White Hot (36 page)

“You knew Danny was engaged?”

He gave Beck a derisive look. “No matter how clever Danny thought he was being by sneaking around to see her, he should have known Huff would find out.”

“Huff knew, too?”

“And evidently so did you. When did Danny tell you?”

“He didn’t. Sayre did.”

“How did she know?” Chris asked.

“She met his fiancée at his grave site.”

“Was she singing?”

“Singing?”

“That’s what she does, sings at that Holy Roller church. She’s the one who influenced Danny to join the congregation. Convert. Confess. Get baptized. The whole nine yards.

“Huff and I let it go for a while, thinking it was an infatuation that would soon wear itself out. But when we realized how serious it had become, the engagement ring and all, we pinned him down about it.

“We said we were glad he’d finally shown some inclinations toward romance, even marriage, but we disapproved his choice. Huff ordered him to break the engagement, never see her again, and never return to that church.”

“The fiancée didn’t know you and Huff were aware of their engagement.”

“I guess Danny didn’t want to tell her. He hoped to win our approval. Beck, the guy was completely brainwashed. He started
praying
for us. Can you believe that? Dropped to his knees right there by Huff’s recliner and started praying out loud for our salvation. He went on for ten minutes about how we needed to be washed clean of our sin and iniquity. I thought Huff was going to have a stroke.”

Beck’s heart was thudding. “Danny wanted to come clean about Iverson, didn’t he?”

“Pardon me?”

“That was the obstacle, the cause of his emotional turmoil. Danny couldn’t marry this woman he loved until he had purged his conscience and confessed his sin against Gene Iverson. Except he couldn’t do that without fingering you and Huff. Danny knew that Huff had killed Iverson and—”

“Huff did no such thing.” Chris got up and poured himself another drink. “If I keep this up, I’ll be drunk by lunchtime. Can’t see that it matters, though.” He motioned toward the windows. “It’s not a workday.”

He sat back down and looked at Beck. Beck stared back at him. Finally, Chris broke a slow smile. “You’re just itching to know, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll tell you. It was an ac-ci-dent,” he said, emphasizing the syllables.

“You?”

Chris made an offhand gesture. “I followed Iverson out of the meeting that night. I confronted him in the employee parking lot. I had taken a hammer with me, just to give some punch to my warning that he keep his mouth shut about the union and stop making trouble.

“The fool charged me like a bull, forcing me to fight back. I was only trying to protect myself. I don’t remember hitting him that hard, but next thing I know, I’m holding a bloody ball-peen and he’s got a hole in his head the size of a half-dollar.

“
Shit,
I’m thinking.
Shit!
I panicked. I ran back into the plant and got Huff. I was scared somebody was going to come along and see Iverson lying there, but it was between shift changes, so no one was in the parking lot.

“Huff calmly assessed the situation. He believed me when I told him that it had been self-defense, but who needed an inquest, he asked. No, he said, the fastest solution to the problem would be to make the body disappear. Which was a smart decision. If the DA had seen that hole in Iverson’s skull, he might have been able to make a more convincing case against me.

“Anyhow, Huff told me where to bury the body, and how to do it, and recruited Danny to help me. Meanwhile he and Red Harper cleaned up the mess in the parking lot and took care of Iverson’s car. You know, now that I think on it, I never asked what happened to it. Hm.”

“Where did you bury him?”

Chris chuckled. “You’re my lawyer, Beck. You can’t divulge anything I confide in you. But some things I’m not completely comfortable telling you.” He gazed at Beck with a mix of amusement and vexation. “Stop looking at me like that. It’s not like I meant to kill him. He was dead and nothing was going to change that. I got on with the rest of my life. Of course I had to go through the trial, which was a pain, but it worked out all right.”

“You never really feared any consequences, did you, Chris? Because you’d seen Huff get away with killing Sonnie Hallser.”

“Hallser?” He frowned as though trying to place the name. “I was just a kid. I barely remember that.”

“You’re lying, Chris. You were there. You saw what happened, and it made a lasting impression on you.”

He leaned back and placed his arms along the top of the sofa as though inviting Beck to talk.

Beck got up and began to pace. “Those days, employees worked two ten-hour shifts, with a four-hour break in between for maintenance and so forth. Huff was about to change that. Go to three eight-hour shifts, eliminating that important time for inspections and repairs. That was the substance of his quarrel with Sonnie Hallser.”

“He was the workers’ appointed spokesperson,” Chris said. “He was a stand-up kind of guy. Everybody liked him, even Huff. The problem with Mr. Hallser was, he took his role of employee representative too seriously. He was close to sounding pro-union. I think he might have been working as a spy for the union all along.”

“Huff had made up his mind about changing the shifts and nobody was going to talk him out of it,” Beck said, thinking out loud. “The shop floor was deserted except for Hallser, who was working on that machine above the sandpit. Huff confronted him. They quarreled. Huff pushed him into that machine and started it up, and you saw it. That man got crushed so severely he was cut almost in half. You saw that, didn’t you, Chris?”

“How could I have seen that, when I wasn’t even there?”

“Huff told me you were.”

Chris was taken aback by that. “Really? Well, even if I was, I didn’t see anything.” He tilted his head and gave Beck a long look. “Why are we talking about this? And why do you seem upset?”

“Every attorney wants his client to be innocent.”

“Oh, I doubt that. If everyone was innocent you’d be out of business. Actually I’m relieved that you finally know about Iverson. We shouldn’t keep secrets from each other. Otherwise, how will there ever be any trust between us?”

“You didn’t trust me with the secret of Danny’s engagement.”

“True. I hate that I let that cat out of the bag.”

“Because your and Huff’s problem wasn’t just the young woman’s piety. It was Danny’s determination to confess.”

Chris swore beneath his breath. “He was going to blab to Jesus and the whole world what happened to Iverson.”

“Do you realize what this means to your case?”

“Case? What case? There’s no longer a
case,
Beck. Remember Wayne Scott’s humble apology for suspecting me? If I’d been wearing a ring he would have kissed it.”

“You had a powerful motive for killing your brother.”

Chris shook his head and laughed softly. “You think
I
killed Danny?”

“Did you?”

“I had an alibi. Sweet Lila, remember.”

“
Did you?
” he shouted.

“No, Beck. I didn’t.”

Chris was smiling when his cell phone rang. He answered it, his smile turning into a frown. “What is it, George?” He listened. “Right now? How long will it take? All right,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll be right down.”

Chris disconnected. “He’s nervous about the inspection on Monday and wants me to look at the drive belt on that conveyor while it’s running, see if I think it’ll pass muster. His ass is on the line because he signed off on the repair of it. He’s afraid he’s going to be left holding a bag of shit, and he’s right. But until we fire him I guess I’d better humor him. I’ve got the only key to that machine, so I’m the only one who can restart it. I knew this lockdown-tagout nonsense would be a pain.”

“We were talking about your motive for murder,” Beck said.

“No,
you
were. Slap Watkins was the culprit. It’s a dead subject. Get over it, Beck.”

And to Beck’s consternation, Chris walked out.

P
arked at the Dairy Queen, eating a Blizzard with peanut M&M’s, Huff laughed with self-derision as he pulled the .357 pistol from his belt and carefully laid it on the passenger seat.

He supposed toting the weapon had made him look a bit ridiculous, but he would have had no compunction about shooting Slap Watkins right between the eyes. It was a foregone conclusion that he had to die.

Now that he was in the morgue, the whole mess was over and done with.

Huff thought that maybe a visit to Danny’s grave would be appropriate. He hadn’t been to the cemetery since the funeral. Yes, he would go today and take flowers.

Wouldn’t be too long, he would be attending Red’s funeral, he thought sadly. He was going to miss—

And that was when he remembered the envelope Red had left with him that morning. He’d stuffed it into his pants pocket when Selma informed him that Chris was at the fishing cabin. In his haste to warn Chris, and with all that had come afterward, he hadn’t thought of it again until now.

With Slap Watkins no longer a worry, and Chris in the clear, he could confront the issues at Hoyle Enterprises with singular concentration and renewed energy. The OSHA inspection had supplanted Charles Nielson as his main concern, but Nielson had been integral to the shutdown, and by God, he was going to pay for that.

Huff removed the envelope from his pocket. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded like a business letter. This morning when he’d asked Red what he’d unearthed about Nielson, he had replied, “It’s all in there.”

But if this was all the information Red and his contacts in New Orleans had obtained, it was precious little. To Huff’s disappointment, there were only a few typewritten lines on the sheet.

“Dammit.” Red was old and sick, and his work had become sloppy.

Huff had hoped for more to work with, a character flaw or bad habit that would leave Nielson vulnerable to attack. Was he a gambler, tax evader, drug user? Did he like kiddie porn? Did he have multiple DUIs? Huff was searching for something in the man’s life that, if exploited or exposed, could destroy his credibility.

Huff put on a pair of reading glasses, which he used only when no one was around, and read what Sheriff Harper had uncovered about his nemesis.

Seconds later, a family van was nearly driven off the road by Huff Hoyle as he sped out of the Dairy Queen parking lot. He had dropped the paper cup with what was left of his Blizzard onto the floorboard. As it rolled with the erratic motions of the speeding car, it slung a sticky, melting goo onto the floor mats.

By the time Huff reached Hoyle Enterprises, that goo had turned to milky liquid. Huff didn’t think twice of it. But he remembered to get the pistol from off the passenger seat.

Sayre was latching her overnight bag when someone knocked on the motel room door. She pushed aside the window drape and looked outside. “Red?” Alarmed, she opened the door. “What’s happened now?”

“I didn’t mean to scare you, Sayre. Nothing’s happened, far as I know.” He removed his hat. “Can I come in?”

She waved him inside and indicated the packed bag. “You just caught me. I’ve booked a flight this afternoon out of New Orleans.”

“You’re going back to San Francisco?”

“That’s where I belong now.”

“I thought maybe you and Beck…”

“No.”

This morning she had drawn a line in the sand. He had remained on the opposing side of it with Huff and Chris. As she was packing, she had vacillated between tossing the strand of Mardi Gras beads he’d bought her into the nearest trash can or taking it with her. Ultimately she had wrapped it in a T-shirt and placed it in her bag. One memento. She allowed herself that.

“I won’t be seeing Beck again before I leave.”

“Huh. Well.” Red looked around the room as though at a loss as to what to say next. When his eyes finally reconnected with hers, she noticed the pinched look of pain at the corners of them. “Have you talked to Huff this morning?” he asked.

Rather than explaining what he was doing here, his questions were becoming more perplexing. “Only at the fishing camp.” Again, he seemed to zone out. Several moments ticked by. Finally she said, “I haven’t got much time, Red. What did you want to see me about? Is it something to do with Danny? Watkins?”

“No. That’s pretty much wrapped up.”

“Which is why I can go home. I vowed to stay in Destiny until I knew what had happened to Danny. I can return to my life now.”

He nodded, but it was an absentminded motion, as though he really hadn’t heard her and didn’t really care what her plans were. He cleared his throat. “Sayre, I take full responsibility for my own actions and won’t lay blame for them on anybody else’s doorstep. I would never double-cross Huff. I want you to understand that.”

She indicated that she did, when in fact she didn’t have a clue what he was trying to say.

“We colluded on lots of things I’m not proud of. At first it seemed harmless enough to bend a few rules, then, I don’t know, I just got caught up in it. Like in a net. I couldn’t find my way out.” He raised his hands helplessly as though asking for her understanding and absolution. “But what’s done is done. I can’t go back and fix things.

“But the future is something else,” he continued. “I’m telling you this because I want somebody else to know the way things are in case…well, in case something bad happens and I’m not around to give the truth of it.”

“Truth of what? Tell me what?”

“Beck Merchant is Charles Nielson.”

The room seemed to tilt. “What?”

“I had some guys I know in New Orleans—private investigator types—checking Nielson out for Huff. Fact is, there is no Charles Nielson, just somebody made up by Beck.”

She lowered herself to the arm of the chair, the nearest place to sit down.

“Now, I don’t know why he worked up such an elaborate charade,” Red said. “Don’t really want to know. But my last official duty to Huff was to give him that information this morning.”

“Oh my God.”

“Out at the fishing camp, Huff didn’t let on like he knew yet. But anytime now, he could open the envelope I left with him and read what’s inside. When he does, I don’t know how he’ll react.”

She shot to her feet. “Like hell you don’t, you gutless old bastard.”

She shoved him out of her way and ran for the door. The tires of the rental convertible smoked on the hot asphalt as she pulled onto the highway. She leaned on her horn if another motorist dared to get in her path as she sped toward her old home, thinking that was where Chris would probably want to go once they left the camp.

She couldn’t even consider the implications of Beck’s being the elusive Nielson, or his reasons for scamming them all. Her only thought was to prevent Huff from finding out before she could warn Beck.

She shook the contents of her handbag into the passenger seat and rifled through it in search of her cell phone, before remembering that she had left it charging after placing a call to her office to alert her assistant of her return.

Her foot pressed harder on the accelerator. She almost spun out in loose gravel when she took a corner too fast, nearly ran over a flock of buzzards that were picking at the carcass of an opossum on the road, and jarred her teeth when she crossed a railroad track doing eighty-five.

Still, it seemed to take forever to get there, and when she did, she moaned as she saw no car parked out front. She stopped the car so suddenly, she smelled the scorched rubber of the skidding tires. She alighted at a run, without bothering to cut the engine or close the car door.

As she raced up the steps to the gallery, the toe of her shoe caught on one and she tripped, catching herself on her hands, painfully scraping her palms. She stumbled up the last couple of steps and lunged across the deep porch. The screened door was unlatched and the front door unlocked. She barreled through them. Selma was coming downstairs with a laundry basket under her arm.

“Have you seen Beck? Where’s Huff?”

“Last I knew, Huff was on his way to the fishing camp. Haven’t seen Beck at’all. What’s happened?”

“Do you think they’re at the plant?”

“I—”

“Call Beck on his cell phone,” Sayre shouted over her shoulder as she raced back to the door. “Tell him Huff knows about Charles Nielson. Have you got that, Selma? Huff knows about Charles Nielson.”

“Got it, but—”

“Tell him, Selma.”

Then she was off again, driving like hell toward the dormant smokestacks.

Beck ignored his ringing cell phone as he clambered down the stairs to the shop floor.

It had taken him only a few moments to put all the fragments together. When he did, the whole picture became stunningly clear.

Chris’s earnest claims that he hadn’t murdered his brother were true. He wasn’t guilty of loading the shotgun, sticking it into Danny’s mouth, and pulling the trigger.

That didn’t mean he was innocent.

When Beck reached the conveyor, George Robson was standing close behind Chris, who was leaning into the machine, inspecting the faulty drive belt in operation. Neither had on a hard hat or safety glasses. Neither had learned a damn thing. But then Chris believed himself invincible—with reason.

Beck had to speak loudly to make himself heard. “Chris!”

George jumped as though he’d been shot and spun around. His pink jowls were flabby with shock. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

Chris straightened up and dusted off his hands. His eyes were on Beck, but he spoke to George. “We can always blame the maintenance man for a lousy repair job, George. In any case, there’s not much we can do about it today. Go on home.”

George seemed to be gulping for oxygen like a fish out of water. He was sweating copiously and wringing his pudgy hands. Without a word, he turned quickly and left them. Beck watched him climb the metal staircase to the Center and disappear through the door.

“Poor George.” Chris hit the machine’s kill switch, and it stopped. “He’s more nervous than I’ve ever seen him. He sees the handwriting on the wall.”

“You had Slap Watkins kill Danny for you,” Beck said without preamble. “While you were with Lila, creating an alibi, Watkins went to the fishing camp, where you had told him Danny would be, and he killed him. You weren’t lying when you said you hadn’t done it. You had somebody else do it for you.”

Huff checked Beck’s office first. Always conscientious Beck. Always working overtime Beck. Always looking out for the interests of Hoyle Enterprises Beck.

Fucking Beck. Cheating Beck. Lying Beck.

Beck’s office was empty. So was Chris’s. But hearing machinery running in the otherwise silent plant, Huff went to the windows above the shop floor. He looked down and saw the two of them in conversation, his son and the Judas who had betrayed them. Huff didn’t think about the irony of using a biblical metaphor. His single thought was of destroying the person who had tried his damnedest to destroy him.

Hefting the pistol, he left the office and headed for the back stairs, but when he reached the shop floor, he cautioned himself not to lose his head, not to go out there with pistol blazing.

As he had told Beck the week before, Nielson was a lousy strategist. The best attack was a surprise attack.

Chris laughed softly. “Slap was very upset with Danny for not hiring him, you know. He took it up with me one night in the parking lot of the Razorback.”

“Where you told him you had a job for him.”

Chris regarded him impassively.

“You told Slap to make it look like a suicide. It might have been convincing, except that Watkins forgot to remove Danny’s shoe. That one mistake made Deputy Scott question that it was a suicide. Never thinking that you would be implicated, you were desperate to do something, so you advanced the idea that Slap Watkins was the culprit and was trying to frame you.”

Beck’s mind was skipping across the events of the past two weeks like a stone over water. “What I can’t figure is why Watkins didn’t hightail it out of town the moment the deed was done. Why did he stick around? Why would he force that encounter with you on the road, and that night at the diner…”

He looked at Chris as though willing him to fill in the blanks, but Chris’s implacable eyes gave away nothing.

“Wait,” Beck said, “I just remembered something. When Watkins came into the diner, I remember him looking surprised to see us there. But it was only me he was surprised to see, wasn’t it? He said he was there for a business…Ah,” he said with sudden enlightenment. “The payoff. He was meeting you there to get his money.

“That was the night of Billy’s accident. I’d just come from the hospital. Our unscheduled meeting in the diner prevented you from conducting your transaction with Watkins. No wonder he was so angry that night on the road. He still hadn’t been paid. He was getting antsy. The heat was shifting from you onto him. In desperation, he went to Sayre and got Scott focused on the fratricide angle. That brought things to a head, so you arranged for a meeting with Watkins at the camp this morning.”

Chris grinned. “I bet you aced law school, didn’t you? You’re actually very sharp. But, Beck, the only thing I would swear to under oath is that Slap Watkins came crashing through the door of the cabin, waving a knife and telling me he was going to kill his second Hoyle and how giddy he was at the prospect.”