Hank had said their goodbyes earlier that morning at the hospital. I hadn’t been privy to their final words, but I suspected that all the affection had been one-sided.
My left leg ached, but I had moved the seat back to give it plenty of room. Hank had wanted to drive, but I wouldn’t let him. I needed to be doing something anyhow. Recovery is its own job, and you have to work at it, and the only way to do that is to do your best to ramp the body back up to speed by not changing anything. A lot of people would disagree with me, I’m sure, but then again, I’m my own person, and was never good at taking advice from anybody.
An hour away from Austin, Hank began to talk. He spoke about his early years, his Vietnam service and the friends he had while he was there who didn’t make it back home. He talked about taking life and what it had done to him, and he spoke of love and love lost.
And finally, be spoke about Bee.
“What she went through, it changed her, Bill.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It was a brief romance, but now it’s done. She nearly lost her life. In fact, she did. The surgeon told me that she was clinically dead for several minutes during the operation. They had to bring her back. I guess an experience like that really affects a person.”
“I hear that it does,” I said.
“She doesn’t want to see me anymore.”
“Uh huh.”
Hank lapsed into silence again, a span which seemed virtually eternal, yet was probably little more than a few minutes.
“Why do you think it is, Bill,” he said, finally, “that we’re put here?”
“Well,” I began, and the words came, slow and measured. “I think it has something to do with another chance. The chance to set things right. To try again and right a few wrongs. I think ultimately it has to do with service to others. Of being of use to them. I’ve heard it said that the measure of a person’s life is whether or not others are glad that they lived.”
“Are you glad that I’ve lived?” he asked me. A brutal one-liner popped into my head, but I tromped down on the head of it. Hank was being truthful. He was being real. It was as if he factually didn’t know the answer to the question, and he should.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d be dead if you hadn’t been here. My whole family wouldn’t even be. You may think you’re a loner and an island all to yourself, but you’ve got another thing coming, pardner. The stupid truth is that everyone affects everyone else. You can affect them for the better, or for worse—it’s your call. But you, specifically, you’re one of the good ones. If you forget everything else, don’t forget that.”
“I have a question to ask you, then.”
“You can ask me anything.”
“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to have. No, I’m not dying, that I’m aware of. I don’t have cancer or anything. My last checkup showed me to be fine, and I come from a long line of the long-lived, except for those who died in the wars.”
“Okay, so you’re dying, but you’re not dying today. Go ahead and ask me.”
“I never had a family, Bill.”
I waited. I wasn’t about to speak.
“But I’m alone now. Utterly alone, and now having had the taste—just the taste, mind you—of the other side, I think I like it.”
“Of course,” I said. “Jennifer can move back into her old room, and we can shuffle the kids
around, and you can take the converted garage for as long as you want. You can even park that damaged old Ford pickup of yours out front.”
There was a long silence. I couldn’t constrain myself, and so turned my head briefly to look at him. His Adam’s Apple bobbed up and down under the leathery red-and-pink mottled skin of his neck, and his lips pursed as he strained against the pressure inside. But I knew it wouldn’t last long, and so decided to help him out.
I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.
“Welcome to the family, Hank,” I said. “You’re coming home.”
AUTHOR'S NOTE
T he Catholics say that confession is good for the soul. This must have some truth to it, or else I wouldn’t be so inclined to unburden myself, or at least not so easily. And it didn’t take any prompting either. Here’s the confession: I have to feel a certain way to slip into Bill Travis’s world.
There. I said it.
There can’t be any music playing, nor anything seriously going on. I have to be fairly well-rested and in equable health. And if these conditions are just right, and if my little mind’s eye GoPro cam into Bill’s world is turned on and tuned in, why then I can follow what’s going on and report it. Otherwise, uh uh. Which is the real reason why I have to have several projects going at once and also the real reason why these books are trickling out there like Blackstrap molasses a week after New Years.
Mind you, now, once I’m “over there” in Bill’s world, and things are hopping and popping, why, I can just let it roll and it sluices out of the old barrel in one hell of a hurry, but that’s not typical until somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of the way to the halfway-finished area of the book, not at the beginning. If I’m anywhere in those first knuckle-dragging neanderthal thirty to fifty pages, well, sometimes it’s slow going. I don’t know why that is, it simply works out that way.
So, like I say, multiple projects are called for.
While writing this one, my main “other” project has been what I call a “serious” work entitled Neptune’s Forge, an Antarctic mystery. And man, is that mystery dark. Also, it’s written in a completely different vernacular than anything else I’ve ever written. All the action takes place near the end of the 19th Century, and it started writing itself in the prose form of that era—sort of a melding of Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and Jack London. I’m not sure what or who I may have been channeling during that book—the ghost of Henry James, possibly?—but, oh man, if you read it, you’ll see what I mean. Between that book and this, it’s not only different continents and disparate times, it’s different worlds.