by Jeff Abbott
She’s dead.” I might as well have leaned over the table and mussed up his hair. The shock showed naked on his face. He recovered quickly, drawing on his cigarette. His eyes avoided mine. “Dead?” I told the story in few words, omitting the list. “I thought the police might have called you by now. They’re starting an investigation, of course.”
“Call me? Why?” Now he looked at me. His complexion, fair to begin with, paled. “You have a key to the library, Bob Don. There was a key on her that Tamma Hufnagel says Beta swiped from Adam, but who knows for sure?” “Good Lord!” He receded into his chair. He blinked his puffy blue eyes through the smoke. “Holy Christ!” he muttered. “Would you like a drink?” “Sacrilege and booze? How un-Baptist of you, Bob Don.” He shrugged instead of arguing. “I’m a man like any other, Jordy. I believe in God, but all His rules get tiresome. I’m gonna have me a whiskey. You want one?” “Sure.” I never drink early, but I’m flexible under stress. He produced two plastic glasses from a desk drawer, along with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He poured solemnly and handed me a glass. He didn’t make a toast and I was relieved. “Beta dead,” he muttered. “Jesus! It seems impossible.” The shock faded from his face and his expression was composed and unreadable. “Everyone dies,” I observed, wondering how he’d react to such a cold comment.
“Yeah, but I always thought she’d go on her own terms.” He shook his head and sipped. “I understand you saw her yesterday, around midafternoon?” “You ask that like you don’t care, but I think you do.”
He fingered his red necktie, covered with little yellow horseshoes.
“You were upset when you saw her,” I said. “Who told you this?” he asked. “Tamma Hufnagel, I guess. She was leaving as I got there.
Practically running. Looked as scared as a four-year-old at a haunted house.” I filed that away. “Never mind Tamma. I’m curious as to why you were there.” He frowned and I saw his fingers whiten against his drink. “Why should I tell you?” His friendliness had not entirely evaporated, but it was drying. I measured him. I hadn’t liked Bob Don before, but in the past five minutes he’d shown glimmers of humanity that elevated him beyond the supercilious glad-hander I’d known.
“Look. She threatened me yesterday in the library, then she ends up dead there from a bat I brought and left in my office. It doesn’t look promising for me. The police and Billy Ray Bummel think I was involved.” He mashed out his cigarette and downed his glass of Jack Daniel’s. His stare held mine. “I’ll ask you a question, Jordy. I want the truth. I will help you all I can if you need it.” His eyes had a frankness I hadn’t expected. “Did you kill her?” “No, I did not,” I answered. “And if I did, why would you help me anyway?” He poured more whiskey into his glass. “Because I liked your daddy, and I like your mama,” he said simply. “I’d do it for them.” “Then help me. Tell me why you were there and what you know about her.” “What do I know about her?” He looked toward the window. He didn’t say anything for several moments. “She grew up here. She was pretty when she was younger. She was wild, too. I remember hearing that about her, although she was several years younger than me. She didn’t get religion bad until she was twenty, and then something happened to her to make her think she and Jesus together were an unbeatable team. She never married ’cause nobody could live with her. Her daddy was well-to-do and she lived off the money he left her.” He shrugged. “She was obsessed with God With judging people.” I nodded. “Do you think she ever used that judging to go a step beyond?” “What do you mean?” he asked hoarsely. “You can’t judge someone until you know their story. She could just judge people by conduct, but that might not be enough.” I watched him; our eyes never strayed from each others’. “Was she the type to dig up dirt on folks? Use it against them?” I thought of the verses she’d associated with Tamma and Bob Don; they suggested secrets best kept hidden. “She wasn’t blackmailing me,” Bob Don said tonelessly. He raised the plastic glass to his lips and gulped. Not the response I expected. I sipped my own drink, trying to act nonchalant. “So why did you go see her yesterday?” He swallowed. “I wanted to clear the air with her about me replacing her on the board. Just make amends instead of amens.” He tried to laugh but it sounded more like a sick cough. “I knew how upset she was and I thought it best to make her feel she still had a voice-through me-on the board.” That was all I needed, another Beta. “And are you her voice now? Are you going to give me as much trouble as she did?” Bob Don looked hurt. He fumbled for his words, as though they were scraps he’d scattered on the floor. “No, not at all. Look, Jordy, please stay out of all this. Let the police do their job.” “Their job seems to be trying to find enough evidence to arrest me, according to Billy Ray Bummel.” “They won’t arrest you.
I promise. I-” Bob Don never got to finish. I heard the nasal sounds of the bee-hived receptionist and I recognized two other voices before the door flew open. Junebug Moncrief and Billy Ray Bummel. They hadn’t bothered with the niceties of knocking. Billy Ray looked at me like he’d caught me with my hands around a tender young throat. “I told ’em you were busy talking to Mr. Poteet,” the receptionist yelled from behind Mirabeau’s Law and Order. “It’s okay, Bernadette,” Bob Don eyed Junebug and Billy Ray critically. “Y’all come in.” Since they were already in, they stayed put. A glaring Bernadette shut the door behind her. “Afternoon, Mr. Goertz,” Junebug smiled. Billy Ray nodded and continued to scrutinize me as if I were a urine specimen. “Gentlemen,”
Bob Don wheedled in his closing-the-deal voice, “usually visitors wait to be announced. Y’all trying to make ever’ body here think y’all gonna arrest me?” He chuckled good-naturedly at the end. “We just wanted to ask you some questions, Bob Don,” Junebug said. “How you doing, Jordy?” I stood, setting my drink on Bob Don’s desk. “I’m fine, thank you.” I didn’t feel it. “You mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Billy Ray asked. “Not making a toast to Miz Harcher’s memory, I hope.” Before I could answer, Bob Don leapt into the fray. “Jordy here and I were just talking about him gettin’ a new truck.” “You must be a mighty cool customer, findin’ a dead body then going car shoppin’,”
Billy Ray observed. He didn’t bother to hide the vitriol in his voice.
“Billy Ray,” Junebug cautioned. He looked at me, then the drinks.
“Didn’t know you were interested in buying a truck, Jordy.” “I’m offering him a good trade-in on that car of his, but he reckons I’m trying to rip him off,” Bob Don laughed, as jovial as a host politely trying to remove unwanted guests. His verbal awkwardness was gone; the hallmark glibness that’d earned him that big car lot was back. “Since Junebug and Billy Ray obviously want to talk to you, Bob Don, I’ll be leaving.” I shook his hand. “I’ll consider your offer. Thanks.” “Give me a call and we’ll discuss it further.” His blue eyes bored into mine and there was steel in his handshake. I thought for a moment that he was reluctant to release my hand, but he did. Junebug and Billy Ray said nothing further to me as I walked out and shut the door. I went past the still fuming Bernadette, who was muttering about the poor manners of civil servants. I emerged into the heat of the afternoon.
Bob Don Goertz, unaccountably, was acting like my ally. But even though he had been forthcoming, he hadn’t seemed comfortable. Did I make him nervous? I’d half-expected him to point a finger at me and tell the officers that I was prying into Beta Harcher’s death. But he hadn’t. And I thought I knew why. I’d asked if Beta was the type to dig up dirt on people; his immediate response was She’s not blackmailing me. It seemed an odd answer for a smooth talker like Bob Don. Not a “Yeah, she was the type to do it” or “No, she was a good Christian woman who’d never commit extortion.” He just said he wasn’t being victimized. I wondered if that was a slip of the tongue, if Bob Don had been so jumpy that he’d logically leapfrogged ahead a couple of questions. Was he being blackmailed by Beta, or did he know of someone else who was? I was getting ahead of myself, I thought. But I’d defi
nitely take him up on his offer of further discussion. He hadn’t said where he was last night. I felt that honest Bob Don wasn’t being entirely so. It didn’t make me want to buy a car from him.
The smell of marijuana hung faint in the air as I sat on Matt Blalock’s screened back porch. I wasn’t surprised that someone in Mirabeau would be toking up, but I found it disconcerting that a Vietnam vet sneaked a puff while staring out at the lush, dense growth of mossy woods that came up to his property like alien jungle. It seemed too much like a scene from an Oliver Stone picture. Matt Blalock wheeled back onto the porch, balancing a lap tray with iced tea glasses with little mint sprigs (I hoped they were mint) topping the tea. I’d have offered to help, but I knew from experience Matt liked to do everything himself. Stopping at the low table in front of me, he handed me a glass of tea and set one down for himself. He deftly whipped the tray around and tossed it onto another table. The tray clattered, but didn’t fall. “Good aim,” I offered. Matt shrugged.
He wasn’t a big guy; only five feet six or so, but his arm muscles bulged massively from years of acting for his legs. He kept his black hair cut military short. Matt’s uniform these days was jeans and some cause-related T-shirt, using his big chest to advertise saving the whales, disarming the populace, or promoting world peace. Today’s shirt invited us to plant a tree. His other nod to calculated Bohemianism was a perfect little trimmed triangle of beard that sprouted on his chin, pointing downward. It was like a small medal of hair pinned to his face. His eyes were dark, quick, and intelligent-without the haunted look one hears vets have. All I really knew about him was that he did occasional computer consulting for software companies in Austin and that he was involved in the Vietnam veterans movement. “Your farm’s looking good,” I offered by way of conversation. He shrugged again, an odd motion that evoked French schoolgirls more than burly veterans. “Credit my dad and my brother.
They do all the work. I just live here.” I couldn’t imagine my family letting me do drugs on the porch, but maybe the Blalocks figured Matt had earned special privileges. “I hope they’ll be reopening the library soon,” Matt observed in his lazy, drawling voice. “I don’t want to have to move our vets meeting on account of that bitch.” I loathed Beta Harcher, but even I wouldn’t have said something that insensitive. “She’s dead, Matt. Have some respect.” “Ding-dong, Jordy,” Matt laughed. “The witch is dead. Look, I’m not one to render tears or even one moment of fake sympathy over someone I despised. She hated me and I hated her and that was fine.” He turned his wheelchair to face me. “You may not think it’s fine now, Matt,” I answered. “You had a key to the library. You obviously didn’t get along with her. The cops have got your number.” He shrugged again. My shoulders would get tired if I only had one gesture to rely on. He kept his hands, wearing fingerless gloves, near his wheels. “They’ve already been out here.
Chief Moncrief and that snot-nosed prosecutor of his. Those two are useless. Whoever killed Bait-Eye is going to outfox them, I’ve no doubt. Junebug’s used to dealing with offenders who show him their monogrammed belt buckles when he asks for ID, and Billy Ray Bummel walks his kid to school ’cause they’re in the same grade. Jesus!” He laughed, a dry, rustling sound deep in his throat. “So. We’ve got us a clever killer?” “Yep. Someone got her into the library, conked her, and isn’t leaving a trace. Anyway”-he sipped tea-“it had to be planned. Can you imagine ol’ Bait-Eye causing a crime of passion?” He slapped his leg in amusement. “I’ve always thought of you as one of the smarter people in town, Matt.” I smiled. “Maybe you did it.” He considered the possibility. “Maybe I did. Although I heard she got it with one blow. I’d have been slower. Lots.” I wondered if he’d seen slow killing before. The look on Matt’s face made my throat tighten.
“You heard what that woman said to me at the board meetings, Jordy.
When I came to talk on behalf of library patrons.” I had, and I looked at the overgrowth on his property, embarrassed. As blunt and unlikable as Matt could be, Beta’s cruelty toward him had been unbelievable.
When he spoke against her censorship stand, she brought out her most vicious artillery. I saw the scene in my mind’s eye: a red-faced Beta screeching and spitting at Matt, calling his veterans’ newsletter unpatriotic and saying it was best he was crippled, since he couldn’t be as seditious from a wheelchair. I do hate venom. Even Adam Hufnagel and his wife, Beta’s strongest allies, had begged her to stop. I’d seen Matt’s hands grip the arms of his chair, his knuckles bleached of blood, fighting for control. I think I had realized then exactly what sort of twisted person I was dealing with in Beta Harcher. The next meeting, the board removed her. “She even called here at the house a couple of times.” Matt scratched at his funky patch of beard. “Told my father he should just push me out into the countryside and leave me to die.” He laughed. “Daddy told her I’d survived worse than the Mirabeau scenery and she could kiss his big white ass.” “I’m sure that mended fences.” “Screw her,” he said, his voice sounding loose and a little drunk. “I’m glad she’s dead.” “Were you this open with the police, Matt?” “No. I wasn’t this open,” he answered-and I knew why. He’d rolled the joint I’d smelled after the visit from Junebug. Matt was a little high and a little more talkative. I considered Matt. He appeared completely forthright, unlike Tamma and Bob Don. I decided on unmitigated honesty. “Did Junebug mention a list of Beta’s that they found?” “Yeah, he did. Allowed I was on some list of hers, didn’t say who else was on it. I told him it was probably her shit list ’cause she sure wasn’t doing her early Christmas shopping for me.” “Well, I’m on the list too. Along with others who have connections to the library.” “So? She was pissed at everyone at the library. Tell me something new.” “Each name had a Bible quote next to it, Matt. Would you like to know what yours is?” That threw him. He actually moved back slightly in his wheelchair. “Not that it matters, but yeah, I would.” “It’s appropriately a quote from Matthew. A famous one. ‘
Verily I say unto you that one of you shall betray me. ’” I paused.
“What do you think she meant by that, Matt, putting that quote by your name?” His fingers tented over his mouth, containing his laughter.
“How could I betray that bitch? I sure wasn’t on her side. You can’t betray an enemy.” Matt gestured with his tea, sloshing some of it on the porch floor. He ignored it and smiled at me, like a general at untrained troops. “And what was your quote, Jordy? Something about keeping objectionable library materials? I’m not up on my Bible. Never had much use for all that claptrap anyway.” I set my tea down and repeated my quote about good and evil. Matt laughed again. His merriness gave me the creeps. I thought he might keep laughing and just not stop. “Je sus! I wish I had so much spare time to muck around in other peoples’ lives. Making lists with fucking Bible quotes-what total horseshit!” “Where were you last night, Matt? Around ten or so?” He quit laughing and glared at me. “I think I resent you even asking me such a question.” “I’m sure Junebug and Billy Ray asked you.” “Oh, they did. But they were more interested in you.” He didn’t need to put the extra stress on the last word; it hit me like a rock.
“Is that the purpose of this little social call, Jordy? To start pointing fingers of blame at everyone else to get the heat off yourself?” “I don’t need to point fingers,” I retorted. “I didn’t kill her, but I want to know who did. I don’t care much for being implicated in a murder. You hated her and you had keys to the library.” “But I’m in a wheelchair,” he said mockingly. “Don’t you hide behind it, Matt. Those arms of yours are plenty powerful. I’m sure you could hit a home run with a bat or bash in Beta’s head, just as easy as pie.” “But I was here, Jordy,” Matt whispered with a smile.
“I was here, with my family to back me up. Is your alibi that good?”
It wasn’t, and it made me feel mad. I stood. “Alibis can be broken, Matt. I’m sure when Junebug interrogates everyone else involved in the censorship fi
ght, the hatred between you and Beta will become an issue. I may have to mention it to him myself.” With that, I turned for the door. Matt didn’t permit me the last word. “Don’t interrupt him, Jordy. He’ll be busy reading you your Miranda rights.” Then low, bitter laughter. I slammed the porch door and headed for my car.
5
A brilliantly splitting headache hit me after my confrontation with Matt. As I drove back into town from the Blalock farm, I massaged my temples and reviewed my predicament. I’d always rather liked Matt, although I didn’t know him very well. He had a reputation in the town for being a smart aleck and a loudmouth, but I’d seen him face down Beta’s abuse without ever sinking to her level. What surprised me was the depth of his venom; he abhorred Beta Harcher as much as she did him. I’d thought he’d be above that, with his concern for baby seals and whatnot. I wondered what the autopsy on her body would show; could the blow have come from someone seated? If so, Matt made a prime candidate. I turned from the farm road onto Mayne, still a bit outside the city limits. I wasn’t making too spectacular a debut as an investigator. I had some possibly meaningless Bible verses and a list of suspects: a Baptist minister’s wife who seemed too mousy to say boo (but maybe wasn’t); a used-car salesman who wanted to protect me (but maybe didn’t); and a bitter, antagonistic activist (no doubt there). I didn’t place any of them above suspicion. Unfortunately no one was understudying my unwanted role of prime suspect. I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I swung toward home. I took the long way around; instead of going right onto Lee Street for the straight shot I turned early, driving down Gregg Street. Beta Harcher’s house sat at the end of the road.