“You got a Rolaids?” she asked the cameraman.
For the occasion, Susan Barnes had worn a filmy white blouse that clung across her breasts, a tight dark skirt and high heels. When Ricky Mundy looked up from his paperwork and saw her standing at the Randolph County Sheriff’s Department information desk, he almost stopped breathing.
“Investigator Mundy?” she said, extending a slender hand. “I’m Susan Barnes, from Channel 11 in Richmond. I wanted to talk to you about the body that was discovered here today.”
What happened at that point was that the testosterone flooding through Investigator Mundy’s body short-circuited all the normal warning signals. He knew he wasn’t supposed to talk to this woman—such pronouncements could only come through the sheriff—and he made a feeble attempt at telling her that.
Susan Barnes looked stricken. Her perfume was very strong.
“But we drove all the way out here,” she said. “I know that a body was found, and I’ve even got a name. I know the victim was from Richmond. All I’m asking you to do is confirm it.”
The biggest problem, from Mundy’s point of view, was the date. It was the sheriff’s thirtieth wedding anniversary, and he planned to spend it at home with his wife.
“I believe I’ll stop and get me a video,” he told Mundy earlier. “Any suggestions? Something to kind of set the mood?”
Mundy searched through his mental file of favorite movies, most of which involved car chases and gunplay. Finally, he grinned wickedly.
“An Officer and a Gentleman,” he said. “It goes back a ways, but it’s really good…And there’s this one scene between Richard Gere and Debra whatshername that’s really hot, the one where she’s on top…”
Inge interrupted him.
“I’m just trying to set the mood, Ricky, not give myself a coronary.”
He also planned wine, he said.
“I thought you hated wine,” Mundy replied. “You always said it tasted like varnish.”
“It don’t matter if I drink it,” Inge said with a wink, “as long as the wife does.”
Inge started out the door around two, then stopped and turned back to Mundy.
“Aw shit—I just remembered,” he said. “It’s Tuesday. If Whitt Scruggs calls about that body, I’ve got a press release on my desk to give him. Whitt probably heard about it on the scanner—I’m surprised he hasn’t called before now. You might want to call over there and tell the new guy…Fogarty…that we’ve got something for him.”
“You want me to have him call you?” Mundy asked.
“Not tonight,” Inge said. “The phone’s unplugged. And don’t tell anybody else about this—I don’t want a half-dozen reporters calling my office tomorrow morning.”
The sheriff left reasonably certain that Deputy Mundy would carry out his instructions. But he hadn’t figured on Susan Barnes.
“I don’t usually beg,” she told Mundy, “but I’m going to be in big trouble with my editor if I don’t come up with something.”
Her wide blue eyes were pleading. Mundy melted.
“As long as you don’t use my name,” he said. “And if Sheriff Inge ever asks you, I didn’t tell you nothin’. It would be my ass…pardon my French.”
Susan Barnes smiled encouragingly.
“He won’t hear it from me,” she said. “Not even if he tortures me.”
There was nothing more Ricky Mundy could do about the murder at that point. The deceased Theo Moore had been placed in a body bag and taken to the medical examiner’s office in Richmond. Since the Echo’s Claude Kizer, who usually doubled as the crime scene photographer, was out of town visiting his sister, Mundy had snapped a few Polaroids himself.
The way Virginia law worked, a crime was investigated and tried in the place where the body was found, but Mundy and Inge would have a lot of help on this one. The Regional Homicide Squad would be mobilized, lending expertise from several surrounding counties and cities, and
J. D. Richardson would be driving over in the morning. What few clues the crime scene offered had been gleaned, and Mundy wanted to go home and prepare for a long Wednesday.
He was envisioning the sway of Susan Barnes’ hips as he walked out the door, completely forgetting about the press release on Inge’s desk.
Whitt Scruggs had spent the day out and about, he told Fogarty, which meant retreating to a secluded farm pond safely within scanner range and reputed to hold a monster bass known as Old Grumpy.
Almost always, he charged the scanner’s batteries first thing in the morning. Today, he forgot. Therefore, all the local radio chatter about a body being found and traffic being rerouted and a crime scene secured never intruded into Whitt’s late-summer lethargy. He sat and watched his bobber and drank his Coors, happily oblivious to it all. Then he went back to the Echo office, finished a minor story for that week’s paper, and left for a destination unknown.
Normally, there was a scanner in Fogarty’s office, but it was broken and off on one of its frequent trips to Walt’s Electric over in Farmville. And the last line of defense for the Echo in such cases—the moonlighting Claude Kizer—had been removed from the picture, as well.
It was as if some cosmic conspiracy had been aligned to make this Susan Barnes’ story exclusively. The Channel 11 truck blew a tire on its way back to Richmond, and the Jefferson Springs murder didn’t make the six o’clock, but it didn’t matter. Nobody else had it.
Eddie Fogarty got four channels on his little portable TV, and he always brought it downstairs on Tuesday nights, just in case Lynchburg or the three Richmond stations reported on something the Echo might have missed. It never happened, but Fogarty learned that it paid to be paranoid.
By eleven Tuesday night, the week’s paper was nearly pasted up, waiting only for Regina to finish her story on what was expected to be a rubber-stamp Town Council session, and Fogarty flicked on the TV, as much to hear the Phillies’ score as anything else.
Half-dozing in front of the set, he suddenly beheld the blonde specter of Susan Barnes. She was standing at what appeared to be the bypass around Jefferson Springs, wearing a solemn look, saying something about…
A body?
“Jesus H. Christ!”
The sound was a cross between a pirate’s oath and a banshee’s wail. Zoe almost amputated a finger with her X-Acto knife and Regina leaped up from her terminal.
By the time they realized what was happening, Fogarty had scrambled to a phone and was punching out the number to the sheriff’s department.
“Sheriff’s department. Dispatcher Gregory,” said a crisp female voice.
“Was there a murder in Jefferson Springs today?” Fogarty demanded.
“I have nothing to report,” Dispatcher Gregory replied.
“Goddamnit, TV says we had a murder! Did we or didn’t we?”
“That information can only come from through the sheriff,” the voice told him, as devoid of emotion as a metronome.
“How about this?” Fogarty said, his own voice becoming high and frantic. “If there was a murder, rap on your desk twice. If there wasn’t, rap on your desk once.”
“Good night, Mr. Fogarty,” Dispatcher Gregory said as she disconnected him.
Desperately, Fogarty rummaged through his desk drawer for Sheriff Inge’s private Tuesday night special number. He found it, finally, but the phone just kept ringing. He slammed down the receiver so hard it bounced.
“Would you mind telling me what’s going on?” Zoe asked him.
“We’ve got a murder in our county. We haven’t had a murder since last fall, and now we’ve got another one, but we’re not going to get it in our paper. That goddamned bimbo on Channel 11 has it, and we don’t. I don’t know where the hell Whitt is, and I can’t get Inge on the phone, and the dispatcher won’t tell me shit. Any more questions?”
“Why don’t you go out to the sheriff’s house?” Zoe asked.
“I don’t know where he lives.”
“I do,” Zoe told him.
Fogarty considered the time element. The finished pages would have to be at Sherry Rittenhour’s farmhouse no later than one-thirty, so that she could drive down to South Boston and get them printed.
“Let’s go,” he told Zoe.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ALIENATION
The Video World out on the bypass didn’t seem to offer much that Sheriff Inge could incorporate into his planned night of romance.
Although the sheriff taught Sunday school at Lee Street Baptist, he was no Puritan. Safe within the all-male sanctity of his office, he could laugh as loudly at a raunchy joke as any of his deputies.
Ruthann Inge, however, would never sit still for a movie that was R-rated or provocatively titled. Nor could she tolerate violence, excessive profanity or anything with Elizabeth Taylor in it—all those husbands!”
There was also the problem of the sheriff’s position in town. It wouldn’t do for him to be seen leaving the store with Debbie Does Dallas, even though he knew that storeowner Dalton Talley kept a secret collection of forbidden films in his back room.
So Inge found himself in the Classics section of Video World’s display and wound up choosing Love Story, with Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal. That turned out to be a mistake.
The sheriff and his wife had a solid marriage, from their own perspective as well as that of everyone else in Randolph County. Unlike a lot of men in law enforcement, Woodrow Inge did not allow his job to consume him. He delegated authority willingly, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to find deputies with any common sense. And he had been in office so long that his election-year activity was limited to appearing at the Ruritan Club’s fundraising barbecue, the annual Downtown Daze in early October and a candidate’s forum put on at the Moose Lodge. The last two times, no one had even bothered to run against him.
Most days, barring a murder or flood or unusual automobile carnage, the sheriff would be home for supper and Ruthann would have it waiting for him. They watched a lot of TV, they went to church on Sundays and Wednesday nights and to the Randolph County High School football games in season, and once a year they drove down to Virginia Beach for the State Sheriff’s Convention. On weekends, they did yard work.
Ruthann had made it to her fifties with her good looks relatively unscathed. Her body was taut, her face largely unlined, the gray wandering through her shoulder-length dark hair seeming more like a decorative complement than something to be dyed into submission.
And she was proud to be married to Sheriff Woodrow Inge. People respected him, and his public bearing reflected that respect. The only vice he allowed his wife to see was a fondness for Southern cooking and sweets that had melted down his upper torso into a pear shape. Yet Ruthann still thought he looked handsome in church, in his dark suit, standing up in front of the Sunday school class.
The year before, the last of their three children—one in college, one in the Army, one married—had moved out, which should have signaled a new era of wedded contentment.
And would have, but for Ruthann’s mother.
Now in her early eighties, Rachel Turner was becoming a bewildered stranger in her own world. At least once a week, she would call the sheriff’s office to report that she had locked herself out of her house. The state pulled her driver’s license after she had drifted serenely through the only red light on Main Street and forced a logging truck to plow through the front of the feed store in order to avoid her. Most recently, Ruthann found her intently watching The 700 Club as a forgotten chicken reduced itself to charcoal in the oven.
“We’ve got to take care of her, Woodrow,” Ruthann kept saying. “She’ll have to come and live with us.”
Whenever he heard this, the sheriff felt his stomach flop. His solution was to find a room for Rachel at the Greenfields Adult Home just south of town, where she would be well-cared for and kept at a safe distance.
“There’s just one problem with her living here,” Inge would tell his wife. “Your mother doesn’t like me.”
Indeed, the sheriff and his mother-in-law had never gotten along. He had been something of a roughneck in high school, and Rachel—a Korean War widow—hadn’t wanted Ruthann to marry him. Even now, despite his Sunday school class, his reputation in the community and his forced politeness toward her, Rachel still flashed back to Woody Inge, the boy who had once borrowed her next-door neighbor’s car and wrapped it around a sycamore tree at the edge of town.
“People don’t change,” she would tell Ruthann. “They just pretend to.”
Rachel Turner had been in poor health for the last fifty years and preparing for the end of the world for the past twenty-five. Whenever that happened, she said, it would be none too soon, because even Jefferson Springs had turned into a Southside version of Gomorrah, hellfire just waiting to happen. She knew that from listening to the Rev. Pat Robertson.
In her final lucid years, Rachel had pulled together a philosophy that combined her Pentecostal roots, her natural mistrust of humanity, and the righteous and terrible predictions of a host of TV evangelists.
“Do you have your house in order, Woodrow?” she would ask the sheriff whenever she saw him.
Most recently, she pretended not to remember who he was.
For the first time in their marriage, Woodrow and Ruthann had come up against a problem that defied compromise, and Rachel’s uncertain fate gnawed at the stout fabric of their relationship. That’s why the sheriff decided to make their anniversary an opportunity to start over, get close again.
Particularly since they hadn’t slept together in any meaningful way since the day Rachel destroyed the chicken.
“Since that came up,” Inge told Henry Massenburg glumly, “ain’t nothing else has come up. Not for any purpose, anyhow.”
Ruthann would drink a little wine on special occasions, her two years of college having muted her fundamentalist underpinnings, so Inge bought a bottle of chardonnay on the way home and three red roses, one for each decade of their marriage. She cooked him some ribs, his favorite, and baked a cherry pie, and he saw those as favorable omens.
She hadn’t heard about the murder, and he didn’t tell her. And since Theo Moore’s corpse had been packed off to Richmond and the regional squad had been activated, there wasn’t a whole lot he needed to do that night but mend fences with his wife.
After two glasses of wine, Ruthann slid over close to him as the movie began. Unfortunately, it contained some four-letter words, which Inge hadn’t expected and which triggered a disapproving “Oh, Woodrow,” from Ruthann on several occasions. The real problem, though, developed when Ali McGraw’s illness became apparent and she began slipping away—although she still looked pretty good to the sheriff, even in the final stages. Ruthann started crying, and couldn’t stop.
“It makes me think of Mama,” she wailed.
It took a two-hour talk, a backrub, and Inge’s promise to “see what we can do about your mama” before Ruthann finally agreed to come to bed. Yet she made no objections when her husband slid in beside her instead of collecting his blanket and pillow and heading for the living room couch.
“I’ve missed having you here with me,” she whispered. “I don’t like it when you sleep out there.”
“I don’t like it, either,” he said huskily, one of his big hands sliding up the warm smoothness of her leg underneath her nightgown.
The night outside was hot and breathless, and the cricket sounds overrode any noises from the highway a quarter-mile away, and Sheriff Inge leaned down and kissed his wife deeply. That’s when he heard the banging on his front door.
“Goddamn sonofabitch bastard!” He screamed, but only inside his head.
“Maybe it’s Mama,” Ruthann said.
“For crying out loud, woman,” Inge said, suddenly irritated. “What would your mother be doing all the way over here? She don’t even drive.
“It’s probably Henry or Ricky, maybe something about that murder.”
“What murder?” R
uthann asked, her eyes widening.
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
Inge peered out a side window at the gravel drive in front of his house, a gray two-story that used to be a farmhouse before circumstances took the farm away. He didn’t see a cruiser, and he didn’t see anything he recognized as one of his deputies’ personal vehicles. Instead, there was a strange blue truck.
The pounding continued.
“I don’t like this,” Inge muttered, sliding out of bed with surprising agility and pulling on his pants, the bulge in the front of his boxers long gone.
He kept a .38 in one of the kitchen drawers, and it was loaded. Keeping the gun in his right hand, Inge eased out the side door and moved around the house from right to left, trying not to step on anything that would make a noise.
It was an advantage to the sheriff that his house was somewhat isolated, but he also worried, especially when Ruthann was home alone. And he heard about too many shootings where the victim had opened the door to a bullet to take that chance himself. He would regain the element of surprise and make it his own.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Zoe whispered to Fogarty as he drew back his fist to bang on the door a third time.
“I don’t care,” Fogarty shot back. “That fat bastard made me a promise, and I’m gonna hold him to it.”
Even above the crickets and the subsequent banging, they could hear Woodrow Inge cock his pistol.
“What in the hell are you people doing here?” the sheriff shouted as Zoe and Fogarty whirled around. “Who told you, you could come out here?”
Inge was wearing a bathrobe over his pants, which would have been comical had he not been armed.
Fogarty recovered quickly and shouted back, although he was actually taking a step away from Inge as he did it.
“You told me you’d let us know if something happened on a Tuesday night! You said I could call you!”
Inge was still all but invisible in the darkness, so Fogarty couldn’t see his puzzled look.
The Kudzu Kid Page 12