From what I gathered on later, Whippy had returned to his home outside of Gastonia early Saturday morning and had stayed indoors the entire weekend. Aside from a brief phone call from his mother Saturday afternoon, he had talked with no one. Tamara Whippy, as was her custom, had been out and about all weekend; shopping, playing tennis and attending a party Saturday night. She’d left the party, evidentially alone, around one in the morning and no one saw her alive again.
According to the Gaston county Sheriff’s department, at 10:23 Sunday evening, Lawrence Whippy called the duty desk to report that a murder had occurred at his residence and then hung up. The deputies arrived at his home within fifteen minutes. They found the front double doors to the 10,000 square foot estate wide open and the house eerily silent. Not knowing what to expect, the Sheriff deputies entered the house, guns drawn.
After finding no one downstairs, the officers proceeded to search the second floor. They entered the master bedroom and found Lawrence Whippy. He was dressed only in plaid bermuda shorts, lying sideways across the king-sized bed with his chalky, white face staring blankly up at the ceiling. His flabby arms were flung outwards, spread eagle like, from his body and his legs dangled at the side of the bed, down to the floor.
A bloody, pulpy hole about the size of a baseball was located in the middle of his chest. From underneath his body, a dark red stain was spreading on the white satin bedspread.
A twelve-gauge double barrel shotgun lay on the floor with empty shells in the barrels. Whippy’s right big toe was ensnared in the shotgun’s trigger guard. The police surmised that he’d sat on the edge of the bed, placed the end of the barrel against his chest, and had pulled the trigger with his toe. The resulting shotgun blast that had torn through Whippy’s body had gone on to splatter blood and human debris on the wall on the other side of the room.
The deputies then went into another large bedroom and looked into its master bath. Inside the shower stall, they found what was left of the nude body of Tamara Whippy. Her corpse was slumped over in the corner, still wet from her bathing. Whippy had apparently met her as she was getting ready to exit the shower and pumped one shell of buckshot straight into the bridge of her nose. The only part of her head that remained attached to her neck was her lower jaw, the rest of it having disintegrated into a fine film of goop that was spread along the shower stall.
Between that and the vomit of the deputy who found her, it must have been quite a mess.
The investigators found Whippy’s suicide note on the desk in the bedroom. It was short. He wrote that “the bitch” had used him and that the “blond hair, blue eyed, tall private detective” his wife had hired could explain the whole thing. He ended it by asking for his parents understanding and forgiveness. There was no signature.
Goddamn Whippy.
I do the runt a favor, and he repays me by killing my client and then himself. Now I was out of what little fee I was going to make out of this mess, and I had the cops after me to explain this abortion.
I sat there and fumed a few minutes, while Ernie told me over the phone that the law would eventually figure out it was me the note was referring to, and I should just lie low until he got in touch with our lawyer and find out what we should do. It was the word “lawyer” that got my brain cells to working and my special gift to kick in. Suddenly, I saw how to turn this disaster into gold, but I had to act fast.
Damn fast.
I interrupted Ernie.
“Listen, I got an idea, meet me in the parking lot next to the Sears store near our office. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“What’s the idea?”
“No time to explain now, just be there, okay?”
Ernie agreed, and we hung up. I gathered up all the film that I’d shot in the past few days and after throwing it all in my car, took off. In fifteen minutes, I was at the parking lot. A few seconds later, Ernie drove up in his Caddy. I motioned for him to stay in his car, and I got out and hopped in his front seat. I handed him all the film.
“Take this to the photo lab and tell them to develop it immediately. I want 8x10 glossies of every single frame on all the rolls.”
“Damn,” said Ernie, “I don’t know if they'll do it that fast, and shit, don’t you want to look at the proofs first before ordering the 8x10’s? That can get expensive.”
“Pay’em to do it now. I’ll need these pictures today. Trust me, if things work out, we might make more money off this than any previous job.”
“You don’t you get it. The Whippys are dead. You can’t get a corpse to pay. Those pictures of yours are so much trash now, unless you want to threaten the family with them…”
Ernie paused and stared at me. He’d begun to get the idea.
“You’re fucking crazy!” he hissed. “There’s no way, not after this, that you can get away blackmailing the family. They’ll have John-Law on you so fast it will make your head spin. They’re rich, and that means connections. They’ll cover it up, and you’ll go to jail. And I’ll be goddamn if I’ll go with you. The payoff ain’t worth the risk.”
He made motions to start the car.
“Damnit Ernie, wait a second. I’m not the one that’s going to blackmail the Whippy family. Our lawyer is.”
“Harry? … Harry Benson!? Listen, Harry's been my lawyer for eight years, and I know he won’t touch this.”
“No—no, not Harry, it will be our new lawyer.”
Ernie looked at me, confused.
“New lawyer?”
“Yeah, our new lawyer, Sandy Milton.”
I proceeded to explain it all to him. By the time I was done, I could have sworn there was a gleam of pride in Ernie’s eye, the same kind of gleam that a father gets when his son hits a home run or scores the winning touchdown. He took the film and told me to get moving.
Time was of the essence.
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