Nailed (19 page)

Oliver chose not to offer an opinion.

“Except you know as well as me, mate, it’s all a bloody
fraud!
Jimmy Leverette was a brute who beat his wife, abandoned his son, and bloody
murdered
a poor sod named Roger Braddock who was doing nothing more than having a beer with his mates. Thunder goes to prison but not death row — and I was surprised about that, a black killing a white in Texas and not getting the death penalty. Shows what they think of their gridiron heroes down there, doesn’t it? Anyway, out he comes, not the least repentant, changes his name, says he’s nobody’s nigger, and he’s off to the bloody races, isn’t he?”

Ring brought his fork down on his plate hard enough to chip the rim. Not that the blemish would be enough to keep the plate from being used again at Teddy’s. The Brit momentarily regarded his breakfast. The grease from the hot dogs and the eggs had congealed with the ketchup.

“Now, look what you’ve made me do, mate. Distracting me and all, my bloody breakfast has gone cold.”

Oliver was notably lacking in sympathy. “So, the only regret you have about Isaac Cardwell’s death is that a potential source on Jimmy Thunder has been lost?”

Ring shrugged. “Well, I hardly knew the bloke well enough to play darts with. As for the source part, that’s true enough. But I’ll tell you what, that old granny, Mahalia, she’s a bloody brilliant source of bile when it comes to her son-in-law. I’ll make out right well with her.”

Oliver asked, “What were you doing last Thursday night and early Friday morning?”

Ring affected a look of wide-eyed surprise, as wide as his piggy little eyes would go. “You think I’d kill my own source? That wouldn’t make me a very bright chap, would it?”

“What were you doing?” Oliver repeated.

“Working on my manuscript in my hotel room. Writers have bloody deadlines, you know.”

“You were alone?”

“It’s solitary labor, writing is. But as I like to work at night, I need a little help at one A.M. or so keeping my energy up. I called room service for a plate of bangers ‘n’ mash and a pint of whatever was cold. So check with the bloody hotel, if you don’t believe me.”

“I will,” Oliver said. “You have any research notes on Thunder or the Cardwells, something that might help our investigation?”

“I’ve got notes, all right,” Ring said. “But the only way you or any other bleedin’ peeler will see them is with a court order.”

Oliver stood and looked down on the Brit. “Man, the fucking people we let in this country.”

Ring only laughed.

“Tell you what, mate,” he said with a grin, “I’ll give you this much. I couldn’t have imagined a better ending for my book, if it turns out Thunder killed his own son. Be bloody Shakespearean, wouldn’t it?”

Chapter 23

Ben Dexter was used to doing formal, sit-down interviews with heads of state, royalty and the elites of the entertainment and sports worlds. But when he had to, he could feign the common touch and revisit the long gone days when he’d had to pay his dues. He could go right down to sidewalk level and interview the man on the street.

That was just what he and his crew were doing after Mayor Steadman declined to speak for his constituents.

Dexter’s questions were simple and direct: Given the recent mountain lion attacks, following the death of Isaac Cardwell, do you believe an actual curse has been placed upon your town? And if so, how do you feel about that?

“It’s a bunch of malarkey, and you must be a horse’s ass for even asking,” asserted a robust gray haired man coming out of a health club.

The response jolted Dexter, not that he let it show. He was rustier at this journalistic stop-and-frisk than he’d thought. He certainly wasn’t going to use that guy’s sound bite. He tried to remember how he used to do it.

He seemed to recall that young mothers with small kids tended to give the answers they thought you wanted to hear. The Social Security set could usually be counted on, as well, to spout enough crap that you could edit out something useful. And if he could get lucky enough to find some yahoo actually showing signs he was a serious churchgoer, that’d be a slam dunk.

On the other hand, people coming out of a health club, they were likely to be pumped up and thinking they were world-beaters. What the hell was wrong with him? He’d forgotten that using this line of inquiry was just like selling real estate: Everything was location, location, location.

“Let’s go,” Dexter told his crew. “We’re looking for a shopping mall near a church.”

They found it, too. The Crossroads Center at Aspen and Glen Brae. Just two blocks up the street from St. Andrew’s R.C.

“I don’t know if the town’s cursed,” answered their first mom with kids. “Not anymore than the rest of the world, anyway. But I am keeping a close eye on my girls. No playing outside unless we go to the beach. Mountain lions don’t swim, do they?”

An old gent out shopping with his wife offered, “I don’t know about curses, but I have lived long enough to see some things strange enough that I couldn’t explain them. So, I suppose. Maybe. But what I think that lady, Mrs. Cardwell, was doing was just showing how angry she was about her grandson being killed.”

By now, a crowd was gathering. People shopping and others going to the mall’s restaurants for lunch were curious to see what was going on. They were forming a semi-circle around Dexter. Without exception, they were white and polite. Very understanding about a difficult situation. That wasn’t at all what Dexter wanted.

But off to one side, sitting on a planter, watching the whole show was a good-looking black woman with a very serious expression on her face. She was well dressed in a light summer suit, and she had some kind of button on her lapel. Dexter couldn’t read it from where he stood, but he headed over her way. Maybe she’d have something interesting to say.

The woman stood as the news crew approached. Now Dexter could read the button.
2-4-6-8, I don’t want to hyphenate. Just call me an American.
Uh-oh. The winner of two Emmies and a Peabody Award, Dexter just could not believe his luck in this town. Still, he couldn’t simply back away from this woman, not with the crowd that had followed him watching. What was he going to say? Sorry, lady, you’re not my kind of black woman.

So, Ben Dexter introduced himself and asked his questions.

“No, I don’t believe in curses,” Lauren Gosden replied. “Not the kind you mean. The kind I believe in is people who stir up trouble for their own gain. There’s
far
too much of that kind of curse.”

Dexter politely thanked her, and turned around. The woman’s response had made all the others gathered nearby look at the reporter and crew in a new light. Dexter would later tell friends in New York and L.A. that just for a moment there he knew exactly how Custer felt at the Little Big Horn.

“I think we’ll wrap it up here for now, guys,” he told his crew.

The lunchtime crowd let them pass without a comment. But almost as they reached their Rover, Dexter felt a tug at his sleeve. It was enough to make him jump. There standing next to him was a small man past the crest of middle age with oily black hair done in a bad comb-over.

“I believe,” he hissed at the reporter. “There is a curse on this town. Probably only the first of many to come.” He nodded to himself as if he had private knowledge of what the others might be.

“What do you do for a living, friend?” Ben Dexter asked.

“Why do you have to know that?” the man asked, immediately suspicious.

“I guess I don’t. Never mind. Thanks for sharing your views.”

“Don’t you want to put me on TV?”

“No.”

Not even if the guy worked from a script Dexter wrote himself. He was too obviously loony. Too downscale. Not telegenic at all.

The thing that Ben Dexter failed to realize at the time was that he’d planted seeds. The relative handful of people he’d talked to that day all went back to work, home or out to eat and talked about him and his questions with their families and friends.

Was the town cursed? How did they feel about that?

In a small town, it didn’t take long for such questions to become topics of common debate. And the dialogue was a lot more serious and candid without a TV crew around.

Ron Ketchum spent the morning talking with Jimmy Thunder’s two exiled lady friends. They were sharing a suite at the Hilton. The chief interrupted their breakfast, and he was fortunate to catch them at all because they had their bags packed and were ready to leave town. They had first class tickets on the noon Reno Air flight to L.A.

Their names were Ashanti Royce and DaChelle Chenier. Each said she was twenty-eight. Both claimed to hold master’s degrees from UCLA. Ms. Royce’s area of study was demographics. Ms. Chenier’s major, interestingly, was criminology. The women were so well spoken that Ron was hard pressed to doubt their educational accomplishments.

That was despite the fact that both of them could have worked any
haute couture
runway in Paris. Well, there was nothing to say women couldn’t be tall, thin, beautiful
and
brilliant. And if he thought that seemed a rather unfair distribution of good fortune, maybe it was just another of his latent biases making itself known.

“Why are you leaving Goldstrike?” Ron asked.

“Our work here is finished, Chief,” Ms. Royce responded without cracking a grin.

“And what exactly was your work?”

“We assisted Reverend Thunder.”

Ron said, “Isn’t that what Ms. Janet Pak does?”

“She’s
clerical,”
Ms. Chenier sneered.

“And your duties were?”

“Professional.”

“In what sense of the word?”

Now both women shared a smile.

“My, my, my, Chief Ketchum, are we having naughty thoughts?” Ms. Royce inquired.

“Not me,” Ron replied. “I wouldn’t even stray near one. Not with a criminologist in the room. What I was wondering, what kind of
work
did you do for the reverend?”

“I helped him understand his audience,” Ms. Royce explained. “Reverend Thunder always shapes his own message, but by helping him identify just who he’s talking to, he can better understand which words he should choose to couch his message.”

“You worked together closely, then?”

“Every day.”

“And you, Ms. Chenier, why would Reverend Thunder need a criminologist?”

“After his unfortunate experience with the law, and having his lawyer of the time fail him, he felt the need to have someone near to reassure him that he wouldn’t attract any unfair attention from the authorities. He’s told both of us on many occasions how unpleasant prison life is. He wants to be very careful that he doesn’t give the police even the appearance of being responsible for a misdeed.”

“Does he think we suspect him of killing his son?”

“Do you?” Ms. Chenier asked without blinking.

“I’m afraid I have to ask the questions. Is Reverend Thunder worried?”

“He hasn’t said so. At least not to me.” Ms. Chenier turned to her colleague.

“He hasn’t said so to me, either,” Ms.Royce added.

“Ladies, at the risk of being indelicate, how about we stop all the bullshitting?”

Neither Ashanti Royce nor DaChelle Chenier swooned. They laughed. Moderately.

“You doubt us, Chief?” Ms. Royce inquired.

“Or do you want to know if we’re just fancy whores?” Ms. Chenier asked.

“What I want to know is why are you leaving town now? Why did Reverend Thunder kick you out of his house? Was it because he didn’t want his son to think you are fancy whores his daddy was humping? And how did Reverend Thunder get along with Reverend Cardwell?”

The two women looked at each other for a five count, during which, Ron was sure, several gigabytes of data were silently exchanged.

Ms. Royce began: “We’re leaving town because Jimmy can no longer afford us.”

“In terms of public relations?”

Ms. Chenier picked up the baton. “Quite possibly that way, too. But it’s more fundamental than that. The poor man is having a cash crisis.”

“The collection plate is coming back empty?” Ron asked, surprised.

“No, not empty,” Ms. Chenier elaborated, “but not nearly so full as it once did.”

“Jimmy has a core of believers who would not abandon him even if he … well, even if he did kill his son,” Ms. Royce said. “But that group of loyalists is not large enough to support either his broadcast operation or his lifestyle in the manner he prefers.”

“So, exeunt Ms. Royce and Ms. Chenier stage left?”

“Exeunt!”
Ms. Chenier smiled with delight. “Aren’t you the surprise for a cop?”

“I went to UCLA, too. Twelve years part time while I was on the LAPD. Now, tell me, was it just a coincidence Reverend Thunder turned up strapped for cash when his son arrived unexpectedly? Do you mean to tell me Reverend Cardwell’s presence had nothing to do with the two of you leaving the estate?”

“The timing was something of a coincidence,” Ms. Royce agreed, nodding her head. “We’d seen that the situation was in decline for some time, of course, but Junior showing up right then, that was an anomaly.”

“Junior?”

“We called Jimmy’s boy that,” Ms. Chenier informed Ron.

“Because?”

“Because he was too good to be an actual adult. He was like a little kid who doesn’t know enough to be greedy or venial, hasn’t been touched by temptation or corruption. But the way he acted so quietly righteous, not even bothered by the near occasion of sin, as the Catholics like to say, we could not believe he was for real,” Ms. Chenier asserted.

“You couldn’t find a handle on him, in other words.”

“Not a one,” Ms. Royce conceded.

“How did Reverend Thunder get along with his son?”

“I think Junior shamed his daddy,” Ms. Royce said.

Ms. Chenier nodded. “Junior did his hitch in real divinity school. Jimmy is a mail-order kind of guy with enough Bible reading and natural gloss to smooth over the rough edges.”

“You think the reverend could have nailed his son to that tree?”

The two women did another mute exchange of information.

Ms. Royce delivered the verdict. “Possibly. But don’t bet your investment portfolio.”

Ron looked at them, sighed and stood up.

“Thank you, ladies. I appreciate your help.”

He started to leave, but Ms. Royce called out to him.

“You didn’t ask if Jimmy was having sex with us.”

“I don’t think that’s relevant to the case.”

“You’re not personally curious?” Ms. Chenier asked. “Like maybe did all three of us get it on together?”

“I have too great a respect for privacy to even wonder,” Ron answered. “But there is one question you can answer for me, if you don’t mind.”

“What’s that?” the women asked in unison.

“You ladies didn’t need affirmative action to get into UCLA, did you?”

Ashanti Royce and DaChelle Chenier collapsed in gales of laughter.

“I didn’t think so,” Ron said, leaving.