“They worked together, but exactly how good of friends were they?” April said.
“Pretty tight; they liked one another. Attlee could be a nice guy if you were on his side. He was polite around ladies; I will give him that. He could have the manners of a swamp rat, but around ladies, including Mamie Woodruff, he was polite and, at times, charming. Mamie tried to smooth some rough edges off him but had only a limited degree of success.” He chuckled.
“Something funny?” April asked.
“To a degree. You’ve seen the history room?”
“Yes, very impressive.”
“Mamie loved that. She spent a number of hours in there having tea occasionally. She would drink an occasional glass of wine but preferred various teas. She gloried that some of her ancestors had titles. That may have been three hundred years ago, but she still reveled in it. Even so, Sam became a friend of hers, and, trust me, Sam Attlee had no royal lineage. No doubt he had a number of his ancestors hung as horse thieves and worse, but no royal blood ran in his veins. In many ways Mamie was a fine woman, but she valued her family ancestry and her reputation above all else and guarded it like a lioness protecting her cubs. So does Wade. He’s the youngest and the momma’s boy in the family. Here’s a family secret for you that’s not really a secret. The youngest was his mother’s favorite. He was the apple of her eye. And you don’t dare say anything negative about his mother around him, even today.” He stuck his cigar in his mouth again and puffed. “But I’m getting off the subject.”
April nodded. ”When I talked to people about Woodruff, it was said Mamie sort of rubbed the rough edges off him too. He was a hard man but she softened him, from time to time and made him, at least to a degree, more compassionate.”
“I’ve heard that. Woodruff was definitely hard in his business affairs. I didn’t meet Clemmie until she was seventeen, and we didn’t become good friends until four or five years later. Two years after that we married. I never got very close to the rest of her family, but I’ve been told Mamie softened Mel Senior and maybe she did.”
“Know anything about the Fordham Project?”
He shook his head. “Only rumors…I have not delved into rumors about the Woodruff family, for obvious reasons. A few things about the family I didn’t want to know. Thought the marriage would work smoothly if I didn’t…have an awareness of some things.”
April looked at him for a moment. “Off the top of your head, who among them could kill?”
April was shocked that Henderson replied immediately.
“Any of them. They have the old man’s genes in them. He never killed anybody but there was ruthlessness in Woodruff. It was disguised by that crinkly little smile and that little dancing step he sometimes did, but it was there. He had limits. There were some things he wouldn’t do and maybe murder was one of them. Well, I’m sure it was. I can’t see Woodruff shooting anyone or knifing anybody…but he and his friends caused a lot of financial devastation to his enemies. The Fordham deal bankrupted a number of people and caused others to lose their homes. The bitterness lasted for decades. Those are the rumors and I think they’re true, but I never wanted to know the details.”
“Thank you, Mr. Henderson.”
He smiled as he walked out. April looked at Clay and rubbed the corner of her mouth.
“You know we may have a problem in this case.”
“You mean because we’re trapped in a house with a murderer?”
“No. I figure once we know who he is, you can shoot the guy…or I can shoot him. I was thinking the Internet is down and we can’t research anything. Our information is limited to the people in the house, and we can’t really assume they’re telling us the truth, can we?”
“True, in a murder investigation you have to judge the credibility of each witness. Some are not very reliable, but I did trust Mr. Henderson,” Clay said.
“So did I.”
“The problem is he didn’t really know all that much and not much at all of a criminal nature.”
April stood up and paced on the thick carpet. She walked to the door and waved. Evans, looking dignified as ever, appeared.
“Clay, I want a glass of wine. Sometimes it helps me think. Would you like something?”
“If the house has bourbon, would you slip a little in a glass and splash some Coke in?”
“That can be done, sir.”
“A glass of white wine for me.”
“Of course.”
She crossed her arms. “You know I want to get to a fiscal place where I can have an English butler. They just give the entire house dignity. English servants sort of go along the history room full of royal ancestors.”
“Which may or may not be true.”
“Mamie Woodruff would hardly be the first person to fiddle with her family line.”
Evans returned with a plate holding a glass of wine and a second glass with Clay’s bourbon and coke. April took a long sip, and then raised the glass.
“The Woodruff household does have great wine. That’s one of the finest I’ve ever tasted. Instead of money for our services, I’m going to ask if Mel junior will pay us in wine.”
She took another sip. “There is another problem in this case; we’ve never encountered anything quite like it before.”
“And you’re talking about…”
“Clay, Woodruff was dying. He had less than three months to live, probably two months. And doctors would not have been surprised if he had dropped dead less than thirty days from now. So, as a few people have noted, why kill him? Could a secret he was going to tell me, whatever it was, be that powerful? Whatever secret it was, it must have happened decades ago. It doesn’t make sense.”
Clay took a sip from his drink. “It doesn’t make sense to us, but I’ll guarantee you it made sense to someone. And that someone knew what he or she was doing. You don’t stab a man in the heart accidentally. Did you take a good look at that dagger?”
“No. I didn’t want to. It’s…ugly, even when it wasn’t covered with blood.”
“Exactly. That was a knife from several hundred years ago. Those knives look better than contemporary weapons, but any knife is ugly and it’s a personal weapon. A gun can be fired from afar. It’s an impersonal weapon. When you stick a knife into an opponent, you hear the man die. Not every person can use a knife.”
“You’re saying you have to be dedicated to killing someone.”
“That’s one of the requirements.”
She paused for a moment. “I didn’t see that type of stark hatred in anyone here.”
“Then they’re hiding it well.”
April took another sip of her drink. “OK, lets talk to Mel junior. He strikes me as…at least credible.”
6
Mel junior sat relaxed and comfortable in an aqua cushioned chair. Even with the shocking murder, he seemed to be at ease. That would be a difficult achievement with his father, the influential Melvin Woodruff Sr., April thought. Wouldn’t all his relatives step lightly around the man? He had all the power and all of the money.
April had her pad and pen out. She flicked the pen open. “Mel, let me get to the basic point. I have heard rumors about what’s called the Fordham Project. Your father even mentioned it in our last interview. But I can’t do any research here and I don’t know what it is. Can you tell me the details of it?”
The comfortable-looking Mel junior looked briefly uncomfortable as he shifted in the seat. “It’s something this family doesn’t talk about. In fact, our mother forbade it as a topic of conversation. She said people were lying about Mel and about the family. Dad went along with Mom’s admonition and never spoke about it, even with his own children. So I just picked up bits and pieces of it. About fifty years ago, this was a sparsely populated county. Our huge growth came decades later. But a number of families and a few individuals had managed to buy bits of property here. Not big slices but small plots of land here and there. Some of those plots were located in strategic places both insi
de and outside the Sea Oak City limits. Certain people…certain rich people…saw the value of that land. These certain people included my father, two of his friends, Sam Attlee and Jed Markatt, their favorite attorney, Pete Whiddle, and a few others. The city council, three members of which were my father, Attlee, and Markatt, told citizens they had to raise property taxes. The reasons were suspicious but would hold up in court because they had the county judge in their pockets. The rates increased about three hundred percent. The owners of those bits and pieces of property were scraping by. They had managed to buy the property for an investment but they scrambled for pennies to pay the taxes every year. The state was still suffering from the Great Depression and the war. The effects of the Depression lasted for a decade and more. Those owners could not pay the increased taxes, so they lost the land. My father and his friends bought the land for pennies on the dollar. In at least three cases, families had their homes on the property. They might have gotten a loan on the property but…”
“Your father owned the bank,” April said.
“He owned most of it. A few other people had shares, but my father had the majority shares. Of course he and his friends were not about to give out any loans. Fifteen, twenty owners maybe lost everything. Most of them had wives and children. For the most part they were wiped out. In the aftermath, at least one man killed himself.”
“I see why your family didn’t want to talk about it,” April said.
“Yes. Many people in town knew what had happened and they cursed the cabal who cheated their neighbors. For a while mother wouldn’t leave the house. She was stung by the criticisms; she almost became physically sick. She treasured her good name but there wasn’t much she could say to defend what was no longer a good name. Of course, my father and his friends were quite right. The land was valuable. Three of the plots illegally stolen are now where the Alemeda Square Shopping Center is located. When a company came in and put in the second bank in the county, the Blue Mountain Bank, it was built on one of the other plots.”
Clay frowned. “If I were a descendent of one of those owners, I would have a motive to kill your father.”
“I won’t be coy. Yes, you would. A prosecutor would probably have a hard time getting a jury to convict you.” His voice dropped and he looked down toward the floor. “I will tell you something. Many years ago I was with my father in the study, just us two, and I began talking about the past with him. I didn’t plan to when the conversation started, but I asked about Fordham and, for once, his smile disappeared and he looked as ashen and as saddened as I had ever seen him. He said, ‘There were times I’ve been tough. There were deals I made and decisions I’ve made that were questionable, but that was the only time in my life I purely stole. It was the first time I purely hurt people…hurt them badly. There was nothing decent about what we did.’ Before that time I had never seen my father experience remorse. But he did that night. He implied he had hesitated but was persuaded by his friends.
“The story about the selected hike of property taxes didn’t get any news play because, at that time, Dad was part owner of the newspaper. He later bought out his co-owner, but the news did spread by word of mouth though. It was a long time, decades, before the names of the men involved were mentioned with anything except distaste. Utter distaste. But eventually people forgot about it. Most of the people affected moved away. This town left a bad taste in their mouths.” He stayed silent for a moment then shook his head. “That is perhaps the darkest of all the dark secrets of the Woodruff clan. I’m sure my father and my mother had hoped knowledge of it would pass away, but such memories never fade; they linger for decades and centuries. I often wonder if a great deal of the family fortune is blood money. Does anything good come of blood money? I’m sure more than one citizen of Sea Oak will say that when they hear of my father’s death. My daughter is away at college. She’s a fine young lady. I keep hoping fate will not take its revenge on the children.”
Clay realized at some point in his monologue Mel junior had stopped speaking to him and April, and was talking to himself. He stared at the wall but was looking far away, perhaps decades away.
“Mother loved her status in this community. She has her picture hanging at the city art gallery denoting her contributions and support. She also has one at the Community of the Arts in Sea Oak. She loved the social gatherings, the dinners for friends, and the local gentry. What I have come to find boring and superficial, she treasured. I don’t mean to criticize my mother. I suppose it was a harmless infatuation and she did contribute a great deal of money to any number of worthy causes, but there is a price to such pretension.” He paused again, crossed his long legs, and leaned back on the sofa. He spoke to the air, or perhaps, Clay thought, he was speaking to the past. “I guess it was twenty years ago, maybe a quarter century, I recall mother was agitated, severely agitated. I thought about telling her to take a tranquilizer. She was always strong and I wondered what was bothering her. She frantically paced, even yelled at servants, which she never did. She had a glass of wine, a large glass of wine, before evening. She seemed on the verge of hysteria. I finally asked her what was wrong. Turned out a reporter for the Charlotte Observer was in town. He was going to do an in-depth feature on the history of Sea Oak and this region. Multi-piece story. Part one, two, three, four and, who knew, maybe five or six. Mother screeched at me he would certainly write about the Fordham Project and smear her and my father. She said all her friends would say terrible things about her. She could never show her face in the city again. At that time, I realized most people in Sea Oak had either forgotten or never known about it. Most of the population moved here long after that squalid tale. Mother was afraid of the past and her alleged royal name. She was in a tizzy for several days. Later I found the newspaper put the story on hold, and the editors never got around to it again. Maybe Dad had a hand in it or maybe not. Maybe it was only a tentative thing anyway. A lot of stories get suggested by feature editors and certainly not all of them get written. Mother holed up in her history room for several days drinking wine before the crisis passed. I think that’s when mother began to diligently rewrite her ancestry and, yes, now that I think about it, that’s when she hired Jackson Mooney to write Blue Creation, A Brief History of Sea Oak. You familiar with that?”
April nodded. “A basic and very generic history of the town and the county from about nineteen thirty to about the year two thousand. It painted a pretty history of the region, but I don’t think anyone would credit it as genuine history.”
“No, they wouldn’t. It had one patron my mother. She liked it; she loved it, for that matter. She was, through her author, writing down what she thought was history for the ages. A tale which could never be challenged. But it can be and will be. Part of the tale she spun was she was the humanizing influence on Dad. That was the generic belief in the town about the Woodruffs. He was hard; she was gentle. He cared about business and commerce, and she cared about the arts and beauty. Who knows? Some of that tale might be true. But she could be tough too, as tough as the men. She wanted everybody to forget that.” He chuckled. “For the most part they have.”
Clay narrowed his eyes and stared at the man. He wondered if Mel junior was drunk. The man didn’t slur his words nor were his legs wobbly. He looked alert. But Clay thought Mel junior might be one of those rare men who didn’t display overt signs of drunkenness. At times, though, their speech gave a hint of the blood alcohol level.
Mel junior shook his head as if waking up from a nap. “Well I suppose I have told you enough for the night. I should retire. If you would like to ask any more questions, just look me up tomorrow.”
“Thank you for your time, Mel,” April said.
He looked up toward the water pounding on the roof.
“This weekend, time is all we have,” he said.
When Evans knocked on her room door, April opened it and smiled. He held a plate with two wine glasses. She took one.
“Thank you, Evans, I needed a n
ightcap. Oh…and I will take Mr. Augustine’s drink. We’ll be…conferring for a few minutes,” she said as she grabbed both glasses.
“Of course, ma’am,” he said.
Clay took his glass as April closed the door. “Those English accents. They always make the speaker sound superior and you feel guilty,” she said.
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