Bad To The Bone (36 page)

"Shut up," the fat man in khaki said. I
pegged him as the sheriff. "Cuff her." Two uniforms hurried to
obey. They yanked Tawny up and pushed her face down on the bed. She
screamed from the pain. They ignored it and cuffed her hands behind
her.

"Now cover her," the Sheriff ordered.

A female deputy draped a sheet over
Tawny.

"What's going on, Charlie?" a deep voice
demanded from the doorway.

A state trooper stood outlined in the door
frame, smoke and light swirling around his tall figure. His
immaculate uniform gleamed with the crispness of starch, his boots
were polished to a high sheen. His Smoky the Bear hat was pushed
back on his head, framing a square-jawed face and sharp eyes. We
were all in trouble now.

"Some sort of drug deal gone bad," the
sheriff said, shaking his head. "We got a tip-off from a cop up in
Raleigh. There's been some shooting. None of my men seem hurt.
We're trying to sort it out—"

"There's the shooter," someone interrupted.
The whole room turned to the speaker. A skinny kid in a too-large
deputy uniform was pointing behind a pile of suitcases. Two
unmoving legs extended into the room, but the rest of the body was
obscured by matching black leather. Number One. Down for the
count.

"Dead?" the sheriff asked.

"Not yet," a deputy replied after bending
over the body for a moment. He whistled. "But here's one for our
collection." He held the TEC-9 up, carefully balancing it on the
bottom of his palms to avoid disturbing any fingerprints. "Ralph'll
get a kick out of this."

"Excuse me," I said loudly from beneath the
desk.

I heard the rustles and clicks of at least
six officers assuming a shooting stance in my direction.

"I'm not armed," I said, holding my hands up
as high as the desk would let me. "Please, I have nothing to do
with this."

"Then why are you here, sister?" the sheriff
asked sensibly. He nodded toward a deputy. "Cuff her, too."

They shoved me into the backseat of a patrol
car with a sullen Amanda Cockshutt. Tawny got her own car, courtesy
of the full-blown, coke-induced temper tantrum she threw when they
tried to dress her. She'd kicked the sheriff, bitten a trooper,
spat on the female officer holding her clothes, flung her blood on
a handful of HIV-terrified deputies and unleashed a series of her
trademark dressing-downs on anyone within earshot. I thought she
was lucky they didn't send her straight to the mental ward, though
maybe that was what she'd had in mind. It reminded me of how smart
she was, as in smart like a fox dozing by a rabbit hole. This was
no time for me to quit the fight.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" I asked
the female officer. She was standing by my open window, watching
Tawny being dragged into another deputy's car.

"Why should I listen to you?" she
answered.

"Maybe because I had my clothes on when you
broke into the motel room and you didn't have to put my panties on
for me like the rest of the lowlifes?"

"Make it quick."

"Alone?"

The deputy opened the car door and helped me
out. She was smart. She knew that keeping her ego in check might
bring a break in the case. She was willing to listen. So was Amanda
Cockshutt. I moved out of her earshot.

Activity swirled around us in the parking
lot: an ambulance pulled in to cart Denny and Number One away,
troopers poured in to act important, and some of the deputies'
wives arrived with sandwiches and coffee. It had been an exciting
night in Taylorsville. I expected the hot dog vendor to arrive at
any moment.

"What do you want?" the officer demanded.
She was a stocky black woman, with close-cropped hair and a blunt
face. She had not appreciated two naked women being part of this
bust. I got the feeling she endured enough dyke jokes from her
colleagues as it was, never mind the wedding ring on her
finger.

"I'm a private investigator from Raleigh," I
explained. "My ID is in my back pocket. This is part of a murder
investigation."

"Better keep it to yourself until your
lawyer gets here," she advised. "Charlie don't hold much truck with
private investigators."

"Just hear me out," I begged her. "What's
your first name?"

"Wanda. But you can call me Deputy
Castleberry."

I gave her a sanitized version of what had
gone down, telling her about my suspicions that Tawny was guilty of
murder and making it clear why it was so important for the Raleigh
Police Department to know that Amanda Cockshutt had been caught
sleeping with the enemy.

"Even if I believe you," she said when I was
done. "It's another story to convince Charlie over there." She
nodded toward the sheriff. He was in earnest conversation with two
state troopers.

"I'll work on him," I said. "But I need you
to do something for me right now." It was a little iffy, she'd have
to mildly contaminate a crime scene. But I convinced her to give it
a try by offering to swap some key information in exchange for her
help. "Deal?" I asked.

She thought it over. "Done. So where's this
coke?"

"I saw one of the guys loading it into the
trunk of that car over there." I nodded at the gray Lumina. The
crime team had not yet approached it, they were no doubt too busy
confiscating Bill Butler's gun.

"Get back in the car," she ordered me.

I wiggled into the backseat, smiled at
Amanda and received a frosty glare for my trouble. Gosh, it seemed
she wasn't speaking to me.

Deputy Castleberry ambled over to the
Lumina, opened a back door and starting looking around. She bent
over the front seat console and the trunk clicked open. When she
slid out of the car, she was holding my knapsack and the cellular
phone. She spoke into the phone briefly and then, holding my pack
casually to one side, she walked over to the sheriff and handed him
the phone.

"It's for you," she told him.

"What the hell is this, Castleberry? I'm
busy."

"It's that detective from the Raleigh PD who
warned us," she explained. "I found the phone in the backseat of
the perps' car."

The men all stared at her.

"It was just sitting there, doors unlocked,"
she explained. "One of the perps indicated it might contain
explosives. I had to look. No explosives. But there is at least a
kilo of cocaine in the trunk."

There was a minor stampede toward the Lumina
as the sheriff took the phone and Deputy Castleberry returned to
her car. She slid into the front seat and adjusted the rearview
mirror, then pulled back the bulletproof partition separating the
driver from the passenger seat.

"You gals ready to roll?" she asked us.

"I want my lawyer," I said loudly, kicking
the backseat.

"Didn't believe you, huh?” Amanda said
nastily.

I ignored her.

"You girls need to say something, be sure to
knock on the partition, you hear now?" Deputy Castleberry said.
"It's soundproof, so I don't have to listen to your bull dookey all
the way to the jail." Geeze, but she was laying it on thick. I half
expected Barney Fife to pop up and add his two cents' worth.

I started in on Amanda Cockshutt the instant
we pulled out of the parking lot. At first she wouldn't bite. I
tried appealing to her conscience, her love of her children, public
shame. None of it got her talking. But then I wounded her pride.
And that's what got her talking.

"You know, Boomer may have been a
son-of-a-bitch," I said. "But he was a damn sight classier than
Tawny. What the hell made you get mixed up with a low-class swamp
coot like that? If I'd known you were that desperate for a walk on
the wild side, I could have introduced you to my dentist. She's
single."

She glared at me. Things had gone from bad
to worse. She was wearing mismatched clothes and not happy about
it. Her dignity was being stripped away.

"What makes you think I didn't know exactly
what I was doing?" she retorted in a scathing tone of voice. "I
knew Tawny Bledsoe was trash the first time I saw her. That was the
point."

"It was?"

“Trash can be disposed of. Do you really
think I was going to spend the rest of my life with her?" She spat
on the floor of the car. “Talk about used goods. I shower twice
every time she touches me."

"Well, don't the two of you make a lovely
couple? Sort of a Bonnie and Bonnie without the Clyde." She didn't
react.

"Then why did you get involved with her?" I
asked.

"Because she killed Boomer for me, you
moron." She looked out the window, enjoying how smart she had been
to get someone else to do her dirty work. "There is a certain
poetic justice in it, don't you think? Boomer being killed by one
of his liaisons. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
Didn't you ever hear that saying?" She laughed, savoring the fact
that the father of her children had gotten his brains blown out in
the middle of getting his pipes cleaned.

I was truly appalled. But not surprised.
Amanda's behavior explained Tawny's descent from liar to murderer.
The two of them together were like Molotov cocktails colliding in
the air. The momentum was bound to cause an explosion.

"Where did you meet her?" I asked. "I'm
always interested in twists of fate."

"Some dyke club in Durham."

"Oh yeah," I said, remembering what the
owner of Rubyfruit Jungle had told me about a bored housewife who
looked like Sigourney Weaver. I thought she'd been one of Tawny's
victims, not Tawny's partner. "The owner remembers you."

She looked confident. "It won't do them any
good."

We both knew who she meant by "them."

"There's no crime in being seen at a gay
bar," she added stiffly.

"So you planned it from the start?"

"I planned it?" She laughed. "I don't think
so. Credit Tawny with the actual idea. I picked her up one night
just for kicks and she went off on me like we were in big love or
something. What a joke. Then I realized she might be useful. I
could use her to get close enough to Boomer to find out where the
bastard had stashed all his assets, so I could divorce his fat ass.
But Tawny figured out he'd be worth a lot more dead to me than
alive, and I sure as hell went along with the idea. And why not?
Fifteen years of his rubbing my face in some young thing, one after
the other, should be worth something."

"You were willing to let an innocent man go
to jail," I said. "Maybe even death row. How could you live with
that?"

"I lived with Boomer, I can live with
anything. From our first year of marriage, he was like some mongrel
who had to hump every dog in heat he could find. I don't care who
has to pay, I'm just glad he's dead. Do you know it only took Tawny
ten minutes to get a date with him?" She stared out the window. "I
told her what to do, and ten minutes after walking onto his lot and
saying she wanted to look at cars, that piece of shit I married
asked her out to dinner."

"I'd say that was due more to Tawny's
talents than Boomer's morals."

"He deserved what he got. And I deserved
what I got for killing him."

"Which was what? Money?"

"Lots of it." She laughed. "Especially since
I get to keep it all now."

"You're going to prison," I said
incredulously. "Where do you think this nice deputy is taking
us?"

"Not me. They can't pin a thing on me. Tawny
did the killing. I had nothing to do with it. She's crazy. I'll say
it was all her idea."

"But you were in Winston-Salem with her kid
the night Boomer was killed, weren't you? It wasn't Tawny at that
church retreat. It was you. That's why the other church members
heard Tiffany crying. She woke up to find a stranger in her room.
Then you answered the phone in her motel room late that night,
pretending to be her. That's called accessory to murder, you
know."

"You can't prove that," she said. "I made
sure of it."

Yeah? I thought, wondering why both she and
Tawny seemed so ready to dismiss Tiffany and all that the little
girl had heard and seen these past few months. Thank god I got the
kid out, I realized, before her mother figured out what a threat
she represented.

"Your mother will testify you were lying," I
suggested. "She'll say you weren't with her in Asheville at that
lodge."

"My mother can't testify to a thing. She
drinks herself into a stupor all day and night. She won't remember
what happened or where we were that weekend. And the kids were
already in bed. There's no way to prove it. It was Tawny that did
it, not me. I'm just the grieving widow."

"I guess you think you're smarter than her,"
I said.

"Her?" Amanda Cockshutt's voice was full of
scorn. “Tawny Bledsoe is nothing but trailer trash with a coke
habit. She wanted to dump her own kid once we got to California.
Tawny's not smart. She's just good at what she does. Which isn't
much. I'd say she has a limited repertoire."

"Looked to me like you were enjoying her
repertoire in that motel room back there."

Her smile was brief. "A certain amount of
posturing was necessary on my part, even with someone as gullible
as that pathetic coke whore."

"Yeah?" I said, my voice challenging. "Maybe
she's smarter than you think."

"What are you talking about?" Amanda's eyes
were trained on the darkness outside. "I can get her to do whatever
I want her to do." She smiled to herself. "Even Napoleon had his
Waterloo. I'm Tawny's. She loves me. That's power."

I laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"You were being set up," I lied. "She and
Jeff were going to clean out your bank account and leave you in
their dust. He told me everything."

"You're lying." She looked away in
disgust.

"Am I? Let me guess—Tawny didn't want to
leave the area until all of your insurance checks had cleared the
bank, did she?" Eavesdropping has its benefits. It can make lies a
lot more believable. "Well?"