Legwork Page 3

  "I've been trying to go through your drawers for years!" There was that laugh again.

  Why do I ever, ever ask him that question? He always answers the same damn thing.

  Bobby D. has one good point. He pays my rent. But he also fancies himself a poor man's Nero Wolfe. Unfortunately, we're not just talking poor here, we're talking destitute. They have two things in common: private investigator licenses and huge rolls of fat estimated at 350 pounds plus. The similarity ends there. Brainwise, Bobby is a long way behind Nero. And Nero actually moved from his chair every now and then. Bobby is plopped on his butt when I arrive each morning and, as far as I know, stays there the rest of the day and maybe even through the night. He must go to the bathroom, but beyond that conclusion, I haven't the stomach to wonder. Fashionwise, Bobby favors stained polyester jackets. Probably because they go well with his pants. He lounges about in this sartorial splendor each day, occasionally bobbing his huge neck, which is as thick around as a tree and a startling contrast to his small, tomato-shaped head and button features. The tomato motif is enhanced by his dark brown toupee, which is styled like a 70's lounge singer, except for a large cowlick that sticks straight up like a stem. He accentuates this showstopping look with heavy gold jewelry which, frankly, I can't see Nero wearing.

  Besides, Bobby D. is real. Nero, I'm sorry to say, is not.

  But I leave Bobby to his illusions. He pays me well. Technically, I'm his receptionist. But only because, technically, I can be no more than that. There is the small matter of a drug smuggling conviction fourteen years ago when I was twenty pounds lighter, very much younger, and a whole lot dumber than I am now. I was carrying just enough to catapult me into the hallowed ranks of felons. Just enough to keep me from obtaining my own investigator's license. Just enough to make me quickly divorce the son-of-a-bitch who'd asked me to drive his car for him then disappeared forever. But not enough to keep me locked away for long.

  Eighteen months behind bars in a Florida women's prison did a lot for me. It made me into a voracious reader and one smart cookie who can spot a phony at twenty paces. It also made me into a feminist who doesn't like women and a woman who doesn't like men but dates them with misguided optimism anyway.

  My attitude serves me well when it comes to following cheating spouses or poking into the lives of the betrothed. Which is what I usually do for Bobby while he sits around and shovels down enough beer and sandwiches to sustain a third-world country for a week.

  Why do I do it? I find it reassuring to watch other people screw up their lives. Participating in my own is a bummer. One day I might decide what I want to be when I grow up. For now, I work for Bobby and live in North Carolina. And that's better than being where I was.

  Me and Thomas Wolfe—we can't go home again.

  In fact, I won't even admit where home was. The closest I'll come to confessing to where I'm from is to say that, back home, we're too busy running from alligators to stop and make pocketbooks out of them.

  It doesn't matter anyway. I have a new life. I even have a new name. It's not technically Casey Jones since the divorce, but it's the name on my MasterCard, so why argue? Besides, call me sentimental, but a new last name was the one thing my ex gave me that can't be cured with penicillin. So I kept it.

  Anyway, I don't deserve to use my own name. My ex took care of that when he convinced me to take the fall for the smuggling charge. I was young, I was in love, I was a sucker for a pretty face. Never again. I did the crime so I did the time. But I never thought of how it might affect Grandpa. He'd raised me on his own ever since my parents had been found lying dead in a field of soybeans, shot from behind by assailants unknown. I don't even remember what my mother or father looked like anymore, it happened so long ago. But I do remember the shame on my grandfather's face when he came to visit me the first—and last—time in prison.

  One day, I will go back and prove to him that all those years he spent feeding and caring for me weren't in vain. And when I do, I know of at least one ex-husband who's going to pay. And one murder investigation that will be reopened. In the meantime, I'm learning what I can and I call Grandpa every other week from pay phones. I never talk long.

  But enough about me. Let's talk about what Bill Butler thought about me. I examined his card carefully. The fact that he was carrying one at all meant he was a little different from the rest of the jackbooted crowd a few blocks west of McDowell Street. What was a nice Long Island boy doing here in the wilds of North Carolina?

  More importantly, how could I weasel information out of him while still retaining a chance to get his skinny bones in bed when I was done?

  I wasn't sure it was possible. I sighed and put the matter on the back burner. It was time to get to work.

  Five minutes later I was pulling up archived photos and articles from the local newspaper—the News & Observer, or N&O, as we locals call it—on my trusty Macintosh. Bobby never moves from his chair; I never start a case without my Mac. We all have our rituals. I learned everything you would ever want to know about computers in the office of that Florida prison. A nice lady from vocational rehab taught me how to turn one on. A not-so-nice lady, formerly of a bank in Miami, taught me how to really make it purr. She was serving a fifteen-year sentence for bank fraud and, like most of the inmates, she'd only been caught because some guy she was dating screwed up and got greedy.

  NandoNet had started as the News & Observer's computer network before they sold it off for a tidy profit. It lets you surf the Internet cheaply and review reprints from their current and past issues by pressing a few convenient buttons here and there. I was interested in deeper access and knew how to get it, courtesy of a young lady who'd been caught with her hand in the ad space money jar. She sold the code out to Bobby about a week before the feds came to haul her away. They ought to call it pink-collar crime. Believe me, it's the wave of the future.

  I started by reviewing the society pages. I wanted to get a better look at Thornton Mitchell, the victim.

  The South was changing, no doubt about it. The society page was nothing like it used to be. No smiling debutantes. No grinning daddys. No homage to the same five last names. Instead, old money had given way to the new elite: businessmen and political leaders. People like the CEOs of nearby research and development firms, flanked by their thin northern wives. They were joined by the well-groomed homegrown politicos and their well-groomed but not always so thin wives. That was one thing I liked about the South. The really rich might still be really thin—especially the nouveau riche—but, face it, when you have homemade pound cake and pork barbecue and mounds of hushpuppies waiting at every fundraiser, who the hell can expect a woman to retain her girlish figure? Not the tubby male veterans of the campaign wars. In North Carolina, it was accepted practice to put on five additional pounds for each year you were in office and if your wife got a little plump too, you didn't turn her in for a new one like those northern heathens did.

  I found Mary Lee all over the damn place. She was at home in society. And her weight was not an issue. She was neither thin enough to arouse envy nor plump enough to lose the babe vote. She was just right and I suspected her advisors polled the populace each week on how well-fed they liked their lady politicians to be. She had something about her, I had to admit, a shining intelligence that made everyone around her look just a little bit dull, even in photographs. Maybe it was no more real than that bright brittle cheer you find plastered all over beauty pageant contestants, but it looked real and that was what mattered. I spotted her standing next to the governor and his wife at a benefit concert, welcoming the vice president at the airport in another photograph, and opening up a new Sunday school for an acre of small black children somewhere down in eastern North Carolina. She looked at ease in every single setting.

  Thornton Mitchell was a different story. For one thing, he had attended different functions. And he wasn't at the pinnacle of power like Mary Lee. He was one of those back-room guys, the kind that circles the candidates
like lamprey eels searching for a soft spot. He popped up regularly in photographs of conservative fundraisers, his sleek black hair, tanned brown skin, and tailored suits making him look like a well-fed seal rising from a sea of attendees. The archivist had done a good job of bringing the N&O into the twenty-first century. I found shots of Mitchell in the photo library going back thirty years. I suspected he'd had a face lift or two over the years since his chins had a habit of disappearing.

  One thing, however, never changed: the age of the girl hanging on his arm. In every single photograph taken during the last fifteen years, Thornton Mitchell held a drink in one hand and a very young blonde or redhead in the other. Put his repertoire together and you'd have a six-pack of Barbie dolls, all hairsprayed and squeezed into tight short dresses. I could see them now, sitting in front of the mirrors in the powder room of the governor's mansion, examining minute flaws in their mascara, adjusting their silk sheen control top pantyhose and practicing that blank stare young babes get when they don't want to say the wrong thing and are a little awed by the company. God, what were they doing with a drooling old geezer like Thornton? The thought of letting him touch me made my skin crawl.

  I tried to find some sympathy for Mitchell, but failed. He was a real estate developer and, in my family's book, that made him no better than the carpetbaggers that my grandpa hated so much—a hatred passed down from his own father. Carpetbaggers had been the ones to take away our land, leading us down that rutted road to rusty trailers and broken-down trucks. How was Thornton Mitchell any different? He was destroying the South just as surely as opportunists after the big war. Just because he was raised here didn't excuse him. It only made it worse.

  I noticed a funny thing about Thornton Mitchell when I pulled up all the photos side-by-side and compared them. He was old. I figured his corpse was close to sixty-five. That gave him about forty years of behind-the-scenes maneuverings and contributions to political causes. So how come he was never in the forefront of a photo? Never standing beside a candidate? Never once taking center stage? And how come I never saw him in a single shot with the esteemed Senator Boyd Jackson, Stoney Maloney's fairy godfather uncle, the puppetmaster behind Mary Lee's opponent? It was pretty damn odd to be a conservative in this state and never shake hands with Boyd Jackson. Maybe they'd had a feud going. Or maybe something cozier.

  I filed the tidbit away for further reference just as Bobby D. bellowed to me from the front office.

  "I got the info you need, doll face," he hollered.

  I logged off NandoNet and marched in to find out what he'd uncovered. I was smart enough not to expect him to come to me. "What's up?" I asked.

  "A dame called it in," he told me. "A young woman reported the body about two a.m. last night. Said she and her boyfriend had been out parking and they'd seen a lady pull her car into the driveway then get out, acting funny. When the lady went inside the house, they looked in the car. Saw what looked like a body rolled in a tarp. Sped away and called the cops."

  "How very civic-minded of them," I said dryly. "She said they were out parking in Country Club Hills?" Bullshit. The kids screwed on the fourth hole of the golf course there. They didn't drive around looking for Lover's Lane.

  "That's what she said," Bobby answered, palms spread wide. "I got me some impeccable sources."

  "What was her name?" I demanded.

  "She didn't say." Bobby shrugged. "She called the dispatcher directly."

  "Not 911?"

  Bobby shook his head. "Nope. Called the dispatcher and was all excited, blurted out her story, and gave the address. Then she hung up."

  "What makes the night clerk think she was young?"

  "She was out driving around with her boyfriend, what else?"

  "Bobby, if you were any dumber I'd make you into a doorstop. No one is a teensy bit skeptical of a miraculous midnight caller who conveniently knew all the facts about the body?"

  "I didn't say that," Bobby admitted. "It sounds fishy to me, too. And to everyone else. Maybe that's why they haven't arrested Mary Lee for murder."

  "Not that Hooter would let them."

  Bobby shrugged. "Whatever. She's been down at the station for a couple of hours now, answering questions. She'll probably be there all afternoon. It's driving the reporters crazy. Happened too late to make this morning's papers and they might not even get a statement from her in tomorrow's edition."

  "How terribly inefficient of Mary Lee," I muttered. "She must remember to murder at a more convenient hour next time." Then it hit me. "The station?" I asked. Had Bill Butler won the battle of jurisdiction after all?

  "Who's in charge of the investigation?" I asked.

  "Joint effort," Bobby replied. "Local and state. CCBI and the SBI. Everybody but Andy Griffith."

  "Well, surprise, surprise, surprise," I said, clomping out to my car. I wanted to get home and sleep off my hangover. My head was really aching. I was bone tired. I needed to get some sleep and think it over. I ought to take a good look at Mary Lee's husband, Bradley, but for now I just wanted a good look at my pillow.

  "Where are you going?" Bobby called after me. "We've got work to do."

  "So do it," I told him. "If you ever want to get up, just put your hands on the armrests and push."

  Twenty-five minutes later, I was snuggled beneath my very own pair of cool sheets. My apartment was quiet in the afternoon light, the silence broken only by the occasional freight train crawling through downtown.

  I had switched off the telephone ringer and muted the volume on my answering machine. It was imperative that I head off Mary Lee and her questions. I was too tired to hear anyone's theories but my own.

  I turned on a local radio station for the old fogies and settled down in my bed. The sounds of Glen Miller filled the room and I shut my eyes, thinking of Bill Butler and how good he would have looked in a World War II uniform. I needed music from another decade right then. I felt transported and hoped it would last.

  I finally fell asleep listening to Johnny Mathis. Helpless as a kitten indeed.

  Chapter Three

  I woke at five the next morning when the paperboy scored a bull’s-eye on the window near my bed. It was still dark outside when I retrieved the newspaper. The cold October morning put a sting into the concrete of the stoop beneath my feet. I couldn't find my second bunny slipper. I wondered briefly if Jack had taken it, but no—a slipper fetish was too imaginative for him.

  The murder took up the entire front page. Every one of those reporters had managed to score a by-line. Shrimpboat Shorty had insinuated himself in not one, but three photographs. Bill Butler was nowhere to be seen. Rats. There was no statement from the Mary Lee Master's camp anywhere. I knew why. She never let a word out the door unless she checked it first and she'd probably been too busy downtown fending off questions to approve any official release.

  Mary Lee's opponent, Stoney Maloney, had been more on the ball. The N&O ran his statement on page two, across from a handsome campaign photograph of him at a recent rally. Stoney had the look of a winner. He was tall with a strong build, a square jaw, clear eyes, Roman nose, and a full head of prematurely silver hair, carefully cut so that no offending strands dangled beneath his collar to provoke the church-going folks. He stood at a podium, hands spread wide, leaning toward a microphone. The camera had captured him as he was making an important point and people always look better when they're not posing. If only he could manage to be as impressive in person as he appeared in photos. He had a wooden side to him, a stiffness in public, a sort of reserve not often found in politicians. Maybe he just hated pretending to be someone he wasn't. Or maybe he had a stick up his ass.

  I read his statement carefully. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either a very fair response or a carefully crafted ploy. I wanted to believe it was genuine but I knew that Stoney was taking no chances: he had surrounded himself with "paid political operatives" as the old-timers like to say, media specialists imported from New York and backed by a war
chest big enough to buy television time every damn night of the autumn. One of his consultants, Adam Stoltz, was only twenty-eight years old and already rumored to be the next generation's Roger Ailes. Whether this was a compliment or not depended entirely on the speaker.

  Still, the official statement had a down-home quality to it and I was willing to give Stoney the benefit of the doubt. The gist was that Stoney was aware that his opponent had been detained for questioning by the authorities and that a body had been found on the premises of her home. He wanted to let people know that the victim had been a minor contributor to his campaign—as he had contributed to virtually every pro- business campaign in the state—but that Stoney had not known him personally. Just the same, his heartfelt condolences went out to the victim's family. He did not mention that Thornton's family consisted of an embittered ex-wife and two alienated college-age children who had long been embarrassed by their father's immature excesses. Stoney then went on to say that he had always found Mary Lee Masters to be a woman of integrity, one who played fair and exhibited a deep moral foundation. He was positive she was innocent and felt sure that the authorities would clear up the mystery. He hoped it would be soon.

  Lordy. They'd drum him right out of the party.

  I didn't get the man. I truly didn't. I'd watched him at a lot of debates by now, taking on Mary Lee. He was always serious, always listening. But a little too good to be true. And, of course, related to Senator Boyd Jackson. I'd sooner vote for him if he was related to an iguana. Stoney was often flanked in photographs by his mother—older sister to Boyd Jackson—and his female sidekick of the moment, usually a quiet woman with the color and personality of putty. Any other guy would have been labeled as gay for being forty-four years old and never married, but since all of North Carolina had met Stoney Maloney's mother by now, everyone knew why the dude was still single. No one was willing to take her on as a mother-in-law.