Nailed (37 page)

It’d all started when his cousin, Deacon Meeker, had called him and asked if Didi might find something for him to do real soon. His gig with Jimmy was going south; the faithful were getting tight with a dollar. Everybody’s standard of living would start to suffer real soon.

Up ’til then, Didi had only talked to his cousin, Deacon, maybe once a year. And he hadn’t given Jimmy Thunder any serious thought in a
long
time. But right when Deacon called, Didi was a little strapped for cash himself. He decided it would be a shame to let a money machine like the Reverend Thunder’s fall by the wayside. If it could no longer do what it was originally built for, maybe it could be turned to another good purpose. Say, washing some serious amounts of dirty money.

While working out the plan in his mind, Didi had been introduced to these two whip-smart colored gals out of L.A., Ashanti Royce and DaChelle Chenier. Stone foxes both of them. Best of all, they were flexible in their thinking about what was right and wrong. Once he’d met the ladies, Didi’s plan fell into place.

What he’d do was become a money-laundering broker. Not work for any one outfit. But offer his services to anyone who had some sizable funds they needed to have cleaned and pressed. When a customer came along, DaChelle with her background in criminology, and computers, could hack into the right data bases and find out if there was too much heat on a potential customer. And from all her dealing with cops, she’d be sure to smell an undercover pig a mile away. Ashanti, the demographer, knew the U.S. census reports like the back of her hand. She could generate endless
contributions
to Jimmy Thunder’s ministry from folks who’d be astounded to learn that they’d made them. Not that they ever would.

Jimmy, he’d get a healthy cut, attention from the ladies, and Deacon Meeker would be on hand to keep an eye on things for Didi. Everything had been working out without a hitch — until Junior Cardwell had popped up out of the blue. That boy had started to put a serious crimp in things.

Didi had never actually seen anyone saved from himself before. Certainly not anyone as avaricious as Jimmy Thunder. But Junior was actually starting to turn his old man around. Made the reverend truly think about giving up all the good things he’d worked so hard to con out of the suckers. Got him to think about doing what was
right.

But then ol’ Junior got himself nailed to a tree. Which just went to show, Didi thought, that no good deed goes unpunished.

Oops. He’d let another cliché slip by, even if he didn’t say it out loud.

Didi looked over at Gayle. Sure enough, he decided, her time was just about up. She’d gotten all of Colin Ring’s notes and his computer out of the Englishman’s hotel room for Didi. And try as he might, he couldn’t think of another thing she could do for him.

Not even one last bump ’n’ grind. He knew from experience that when you got a gal down for one last ride and she knew what was coming — and somehow they all did — why, it just wasn’t fun for anybody. So, he’d spare Gayle that much.

He’d just take her inside, do her quick, and leave her there with ol’ Colin Ring.

Nobody knew he’d been staying at Gayle’s house. He’d leave nothing behind to connect him to either killing. That smartass cop who’d popped up and taken his picture on the way out of Jimmy’s place might have thought he had something. But what he had was the way Didi
didn’t
look.

That dark guy with the gleaming bald head and the earring might get blamed for stealing Gayle’s car, but Didi would bet they wouldn’t have the Porsche on the stolen auto wire before he could drive it down to Reno. Once he got there, he’d just leave the keys in the car and the door unlocked. It’d be gone in two minutes.

Wouldn’t take him a whole lot longer to catch the first plane out to anywhere far away. Then he’d make a connection to New Orleans. He’d let his hair grow out and his skin color fade. Before you knew it, the guy who’d been photographed with ol’ Gayle, he’d be gone for good.

Jimmy’s lawyer, Marcus Martin, would have to make a permanent departure in the near future, too. But killing him would take a little planning. Couldn’t just do the man inside of the Reverend Thunder’s house. What Didi had to figure out was how to get Martin back to L.A. alive and then ice him in some untraceable way. He didn’t know how to accomplish that yet, but he was confident something would come to him.

It always did.

They were pulling up to Gayle’s house when Didi stopped her from pressing the garage door opener. “Leave it outside, baby. I got another little errand to run.”

Gayle looked at Didi without saying a word. But somehow she knew that this irregularity — not driving into the garage as usual — meant it was all over for her. Didi was going to kill her now. She was as certain of it as she’d ever been of anything. Worse still, she was sure Didi knew she knew.

As Gayle brought the car to a stop in front of her garage door, her hands froze on the steering wheel. Her whole body started to shake. Her shoulders hunched as if she were a leaf blown from a tree, curling in on itself. She wanted to scream, but could make only small mewing sounds. Tears slipped from her eyes and scalded her cheeks.

Didi reached over, turned off the engine and took the key. He got out of the car, walked around to her side and opened the door for her. He waited a moment in silence. When she didn’t come out, he spoke softly.

“Come on, baby. I promise: It’ll be easier than going to the dentist.”

Christ, she thought, the bastard even had to come up with a great exit line. But was a knack for dialogue really a basis for a relationship? Was it enough reason to
die
for a man?

“Come on now,” he repeated, his voice a little harder this time.

To her great shame, she obeyed him. What the hell was wrong with her? He was going to kill her whatever she did. Shouldn’t she at least make it
hard
for him?

Getting to her feet, wobbling on one three inch heel and one sheared-off flat, she looked Didi in the eye and said, “I hope your dick falls off, you trip on it, and fall into a tree chipper.”

Feeling compassionate, Didi replied, “Sure, baby. That’s just what’ll happen.”

But it wasn’t.

From the woods at the edge of Gayle’s property came a growl. Two luminous feral eyes appeared. Didi and Gayle reached the same conclusion at the same time: mountain lion.

But Gayle’s thinking leaped one step ahead. She knew what Didi would try to do here. Exactly what he’d done to her with Colin Ring. He’d try to throw her at the lion. Only this time she wasn’t going to let him.

Before Didi could grab her, Gayle raised the foot wearing the remaining spiked heel. As he grasped her shoulders, she raked the heel down his shin and directly into his instep. Didi bellowed in pain, releasing her and bouncing up and down on his good leg. Gayle ran out of her shoes and around the Porsche. She dived into the passenger seat, and before Didi could get his bearings, she pulled both doors shut and locked them.

Didi looked at the lion. It had edged forward, but only a little. So, the killer peered into the car at Gayle. His face wasn’t contorted with rage, as she’d expected. It registered only disappointment, mild disapproval. Didi reached around to the small of his back, and brought out his gun.

He took one more look behind him — and now the lion was nowhere to be seen.

“You want to come on out, baby?” he asked.

Gayle shook her head. If he wanted to kill her, he would have to do it the hard way. The killer shrugged. He held up the car key, let her look at it, and inserted it into the lock. But with Gayle’s finger holding the button down, he couldn’t get the door to open.

Now,
Didi looked angry. He’d run out of patience. He turned to face the car squarely and raised his gun to shoot Gayle.

Which was when the lion leaped off the roof of Gayle’s house and took Didi. Slammed his face smack up against the driver’s side window, which, thank God, didn’t shatter. Gayle heard the growl of the beast, the scream of the man, and the snapping of Didi’s spine. A jet of bright red blood shot out of Didi’s neck as an artery was severed. It splattered the Porsche.

Gayle didn’t recoil. She watched in rapt fascination, trying hard to remember every detail of sight and sound, whispering fiercely, “Kill him, kill him,
kill him!”

The lion needed no encouragement. It finished the job quickly. Then with its face painted in Didi’s blood it stood on its hind legs and looked in at Gayle. It pushed the Porsche with its front paws, as if to tip it over. But the sports car was too heavy, too well balanced. The big cat gave Gayle a grunt. Not really angry, just disappointed in her the way Didi had been.

But the mountain lion didn’t know how to fire a gun, so it took Didi DuPree’s mangled neck in its mouth, flipped his body on its back, and carried the killer into the woods to eat.

Gayle told the departing predator, “If you need an antacid, pal, it’s on me.”

Hey, she thought, that was a pretty good exit line, too.

Chapter 48

Thursday

Ron and Corrie were a tangle of interlocked arms and legs when the phone rang. Their eyelids snapped open in unison, as if they’d been choreographed. Extracting circulation-deprived limbs from the jumble, however, was managed with far less artistry. Both of them saw that the morning sun had peeked over the horizon. The day was still young, but they were already late to meet it.

The phone rang again.

“Oh, God!” Corrie exclaimed. “That has to be the deputy chief wondering where the hell I am. Quick, pick up the phone,” she instructed Ron. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

Ron watched her scurry nude into the bathroom. Then he answered the phone.

It was Oliver, all right, but he wanted to talk to the chief, not the game warden.

“Found Colin Ring,” he said without preamble.

“Where?” Ron asked.

“Dead in a lady screenwriter’s house.”

Gayle Shipton. The name clicked into Ron’s head from last night.

“Is she dead, too?”

That was when Oliver threw him a curve.

“No, she’s just fine. But she says that DuPree character you wanted is dead.”

Ron was stunned. “She killed him?”

“Nope. It was the mountain lion. Finally nailed somebody.”

“Jesus!” Ron got Gayle Shipton’s address from Oliver.

Then he ran into the bathroom and jumped into the shower with Corrie.

But it was purely a matter of hygiene.

Ron raced to Gayle Shipton’s house with Corrie right behind him in her 4x4. Officers Santo Alighieri and Divine Babson had been reached just before they ended their shift, and they were at the Shipton house when Ron and Corrie arrived. Oliver was there with Dr. George Ryman, the town’s volunteer medical examiner, and two more patrol officers.

The lot of them met with Gayle Shipton on the balcony outside her living room. Alighieri and Babson identified her as the woman they’d seen last night at the Thunder estate. They also confirmed that the Porsche outside was the car they’d seen. Ron thanked the officers and dismissed them. He told the other patrol officers to wait outside and hold at bay any media types who showed up.

Dr. Ryman did the obvious and pronounced Colin Ring dead. Then he, too, went outside to wait for Officer Benny Marx to wrap up his work behind the Reese house where the bloody hammer had been found. The crime scene specialist hoped to make it to the Shipton place within the hour.

Gayle Shipton admitted picking up Didi DuPree in a cafe. She said she’d been interested in some recreational sex. But once she got him home, he’d pulled a gun and told her she was his
slave.
If she didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he would kill her.

In response to Ron’s question, Gayle said, yes, Didi had shaved his head and darkened his skin. He was the man with her last night. They’d gone to the Thunder estate right after Didi had killed Colin Ring. He’d forced her to lure the Englishman to her house so he could have her gain access to the key to his hotel room, and steal all of Ring’s material on the book he was writing about Jimmy Thunder.

Gayle detailed the blackmail plan against Jimmy Thunder she’d heard at the reverend’s estate last night — but, no, she hadn’t heard what it was Didi had wanted from the man.

Finally, she described how Didi had planned to kill her when they returned to her house last night. But the mountain lion had intervened.

Corrie spoke up. “I know you must have been terrified, but did you notice if the animal had any distinctive markings?”

Gayle recalled without difficulty that the lion had a scar over its left eye.

She’d written down everything she’d seen and heard as soon as she’d run into her house.

She’d also copied to a flash drive everything that had been on the hard disk of Colin Ring’s laptop computer, and photocopied all of his handwritten notes on her office copier. Then she’d mailed the works to her agent in L.A. She’d phoned him, told him what had happened, and he promised that he’d have an auction set up for the rights to her story by lunchtime.

But Gayle didn’t mention any of this to the police. She simply told them that all the material Didi had forced her to take from Ring’s hotel room was down in her car. They were welcome to it.

She further said she had a project to finish with a crushing deadline. If they didn’t mind, she was going to complete it down in Palm Springs. She didn’t say specifically at the Betty Ford Clinic. But since she had felt it best to flush all the drugs she’d had on hand before she called the cops, she thought she might as well check in now.

Gayle gave Ron her attorney’s name and number in case they needed to reach her. She was pleased the chief was sophisticated enough to accept that. It made her think maybe she should have a cop around to give her technical advice on her new project.

But someone younger.

Ron, Oliver and Corrie regrouped outside of the Shipton house. The two cops glanced up to make sure Gayle wasn’t eavesdropping from her balcony. She wasn’t. But out of professional paranoia, they spoke quietly anyway.

“So,” Oliver asked Ron, “knowing the woman makes up bullshit for a living, how much of that story do you think we ought to believe?”

“The general outline. She admitted she picked DuPree up for sex. That was supposed to make us think she was being honest, had nothing to hide.”

“She kept referring to the man as Didi,” Corrie offered. “Doesn’t sound like she was much of a slave to me.”

Oliver barked out a short laugh. “Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to having her pick any cotton.”

Ron smiled thinly. “Okay, let’s look at what we have here. Ring’s dead upstairs, and who knows how much of DuPree is left out in the woods. Just because they’re both dead, though, does that mean we like either of them any less as Isaac Cardwell’s killer?”

“I want to read Ring’s notes and manuscript before I tell you how I feel about him,” Oliver said. “But I like DuPree better right now. Isaac Cardwell was about to wreck DuPree’s scam, and we all saw upstairs the man liked to exercise his right to bear arms.”

Corrie gave a bemused shake of her head.

“What?” Ron asked.

“I was just thinking how ironic it would be,” she said. “DuPree turns out to be your killer, and he gets eaten by the mountain lion? Nobody will ever believe it wasn’t divine retribution. Maybe not even me.”

Ron and Oliver looked at each other. Cops were professional cynics. They’d never admit to sharing such a belief. But they both knew if it worked out the way Corrie had said, Goldstrike would be stuck with its very own legend.

The chief wanted to offer one more possibility, however.

“Part of the blackmail angle DuPree had on Jimmy Thunder, maybe the biggest part for some people, was he’d had homosexual relations in prison. In Ms. Shipton’s word, the good reverend had a
punk.
How do you think Texas Jack might feel about that, if he’d heard about it somehow? Jack was raped in a jail cell as a young man by a black inmate. Then Jimmy Thunder stiffs him for two hundred thousand dollars in poker debts. Then, maybe, Texas Jack finds out the reverend had brutalized a young man the way he’d been assaulted himself. You think that just might set him off?”

Oliver nodded. “Only thing is, if it did, I’d see Jack nailing
Jimmy
to that tree.”

“Unless he knew it would hurt him more to lose his son,” Corrie suggested.

The deputy chief knew deeply it would grieve him to lose his son.

“Could be — if he knew that.”

Ron said, “I’m going to push Sergeant Stanley on finding out where that nail I took from Jack’s place is sold in town. Maybe that will lead to something.”

Just then Officer Benny Marx pulled up, having finished his work at the Reese house. He walked over to his superiors. He told them he hadn’t found any footprints in the area of the hammer, other than those of the tipsters: mother, son and canine. What he had found were marks indicating that the hammer had, in fact, been thrown to its final resting place. The tool was now on its way to the state police lab in Sacramento for analysis.

Benny Marx looked up grimly at the Shipton house. “I used to think I’d never get a chance to practice all the evidence gathering skills I learned. Now, I get nightmares.”

The comment raised a thought in Ron’s mind.

He asked Corrie, “Will you need Officer Marx’s help when you find DuPree’s remains?”

Benny blanched at the thought of going out into the woods. Corrie blanched at the thought of taking him. The deputy chief was enough of a tenderfoot for her.

“Why don’t we just bag the cat first?” she suggested. “The other stuff can wait.”

“Yeah,” Benny agreed fervently.

“You ready, Deputy Chief?” she asked.

“Yes, Mem’sahib,” Oliver replied. But they both grinned as they headed off to Corrie’s 4x4. Officer Marx hurried inside Gayle Shipton’s house in pursuit of nightmares that fell within acceptable limits.

Ron decided it was time to return to the scene of the crime.

The original one.