White Hot (24 page)

“Do you know where he’s been living since his release from prison?” Chris asked.

“He’s supposed to be staying with his daddy’s people. That’s according to his parole officer. But I went to see his uncle today and he said Slap left weeks ago. It was his understanding he was staying with friends.” He told them about canvassing several places that afternoon. “Everybody we talked to played dumb, but somebody’s lying. We’ll start making the rounds again tonight.”

“Exercise caution,” Chris said. “He knows you’re looking for him.”

“So he’s been tipped?”

Beck said, “When Chris mentioned Danny, Slap immediately asked if that’s why you were looking for him.”

“Have search warrants handy,” Chris suggested. “You might come across something linking him to Danny.”

Red dashed that optimistic possibility. “I wouldn’t count on Slap being caught with hard evidence. He’s no Einstein, but he’s not that dumb.”

“You’re probably right,” Chris said grimly. “But as sure as I’m standing here, he killed my brother.”

Red promised to keep them updated, then returned to his car and drove away. Chris instructed Dr. Caroe to send him a bill, and the doctor told him he could count on it.

“Not quite the evening out I anticipated,” Chris remarked once they were back in his car, which now sported a dented rear fender and busted taillight. Beck was driving.

“I knew I should have stayed at home.”

“Well, thanks a lot for your concern,” Chris said with feigned affront. “I hazard to think what would have happened if I’d been alone. Of course, you dillydallied long enough for him to gut and fillet me. It was over before you got there.”

“I fell in the ditch,” Beck admitted with chagrin.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Is that what I’m smelling? Stagnant water?”

“I was up to my knees in it.”

Laughing, Chris cradled his arm against his chest like a newborn. “This is beginning to hurt. I wish I’d asked the doc for some pain pills.”

“It does sound like Slap was somehow involved with Danny’s death, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think he was
involved,
I think he murdered him out of revenge.”

“Then…? Never mind.”

“No, what?”

Beck gave a quick shrug. “If he killed Danny, wouldn’t he be trying to avoid us, particularly you? It strikes me as odd that he pursued us tonight.”

Chris shook his head. “You’re thinking like a rational, intelligent person, Beck. Watkins is a moron. He’s itching to let us know that he killed Danny. He’s taunting us. He can’t resist the impulse to gloat. Before he went to prison, I could count on one hand the times we crossed paths. Now suddenly he’s everywhere we are. You think that’s coincidence?”

“I suppose you’re right. He could’ve killed you, Chris.”

“That crossed my mind,” he said grimly. “But not until it was over. When I realized what could have happened, I got weak in the knees.”

Beck turned into the Hoyles’ drive.

“Oh, hell,” Chris groaned. “It didn’t even keep until breakfast.”

All the lights in the house were on. Huff was standing on the gallery, smoking a cigarette, waiting for them.

Well, he’d gone and screwed himself but good.

Slap Watkins kept to the back roads, some of them little more than dirt trails that wound through the swampy terrain. Usually they ended at either a body of slimy, snake-infested water or a cul-de-sac of dense forest, forcing him to backtrack and possibly meet head-on a posse of badges who had picked up his scent. And, speaking of scent, he wouldn’t put it past the Hoyles to sic a pack of search dogs on his ass.

He was no whiz kid when it came to book learning, but he had well-honed fighting skills. He knew how to deal with brute force. You fought back, and if you wanted to win you fought dirty.

When Chris Hoyle had charged him, he was momentarily startled. But his self-defense instincts instantly took over. Reverting to the lessons of a lifetime, forgetting about his tenuous parole and the three years of hard time he’d served prior to the conditional release, he’d slid the knife from his boot.

He berated himself now for not keeping a clearer, cooler head, for drinking too much, for letting that arrogant, rich bastard egg him on. His head was still fuzzy on the details of the fight. He didn’t remember lashing out with his knife, but he must have, because Hoyle was the one who wound up bleeding.

Honest to God,
Slap would later tell anyone who would listen,
I only meant to threaten him with the knife. I never intended to use it.

S
ayre phoned Beck at his office at five o’clock on Monday afternoon.

“Beck Merchant.”

“Sayre Lynch. Are you free this evening?”

“Are you asking me for a date?”

“There’s someone I want you to talk to.”

“Who?”

“Calvin McGraw.”

“My predecessor? What for?”

“I’ll meet you at my motel at six.”

The next thing he heard was the dial tone.

He knocked on the door of her room at precisely six o’clock, and she answered immediately. Her handbag was already on her shoulder. The room key was in her hand.

“I don’t get to come in?”

She closed the door behind her. “I’ll drive.”

The top was down on the rental convertible. The wind played havoc with her hair as they headed out of town, but she seemed not to notice. The air conditioner was blowing at top speed, but it was having little effect on the temperature inside the car. It had been parked in the sun all day, and the upholstery was like a heating pad along Beck’s thighs and back.

“I heard that you and Chris had an exciting Saturday night,” she remarked.

“We tried to keep a lid on it, but news of it spread.”

“How is his arm?”

“Not as bad as it could have been.”

“I can’t imagine Chris having a face-off with anyone in the middle of a public road. What was he thinking?”

“He was thinking that Watkins killed Danny.”

She turned her head sharply. “
Slap Watkins?
Are we talking about the same guy?”

“Your would-be suitor. Danny passed when he applied for a job at the foundry.” He gave her a condensed explanation of why Watkins was considered a viable suspect.

“Do you think that’s credible?” she asked when he finished.

“Credible, yes.”

“Likely?”

“I don’t know, Sayre.” He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with both the scorching upholstery and her question. “The sheriff’s office thought it had enough credibility to want to question Watkins.”

“If you lined up everybody who has a grudge against the Hoyles, the line would stretch for miles. I can think of a hundred people with far more reason to hate them. What about all the employees over the years who’ve been fired? It’s like Watkins’s name was drawn out of a hat.”

“I would tend to agree with you, if not for what he did Saturday night. I saw him cruising past my house. At the time, it didn’t register with me who it was, only that it was a guy on a motorcycle. But it was Watkins. Clearly he followed Chris there, then deliberately tried to run us off the road.

“As of now, he’s facing charges of assault with a deadly weapon whether or not he had anything to do with Danny’s death. He’s had a long and illustrious criminal career. He became visibly nervous at the mention of Danny’s name. Any way you look at it, he’s a dangerous man, and I don’t think he’d get squeamish over committing murder.”

Sayre still didn’t seem convinced. “Because of his criminal record, he makes a convenient scapegoat, doesn’t he?”

“He attacked Chris with a knife.”

“Did you witness the fight?”

“Most of it. When I wasn’t wading my way out of a ditch.”

He told her about his mishap, but the humor of it escaped her. Instead, her lips formed an analytical moue. “If you were on the witness stand in a court of law, could you testify under oath that Watkins intentionally slashed Chris?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Chris had a bleeding arm.”

She pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped the car beneath a magnolia tree that provided shade. Leaving the engine to idle, she turned to him. “Once when we were teenagers—junior high or thereabouts—I was spending the afternoon in the bathroom, primping. Despite there being three other bathrooms available, Chris kept knocking on the door, bugging me for no other reason than that he was bored. Finally I opened the door and told him to get lost and leave me the hell alone.

“He pushed his way into the bathroom and we got into a tussle, slapping each other, kicking. Then suddenly he screamed bloody murder and went tearing out of the room in search of Huff. He claimed that I had attacked him with my curling iron, and he had a nasty burn on his arm to prove it.”

She paused to let him know that she had reached the point of the story. “I wasn’t even holding my curling iron when I opened the door to him, Beck. It was plugged in but lying on the dressing table.”

“You’re suggesting that he intentionally burned himself?”

“Yes. It was worth the pain to get me in trouble.”

“What you’re saying is that Chris may have let himself get conveniently cut by Slap Watkins’s knife.”

She gave him a long look, then steered the convertible back onto the road. “Your encounter with Watkins wasn’t the only buzz today.”

“Where do you hear your ‘buzz’?”

“The beauty shop.”

He tipped down his sunglasses and looked at her wind-wrecked hair.

“I had a pedicure,” she said defensively.

That gave him an opportunity to lean forward and look down the length of her shapely calf to her right foot, which had kept the accelerator at a constant seventy miles an hour since they left the city limits. “Hm. Pretty. That’s not really a color, though. Not like red or pink. What do you call a color like that?”

“Beige Marilyn.”

“Like Monroe?”

“I suppose. I never thought about it. The point isn’t the color of my toenails, Beck. The point is, a salon is the best source of local information. They may be iffy on the exact location of Iraq, but they know with absolute certainty who’s sleeping with whom, who got slashed last Saturday night, and so forth.”

“Is that how you tracked down the jurors of Chris’s trial?”

She shot him an arch look but refused to be thrown. “Actually, no,” she said coolly. “I got that information from the courthouse.” After a short pause, she said, “I wondered if Huff knew about that.”

“He knows. Did you think you could keep your meetings with these people a secret? You’re high profile, Sayre. You may be outfitted in the best the local Wal-Mart has to offer, but you still look like ‘city’ to them. The fact that you’re back after a ten-year absence is big news. But you’re meddling in Huff’s affairs, and that news is even bigger. As much as they’re in awe of you, nobody wants to get on the bad side of Huff Hoyle.”

“I knew when I started calling on those jurors that it would get back to Huff and Chris. And you,” she added, glancing across at him. “I didn’t care.”

“What did you hope this scavenger hunt would yield?”

“An individual with a conscience. One who would admit to either accepting a bribe or knowing that others had.”

She told him about a widow named Foster who had a mentally disabled middle-aged son. She described her meeting with a man who had begun to weep when she asked him about his jury service.

“When I pressed him for more information, his wife asked me to leave. Later I discovered that he was saved from declaring personal bankruptcy a month following Chris’s trial. What a coincidence.” She turned off the highway and drove through a pair of impressive iron gates. The walls on either side of the gates had artificial waterfalls cascading over faux stone with “Lakeside Manor” spelled out in wrought iron.

The retirement community was situated on a man-made lake and flanked by an emerald, eighteen-hole golf course. There was a clubhouse nestled in a grove of sprawling live oaks that had a swimming pool, state-of-the-art workout gym, restaurant, bar, and recreation center. Beck knew this because the amenities were listed on a discreet green sign with white lettering. The residential lots were compact, but the homes on them were elegantly appointed. Paved walkways meandered through the immaculately landscaped complex.

Sayre parked at the clubhouse in the lot designated for visitors but made no move to leave the car. “I hate places like this. They’re so sterile. Everybody is the same, and so is each day. Don’t they get bored?”

“At least they don’t have labor strikes to worry about.”

She turned to him. “So that buzz was accurate, too.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There’s this guy named Nielson.”

“His name was mentioned at the salon. You dropped it the other night. Who is he?”

“Trouble for companies like Hoyle Enterprises.”

“Apparently Billy Paulik’s wife has been in contact with him.”

“And because of that,” Beck said, “he’s called in the heavy artillery. He’s recruited union men to picket and incite our workers to strike.”

“Good for him.”

“It’s going to get ugly, Sayre.”

“It’s already ugly.”

“People will get hurt. No, don’t say it,” he said quickly when he saw that she was about to speak. “I realize you can’t get hurt much worse than Billy was, but that was a tragic accident. Preventable perhaps, but still unintentional. A strike is a war.”

“I hope your side loses.”

He laughed ruefully. “You may get your wish.” Settling his head on the headrest, he looked up through the branches of the tree under which they were parked. “The timing of it stinks. Danny died little more than a week ago, and his death was most likely a homicide. Red Harper is having the devil of a time tracking down a local reprobate who has a taste for Hoyle blood. Meanwhile a detective in his department is still putting his money on Chris as the most likely suspect.

“You’re driving around hither and yon in your bright red convertible, reminding folks that this isn’t the first time Chris has been implicated in a man’s death. You’re sending Huff’s blood pressure into the stratosphere. You’re rooting for the opposing side in a labor dispute. And then there’s the other.”

“What other?”

Without raising his head, he turned it toward her. “I’m having a hell of a time keeping my hands off you.” He looked down at her right leg, where her skirt had ridden high above her knee. “I don’t know which is worse. To be away from you and able only to daydream about touching you. Or to be this close, to see you, and still not be able to act on the impulse.”

He dragged his gaze from her exposed thigh to her face, which he had mistakenly thought would be safer territory. Her turbulent expression disabused him of that. “Mrs. Foster was bribed with a large-screen TV that would keep her disadvantaged son ‘content,’ ” she said tightly. “That man sold his soul to get out of debt.”

Sitting up straight again, Beck sighed. “You know these things for fact? You can prove it?”

“No.”

“You know that these two individuals were among the six who voted for Chris’s acquittal?”

“No.”

He looked at her with reproof. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the widow with the retarded son and the man who barely escaped bankruptcy did accept bribes to vote for Chris’s acquittal. Did it make you feel better to remind them of their malfeasance?”

She looked away and answered a quiet no.

“What edifying effect did it have on their lives for you to hold a mirror up to them, Sayre?”

“Nothing,” she snapped. “You made your point.”

“Then why did you bother these people? What purpose did it serve? Your beef is with Huff and Chris. Why don’t you confront them directly?”

“Why don’t
you
?” she fired back. “Or don’t you want to know the truth about Chris’s trial? You would rather not know that Huff bribed jurors so Chris could get away with murder. Isn’t that right?”

Raising his voice to the level of hers, he said, “If Huff bribed those jurors, maybe it was to make damn sure that his son didn’t get convicted of a crime he did
not
commit. This vendetta of yours—”

“It’s not a vendetta.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

“Integrity. They have none. I hoped that maybe…”

“What?”

She paused, took a breath, then said gruffly, “That maybe you do. That’s why I brought you here.” She nodded toward a row of lakefront homes. “Calvin McGraw lives in the third house from the corner. He consented to talk to me this morning. I was actually surprised that he agreed to see me. Until I arrived. I was shocked by his appearance. He’s aged considerably since I last saw him.”

“Ten years can take their toll.”

“I think most of his aging has occurred in the last three, since he tampered with the jury and saw to it that Chris got off. He’s been ravaged by guilt.”

“He admitted that?”

“Yes, Beck, he did. That was his last big hurrah for Hoyle Enterprises. He signed on as legal counsel soon after Huff assumed control from my grandfather. McGraw did for Huff and the company what you do now. The last thing he did before Huff retired him in favor of someone younger and—”

“More unscrupulous?”

“I was going to say brighter.”

He frowned skeptically but motioned for her to continue.

“After the jury was selected, McGraw looked for those with vulnerabilities.”

“Like a retarded son.”

“Precisely.” She gazed toward the tennis courts, where two couples were playing a lackluster match. “Very perceptive of you to ask if I’d felt good after talking to these people. In all honesty, I felt rotten. Especially after visiting with Mrs. Foster.

“I don’t blame her for seizing an opportunity to improve their life, even with something as vacuous as a television. In her situation, I would have grabbed at it, too. What she did wasn’t selfish. She did it to benefit the son she loves.”

When she turned back to him, her wistful smile turned into a frown of distaste. “But Calvin McGraw did Huff’s dirty work for the most selfish of reasons. There wasn’t any nobility behind what he did. He left Huff’s employ financially fixed for life, able to afford a swank retirement community like this. But the man isn’t living out his days peacefully. He welcomed the chance to unburden himself to me this morning. He admitted everything.”

Beck looked at her for a long moment, then reached for the door handle. “Okay, let’s go hear what Mr. McGraw has to say.”

They took a footpath that followed the shoreline of the lake. McGraw’s house had lacy ironwork grilles in front of the second-story windows, simulating the balconies in the French Quarter. Deplorably so, in Sayre’s expert opinion.