A Man for All Seasons (12 page)

“A bad woman can be the ruin of a good man,” Holliman said sadly.

“No doubt about that,” Mrs. Jennings retorted.

“Can you remember anything else he might have said about her?” Josette pressed.

“Well, he didn't say a whole lot about her,” she repeated. “Not even what she looked like, although my Dale liked a good-looker. I don't think he would have been interested in an ugly girl.”

“No, I don't either,” Josette replied, but she was wondering about that, because he'd asked her to the Webb's party the night of the murder. Josette had a passable figure, but her face was just ordinary, not pretty, and she wore glasses. Funny, she hadn't thought of that until now.

“Didn't recognize that minister,” Holliman murmured. “Did you?”

His sister shook her head. “I asked the funeral home director if he could find somebody,” she replied. “He didn't even have to look. That young fellow volunteered to do it. Nice young fellow.”

Holliman was about to say something when the front door opened and Brannon came in with a big sack of food, and a boxful of coffee cups. By the time they finished the meal, the thread of conversation was lost.

 

Later, Brannon took Holliman home before he drove Josette back to her hotel and told her what he and the warden had discovered.

“We've got a guy in our office, back in Austin,” she told him. “Phil Douglas. He gives Simon headaches, because he's so overeager, but he's a real hacker. There's nothing he doesn't know about computers. Maybe he could track down whoever changed those records.”

“We've got people working on it, but you might give him a shot at it,” Brannon replied immediately. “It had to take someone specialized. I know computers, but I couldn't get into protected files, even with my clearance.”

“Neither could I,” she agreed. “Something else—
Mrs. Jennings said Dale was involved with a woman when Garner was murdered. She said he was obsessed with getting enough money to keep her happy, and that there was some sort of package involved. But Mrs. Jennings never saw it.”

He'd already parked the truck near her hotel room. He leaned back in the seat and folded his arms over his broad chest. “A woman. Did she know what this woman looked like?”

“No. He didn't tell her much, just that the woman was smart and that she liked fancy candy.”

“It's probably a dead end.”

“That's what I thought,” Josette agreed. She turned her purse over in her lap. “That was nice of you, slipping the minister money for preaching the funeral. I was going to do it, if you hadn't. He was sweet.”

“Not long at the job, either, apparently,” he mused, smiling. “His Bible was brand-new.”

“He did a good job, for somebody who didn't know Dale.”

He studied her from under the brim of his dress Stetson. “I hate funerals.”

“Me, too, Brannon,” she confessed. “But this one went with the job. I felt sorry for his mother and his uncle.”

“They're good people. Sometimes the worst offenders come from the best families.”

“I've learned that.”

He studied her openly, one eye narrowed. “Tomorrow, I'm going to check out bank records and see if Jennings made any large deposits recently. You might phone your office and get that computer expert to work.”

“I will. Thanks for driving today.”

He shrugged. “I don't really feel comfortable riding with anyone else.”

“I noticed. You were always like that. You can't give up control, can you, Brannon?” she added.

His face hardened. “I never had any when I was a kid. My father told me what to do, where to go, how to breathe. Gretchen was only ten, too young to understand much about how things were, but I wasn't. My mother couldn't call her soul her own. He upset her constantly. I kept him away from Gretchen. She never even knew how dangerous he was.”

“At least he didn't take a short quirt to her,” she said, recalling something that had happened to her friend Christabel at the age of sixteen.

He nodded. “Judd Dunn sent Christabel's father to jail for that, after he'd beaten him within an inch of his
life. Christabel's protests and her mother's didn't faze him. Christabel almost died from the attack. Her back was in ribbons when her father got through with her. All because she tried to stop him from beating a horse.”

“Are she and Judd still married?” she asked, because Judd was a good friend of his, and a fellow Texas Ranger.

“Yes.” He smiled involuntarily. “And still not living together. She's, what, almost twenty-one now?”

“She was sixteen when he married her, for no other reason than to take care of her and her mother,” she agreed. “Her father had no sooner got out of jail than he got drunk again and wrecked his car. He died of his injuries, so Judd still has the responsibility for the ranch, not to mention Christabel and her mother. You'd think he'd be glad to let her take over the ranch, and have the marriage annulled. She wrote me that a man she knows wants to marry her.”

“That's what Judd told me,” he commented, pushing his hat back on his head. “But he doesn't approve of her choice, and I wouldn't give a fig for Christabel's chances of an annulment.”

She wondered about that. She didn't add that Christabel had also written her that she was either going to make Judd wild for her and seduce him, or make him
give her up. It would be interesting to know who won that contest of wills.

His pale eyes slid over her body in the neat-fitting dark suit, down the long skirt to her ankles and back up to the high-buttoned white blouse she wore with the suit. “You always button the collar of your blouses,” he commented. “And wear skirts down to the ankles. I wish you'd stayed in therapy, Josette. You don't move with the times.”

“My life was ruined because I tried to.”

The statement was bitter, full of self-recrimination. He laid his arm across the back of his seat and his pale eyes narrowed. “You don't have to sacrifice your principles to fit in these days,” he said. “A lot of women prefer being celibate to risking their lives, and they're not afraid to say so. Sex is dangerous. Even men think twice before they indulge.”

She averted her eyes to the windshield. “You, too, I guess?” she asked, and could have cursed herself for that involuntary question.

“Me, too,” he said at once. “I don't want some fatal disease or a chronic condition doctors still can't cure.”

“That doesn't stop a lot of men.”

He was still watching her. He noticed the twinge of
color on her high cheekbones. “You don't even date, do you?”

She thought about denying it, but there was really no point. “Not much,” she said frankly, meeting his eyes. “I still don't have a clue about how men think, and I don't want to be accused of—teasing.” She bit off the word as if it tasted bad.

He averted his face. His jaw clenched as his own words came back to haunt him.

“Surely you remember?” She clutched her purse. “You were eloquent about women who—how did you put it?—led men on and wouldn't deliver.”

He grimaced. There was an audible sigh as he curled one big hand around the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. “I guess I was. I was shocked. Furious. All those years, I thought I was right when I helped get that boy off. To be confronted with positive proof that you were the real victim was painful.” He slanted the hat back over his eyes, as if to hide them from her. “But I had no right to say those things to you, or to leave without a word, after we'd been going together for months.”

“We never went together,” she said in a monotone. “You took me out places. That's all it was.”

“Until that last date, maybe.” His jaw clenched again with emotion. “I don't like being wrong.”

“Most of us make mistakes as we go along. Not you, of course,” she added with veiled sarcasm. “You never make mistakes, do you, Brannon? People are good or bad. No gray areas. No intangibles.”

“I've been in law enforcement since I was eighteen,” he said curtly. “The law is the law. You either break it or you don't.”

She sighed. “Yes. I guess you're right. I'd better go in. I'll phone you tomorrow afternoon.”

“I'll be out most of the day,” he said tersely.

“Then I'll leave you a message, Brannon,” she said sweetly, opening the door.

He turned his head and looked at her, saw the lines in her face, the dark circles under her eyes, the weariness. “Get some rest.”

“I'm fine.” She closed the door firmly, turned and went into the hotel. The doorman grinned at her and rushed to open the door. She didn't look back.

Brannon pulled out into the street with mixed emotions. He remembered the feel and taste of her in his arms. They were old memories but they were vivid when he was with her. He wondered if she remembered the magic they'd shared that one evening, before their
lives were torn apart a second time. He'd never been able to get past it. Other women were good companions, but Josette was under his skin.

He thought about his father, about the misery the man had caused him and his mother with his incessant raving, his constant criticisms, his demands for perfection, even when he was sober. He'd grown up hating his father for being so inflexible, so judgmental and righteous. Abuse can come in many forms, and one of the worst was verbal. Only now did it dawn on him that he was becoming like his father. He did, as Josette had accused, see things only in black and white. He didn't allow for gray areas. There was only the law.

As he drove back to his own apartment, he considered that. His painful childhood was something he felt comfortable discussing with Josette, but he'd never talked about it to his own sister. Gretchen had been treated gently, cared for, loved by Marc and their mother. She had little memory of their father's brutality, because he was drinking regularly and had calmed down somewhat by the time Gretchen was old enough to be aware of his problems. He'd died while she was in grammar school. But Brannon's memories were much more painful. In many ways, they'd shaped him into the man he'd become.

On the other hand, Josette was better able to understand that sort of pain, because she'd experienced it in her own life. They shared a history of turmoil and unrest. A lot of her problems were probably his fault. But circumstances had been unkind to both of them.

 

Inside her hotel room, Josette was thinking the same thing. She felt drained from the conversation, from the long day, from the case, from the past—she was simply exhausted.

She had room service send supper to her room, which took up most of the rest of the daylight. After she leisurely ate her meal, she took a bath and wrapped up in her chenille robe, her long hair dripping around her shoulders in a wavy golden curtain until she wrapped a towel tightly around her head to absorb the moisture. She sat on the bed to go over her case notes.

The file on Dale Jennings was thick, and references to Jake Marsh turned up every few pages. She couldn't forget that Dale had helped one of Marsh's friends get a job working in Bib Webb's campaign. There had to be something to that.

She'd taken a lot of time gathering this much evidence and printing it out. She didn't want even one
loose end that she didn't tie up. Furthermore, she was going to share it with the police and the district attorney's office, so they had access to everything she'd dug up.

The most noticeable thing about the file was the lack of anything that pointed to that missing piece of evidence Dale had held on to. There was no mention of a safety-deposit box, or a key. There was nothing to point to a hiding place.

She remembered what Brannon had said, about the transfer to a state prison, and her eyes narrowed in thought. Perhaps if Phil Douglas, back at the office in Austin, could find a starting point, he could turn up something besides the name of the person who'd gotten Dale out of federal prison. She made a note on the canary legal pad to that effect.

When she finished, she put the file along with the legal pad and pen on the bedside table and propped herself against the headboard with both plump pillows. She wasn't really sleepy, and her mind was whirring around so fast that she couldn't hold a single thought in it. She turned on the television, but there wasn't anything interesting on, except the weekly political faux pas. In an election year, one-upmanship on the nightly news was definitely the thing.

She turned off the television in disgust. What was there to do in a hotel miles from her apartment? She missed Barnes, her cat. Usually he slept curled up next to her on the bedcover.

She wondered if Brannon had a cat these days. He used to have a mangy old yellow tomcat that slept on the kitchen floor at night. It had been Gretchen's pet, but Brannon had fed it, and when nobody was looking, he played with it. He called it John, after the fictional John Reid, the original “Lone Ranger” of television legend. He'd always wanted to be a Texas Ranger, Gretchen had told her once. He knew the tiniest details about the first Rangers. He'd worked hard at law enforcement, just to have a shot at a job with the exclusive law enforcement group. It was a difficult job to get, too. There were only fifteen Ranger sergeants in Company D, Brannon's company, that operated out of San Antonio, and they had to cover forty-one counties. They worked with many other law enforcement agencies to solve crimes, because their authority was literally borderless—a Ranger could go anywhere in Texas to assist in criminal investigation, and infrequently even went overseas in such endeavors.

Gretchen had wondered if Brannon's infatuation with
law enforcement had been because of his father. As a young boy, Marc felt he had no power at all. He was at the mercy of a verbally abusive father, and Marc was the only protection his mother and Gretchen had. While old man Brannon might not beat his son, he was apparently good at mental cruelty, which was, in its own way, equally destroying to a young ego.