Buried Memories (18 page)

Both men knew they had to question Betty’s kids. If their mother was involved in a murder, possibly the family knew about it.

“I’ll run down her kids and get some statements,” Rose said. “Hopefully I can convince them to spill the beans on Mama.”

“Good luck,” O’Brien said. “Sometimes there’s loyalty to a parent that makes no sense whatsoever. If a parent is all a kid knows, all he has, there’s probably a certain amount of fear, some love, and the fact that he doesn’t want to see Mama get in trouble. Good luck.”

Phyllis Coleman hadn’t lived all that long, but she had lived hard. The prettiest of the four Branson girls, Phyllis resembled Betty more than any of the others. Her silky, light blond hair draped past her shoulders, but didn’t conceal the tattoos on each arm. A unicorn pranced around her upper left arm, and the sun rose on her right.

The twenty-three-year-old lived in Balch Springs, a small rural town bordering Dallas, with much lower rent than its big neighbor.

Phyllis sat in what charitably could be called a dive in a shabby area of East Dallas. The entire bar was an all-smoking section. Overflowing ashtrays sat on tables, along with empty beer bottles from previous customers. Phyllis, hazy from too much to drink, fingered an embedded ring on the table.

The young woman sitting with her suggested, “Phyllis, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

“For what I’ve gone through, I couldn’t have too much.”

“You’re not getting into your ‘poor me’ thing again, are you?”

“Poor me is right. If you only knew.” Phyllis’s long earrings swung as she spoke.

“You’re like a broken record. You keep hinting at problems in your family, but you just skip around the outside. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Do you know anyone who’s murdered somebody?” Phyllis asked.

“Hell no, and I don’t want to.”

“What if your own mother murdered her husband?”

“That’s it. I’m leaving,” her friend said.

“No, wait. Honest. That’s what I’m dealing with. My mom, Betty Beets, killed two husbands.”

Her friend slid Phyllis’s drink beyond her reach.

“I’m telling you right. Not only did she kill them, she buried them in her yard.”

Obviously shaken, her friend slowly stood up and moved to the door. She had to get away. She needed a phone. She had to call Crime Stoppers.

Betty Beets screamed, “Why?” when the police contacted her at the Cedar Club with news that they had booked her youngest son, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Bobby, into the juvenile detention center. Her mystification grew when she learned that Ray Bone had been detained in jail.

At almost midnight, she drove to downtown Athens and met with juvenile authorities. It gave her the willys to drive past the lake at night with no moon to light the ripples on the waves. The lake appeared deeper in the dark.

But on the outskirts of Athens, no bright lights shone either. With bars outlawed and churches sitting on almost every corner, at this hour everything was dimly lit.

Once at the juvenile center, the officers told her about the shoot-out in minute detail. They discussed Bobby’s aggressiveness and his dislike of Bone.

The authorities would detain Bobby for a couple more days, then release him to a relative.

Now she had to figure out what to do for Ray.

Rick Rose knew Gerald Albright’s habits. At eight every morning he could be counted on being in Seven Points having coffee at McClain’s, a homey restaurant in Seven Points, known for its rib-sticking breakfasts. The place wouldn’t take credit cards, but they’d accept a personal check. McClain’s sat at the main intersection. Seven roads came together at that point, hence the name of the town.

Rose went inside and waited for Albright to finish his coffee, then followed him out. He caught up with him in the middle of the block where there was less pedestrian traffic to hear their conversation.

“Gerald, got a minute?”

Albright quickly turned around and smiled. “How’s it goin’, Deputy?”

“Just want to ask you a few questions.”

“You flatter me. You think I’d know something you’re interested in?”

“I’ve been talking with a friend of yours, Ron Becker.”

Albright’s friendly expression changed. “What’s old Ron up to?”

“Actually, we were talking about what you’ve been up to.”

Albright stopped in his tracks. “Ron doesn’t know shit about me.”

“He seems to think so.”

“Like what?”

“Mentioned you were out frolicking with Betty Beets.”

“Oh that,” he said, striking a match on the sole of his boot to light his cigarette. “I’ve seen Betty a time or two.”

“Actually,” Rose said, “it’s what she told you that we were discussing.”

“Betty gets pretty drunk.” He lit his cigarette, then shook out the match. “I always say you can’t believe a drunk. It’s the whiskey talkin’.”

“Well, the whiskey told him what’s planted in Betty’s wishing well,” Rose said.

Gerald inhaled his cigarette smoke, but said nothing.

“Is that what Betty said?” Rose asked again.

Albright exhaled and studied the glowing tip of his cigarette. “Something like that. I’m telling you, Rick”—he stopped to extract a piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue—“that woman scares me to death.”

Officer Diaz Ortega of the Dallas Police Department took the message from Crime Stoppers. The organization automatically forwarded calls to police, but rarely as bizarre a tale as they relayed today.

After hearing the facts that Shirley’s friend in the bar had related to Crime Stoppers, Ortega easily recalled the Beets drowning. He remembered that the sheriff’s office in Athens had initially handled the case. They’d be the first people he’d want to call.

“Who’s working the Beets case now?” Ortega asked the Henderson County deputy who answered the phone.

“That’s Rick Rose,” the deputy said. “He’s not in at the moment, but I can page him on his beeper. It’ll be the quickest way to get hold of him.”

SEVENTEEN

Betty had spent two hours at the juvenile detention center last night with Bobby, so now at nine in the morning, she had to force herself to get up. First, she’d check with Ray about his bail.

She showered, dressed, and strolled out to her truck, wondering why it looked so much lower than ever before. Several feet closer, she found four flat tires, apparently all slashed with a knife. Could this be some kind of threat, or maybe just teenagers prowling late at night? She didn’t know.

She spent the day replacing tires. After she paid the bill, she gritted her teeth at the expense. Then she remembered the Dallas Police and Fireman Pension Committee would meet next week. Once she started receiving that monthly check, life would be wonderful.

However, that could still be a couple weeks away and right now the tires had eaten her bank account. She had no money to bail out Ray. She had talked with him earlier and vowed she’d raise money somehow.

That night, she worked particularly late, and her tips were good. Her story of slashed tires had entertained her customers, and one person had suggested they take up a collection.

Around two
A.M.
, she drove home from work, and when she neared her house, she shook with apprehension. Would someone be waiting outside her trailer with the same knife he used to slash her tires? Distressed, she stopped at the security station for Cherokee Shores, and told the guard about her problem.

“Now you can see why the hell I’m so concerned,” she added. “I figured if they’d do that, what else would they try?”

The man nodded sympathetically.

“Would you mind following me to my house and wait till I’m inside?”

“It’d be my pleasure, ma’am. Let me get my car keys and I’ll be right behind you.”

Betty found it comforting to see the guard’s headlights in her rearview mirror.

They curved around the subdivision, each road walled by thick forest and looking ominous at night. Then they turned down her street. As if orchestrated, when both vehicles pulled up to Betty’s property, a flash of light exploded, followed by a loud bang; then flames shot out of her trailer.

They both scrambled out of their cars as fast as their feet would carry them and ran to the trailer. Betty grabbed the green hose she always kept handy to water flowers, but found it pathetically inadequate for the fire.

“Oh my God, do something,” Betty screamed. “My dog’s locked up in the pantry.”

The guard had hurried to his car and phoned the Payne Springs Fire Department. They were only five minutes away.

Betty stretched the hose to her kitchen and sprayed water inside.

In another twenty minutes, the fire department had extinguished the fire, but the trailer still smoldered in a hazy gray smoke. Everything looked dark, wet, and soggy.

Betty dashed inside, and came out carrying her dead, smoke-darkened dog. Her hair and clothes reeked of fumes.

By now, neighbors had gathered. Betty sat on the steps of her front porch, cradling the lifeless animal. “Those goddamn bastards suffocated my dog.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “This is murder, pure and simple. Those bastards murdered my dog,” she kept repeating as tears removed her mascara.

A gritty-faced fireman went to her. “Ma’am, just wanted you to know this fire was started by gasoline. It’s gotta be arson. The state fire marshal needs possession of the trailer while we get an investigation going.”

Sadly, Betty nodded, then affectionately laid her dog on the porch and went back inside the charred shell of her trailer. Moonlight filtered through the smoke-covered windows while the firemen accompanied her, carrying flashlights that cast strange patterns on the damaged rooms.

“Look at this mess,” she said. “This bedroom’s practically gone. Let’s see what’s back here.” They followed her down the hall to her bedroom. The bed had burned, and the sodden mattress still smoked.

“At lease my closet doors were closed, hopefully I still have clothes.” Betty looked at the ruins that had once been her home. She sighed. “Where on earth am I gonna live?”

Rose stopped at the first pay phone he found to return Officer Ortega’s call. He spotted two phones mounted outside a small, redbrick grocery store in Cherokee Shores. He listened to the officer and smiled in disbelief when he heard Ortega’s report.

“What you’re saying fits the scenario of everything we know so far,” Rose told him.

Rose had been trying to find Phyllis Coleman ever since he had talked with his informant, almost a month ago. It turned out that Phyllis had temporarily separated from her husband and was staying in a friend’s apartment, so she had no phone listing. Nor could she be traced by a driver’s license or credit cards. She had none.

“I’ve got her temporary address and phone number,” Ortega said.

Rose busily jotted down the information.

“What are you guys doing right now?” Rose asked. “Do you have time to run out there?”

“I can if I go right now, but you know homicide. If something breaks I’ll be out of here.”

“Right now is perfect,” Rose said. “How about heading to her apartment and I’ll get her on the phone. Hopefully, I can keep her talking until you get there.”

Ortega agreed to the plan and Rose called Phyllis’s number.

After six rings, a sleepy, slurred voice answered the phone.

“Phyllis Coleman?” Rose asked.

“Speaking.”

“This is Deputy Rose with the Sheriff’s Office.”

“God, what do you want?”

“Just to talk to you. I need you to answer a few questions.”

Phyllis sounded apprehensive. “What about?”

“Just a sec,” Rose said. He let the receiver dangle down the brick wall while he used the phone next to it and called Ortega. He learned that Ortega had already left for Phyllis’s apartment.

“Okay, I’m back. I want to talk about your family. Especially your mother. I’ve been hearing some things about her and just needed to ask you.”

Apparently everything clicked at once, and Phyllis began crying. Her voice sounded garbled and Rose had difficulty understanding her through her sobs.

“What do you want to know?”

“What did she do, Phyllis?”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

“Pretty much what you told someone in a bar last night. A person at the next table overheard you,” Rose said to cover for the woman who called Crime Stoppers.

“Oh shit. All’s I know is what my sister, Shirley, told me. I just couldn’t believe it. We were down at Mama’s, across the street in the woods, and Shirley kept telling me how scared she was, she didn’t know what to do when Mama asked her to help bury Wayne.”

“Wayne? Who’s Wayne?” Rose was mystified. Could Phyllis be so messed up she didn’t know Jimmy Don’s name?

“Wayne Barker,” Phyllis said. “Isn’t that what you’re calling about?”

Now a light went off in Rose’s head and he was astounded. He’d heard another one of Betty’s husbands had disappeared, but didn’t dream he’d only gone as far as Betty’s yard.

At the time, everyone believed Betty when she said that Wayne had left on his own accord. Just like they believed her now. There had been no investigation, no one coming forth asking authorities to look into Barker’s disappearance. Not even his family. Rose’s mind went back to his criminal justice courses. The Black Widow killer was the hardest of all to detect for she quietly laid meticulous plans, then struck, and usually at home. Without emotion, she targeted people close to her such as a trusting spouse, and usually for profit. That fit Betty to a tee.

After those thoughts flashed through Rose’s mind, he asked Phyllis, “What about Jimmy Don Beets?”

“Just a minute, I’ll get to him.”

Rose scribbled notes as fast as he could, but the avalanche of new information made it difficult to steady his hand.

“Anyways,” Phyllis continued, “we were drinking and when I heard what Shirley had to say, I wanted to keep on drinking. I got so damn sick on Tom Collins that they had to hold me over the toilet.

“Back when it happened, I couldn’t believe that Wayne just walked off, but that’s what Mama told me.”