Authors: Cathy Pickens
“You’re kidding. She called herself? Mrs. Mart called herself from his phone line.”
“Yes. She repeated the process again at 2:00
A.M.
and again at six.”
“And this shows up on the records as though he’s calling her?”
“Egg-zactly.”
“You witnessed all this?”
“And captured it with time-stamped videotape and still shots with a telephoto lens, clearly showing the tap apparatus attached to the line and the identity of the person conducting the tap.”
“That’s absolutely wonderful. I can’t believe she had the nerve to pull something like that.”
“The only surprise with folks should be when they don’t surprise you.” Edna had completed her report and reverted to her more typical homiletics.
“I suppose I should inform Mr. Mart before we turn your evidence over to—who? The solicitor?” Personally, I wanted to nail the witch’s evil hide to the barn, but I’d never married the woman and he had. However, she’d committed a crime—a federal crime.
I doubted it would be up to Tolly Mart what happened to her at the hands of a criminal prosecutor.
That was a heart-warming thought. I wouldn’t want to be the soon-not-to-be Mrs. Mart when she appeared before an irate Judge Lane. She might rather be arrested by the feds and forego that honor.
“I’ll have Shamanique call the judge’s clerk and schedule a hearing,” I said. “He’ll likely want you to be available.”
“Certainly,” she said.
“Thanks, Edna. This is really terrific.”
“Of course.”
I was certain Edna liked getting compliments as much as anyone, but she always did a good job pushing away any act of familiarity.
I left a message on the office answering machine for Shamanique, asking her to request a hearing, on Monday if at all possible. I’d see Tolly Mart later this afternoon—tomorrow at the latest. Always in a hurry to share good news.
I settled back in my seat with a grin of satisfaction.
“Can’t tell me, counselor?”
“No. Not yet.” Oh, how I wanted to. “Hope you’ll have the pleasure of serving a warrant soon, or hauling someone out of Judge Lane’s courtroom on contempt charge on Monday.”
“Ah, the things that make your day, counselor.”
I stretched my legs out in the super-sized floorboard, content with how the day had begun—or how the night had ended, in Edna’s case.
Rather than turn onto the bypass around Seneca, Rudy drove straight into downtown.
“You haven’t eaten breakfast, have you? Thought we could swing into Betty’s Hungry House before we hit the road.”
I wasn’t about to complain about stopping for a cat’s-head
biscuit slathered in butter and jelly. Knowing Rudy, it would be an appetizer for wherever we were having lunch in Columbia. Maybe I could run behind the car part of the way.
Rudy turned onto the residential side street and parked in the grass-and-gravel lot.
As we slipped in the door of the shambling building that showed years’ worth of patched-together growing pains, a waitress changing out the coffee filter gave Rudy a nod. We took the only empty booth in sight, at the front window close by the register. Rudy sat with his back to the wall.
The air was smokier than I liked, but the biscuits—truly as big as a cat’s head—made up for any breathing difficulties.
Rudy ordered his usual—three plates of food. “Don’t tell my wife. She’s been getting on me lately.”
He rubbed his belly and settled sideways in the narrow booth, watching the bustle near the cash register.
“A’course, she’s been getting on me about a lot of things lately.” He wasn’t talking directly to me. He was just talking.
“What’s she getting on you about?” Sometimes friends just need to talk, not necessarily be heard.
He brushed an imaginary crumb off the table. “I don’t know. She’s chewin’ my ass about running for sheriff.”
“Wow. So you are thinking about it.”
“Hell, no. She wants somebody in the family to be sheriff, she can run herself.”
“Why’s she want you to run?”
“Money. Better hours, she thinks. And prestige. Thinks it would raise her up. Tired of me being second banana, she said. But it’s really more about her. She wants a boat.”
He fell quiet.
“A boat, huh.” Not the time to rib him that I didn’t know a boat went with the job.
He watched the restaurant rather than me, in that way guys have when they’re talking about something important and personal.
“Not that I’ve ever seen her swim. And she sure as hell don’t want to fish ‘ner nothing. She wants to hang out at the marina and the boat parties. Invite people out.”
“You like fishing.” I tried to keep any sarcasm out of my voice.
He turned to me, his eyes two squints. “Too busy fishing drunks outta the water to enjoy boating.” His tone encircled that last word with contempt.
I didn’t like knowing Rudy wasn’t happily married. Maybe he was and this was just one of those minor marital stumbles, though pushing him to be more and better didn’t sound minor. Not the kind of thing I’d want a spouse pushing me to do.
I changed the subject. “Do you like working with L.J.?”
The plates appeared quickly in front of us, dealt out like cards by a Vegas dealer. The steam rising from my biscuit carried warm comfort.
“Must,” he said, chopping his liquid egg yolks into his grits. “Can always move on if I don’t.”
We fell to eating, me in buttery bliss. I wished I could find a graceful way to suggest Rudy take some precautions to protect his credit if his wife had designs on improving her lot in life. I’d seen it get awfully expensive for another husband just before his divorce—and ruinous for his credit rating.
We ate, Rudy quickly, me with plenty of time to savor the soft biscuit and its crisp crust. Even without Aunt Vinnia’s homemade marmalade, this was good.
Not until we passed Irmo on the outskirts of Columbia did we talk about the reason for our trip.
“I forgot to tell you,” I said. “You know about the $200,000 life insurance policy on Neanna.”
“Yeah. Still can’t fathom what a girl that age with no children or husband needs with that much insurance. Hell, I don’t have that much insurance. Mostly because my wife keeps joking that if I had enough insurance, it wouldn’t be a sad day for everybody when I die.”
I left Mrs. Rudy Mellin’s joke alone. “You won’t believe the reason Neanna’s grandmother took it out. Gran’s cousin said Gran hoped it would hold Neanna here, keep her safe. Said God wouldn’t ever let her have $200,000, so this gave God a good reason to let her keep her granddaughter.”
Even though he was flashing along in the fast lane at probably eighty miles an hour, Rudy took his eyes off the road to see if I looked like I was joking.
He snorted. “Guess the joke’s kinda on her, huh? Didn’t get to keep either one.”
“No.” The whole thing grew even sadder in that perspective.
“You said this Fran woman has money of her own. You think that’s a lie?”
“No. She really has money.”
“Nobody ever has enough, do they?”
I had no answer to that.
We got to Columbia with time to spare, but Vince Ingum, the cop who’d retired to Myrtle Beach, apparently still shared Rudy’s ability to flout the speed limit despite his retirement. He too arrived at the restaurant early, approaching the door to Yesterday’s from the opposite direction but at the same time we did.
Yesterday’s was Rudy’s delightful surprise for me—my favorite place in Columbia, where in over a decade as a loyal customer, I’d
eaten only one dish: what they called Confederate Fried Steak, a chicken-fried steak recipe imported from Texas or Oklahoma. Homesteaders moving west had taken their Southern fried fanaticism with them and melded it into a new tradition when they found themselves in a place with more beef cattle than chickens. I was glad the mouth-watering delicacy had made its way back to South Carolina.
I studied the vegetable list so I’d be ready to order—cantaloupe and black-eyed peas. Then I studied Vince Ingum.
The waitress had seated us in one of the sheltered church-pew booths that lined the walls, brightened recently by new paint. The lunch crowd would begin shrinking soon, so we could use our enclave as long as we wanted.
Ingum wore his hair in a buzz cut. His bulldog jaw jutted out like a challenge, and his crystal-blue eyes were circled with a yellow edge. What Granddad used to call killer-dog eyes. Never trust a yeller-eyed dog, he’d said, mimicking the deep mountain speech from whence the warning originated.
Ingum’s face was open, despite his spooky eyes and his aggressive jaw. His skin had the blotchy red-brown tone that Scots-Irish descendants get when they decide to become near-tropical sun-worshippers. I hoped he had a good dermatologist. His voice had the husky scratch of a former smoker and a warmth that drew you in, all the while he was watching you.
I wondered what he saw.
“So you’re trying to get on one a-them TV shows, are you?” He directed the good-natured gibe at Rudy.
“Got to be easier ways than this.”
“Yeah. Maybe they’ll pick you to be on
The Bachelor
, so you can have your pick of a bevy of cat-fighting beauties. Oh, no, wait. You’re already spoken for. Better stick with the police shows. You ain’t smart enough for
Jeopardy
.”
Even Rudy had to laugh at that.
“A’course, I got too damn much time on my hands, I’m knowing about all these TV shows. I’m just glad you’re looking into this.” His voice grew somber. “This case has haunted me every day since. I truly hated to retire and leave this jacket in the file cabinet.”
“You said you had some of the file?” Rudy asked.
“Copies. Right here.”
The waitress came to take our order. Rudy and Vince wisely followed my lead on the chicken-fried steak, but went their own ways on the vegetables.
As soon as the waitress left, Vince hefted a thick manila envelope off the seat beside him and slid out papers and pictures.
“A’course, this is nothing compared to the full file. I can’t believe it’s gone. Guess it’s nothing compared to the files you gather now, what with your computers and DNA tests and forensics. All we had was flat-footing it around town asking questions and banging out reports with two fingers on manual typewriters.”
“And taking pictures,” Rudy said as Vince handed him some eight-by-ten black-and-whites he’d separated out from the papers.
Rudy sat beside me, on the outside of the bench seat. He’d had trouble sliding his football-player thighs between the end of the pew and the table corner, but once he’d cleared the corner, the pew provided plenty of room.
I looked over his elbow. The photos showed Wenda’s body, though from a distance and straight on, not at the intimate angle shown in the picture we’d found. Close-ups showed her suitcases, her gashed, bloodless throat, the dried fall leaves scattered around the bench where she’d been displayed.
I caught Rudy’s eye and asked my question by raising an eyebrow. He gave one nod.
“Mr. Ingum, do you recognize this?” I pulled the four-by-six photo from the envelope I carried. “Would this have been one of your officer’s crime-scene photos?”
He slid his wire aviator glasses up to his forehead, holding the photo close, studying it for a long moment before he started shaking his head.
He turned his spooky eyes to me, softer and more liquid and vulnerable until he let his glasses slip back into place.
“Where’d you get this?” His tone was even as he stared at me.
“Gran—Wenda’s mother—had it. Somebody sent it to her.”
“Who the hell’d send something like this to a victim’s mother?”
I would’ve hated to be the rookie cop who stepped in a cow pie on this guy’s watch.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Walter—at the
Clarion
office—said it wouldn’t have been one of his news photographers. They wouldn’t take that kind of shot.”
“Sure as hell not one of ours. We couldn’t buy Bic pens, much less fancy flash equipment. Not like these days, with computers and Kevlar and college boys, huh?”
He jabbed Rudy’s arm with a not-quite-playful fist.
Something about Rudy was different around this man. He didn’t pop back a snide comment, and I sensed a tenseness I wasn’t used to from Rudy. Was Rudy reliving his rookie days? This guy would’ve been a tough one.
I had my own nightmare mentors from my rookie days, but Vince wasn’t one of them, so I went on with my questions. “What do you remember about the case?”
“We didn’t expect murders like this. Drunken brawls at a pool hall, drunk drivers flying off the mountainside, goofy kids trying some stunt on the lake, a husband hits his wife once too often and one of ‘em ends up dead. Nothing like this, though.”
He pointed a stubby finger at the photos in Rudy’s hands. “First off, she was from out of town. That meant we didn’t know the players. Weren’t even sure who she was, at first. Then the short list of suspects didn’t pan out. Couldn’t shake anything loose.”
I watched as Rudy turned through the photos once again. These photos had a very different quality from the one we’d found in Neanna’s car. I didn’t know quite how to describe the difference in the photos—the angle, the light, the clarity. Something.
“Cold cases, as everybody’s fond of calling them these days, aren’t solved by police work alone. Let’s face it. Absent some breakthrough like DNA, unless the killer’s caught for another crime or unless time works on somebody’s conscience, somebody with enough courage to come forward, cold cases stay cold.”
“When somebody decides to do the right thing,” I said.
“Naw.” He shook his head. “Civic-mindedness seldom factors into it. Revenge is more like it. More’n likely, he pisses off his girlfriend and she decides to tally up the scorecard.”
“Who were your suspects?” I asked.
“Her boyfriend, Tank Smith, for starters. Not an upstanding citizen. Tank had recently taken to spending time in Camden County and had brought some of his trouble from Atlanta with him.”
He sipped his ice tea. “Tank had an alibi we couldn’t shake. Visiting in Tampa, with plenty of witnesses and at least one of those would’ve loved to see him in trouble. Never found the place she was actually killed and never found the knife, so we had no physical evidence linking him or anybody else to the body.”