Murder One

by Allen Kent

  The man who appeared was as dark as the girl was pale. Thick as an angus bull with the hands and arms of a pro wrestler. But his features, balding head, and a less-myopic version of the wire-rimmed glasses we had seen on Rufus Pogue, showed him to be the man’s son. A jeweler’s magnifying lens was pushed up out of the way of his right eye.

  “Thank you, Angela. And good morning.” The voice was so soft and buttery that I would have sworn it couldn’t be coming from this fullback of a man.

  Joseph and I walked together toward the back counter. “Good morning,” I said for both of us. “Can we speak privately somewhere for a few minutes?”

  The younger Mr. Pogue glanced about the shop with an amused grin. “Looks pretty private to me right here. If someone comes in, Angela can help them, and we can slip up into the back.” He held out a meaty hand. “David Pogue.”

  I looked cautiously at the girl as I shook his hand. “I mean ‘very privately,’ Mr. Pogue.”

  “Anything I can hear, she can hear,” the big man said. “I’m training Angie to take over the store. There’s no transaction too private for her to know about.”

  I gave a conceding nod and Joseph and I both held out our badges. “As you can see,” Joseph began, “we’re both Missouri law enforcement officers and have no jurisdiction here. But we’re investigating a murder that you may be able to help us with. We would just as soon talk to you about it unofficially without all the hoopla it will take to bring in local authorities.”

  The jeweler smiled thinly and waved us to two stools that fronted the counter on our side, pulling another pair up across from us. He looked carefully from me to Joseph. “You’re the couple who stopped in on my dad in Mazatlán. He thought you might be coming by here. Said you seemed more interested in where the Confederate dollars had come from than how much they might be worth.” Young Pogue sat, but still seemed to fill all the space on the far side of the counter. Angela slipped behind one of the massive shoulders.

  “We weren’t entirely forthcoming with your father,” I confessed, sliding onto one of the stools next to Joseph. “We’re investigating the death of a woman named Nettie Suskey. One of the puzzles we’ve been trying to solve is how the woman supported herself. During a search of a safe deposit box, we found that she owned several coins that looked like genuine ’61-Ds. Our follow-up investigation found the only recent sales to be from your shop in Mazatlán where we learned, much to our surprise, that they had come from a source not too far from Nettie’s home. This shop. The Gold Standard.”

  At the mention of Nettie’s name, David Pogue’s brow had knitted almost unperceptively, but Angela’s face had tightened and her eyes fluttered to blink back tears.

  “Nettie brought her coins here, didn’t she,” Joseph said softly, directing her comment to the girl. Angela turned toward the big man who continued to look at us unflinchingly across the glass counter, then burst into tears and rushed up the stairs onto the back balcony. Her footsteps descended steps somewhere farther back and a door slammed.

  Joseph kept her voice soft and even. “Do you want to tell us about that, Mr. Pogue?”

  The thick chest rose with a long, nasal breath, then collapsed with a massive sigh. “Yes. Nettie’s been coming here for a number of years. Brings one coin a year. We didn’t even know her last name until now—or where she came from.”

  “That information wasn’t important to a transaction of that size?” I questioned. “All cash with new hundred dollar bills and no last names? You must have given her tens of thousands of dollars for each coin. Do you have that kind of cash lying about just in case an old lady drops in with a priceless gold dollar?”

  Pogue’s dark eyes fixed a smoldering glare on mine. “We were always very fair with Nettie. The first time she came, we explained what we thought her coin would bring in an open sale and offered her two-thirds of that value. She insisted on half. Said she didn’t need all that money and wouldn’t know where to put it.” He glanced back over his shoulder, then down through the glass of the countertop.

  “She came down once or twice a year other than the purchase times. During those visits, she’d tell us when she would bring a coin. She and Angie got to be pretty close.” He looked up at Joseph and smiled more broadly. “You probably couldn’t tell, but Angela isn’t my biological daughter. We worked with her through CASA, then had her as a foster kid for two years. Finally managed to talk the white court into letting us adopt her. Nettie was like a grandmother to her. What happened to her?”

  “Someone broke into her home, ransacked the place, and smothered her.”

  David Pogue’s eyes misted and he shook his head slowly. “Who could have done something like that to an old lady?”

  Joseph waited while he blinked his eyes clear, then pressed, “She never told the girl her last name or where she lived?”

  “Didn’t seem to matter to either of them. Both saw themselves as people without much of a past worth remembering.”

  My turn for a question. “And you didn’t need that personal information for financial reports?”

  Pogue sat back and folded the trunks of his arms across his chest. “You got us there, I guess. You’ve been to Mexico. We don’t sell the coins out of that store so we can keep close track of financial details. And we aren’t in the Sinaloa province because we’re looking for close Mexican oversight.”

  I wanted to suggest to Joseph that this might be a good time for us to step outside for a few minutes but felt her silent permission to be unprofessional. “We’re here to try to get answers to what happened to Nettie,” I said. “We’ll worry about the sales transaction if that appears to be a factor.”

  We heard the door open back on the balcony and could hear Angela scrape a chair closer to the half-wall.

  “When did this happen?” Pogue asked.

  Joseph answered. “Just over a week ago. We’re looking for reasons. Someone knowing she had a supply of 1861-Ds seems like it could be one.”

  Pogue nodded. “Yup. That would be. We knew she had more than she’d brought down. But there was some real advantage to us in them coming to us one at a time and spread out.” His dark face twisted into a cynical smile. “Scarcity adds value, and you always like to create the impression that the one up for auction might be the last.”

  “How many did she say she had?”

  His shrug absorbed what little we could see of his thick neck. “She was here a few months ago. We knew from what she said that there were a few more.”

  I stepped back in. “What did she say that led you to believe that?”

  He had also heard Angela return and called to her over his shoulder. “Angie? Why don’t you come on back down here. You can help me with this.”

  She appeared at the steps, pink-faced and puffy-eyed. This time Pogue had her sit on the stool beside him. “Do you know anything about CASA?” he asked.

  Joseph looked blank, so I answered. “We have a small chapter in the county. Court Appointed Special Advocates. Volunteers who work with kids in foster care so they have someone who’s keeping an eye out for them while they’re in the foster system.”

  Joseph was free with her ignorance. “Don’t all foster kids have a social worker assigned?”

  Angela sniffed. “To you and maybe fifty others. And that’s a real burnout job. I had four or five during the years I was in foster care.”

  “And how many of these CASA volunteers?” Joseph asked.

  Angela turned to the giant beside her and her eyes again misted. “Only one. Mom and Dad.”

  Mr. Pogue wrapped a burly arm about his daughter. “Nettie was quite taken with the whole CASA idea,” he said. “She knew there was a chapter where she lived and that foster numbers were growing. When she was here last, she even told us she was planning to change her will to leave the rest of her coins to her local CASA group. That’s how I knew there were more.”

  While Joseph was learning about Court Appointed Special Advocates, I had been looking over a 1907
twenty-dollar gold piece in the case below my elbows. My eyes snapped back to the big black man at mention of Nettie’s will. “She talked about changing her will?”

  He gave a smooth, honey-coated chuckle. “Yes. She’d been thinking about it for months, but was afraid to tell some friend of hers that she was being shut out.”

  “Some friend who’d been told she was in the will?”

  Pogue nodded. “That’s the way I understood it. Nettie wanted to have her will redone to give everything to CASA.”

  Joseph had also shifted her attention to the jeweler. “Did she name this friend?”

  “No. She never really talked about having any good friends, did she, Angela? But this was someone she’d written into her will.” Angela shook her head, still dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex.

  I looked over at Joseph and saw that she agreed it was time to wrap this one up. I pushed my stool back and stood, reaching across the glass to place a consoling hand on the girl’s. “Sorry we had to be the bearers of bad news. I know Nettie must have appreciated your friendship and . . .,” I shot Pogue a knowing grin, “. . . your business assistance. Thanks for being so helpful.” I dropped a card onto the glass top and Joseph did the same. “If you think of anything else that might be useful to us, give me a call. We’re not that far away.”

  David Pogue picked up the card, flipped it over for a quick look at the empty back, then ran his eyes over the front. “Crayton, Missouri,” he muttered. “That’s where Nettie was from?”

  “Near there. Out in the country.”

  “That’s not too far,” he said.

  “No,” I acknowledged, watching the merchant’s eyes. “A man could be there in just over an hour.”

  His lids drooped thoughtfully, his eyes dropping again to the counter. “Have they had her services yet? Angie and her mother and I would like to come up.”

  “Nothing arranged yet,” I said. “But if you’ll give me a card, I’ll send details when we get them.”

  He picked a gold-embossed card from a holder on the counter. “Please do. She was very good to us,” which struck me as something of an understatement.

  24

  Nothing was said until we were on highway 62 headed north along the west side of Beaver Lake. That seemed to have become our habit: spend some time thinking after each interview, then talk it through. But it wasn’t Angela or David Pogue Joseph had on her mind.

  “We messed up, Tate,” she said before I could raise the question of the will.

  “You mean by not pushing Brenda Castoe harder about the will?”

  “No. By sleeping together.”

  “Oh.” I’d been thinking about it off and on all day, but not as a topic of conversation for the drive home. I was thinking more of asking her to stay over again tonight. “You’re having some regrets?”

  “It was nice, Tate. Very nice. But I promised I wouldn’t mix business and pleasure again. And I screwed up, so to speak. It was a mistake.”

  “I thought it was wonderful. I was going to ask you to stay again tonight.”

  “See? That’s what I mean. Another night or two, and we’ll be thinking we need to drive back and forth between our places and start something regular. I’m not ready for that.”

  I drove a few miles without saying anything, unsure what to say and less sure how to say whatever I finally decided on. When I couldn’t see a car in front or behind, giving me some made-no-sense feeling of privacy, I said, “I’m not sure I’d find that a bad thing. I haven’t really cared for anyone for a long time, and I do care for you. Is that a bad thing?”

  “Yes,” she said emphatically. “It’s a bad thing. I haven’t cared for anyone in any serious way for a long time either. I’m feeling like another night or two in your company and that will be over. I can’t have that.”

  “If it’s happening, why not let it happen?”

  “Oh, how do I answer that? Let me count the ways.” She gazed out the window for her own few miles of silence, then said, “First of all, when you start caring too much about a partner, you act differently. And react differently. That’s not always safe in law enforcement. Like when we went down after the Greaves. We needed to be thinking about procedure, not about the other’s safety all the time.”

  “I think we’d have done pretty much the same thing. We’re always covering the other’s back.”

  “Yes. But not always rushing in to take the first shots so the other doesn’t get it. That’s what I mean.”

  “I don’t think either of us rushed in on the Greaves to keep the other from doing it.”

  “Okay. Bad example. But you know what I mean. We can’t let our feelings about each other color our professional judgment.”

  I gave that a thoughtful nod. “But how I feel about you isn’t going to change if we’re not sleeping together. I’ll be worrying about you just the same way.”

  “Not true,” she said with the same certainty with which she had started this conversation. “It makes a big difference. There’s this . . .” She struggled for the word. “. . . this intimacy that develops that changes things.”

  “Like, what does it change?” I asked, partly to be argumentative and partly because I wanted to know.

  “I swear,” she snapped back, turning again to the window. “You dicks-for-brains men! Don’t you have any feelings of affection that don’t end with an ejaculation?”

  “Hey, now,” I defended. “I told you I was getting pretty into you way before I really got into you. And if I’m remembering right, I was all snuggled in and having a pretty good sleep when you slipped in beside me and grabbed me from behind.”

  “You said you’d been hoping I’d come. And I could tell you had.”

  “Okay. So I was hoping. But you were the one who came to my room.”

  “Well, it can’t happen again. For another thing, I’m waiting to get transferred back to Saint Louis as soon as there’s an opening. I don’t want to spend the rest of my career driving about in these hills worrying I might have just rolled in poison ivy.”

  “You didn’t get poison ivy. Instead, you got a trip to Mexico. You’d give that up to go work in the city?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  She was beginning to piss me off. “Well, when we get back to our outpost of civilization, you can just motor on up to Springfield and get your papers in for a transfer.”

  “They’ve been in for a long time,” she said glumly. “And I owe it to you to see this case through.” Before I could say, “You don’t owe me anything,” she continued, “So—what about Pogue’s saying Brenda Castoe knew about the will?”

  My mind was still processing the possibility of Joseph being transferred back to St. Louis and how I’d feel about it. It took me a few seconds to shift gears. When back in low, I asked, “What makes you think it was Brenda she was talking about?”

  Joseph seemed to have left “No sleeping together” and “Transfer to St. Louis” miles behind.

  “Who else would it be?” She glanced over as if that whole last twenty minutes hadn’t happened. “We know she’s in the will we’ve seen and she denied knowing about it.”

  “Right. But if Nettie had been inclined to change the thing, wouldn’t she have gone ahead and changed it after the CASA discussion.”

  “In just the last few weeks? No. She was still trying to get the nerve up to tell Brenda.”

  “Or she told her, then didn’t have a chance to get the will changed.”

  “Yes. Or that,” Joseph agreed. “In fact, I’m kind of leaning in that direction.”

  “What about Angela and David Pogue? They certainly had a vested interest. And that guy could pin an old lady in a chair and hardly know she was there.”

  “Did they seem like killers to you? The girl loved the old lady and, as David said, they benefited from having a new coin show up once a year. Since they didn’t know where she lived, they wouldn’t know about the valley being flooded and Nettie having to move.”

  “If t
hey didn’t know where she lived. And if they had all the coins, they could still dole them out once a year.”

  “We need to see if Pogue Junior has prints on record that we can run against our mystery set.”

  I carefully lifted the gold embossed card from my pocket. “I’d guess we have a pretty good thumb, index, and middle finger right here.”

  27

  We made it to the office without another mention of the night before. Grace met us when we walked in, gave Joseph a quick full-body scan that said to me “Why does she get to wear those jeans that make her butt look so good instead of patrol uniform pants?” I wanted to remind her that she chose to wear uniform pants precisely, I believed, because she thought they made her figure look better. In fact, was there something different about her today? Something that made her even prettier? Maybe my growing attraction to Joseph was freeing my shackled interest in women since Adeena’s death to be more appreciative in general. Grace interrupted my thoughts.

  “Galen Suskey’s waiting in your office.” She pushed past us to the side table that held the coffee machine and poured herself a cup, not looking back again at either of us.

  I checked my mail basket in the rack by the door and thumbed through to see if anything looked urgent. Nothing did. “Did he say what he wants?”

  Grace swung back past us toward her desk, confirming my suspicion that something was different. A touch of vanilla? And had she decided to wear a little makeup?

  “He wants to know where you are on the case. I guess he’s been pushing Judge Werner for some decision on who the property goes to. His honor said he’s not hearing any claims or deciding anything until you finish your investigation.”

  I glanced back at Joseph who was pouring her own cup of coffee. “You want to sit in on this?”

  Grace shot a quick look over her shoulder to see if I was speaking to her, plopped the cup hard enough on her desk to splash a black stream onto the blotter, and dropped heavily into her chair.