A Murder In Passing (12 page)

“Thanks, Sam. I really appreciate you springing me from this place for a few hours.”

“Thank you. I appreciate the help. You make a good case for the shot coming from across the meadow.”

“That's what I would've done. Good sun position, no twigs or branches to deflect the bullet. Distance far enough to keep the shooter out of sight and allow for the slug staying in the body.” He paused. “I guess we don't know the angle of penetration.”

“Why's that important?”

“It could give us a more precise elevation difference between shooter and target. Maybe support the theory that the shooter was on the higher ground. And we might know if the victim was coming or going from his car.”

“Wouldn't that depend upon whether he parked facing in or out of the meadow?”

“Yeah. You're right. But it would be nice to know.”

“Why?”

Jason looked at me like I was overlooking an elephant sitting on the hood. “Wouldn't that help you know if the killer had been in place ahead of time, either luring the victim to the site or anticipating his arrival? Otherwise, he probably followed him there and found a shooting spot where he had a clear but distant view, particularly if he wasn't sure from what direction his target would be returning.”

I just stared at him.

“What?”

“Jason, I'm the professional investigator.”

His face fell. “Sorry. Guess you knew all that.”

“Here's what I know. That was very good thinking. But I outrank you. Didn't you learn in the army not to make a superior officer look stupid?”

He grinned. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Because I'm perfectly capable of looking stupid all by myself.”

Chapter Twelve

Wall Street. The name has become synonymous with greed, corruption, and cronyism. An environment that fostered the fleecing of America and made the robber barons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries look like altar boys.

But not Wall Street in Asheville, North Carolina. Only a few blocks from the Pack Library, the short street of shops and restaurants begins at Asheville's triangular Flat Iron Building and runs along the edge of a city hill. Buildings on the lower side have their first story on Patton Avenue while their Wall Street entrances actually open to the second floor.

At five-thirty on Tuesday afternoon, Nakayla and I strolled hand in hand past the ever-present street musicians to one of our favorite Wall Street dining spots, Cucina24.

Nakayla had spent the afternoon in the library and an early supper sounded like the perfect way to swap information about the day's discoveries. The restaurant was not yet crowded and the maitre d' led us to a table by the rear window overlooking Patton Avenue thirty feet beneath us. He handed Nakayla a menu but she waved it off.

“I want a glass of Chianti and the wild mushroom pizza.”

“Mushrooms?” I rolled my eyes. “Really?”

She nodded toward the wood-fired oven visible behind the bar. “Sorry. The sight of those flames gets me every time.”

The maitre d' extended the menu to me. “We have dishes without mushrooms.”

I lifted my hands. “I surrender. When I see her pizza, I'll regret any other selection. Bring two. But change her Chianti into a draft Porter for me.”

“Very good, sir. I'll tell your server. Miracles are her specialty.”

The drinks arrived in less than a minute. I clinked my beer against Nakayla's stemmed glass of red wine. “To our case.”

“Whatever it might be. How was your field trip?”

I gave her a recap of the scout of the Kingdom of the Happy Land, Ed Bell's history of the place, and Jason Fretwell's opinion of where the shooter could have been positioned.

“What do you think about Jason's theory for the time of the shooting?” Nakayla asked.

“Makes sense. If the victim was Jimmy Lang, then he could have been on the property around noon and had plenty of time to pick Lucille up from the nearby camp at two. But why was he there?”

Nakayla ran her finger around the lip of the glass. “That's the question. One of several that we need to ask Lucille.”

“But let's hold off until we've talked to more people.”

“Who do you have in mind?”

“I made a mental checklist of the names I heard over the past two days. John Lang, his son William, this Earl Lee Emory who was the business competitor.” I paused, wondering whom I'd left out.

“Quite the list. Three names. The computing power of your brain is astonishing.”

“I know. Especially since I had to squeeze those names in among all the women madly in love with me.”

Nakayla lifted her glass of Chianti. “Wow. That makes a total of four names. And I can give you a fifth.”

“I'll take it. Who?”

“David Brose. He's the folklorist and curator for the John C. Campbell Folk School.”

“Where's that?”

“Brasstown, North Carolina. Near Murphy. About as far west as you can go and still be in the state.”

“How's Mr. Brose fit in?” I grabbed my beer and leaned back, ready for Nakayla's story.

“I hope he might provide some insight into the missing Doris Ulmann photograph. I spent the afternoon researching her and Julia Peterkin. Everything matched what Lucille and Marsha told us. Julia Peterkin was the mistress of Lang Syne Plantation and she wrote novels in the Twenties. She drew upon her experience with former slaves and the first-generation born into freedom. Her characters, particularly black women, were strong and lusty.”

“I like a lusty black woman.” I tried to wriggle my eyebrows like Groucho Marx but only managed to wiggle my ears. Not exactly a seductive come-on.

“Cute trick. Better if you were wearing a hat.”

“A hat and nothing else.”

“Please. I'm getting ready to eat.” She took a healthy sip of wine. “Anyway, for a while Julia Peterkin was the literary darling of New York and Chicago. Carl Sandburg introduced her to his circle of friends in the Windy City.”

“Heady stuff for a talented woman stuck on a plantation in South Carolina.”

“Yes. She spent a lot of time in New York, had a long running affair with a writer named Irving Fineman, and became good friends with Doris Ulmann. They even shared another lover.”

“This John Jacob Niles?”

“No. Someone else.”

“Speaking of lusty women.” I took a swallow of beer and wiped my lips with the back of my hand. “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Pareé?”

“Funny thing is Julia Peterkin eventually returned to her plantation role. This was shortly after Doris Ulmann died.”

“Would she have had a motive to steal Lucille's photograph in 1967?”

“She might have had a motive, but the means and opportunity would have been a problem. Julia Peterkin died in 1961.”

“Oh. So much for her role in the case.”

Nakayla cocked her head and eyed me like a teacher disappointed in a prized student. “Don't be so quick to dismiss her. We do have the letter she wrote Lucille's grandmother. It's proof the photograph existed and no one can contradict Lucille and Marsha's claim that it disappeared the same time as Jimmy Lang.”

“But what good is that if it doesn't provide another suspect?”

“We have Julia Peterkin's disparaging remarks about John Jacob Niles.” She slid her wine aside and leaned across the table. “And in 1967, he was very much alive.”

I mulled that possibility for a moment, struggling to see how Hewitt Donaldson could concoct a believable story about a man returning to steal a photograph thirty-five years after it was taken. “Where is John Jacob Niles today?”

“Very much dead. But in 1967 he was seventy-five and still composing and performing concerts.”

“Did he have a criminal record?”

Nakayla shook her head. “No, but Julia Peterkin's misgivings seem to have played out during his relationship with Ulmann and afterwards. He was with her during her final illness. She was severely stricken in Asheville. They made it back to a hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where her personal physician was vacationing. Other than the doctor, Niles kept everyone away from her, including her longtime chauffeur. Then he had a total stranger witness a will she allegedly wrote in the hotel leaving him ten thousand dollars and all her photographic images.”

“Nice work if you can get it.”

“Yeah. But Ulmann made it back to New York and had her attorney draw up a proper and more complete will that still included Niles. She died a week later. Then a big struggle ensued as Ulmann's sister and brother-in-law contested the will. They tried to get Julia Peterkin to testify against Niles.”

“Did she?”

“No. As much as she disliked Niles, she wanted no part of dragging Doris Ulmann's name through the mud.” Nakayla fumbled through her handbag in the chair beside her and retrieved a notepad. “I had to jot down one Julia Peterkin quote that she wrote to a friend explaining her decision. I found it in a book called
The Life and Photography of Doris Ulmann.
‘I could not help resenting the man who seized upon her like some horrible leech, never to let go until he had gotten what he aimed from the start to get, her property. I plead with her once, only once, to save herself from his clutches. Poor child, she had not the strength, maybe not even the will to do so. Of course, it seems a pity that a scoundrel should have all her work in his filthy hands, but even that seems better to me than to have her name and reputation smirched more than it already is.'”

Julia Peterkin's visceral loathing of John Jacob Niles flowed through the words. I could hear Hewitt latching onto “leech,” “scoundrel,” “clutches,” and “filthy.” Still, the letter offered no proof of villainy, just the opinion of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist. Making it relevant to the legal case would be Hewitt's job.

“Did Niles wind up with everything?” I asked.

“No. In the end, he received a trust fund. Other money from the estate went to care for Ulmann's photographs and to two institutions, Berea College in Kentucky and the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown.

“Where your Mr. Brose works.”

“Yes. I stepped out of the library and called the school. They said Brose was the expert I should speak with.” She paused as another thought crossed her mind. “I didn't try to reach him because I had an incoming call from Donnie Nettles.”

“The mushroom guy?”

“Yes. He'd heard Lucille had been arrested for murder and wondered if the victim was Jimmy Lang.”

That got my attention. “How did he link the two together?”

“He knows John Lang's son William. William was a year ahead of him in school, but they played sports together. He said William told him his uncle disappeared while William was in Vietnam.”

“So, Nettles grew up here?”

“After he was twelve. His folks came from Kentucky. Then he moved to Asheville when he got out of the army.”

“He told us he was also in Vietnam.”

“That's right. But he and William didn't serve together. William enlisted the year before.”

“Was Nettles in town when Jimmy vanished?”

“No. Especially when I told him the date was July 14th. He said he was at Fort Bragg, only days away from deployment to Vietnam.”

“Did he know about the relationship between Jimmy and Lucille?”

“He said there were rumors, but he never talked about it with William. It wasn't the kind of thing you discussed back then. Do you want to interview him?”

“No. Sounds like we're dealing with nothing more than Nettles' curiosity.”

“Excuse me, these are hot.” The waitress and an assistant set the two pizzas in the center of the table.

My mouth watered at the sight and all unpleasant memories of mushrooms vanished.

“Will there be anything else?”

I pointed to Nakayla's glass. “A Chianti for the lady and I'll have another Porter.”

“Very good, sir,” she said, as if a customer could ever make a bad selection.

Nakayla wriggled her beautiful eyebrows while her elegant ears remained motionless. “Are you playing the role of John Jacob Niles and trying to get me to change my will?”

“Trying to get you feeling lusty.”

“No problem. Nothing like three hours in the library to jump-start a woman's libido.”

I kept quiet, counting on my physical charm to seal the deal.

We chewed our pizza and enjoyed our drinks in silence. Sometimes companionship is felt strongest when no words are spoken.

When my plate was empty, Nakayla said, “You can have my last slice. I'm full.”

Without hesitation, I grabbed it before she could change her mind.

“You know how much money John Jacob Niles was given a year in the settlement of the estate?” she asked.

My mouth was already full of pizza. I shook my head.

“Thirty-five hundred dollars.”

I grunted an “mmm.”

“In 1935, that would have been a comfortable sum, but in 1967?”

I swallowed. “A lot less.”

“I ran an inflation calculation. The dollar was worth less than half. About forty cents.”

I understood where Nakayla was headed. “So, depending upon other income sources, Niles could have been facing a money squeeze. It would explain why, as the photographs grew in value, his need for money could have also grown.”

“It's a possibility,” Nakayla said. “And maybe this photograph was one no one else knew about. Unfortunately, a lot of Ulmann's negative plates were lost in 1954 when Columbia University ran out of storage space and gave the Ulmann Foundation an ultimatum to have them removed. They only found housing for part of the collection. Thousands of plates had to be destroyed. Lucille might have had the only copy of any photographs from the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and Niles might have been the only person alive outside the family who knew about it.”

“What's your next step?”

“I'd like to get a better description of the photograph from Lucille. Then I thought I'd call Berea College, the Getty Museum, Oregon University, the major centers of Ulmann collections. Multiple prints were probably made and one of those institutions should either have it or know of its existence.”

“What about the folk school in Brasstown?”

“I think the school and Mr. Brose warrant a personal visit. Would you like to join me in a excursion to the most western frontier of North Carolina?”

“Yes, but not before we make an excursion to your place in West Asheville. I'm worried about your libido.”

Nakayla laughed. “So, that's your next step? What about the case?”

“See if you can schedule an appointment with David Brose toward the end of the week. I'd like some time to run down our local interviews before then. You can contact the colleges and museums.”

“I'll need to talk to Lucille first.”

“I know. We'll move her up and see her first thing in the morning.”

Nakayla pursed her lips as if my agreeing made her reconsider the idea.

“What?”

“Shouldn't we clear any conversation with Lucille through Hewitt?”

Her question raised an interesting point. Immersing myself in the investigation, I forgot we were no longer working for Lucille and Marsha Montgomery. Our client was Hewitt Donaldson, and if anyone was going to question Lucille, he might want to clearly establish that her answers fell under attorney-client privilege.

“You're right. I'll call him right away.”

Nakayla stuck out her lower lip in a mock pout.

“What now?”