by Eddy Rogers
Another reason I wanted to leave was to find out the results of Carla’s sonogram in Austin, set for earlier that afternoon. She’d not called, and I wondered whether the sonogram had identified the sex of the child. Sonograms don’t always show the front of the baby, thus preventing a view of the kid’s plumbing. I suspected that was the problem. Or she wanted to tell me face-to-face. My wondering what the results showed drove me home.
When I pulled into the driveway and walked into the house, Carla was nowhere to be found. I called out, and she responded from one of the guest bedrooms. “How do you think this bedroom will look in baby blue,” she said with a smile.
“A boy then?” I said smiling.
“Yep, so we’ll have a John Marshall Mariner, Junior.”
“I wish we could celebrate.” I wondered how my life was going to change with a new male capturing Carla’s attention.
“We can. I just bought a standing rib roast, potatoes to bake, and your favorite, brussels sprouts. We’re having a banquet tonight. You can have your wine but I’m just going to have water.”
What a week. The family and the pregnancy thriving, my practice growing, and progress on Betty’s murder. I spent the weekend very unproductively, not doing anything but reading and watching a fire in the fireplace.
•••
Bob called Sunday night with welcome news. “We’re in luck. Those guys in Houston sure have a pipeline into the underworld. HPD picked up Orlando as he was going into his house early Sunday morning. Fortunately he’d had too much to drink, so he didn’t put up any resistance. Nice pad he lives in, in a Hispanic middle class suburb near Hobby Airport. As a bonus, HPD found a half million dollars-worth of cocaine, weed, and pills, along with almost a hundred thousand in cash. Peterson’s elated that he’d shut down a big drug operation. All Pena said when he got arrested was that he wanted a lawyer. He refused to talk. Given his being pretty drunk, the arresting officers just put him in a cell to let him sleep the alcohol off. That may have been a mistake, since when he woke up he was madder than a wet hen. Claimed he hadn’t done anything, shouted obscenities. When he demanded to know why he was locked up and then told murder in the first for his execution-style slaying in Blanco, he shut up and then cursed Bruto. He had to know the only individual who could finger him was Bruto. The officers enjoyed the show. They always love taking a guy down who’s killed a victim in cold blood.”
“I’m so glad they caught him. He might be the one who started the fires.” I said.
“Maybe, maybe not. Bruto may have told us the truth when he said Pena killed Betty, but I doubt he’d fess up to other crimes like arson. With both of them in jail, the chance of another fire has gone down considerably. And you don’t have to worry about your safety. Neither of them can get bail since both are up for high crimes and both are flight risks.”
“What’s next?”
“Orlando will be arraigned tomorrow, and that will give HPD the chance to ask him questions in front of the judge. He’ll refuse to answer and ask for an attorney. Once that guy shows up or is appointed, we’ll have a lawyer to talk to. Pena can afford his own attorney. I’ll let you know when the cell phone records arrive. Do you think Larry’s available to look them over? That’s going to be a very time-consuming task, and I don’t have the people to do that quickly.”
“I’ll find out and get back to you. Thanks for the update.”
•••
“You guys made page one,” Larry said when I called late Monday morning.
“What?”
“The Houston Chronicle had a page one story detailing how Orlando Pena had been arrested and charged with murdering Betty Longstreet. Big news in Houston when a Houston socialite’s murdered, and bigger news when the bad guy is from Houston.”
“Johnson must know by now. I wonder if Blaise does as well?”
“With his Houston connections, almost for sure. How do we sort out which one of them’s the guilty party?”
“I’m glad you asked. Last Friday Bob Hauffler got a subpoena for the cell phone records for Johnson, Scranton and Blaise, hoping to connect one of them to the fire at the church and the one at my home. Bob’s expecting the records by the end of the week and wondered if you had time to come up here to go over the records. They’re voluminous and’ll take time to work through. As you know, Bob doesn’t have the personnel to do that quickly.”
“I’d love to do that. Will I have my meter on to charge the estate? That’ll make it easier for me to escape my duties at Crowe and Cowley.”
“Absolutely. With the three prime suspects being beneficiaries, the estate has every interest in sorting out whether one of them’s involved. Could be none of them. There’s always the possibility that either Orlando or Bruto overheard talk about the gold and initiated the scheme themselves. Unlikely though.”
“Good. I’ll be up Friday around noon. That’ll be a good time for Mexican food at El Charro. I’ll buy.”
“You’re on.”
•••
Pena did as everyone expected. Refused to say anything either to the police or to the judge except “Not guilty” at the arraignment. He’d immediately lawyered up with Percy Groom, a prominent criminal defense attorney who’d become famous for getting alleged criminals off with either a hung jury or a not guilty verdict. Not even lesser offense convictions. The system’s supposed to work that way. Better that a bad guy escape justice than an innocent man go to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.
Thursday started off with a bang. Larry called, excited. “John, the strangest thing’s happened. Late last night Peterson called and said that there’d been a major wreck on Memorial Drive, inside the 610 loop around midnight. Remember where Memorial Drive goes under Greenbrier-Shepherd, curving a little as you drive under it?”
“Sure do. Always drove that way when I lived in Houston if the traffic was backed up during morning rush hour on I-10.”
“Well, a car was going eighty or ninety under the bridge and lost it. Went right into the concrete pillar. A Cadillac Escalade, new one. You could hardly recognize the vehicle except from the rear tailgate.”
“What’s this got to do with what we’re working on?” I was confused.
“Guess who was driving the Caddy?”
“Who?”
“Carroll Johnson.” It hit me hard. I couldn’t figure out what this meant for what we were doing, piecing together the murder and finishing the estate work.
“Is he alive?”
“No. Very dead. No one could have survived a crash like that. No one was in the car with him.”
“I’ll be up there for lunch tomorrow. To me this is just another Aubrey McClendon story.”
“What do you mean by that? Who’s he?” I said.
“He was an oil and gas wheeler-dealer in Oklahoma City. He got indicted on charges related to his oil company, and within a day crashed into a bridge support at a high speed and died. Never could tell if he lost it driving or committed suicide to save face.”
“Interesting. As you may remember from our so-called suicides in Houston eight years ago, I just don’t understand people committing suicide.”
“He had to have heard that Orlando had been arrested and charged. Personally, I’ve always thought that minister in Blanco started all this, but this may change things. See you tomorrow.”
“Strange. I’ll let Bob and Jane know. I’m not sure whether this simplifies things or makes them more complex. At any rate, the search for the brains behind the murder is still on.”
I called Bob and Jane and brought them up to date about Johnson’s death. Jane said that she’d started the process of getting Pena extradited to Blanco County pending a trial. She carefully brought up the possibility of a plea deal with Pena. Groom had brought the subject up when he called Jane to ask about the possibility of bail.
“I’ve travelled th
is road many times,” she said to me. “Justice versus knowledge. Pena can tell us what happened but needs a bargain to make sense for him to spill his guts. On the other hand, anyone who murdered on a contract killing deserves a death sentence. Society needs him to be eliminated, and spending eighty grand a year incarcerating him for the rest of his life wastes money. How do you feel about a plea deal? He tells the full story and we let him off with life without parole? I’m not sure myself.”
“Gotta think that one over. With Johnson dead, the only person who might object is Paul Scranton. Johnson’s heirs perhaps, if Johnson’s not the one behind this.”
“We’ve got plenty of time. You’ll hear when Pena’s on the way up here.”
“Thanks.”
Starting off the morning with Johnson’s death and Jane’s thoughts on a plea deal ruined my plan to go to the office. I’d wanted to work up a set of questions for a deposition in a case I agreed to handle involving a nursing home death in Wimberley. The poor woman, nearly 89, had passed away in the home, and when her children made arrangements for the funeral, discovered that she’d literally wasted away over time. Even though she was originally around five-five, at her death she weighed only eighty pounds. So her children sued the nursing home. The nursing home retained me to defend them and agreed, oddly, to pay me an advance of twenty grand. According to the nursing home, the woman had been at the home for three years, was bereft of any real memory, and after the first year refused to get up and move around. By the third year, she’d sleep almost all day. They said they made every effort to get food down her, even feeding her the last six months, but the record of her intake of calories showed that she wasn’t getting enough nutrition. They’d called a local doctor in multiple times, but he said he couldn’t prescribe anything that would reverse her decline.
A sad case, but the nursing home said they couldn’t have done anything else that would have changed things. The children of the woman, two daughters and a son, hadn’t seen their mother for two years. The daughters lived in Dallas and the son in Little Rock, all of them with active lives, spouses and children of their own. My sense of the case was simple, that the children felt guilty for not seeing their mother for so long and wanted to do something to make up for their absence, an absence that may have contributed to their mother’s decline. Asking questions in a deposition of the three would be very delicate and had to be thoughtful, not confrontational. I just couldn’t get myself to work on that after the events pushing the Longstreet matter toward a conclusion.
I blew off doing anything that day. I enjoyed lunch with Larry the next day. We talked through the details of Johnson’s suspicious death and speculated on what the cell records would look like. A random thought of mine, that Johnson and Blaise were in league together, got quickly shot down by Larry. They had nothing in common and if anything were adversaries, not co-conspirators. Larry did mention that they were doing an autopsy on Johnson, as Texas law required. Along with the cell records, we might be able to piece the murder facts together without depending on Pena to fill in the blanks.
Larry agreed to take the afternoon off since the records, we were told, wouldn’t arrive until Monday morning. When we got home Larry hugged Carla and smiled at Carla’s growing belly. “Can I be a godfather?” he said, surprising both of us.
“Why of course,” Carla replied enthusiastically. “We’d be honored.”
After noticing the chill in the air, I suggested adjourning to the living room where we could build a fire and talk. We did that, and after an hour of that, we got sleepy. Carla went to our bedroom and Larry and I dozed between conversations and reading. That set us up for a nice, quiet weekend. I tried to forget about the nursing home and the Longstreet murder.
17
Sure enough, the cell records came in as promised the next Monday morning. Turned out that Blaise had AT&T and Johnson and Scranton had Verizon. Both carriers claimed their people had worked over the weekend to get the records to us quickly, knowing why the police wanted them. And indeed the records, sent in electronic form on thumb drives, filled up the three gigs on each drive. All that interested us, however, were the records from six months before Betty’s death up to October 23, when she died. That cut down on the volume of cell locations Larry had to look at. Identifying the towers cited was task number one. Each carrier provided a geographic guide so that Larry could map out the local towers in Blanco, near the church, and near the Longstreet ranch. Still, Larry had a challenging and time consuming task. And a boring one. Glad I didn’t have to do it. The best part was that Larry needed a desk top computer to analyze the data and then print it, so I gave him my court house office, and I worked from home on my lap top. It’d take Larry two days to work through the data. Might get used to this schedule.
Mike Trombley, the owner of the Wimberley nursing home, called me on my cell. “John, I’ve been thinking over the weekend. I don’t want to run up a big bill on the Schwartz death at the home. The family needs to know where we are. I have one insurance policy for errors and omissions, for a hundred thousand. The company they’re suing is a management company that runs the place, and the building is owned by a trust whose beneficiaries are my children. I own the stock of the management company but its net worth is less than fifty grand. I’ve spent years keeping assets out of my name, so I only have a small net worth, and almost all of my property is exempt, not reachable by any judgment or a bankruptcy.
“You’re in charge of the case, but I’m in favor of your calling them, telling them the circumstances and offering the insurance policy proceeds, arguing that that’s the most they’ll ever get even if we go through a trial. A judgment’s not worth anything if it’s over a hundred grand. What’ya think of making a settlement offer right now?”
“Worth a try. That way the three of them wouldn’t have to come here for the deposition. Might be better to set the deposition first and then contact their lawyer and see what I can get done. I’m a little worried that you own the management company. They might attack you personally, but piercing the veil of your corporation’s tough in Texas. We could offer them an affidavit telling them what you just told me, that you don’t have much in the way of non-exempt assets.”
“I understand. Been down that road before. Just runs up legal fees to have a full-blown trial, but they’ll have a hard sell to a jury, especially since they didn’t visit Mom for years.”
“Agreed. I’ll do what I can.”
•••
Mid-day Tuesday, I’d stayed in my pajamas to work at home. Larry called from my office. I could tell he was excited. “These cell tower sequences are like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. I have it figured out, at least about the fires.”
“Well, go ahead.” I was anxious to learn what he’d found.
“Nah. It’s gonna cost you a lunch at the Old 300 for barbeque. I promise I won’t get anything beyond the lunch special. No beer. I’ll come to your office, go over what I have, and then we’ll walk over to lunch.”
“That wasn’t very nice of Larry,” Carla said. “I want to know too.”
“That’s Larry. He wants to show me what he has, not tell me. He needs me to authenticate his conclusions. Then we can tell Bob and Jane. Tell you what. I’ll call you as soon as I hear him out. Okay?”
“Sure. Don’t go too fast running into town.”
The square in Blanco was full, as the lunch hour always creates a crowd at the restaurants around the square, and people line up at the post office over their lunch hour to get things done. I had to park down Fourth Street, past city hall.
Larry had pasted several sheets of copy paper together. At the top of one he’d written “Johnson”. Below that he’d written two sequences. “Look here, John. This is the core of it. The first one, surprisingly, has Johnson in Blanco the day of the church fire. He must have eaten in the town square, and then, after that, drove to the church. He was there for ten minutes a
nd then left. The additional sequences are cell towers on his way back to Houston.” The news about Johnson surprised me. I hadn’t even thought he might be the one who started the fires.
“The second sequence is more interesting. He left Houston around dinner time, travelled up here in three hours, stopped in Wimberley, then drove near the cell tower closest to your house. Then he high-tailed it back to Houston.”
“Pretty well shows Johnson’s the culprit. Why would he do the fires?”
“I’m surprised too. An important investment banker getting his hands dirty like that. He must have known that Betty and Blaise had a relationship going. Betty may have told him that she’d become disenchanted with the cowboy church, if not Blaise himself. Johnson could have figured that he’d make Blaise the patsy, so he’d get blamed for Betty’s death. And as to your fire, just a warning, and one that you’d suspect Blaise for. In fact I’d bet that Johnson covered his ass and talked to you after both fires.”
“Come to think of it, he did. I thought he was in New Orleans both times too.”
“By that time he was, and he made you part of his cover story.”
“Good work. Certainly incriminates Johnson in the fires. Doesn’t prove any connection he had with the murder, however. Why would he want to kill Betty?”
“We may never know. He probably got tired of hearing rumors of Betty’s side relationships. They argued a lot whenever he came to the ranch. At any rate, Johnson made sure he stayed in Houston the night Pena killed Betty in Blanco. Pena did it. Johnson put the killing in motion. I’d hate to have to make a deal with Pena now with this information. That guy’s an animal.”
“Let’s call Bob and Jane, bring them up to date and get a little barbeque. Gotta call Carla first and let her know. I promised I’d do that. I know they’ll all be as surprised as we are about Johnson.”