* * * * *
It was no surprise, of course. The strictly cash method of payment, the lack of references, and the fact that for over eight days the remains of Susan Bowman lay unclaimed in the county morgue had been pointing to the fact that the broad wasn’t who she claimed to be.
Ernie had used her driver’s license info to track her down to her alleged place of birth, Fayetteville, N. C. Some digging around and a few phone calls to some local private dicks in that area eventually turned up the birth certificate of one Susan Ethel Bowman, born August 25, 1937 to Julius and Teresa Bowman of Fayetteville. While both parents were already deceased, they still had relatives living in the area, as well as a surviving son. All remembered that Susan had been born to the Bowman’s back in ’37 and everyone swore that the same little girl had succumbed to polio the next year. Sure enough, some more digging brought to light the unfortunate girl's death certificate, dated October 3rd. 1938. Cause of death: complications due to polio.
If that wasn’t enough proof, a quick visit to the Fayetteville Mt. Zion Baptist Church cemetery proved to be the location of her grave. The child was also joined in eternal rest with her parents, who had been buried by her side after they had passed on. Evidentially, someone thirty-eight years later got a copy of the birth certificate and decided to resurrect the girl from the dead.
The remainder of the story, as meager as it was, fell quickly into place. Susan Bowman was reborn some fifteen months ago when she applied and got a first-time North Carolina Driver’s license in Winston-Salem. Nothing more was heard from her until she rented the house outside of Warhill. Then ten months later, she was a corpse again.
Bang, end of story.
Her fingerprints had been sent to the state authorities, but so far with no results. However, even without a positive ID of the corpse in the morgue, Ernie and I agreed that this entire affair was getting to look more and more like a setup. We urged Swinson to confront Anderson with this new information, but he put the quash on this.
He’d pissed off the D.A. a few days before by getting Sonny released on bail directly from the hospital. He had pulled a few good ol’boy strings with the judge and Sonny was home, under a doctor’s care, as he recuperated from his overdose. It had caused a stink in the papers and TV news, but Eric Slatterson had put up a king’s ransom in bail and had agreed to keep Sonny at the family estate until the matter was resolved in court.
I personally thought the D.A. was secretly happy Sonny made bail because it gave him the excuse to pitch a fit in public, railing at the preferential treatment the rich and powerful still got in the county and how he’d never quit working on the public’s behalf to change this. That alone was probably worth a few thousand votes in the future.
Before bringing up this new information and risk more of the D.A.’s wrath by making the state’s case more difficult, Swinson wanted to find out who Susan Bowman really was, and if there was anything else out there to besmirch her character—as if being a drug-addled whore wasn’t enough. As for the involvement of a third party in all this, he said he’d talk with the Slattersons and see if they had anyone who might want to do them any harm.
Swinson said that while Eric Slatterson was a hard-nosed son-of-a-bitch, in all honesty, he couldn’t see anyone going to all these lengths just to inject some misery into Slatterson's life by ruining his son. He was betting that this Bowman woman had a criminal past or an outstanding warrant against her and was merely trying to start a new life or hide from the law. She probably had seen Sonny as an easy mark and was using him for support and money. As for the drugs, maybe she was using an old contact to mail it to her. It wasn’t unheard of.
Right now, all Swinson wanted to do is be able to destroy the reputation of the Bowman woman, both in and out of court, and he didn’t want to do it piecemeal. He wanted all his ducks in a row when he took on the D.A., and he wanted the facts on this broad written in stone. His goal was to prejudice the jury against the deceased so that they would sympathize with Sonny and either acquit him or find him guilty of some lesser charge, like involuntary manslaughter. So the less heads up we gave to Anderson to counter our plans, the better. So mum was the word.
This left Ernie and me the task of finding out Susan Bowman’s true identity. Ernie stayed in Charlotte to mind the store there and to coordinate any record searches about the state and country, while I stayed in the Warhill area, hoping to strike pay dirt.
Eventually, after a few more unproductive days of finding out nothing, I was about ready to call it quits, go home and wait to see if Ernie turned up anything. Not that I was unwilling to stick it out there a while longer and charge Slatterson for twelve-hour days while doing three hours worth of work, but things were just plain boring there in Warhill, and I was looking for a break in the non-action. It seemed like the only available whore in town had been murdered, and I was feeling a tad antsy, if you catch my drift.
So there I was a couple of days later eating lunch at the local drugstore, contemplating how I was to explain to Swinson that I needed to get back to Charlotte to assist Ernie for a while, when the break came that would eventually solve this entire case.
I was sitting there drinking a cup of coffee, when the village idiot came into get paid. Roger Ogle had the nickname “Slow Poke”—more often than not shortened to plain old “Poke”. Well, Poke Ogle was a fixture in town. He was in his mid fifties, of average build, had close cropped gray-brown hair and soft, gentle brown eyes. Always simply clad in a flannel shirt and jeans, with a cheap coat when the weather was cold, his main distinguishing mark was a thick scar that started just above his right-eyebrow and traveled up to the top of his head.
Poke Ogle had moved to Warhill some thirty-five years ago and had gotten employment at the local bakery as a dough mixer. Responsible for mixing massive half-ton vats of dough in order to produce loaves of bread for the region, Roger Ogle had been a happy, productive citizen of the town. He was operated a large and complex dough-making machine and was entrusted with the secret recipe for the light and tasty bread the bakery was famous for. He was young, apparently fairly good-looking, was dating a few of the local girls and appeared to have a full and rich life in front of him. Then, the tragedy struck.
It had snowed one weekend, so Roger and a few friends decided to go sledding. There were girls in the group and Roger, hoping to impress one of them, decided to go down the hill while standing up on the sled.
Bad move.
He’d made it about halfway down the hill when he lost control and landed head first onto a rock that was buried under the snow. He split his head wide open from eye to forehead—an accidental do-it-your-self lobotomy. He was rushed to the local hospital and then later transferred to Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, where some pioneering brain surgery was done. His life was saved, but at the cost of about fifty IQ points, and he obviously didn’t have that many to spare.
When he was released from the hospital, Roger remembered who he was, where he was from, who his family was and other mundane items, but he was functionally unable to perform any complex tasks. Small towns being what they are, the local folk took him under their wing and started to give him menial jobs around town, like sweeping floors, cleaning parking lots and carrying groceries for the elderly. For the next thirty-five years, Roger Ogle slowly plodded, earning the moniker “Slow Poke” and became a part of everyday life in the town of Warhill.
Poke had just finished cleaning up the parking lot for the drugstore, and had sat down beside me to wait for the owner to pay him for his efforts. The waitress had given him a free cup of coffee, and he was enjoying it. We had never talked, but I’d been around town and at the drugstore lunch counter enough now so that he apparently recognized me.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” I replied.
“People say you’re nosey.”
“That’s my job.”
“She was a pretty girl. Big tits.” he commented.
“Indeed. Big’uns.”
I said, silently vowing to get the hell out of town because I’d been reduced to discussing breasts with a retard.
“Mountain girl, ya know.”
My ears picked up.
“What you mean, ‘Mountain girl’?”
“From Xavier,” he mumbled.
“Xavier?”
“Yep.”
“Xavier is a town?”
“Nope,” he said, then drunk some coffee.
I don’t know how I knew it, but that old radar of mine was working. I was getting the feeling that I was on to something. All I had to do was be patient and not lose my temper with Poke. It took about ten more minutes of prodding and forcing him to keep his mind on the subject, but it turned out he’d once helped Susan Bowman fix a flat tire in the back of the parking lot here at the drugstore. As he worked on her car, they had struck up a short conversation, and she’d asked about him and his past. One of the things he’d mentioned was that he was originally from Xavier County, located in the Blue Ridge mountain area of North Carolina, right next to the Tennessee border.
She’d told him she was familiar with that neck of the woods because she’d grown up in the same area, near a town called Oldbury. With that she paid him a few bucks for the assist and drove off. Thereafter, she’d always wave to him when she saw him walking down the street.
Bingo.
I thanked him for his trouble, bought him a burger and made my way to Swinson’s office with the news. After a brief consultation with Ernie back in Charlotte, it was agreed I was to make my way up to the mountains of Xavier County and see what, if anything, I could find out.
What I was to find out came close to killing me.
Chapter 14
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