“No,” Emma said. She turned away and asked Hank if he’d heard from Stan.
Shelly heard him say “No.”
“Well, I guess I’m worried,” Shelly told her. “It’s not like him not to answer his phone or at least let me know if he’s going to be tied up. He always tells me when that’s going to happen.”
She heard Emma tell Hank that Shelly was worried about Stan.
He said, “Well, I guess I’d better drive to the office and see if he’s sick or something.”
He told her almost the same thing Shelly had said about it being odd that he hasn’t been in contact with her.
“I’ll call when I get there and let you know,” he told Emma. Shelly heard a noise like he’d gotten out of his chair.
Shelly said, “No, tell Mr. Thomas that I’ll drive to town and see if everything is okay. I’m closer. He may have had some kind of emergency meeting and turned off his phone.”
“I just pray that he’s okay,” his mother said.
Shelly did too, but didn’t want to say anything that might further upset Stan’s mother. So she got into her car and drove to Stan’s office to check on him.
Shelly reached the office building and was about to go into the building when Mr. Thomas pulled up behind her car. He called for her to wait and they both took the elevator up to the second floor where Stan’s office was.
The office door was unlocked. Hank went in first just in case. The lights were off inside and the door to Stan’s office was open. He hurried over to look inside. Shelly was right behind him.
“My God!” he said when he saw Stan laying face down on top of his desk. The blood red bullet hole was clear in the right side of his head. There was no doubt that he was dead.
Shelly screamed, “No! Please God, no!” She pushed past Hank to get to Stan. His hands were cold, without life. She staggered back a step with her hand over her mouth. Tears ran down her face. Her fiancé was dead. She began crying.
Hank didn’t say anything. He just stared down at his murdered son, cursed and called the police. He told them why he was calling.
A few minutes later, Chief Jenkins and two deputies showed up. An ambulance waited downstairs on the street to take the body as soon as the chief gave the okay.
Stan’s cabinet door, where he kept the box with the coke left by Perlin, was open. No box was seen. In addition, his desk drawers were open and the Alabama check book was missing.
*****
News of the Stan Thomas murder made the late-night television news report and all the morning media reports.
Bishop rarely watched or listened to the news, so he knew nothing about Stan’s murder until Kathy called and told him.
“Be damned. I guess somebody’s husband stood all he could stand.”
She laughed.
His quip referred to husbands who didn’t like the attorneys representing their wives in divorce cases. The husbands always took an instant dislike of the attorneys because they always told the dark side of a marriage, and that dark side almost always lay on the husband’s shoulders.
He also wondered if Shelly’s affair with Freddie had anything to do with it. If Thomas knew about it, all of it, and had threatened Freddie, Freddie might have decided to stop him from doing anything. He’d mention it to the chief.
“I don’t know about that,” Kathy said. “The news didn’t give any reason, just that he’d been shot and killed.”
“I met him at the tournament but didn’t know the man personally. I’m sorry. Killing anybody is rarely a good answer to a dispute.” He told her about the call he’d had from Elmer Bryant much earlier. How he wanted Bishop to represent him in an action he expected Thomas to file against him.
“Based on what Bryant told me, I kind of figured Thomas was going to file a complaint against him asking for a restraining order. I told him I was too busy. I don’t know what happened.”
“Maybe Thomas served Bryant with the restraining order, and Mr. Bryant decided to get even.”
“A possibility,” Bishop said. “I’m assuming you’ll be over this afternoon after you close the book doors? My day is nothing until you’re sitting beside me on the porch.” He was referring to the library when he used the “book” term.
She said she would. “I feel the same way. My day starts when we’re sitting on the porch watching the beavers with a G and T in hand.”
*****
Someone else also got the news of Stan’s murder. Garcia, and all the people who had been involved with him in Stan’s “weed” business. They didn’t know about the coke thing he had started on the side, but Garcia figured they’d need to do something with all the weed before anyone came around asking questions.
He asked them to meet him at the growing site right away. They harvested every plant that was even close to being ready, including the small plants in Stan’s green house.
One guy by the name of Angel had a barn available and suggested that they take the pot there in case the police came to the Thomas farm looking for why someone would kill the man. They could cure it there, and even roll some of it into joints to sell when the dust from the killing settled down. No one knew what was going to happen.
Garcia knew where Stan had been leaving the cured buds and joints – Margo’s trailer – and how he was getting paid. But he and the rest of them, especially Angel, were afraid to do anything until they knew what the police were going to do about Stan’s murder. And somehow they had to contact Margo to work out an arrangement.
Angel said, “The killin’ might have had something to do with what he was doing, selling the pot. Somebody, maybe another dealer, didn’t like it.”
Garcia agreed.
They talked about doing what Stan had been doing with Margo, leaving the pot and picking up the money, but weren’t sure what the police knew so they figured they’d better wait. They’d have to figure out how to set things up down the road. Somebody, one of them, would have to talk to Margo, the woman in the mobile home.
The decision to continue selling the stuff made the men who had been helping Garcia happy. They’d become used to the extra money. Even Angel who had a good job, didn’t complain. With three children, the extra money had come in handy.
But they also wanted to know what they were going to do in the future. How and where were they going to grow the stuff?
He figured that whoever ended up with Mr. Thomas’ property would likely want them to stay on and look after the place for awhile, till they sold the place. Maybe the man’s momma and daddy. That’s how it usually worked.
But Garcia had become nervous about the field where they had been planting the pot. Every time Stan was there, he spent time staring into the woods and down the drive way as if expecting someone to show up and start shooting. From that, he figured they were planting the “weed” on property he didn’t own. Since Stan must know who owned it, Garcia figured he must know the owner and that was why he was worried. If the owner comes by, and he finds the weed, who knows what will happen? We all get arrested.
So the first thing Garcia did after he and the others had harvested every usable plant at the site was walk every foot of the twenty acres Stan owned.
As Stan had discovered, most of it could be seen from the road out front. Not clearly, but clear enough to have made Stan nervous about planting weed on it.
But Garcia noticed that the part of the property that sloped to the Mason River could not be seen from the road. Here is good place to grow weed, he thought.
He told his friends that if they braced some of the dead tree trunks from the woods along the slope and put dirt behind the trunks, that would make a row of the resulting retaining walls. They could plant the “weed” sprouts there and nobody could see it from the road. That’d give them over two hundred feet of ground that could be used for marijuana. And it’d get pretty good sunlight. The river was on the west side of the property so the marijuana would get full sun from just before noon till sunset. Plenty, he figured.
The other problem Garcia faced was getting more marijuana seeds when what Stan had left ran out. Angel could read English pretty well. He was the one who had encouraged Garcia to slip across the border. Garcia had known about the farm that had been owned by the elder Thomas man and woman, and how the man had built the apartment for immigrants who needed work.
Angel was married and had three children. He was in his forties. He was actually born in this country and attended regular school, even though his parents were illegals initially. They later became citizens and bought a ten-acre farm just outside the town, not too far from the farm owned by Stan’s grandparents.
Angel inherited the place from his parents when they passed away. He got a degree from the local Junior College, and went to work for a poultry company in their processing division. He eventually became the manager of the division which used mostly immigrant workers on the production lines.
He and Garcia had searched Stan’s files after they’d talked about taking over the business. They found an order slip in one of Stan’s files for marijuana seeds. No one would know it wasn’t Stan re-ordering the seeds.
Angel said he’d open a bank account for them so they could write checks out of it to pay for the orders they hoped to place for more seeds. They would also use the account to divide up the money they were making from selling pot, if they were able to start selling it again. Those were the problems they were facing.
However, Angel told Garcia he’d wait a few days before doing anything, to let the dust settle over the murder of Thomas. Then, they’d make a decision about what they might do.
“I think we’re ready to go, but I want to make sure nothing’s out there we haven’t thought about,” Angel said.
Garcia agreed.
*****
The chief called Bishop in the early afternoon and said he was coming out. “I’ll need a beer,” he said. “I want to tell you about the case that just came in the door.”
“Can’t you tell me on the phone?” Bishop asked. Kathy had just arrived, and he was jealous of his time with her.
“Best to tell you face to face,” the chief said and hung up. “I want your reaction.”
Bishop kind of figured it was the Stan Thomas murder Kathy had told him about, but didn’t say. Sometimes the chief just liked to come out for a beer to relax. While he was doing that, he talked about whatever had been bothering him that day.
A few minutes later, he was knocking on Bishop’s back door.
“Come on in,” Bishop said as he opened the door. “What’s this case you can only talk about face to face?”
“Where’s my beer?”
Bishop pointed to the back-porch table. Kathy was sitting in a chair. She had a glass of wine. There were two beers on the table along with a bowl of chips.
The chief spoke to Kathy, telling her how glad he always was to see her and joked about how lucky Bishop was that she hadn’t found out about him yet.
She laughed.
“I hope she won’t,” Bishop said. “And, don’t get any ideas about telling her.” He joked.
The chief laughed as he pulled out a chair and sat down. After taking a drink from his beer bottle, he looked at Bishop who had also sat down.
“You may have heard,” he said. “Stan Thomas, Hank Thomas’ son was shot and killed yesterday. Probably mid to late afternoon.”
“Son of a gun,” Bishop said, like he didn’t know about it.
That didn’t surprise the chief. He knew Bishop only cared about Kathy, the land he lived on, including the beavers across the creek, and his clients. And he only cared about the clients as long as they had bad loans for him to “work out” or, for which he could find solutions with the borrowers to bring them current. Nothing else mattered to him.
Kathy, sensing the chief’s wonderment, looked at him with a grin and said, “I told him.”
“Yeah, chief, she did,” Bishop agreed. “I only casually knew the guy – met him during the tennis tournament – but I read in the paper when he opened his law office. His dad was pretty big in the truck farming business before he retired, I understand.”
The chief gave a half smile and said, “I figured. Learned never to trust this guy.” He gave Bishop a quick wave.
“Just letting you tell your story,” Bishop said, and proceeded to remind him about the call he’d gotten from Elmer Bryant. How Bryant was about to be sued by Thomas at one time, and how he might not have liked it. He knew that some people looked at a lawyer as their enemy even though they were just doing what their client was paying them to do.
Chief Jenkins gave that a “hmm,” and Bryant just became a suspect in the killing.
Bishop also told him about the Freddie and Shelly affair.
“Stan most likely didn’t like it. I think Freddie was taking advantage of Shelly. Stan might have threatened him, and Freddie might have decided to make sure he didn’t make good on his threat.” He told him some of the details.
“Well, I now have two people who might have killed him,” the chief said.
“So what happened? How’d he die?” Bishop asked.
That Stan Thomas had been murdered in his law office was about all the media reports had to say by way of details.
The chief told him all he knew. Somebody had shot the boy in the head. He was found dead in his desk chair by his dad and fiancée.
“No possibility of suicide,” the chief added. “No gun found.”
“Any conflicts other than Freddie and Bryant that you know of?” Bishop asked.
“Not a one. He was just a struggling lawyer, like a lot of ‘em in town. He was living in his grandfather’s old home. Owned it, I think. However, I will tell you a story that might make you think. It did me.”
He told Bishop about a call he’d received from Leann Barkley, Stan’s secretary. She had just read about the shootout between, what the Jackson newspaper just reported was, drug gangs. One of the guys killed was Don Perlin. She said he’d had a meeting with Stan a few days ago. And he left a box with Stan, which he’d locked in the cabinet. The cabinet was open when the body was found, but there was no box inside.
The chief figured the box contained drugs; cocaine, most likely. “His secretary said Stan had been acting funny as hell after Perlin left. Like he was flying. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen it myself,” Bishop said. “Freddie Meyers was acting the same way during the tennis tournament at the Club.”
“Well, you know what I mean then. I figure he got into whatever was in the box Perlin left. Cocaine I figure.”
“Yep. Most likely,” Bishop said.
The chief added, “Perlin was at Ole Miss with Stan’s brother. I don’t know if you know, but the boy, George, was under the influence when he hit the utility post and was killed. The chief up there called to tell me. His fraternity had had a visit from Perlin that day. So, although nothing could be proved, it’s possible Perlin brought drugs by the house. There was a party to celebrate the Egg Bowl game between Ole Miss and State.”
“Big game,” Bishop said. “I doubt there’s a sober soul in the stadium. Maybe sober isn’t the correct word these days.” He was thinking that a lot of the students had converted from booze to drugs.
“Yeah. One more thing his secretary told me about was a visit he’d had from Elmer Bryant,” The chief said, and proceeded to recite the confrontation between Bryant and Thomas. Bryant had accused Thomas of dealing drugs to Margo. Thomas had disagreed but with this latest info about Perlin maybe Bryant was right, the chief said. “Perlin may have been his supplier. May have been Margo’s supplier via Thomas. Too damn many ifs for me to feel good about it though.”
“Well, be damned. You’ve found a lot. Sounds like the Thomas boy could have been knee deep into drugs with the Margo woman. Bryant said he was anyway. What are you going to do about it?”
The chief looked at Bone. “Good question. I don’t know. Tell you this, Bishop. I’m only telling you what I’m about to
say, nobody else, got it.”
“Okay, I understand,” Bishop said. In other words, he didn’t want Bishop telling anybody else.
The chief told him he was up to his eyeballs in the drug epidemic in town. “We were making some progress, but it picked up again, and frankly, I’m burned out,” he said. “Could be Stan Thomas was supplying it to the Margo woman, but I can’t be sure. No real evidence. I still have to track it down. Totally. And, until Thomas died, and his secretary called me, I didn’t have a clue.”
Bishop shook his head.
The chief continued, “Hell, there have been some days that I want a shot of Jack Daniels in my coffee at breakfast. Bad. But I have to stay with it. I’m in charge of the damn drug task force. That’s why I came out here. I was wondering if you’d kind of step in for me on this murder?”
“Me? Why me? Hell, chief, I didn’t even know the boy. Well, barely anyway. As I said, we met briefly during the tennis tournament. Just a hello meeting.”
“That’s more than I can say. I’m hoping that maybe you’ll just look it over and say it looks like a random killing, maybe a fight between drug dealers and we should file it under unsolved killings. Hard to imagine, but possible. Your opinion would carry a lot of weight.”
Bishop frowned and said, “Damnit, chief. I don’t want to get involved in the thing. I have a life and a kind of business working for banks. They call and I jump.”
“I know, but I really need you on this on Bishop. I do. I don’t have anybody with enough experience to step in on this one. It’s kind of important. Hank Thomas knows everybody in town, including the sheriff and the mayor. I know I can get the mayor’s approval to appoint you to help.”
Bishop sighed loudly. “Son of a bitch, chief! Son of a bitch. That’s asking a-”
Kathy reached over and touched his arm. “Why not help him, Bishop. He’d tired. It shows. Just check it out. If it looks hopeless, just say so and he can close the case.”
“Yeah,” the chief said and nodded in Kathy’s direction. “I just need somebody on it so nobody, mainly his parents, can say we’re neglecting it. You’ve got a good reputation.”
Death of the Weed Merchant Page 11