Authors: Cathy Pickens
I closed the file folder, hiding the photos from view. That was enough for now.
“Where did she—shoot herself? You called it a kill shot.”
“Behind the right ear and the right ear canal, into the brain stem. She died instantly.”
Kill shot
.
“You gonna eat your tomatoes?” He reached for the three bright red wedges decorating my lettuce salad without waiting for an answer.
I picked up my fork and stirred my bleu cheese dressing. The macaroni and cheese smelled good, crusty and brown on top.
A misspent youth, immersed as a young lawyer in medical records, physician textbooks, and photographs of the violence doctors can do to a human body trying to save it—or what an incompetent doctor can do in the name of “practicing” medicine—had
left me able to distance myself from gruesome photos and the aftermath of injury. For some reason, though, I couldn’t as easily separate myself from Neanna’s private and devastatingly final act. Was it because of her sister, because I had a sister?
“Did you look at all of them?”
“No, not quite.” I was still tossing my salad to mix the lumpy dressing. I’d known Rudy since kickball in grammar school. He was good at a lot of things, but he wouldn’t be much help figuring out my emotional reaction to Neanna’s death.
He stared at me, waiting. No food in his mouth or on his fork. “Look at the last ones.”
I put my fork down, flipped the file open, and turned the stack of photos over to begin at the end of the stack. These photos were of the inside of the car trunk. I kept turning until I found the first in the series: a view of the open trunk from several paces away, with each photo moving progressively closer.
Inside the trunk was a battered blue American Tourister hard-sided suitcase. When had those things been popular? Before some wise man put wheels on the bottom and made them small enough that we could lift our own. I remembered the last time my mother’s college roommate came to visit when I was a kid. Her bag, one just like this one, had weighed a ton, full of gifts for Lydia and me.
The suitcase lay open in the trunk, clothes strewn about—something lacy and pink, some jeans, a red sweater, a black bra. I glanced at Rudy. He was chewing now, slowly, watching me.
The last photos were close-ups of the suitcase itself. The blue lining was loose. I studied the close-up shots of the two halves. The lining had faded in spots but didn’t look as though it had rotted or shredded from age or wear.
“The lining was torn out of the suitcase?”
He gestured with his fork. “Great minds thinking alike here.”
He cut off another hunk of crispy fried flounder. It looked better than my “vegetable” plate: carrot salad, lettuce sans tomatoes, bleu cheese dressing, macaroni and cheese, and boiled crookneck squash.
“Where was her purse?”
He bowed his head as if acknowledging that his pupil was on track. “In the trunk. Down in the wheel well. Maybe I didn’t include that photo.”
“Also dumped out and ripped up?”
He nodded, chewing.
“Why would she do that?” I didn’t need to say that out loud.
“I’m guessing we both got a guess.”
“That she didn’t.”
“That’d be my guess.”
I sat a moment, digesting the implications. “Didn’t you say she had no ID?”
“They found it when they worked the trunk. Down under the spare tire.”
“Did you find a scrapbook?”
“No. Should we?”
“She had one with news articles about her aunt’s death. Her sister thought she brought it with her.”
We both sat silent for a moment, then I said, “Back up, Rudy. How come you decided she committed suicide?”
“You’re talking to the wrong person.”
I scooped up a forkful of macaroni. “Suppose you start talking now.”
“You met our new baby detective.”
I covered my mouth with my hand so I could talk around my food. “He’s the one who worked the scene.”
He nodded.
I turned back to the file folder, looking again at those final two shots.
“He’s a detective? He can’t be much younger than you.”
“He’s been to the FBI Academy.” Rudy emphasized the last words with raised hands and eye rolls and a body wiggle that put the disdain in his voice into motion.
“At any age, you wouldn’t have missed a ransacked suitcase.” I cocked my head to the left, toward the file folder beside me.
He shrugged and pushed his jealousy or disgust or whatever was going on with him and the baby detective out of sight as quickly as it had appeared. “Cop years are like dog years,” he said. “They go by quick, age you quick. He’ll learn.”
“Meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, I got L.J. to put me in charge of this. After she saw these, she agreed.”
Sheriff L. J.—Lucinda Jane—Peters had been a high school classmate of ours. If there had been a senior class superlative category for “most likely to break the law,” L.J. would have won hands down, a qualification that surprisingly made her a pretty good sheriff, if you overlooked her tendency to bully people.
“That going to cause more hard feelings when the new kid finds out you squeezed him out of his case?”
“I’ll work with him, but if he messes up, then who the hell cares whose feelings get hurt?”
We ate in companionable silence. I had to rearrange some things in my brain.
“Okay, so what do you have so far? No suicide note, a positive GSR test. The window glass was blown out. No way somebody could’ve shot her from outside, on the driver’s side?”
“Naw. I called the ME after I saw those photos, just to doublecheck. Entry wound is on her right, exit wound on the left.”
“But—” I paused, the significance of the photo of the driver’s side door crystallizing for me. “Explain the glass. If the bullet came from inside the car, wouldn’t the glass fall outside on the ground?”
I knew from experience how much glass a broken car window left and how much vacuuming it took to clean it all up; someone had broken the window in my firm-leased BMW when I worked in Columbia.
“Good eye,” he said. “That attracted everyone’s attention. Most of the broken glass fell inside the car, but the window slopes in slightly, which could explain why it fell inside rather than outside.”
On TV, somebody would gather the glass and glue the whole window back together to check which side showed exit beveling, just to make sure. Maybe Rudy could suggest that to the baby detective. Something to keep him busy.
“Was it her gun?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Stolen in a home robbery in Birmingham four years ago.”
I couldn’t see somebody with Fran’s privileged background buying a hot gun on the street from a fence, but Neanna had lived life closer to the edge, maybe had run with folks who could have gotten her a stolen gun.
“Any word on the tox screen?”
“A little pot. Some alcohol. A lot of Xanax.”
Two thoughts running on different tracks collided in my brain. My emotional first response was,
No, don’t tell me she’d been using. Like mother, like daughter?
The second, more rational response, I asked aloud. “Could she drive on that?” Even if she’d acquired a tolerance, could she navigate unfamiliar mountain roads?
“You’d be surprised the crap some of the folks you meet on the road got in themselves.”
He studied his empty plate for a forlorn moment, then asked, “You see the gun?”
I nodded.
“You ever handle one of those? A .40 caliber?”
“Yeah, once. At the range.” Dang thing almost unhinged my right shoulder.
“That model’s heavier than mine,” Rudy said. He could see he didn’t have to lead the witness any farther.
I lifted my right arm, elbow stuck awkwardly out to the side, an imaginary muzzle pointed at the base of my skull, the spot where a bullet disrupting the medulla oblongata would stop everything. Instantly. Breathing, muscle movement, everything.
“That would be a difficult shot,” I said. The weight of the gun, the angle, her small hands.
He nodded, proud of his pupil.
“Any dessert?” The waitress whisked up our plates, Rudy’s wiped clean, mine only half-eaten.
“Peach cobbler,” Rudy said without pause.
Maylene’s desserts were usually the best thing on the menu, but I wasn’t in the mood, even for warm peach cobbler and rock-hard vanilla ice cream. I turned sideways in the padded booth, my back against the wall and my legs stretched out across the bench seat.
I could feel Rudy staring at me. Was he willing me to say it out loud so he wouldn’t have to commit himself?
I didn’t turn to look at him. “You saying you don’t think she killed herself?”
He slid his ice tea glass back and forth between his hands. “Not saying anything for certain. Just raising questions.”
“Too many questions.”
He glanced at me before his attention fell back to the puddle of condensation spreading from his sweating tea glass.
“It’s worth digging into, don’t you think?” I asked. “Just to make sure? It’s probably suicide, but I’d hate to be wrong.”
He shrugged. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“It bothers me about that window glass on the inside of the car. I can see how that could happen, given the curve of the door, but at the same time . . .”
He nodded.
“You think we could find a car like that? Do an experiment?”
“You been watching too much TV.”
“I was just thinking, Pun’s junkyard probably has a car like that.” Pun was always helping my dad track down parts for my Mustang. He probably wouldn’t ask many questions—or mind if some window glass got broken. “I can check, if you want,” I said.
“Maybe.” Rudy wasn’t going to let himself look too excited—or too committed. Playing it close to his beige uniform shirt? Or was he worried about looking foolish, if Detective Boy found out?
“Do y’all still have her car—Neanna’s?”
“Yeah.” His tone was cautious.
“Can I look at it? Or is it still—whatever?”
“The crime-scene guys have finished with it, if that’s what you mean. But we can’t use it for any kind of experi—”
“No, no. I know that. I just wanted—can I see it?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know why you’d want to.”
I couldn’t quite answer that, even for myself. Whenever I’d tried large civil cases, I’d liked to conduct witness interviews myself, see the scene, touch the evidence, read the original hospital records before they were photocopied—even when I couldn’t in good conscience bill for that time. I liked to know my case, personally.
“I just want to give her sister some small sense of—” Not closure. Something like this is never over and shut away.
“Understanding?”
I nodded. “Something like that. Too many open questions just makes it that much harder. Maybe it will help convince me that we have the right ending for her.”
“I can take you tomorrow, if you want.”
“Thanks. Would you all still have the file on her aunt Wenda’s murder?”
“Should have. It’s still an open case. Reckon you want me to dig that out, too. Anything else, Miz Andrews?”
With his attitude, he made a mighty poor Della Street. No good as Archie Goodwin, either.
The peach cobbler brightened his mood, if only a watt or two. He hunkered over it, using his left arm to protect it from a sneak attack from across the table.
I needed to change the subject. “You ever think about quitting? Doing something different?”
His brow wrinkled in a frown, and he looked at me as if I might know something he didn’t. “No-o.”
I shrugged. “Just wondered. You know. What else you might find interesting.”
“Well, let’s see. What could I do? Work in a mill? Everything’s heading to Mexico. Nobody pumps gas for a living anymore. Fixing my own car makes me cuss, so my mama’d be by regular to knock knots on my head. Maybe the feed-and-seed store?”
“You ever thought about running for sheriff?”
He snorted. “My wife has. You both gotta be kidding. Kissing be-hinds on county council? Listening to an irate mama scream because a deputy abused her crackhead son? No thanks. I like what I do just fine.” He narrowed his eyes. “What makes you ask?”
“Nothing. Just wondered.” L. J. Peters, Rudy Mellin, and I had started kindergarten and graduated from high school together. I’d never heard him say how he liked working for L.J. No gracious way to ask how it was to have her for a boss, so I changed the subject.
“You heard about the ghost hunters in town?”
He spooned in a heap of golden crust and peaches Maylene had frozen last summer, dripping with half-melted ice cream. The smell of cinnamon made my mouth moist. “Heard something about it.”
“Not a big crew or anything. Three kids. You see their article in yesterday’s paper, asking anyone who had paranormal goingson around their houses to call them?”
He covered his mouth with a filmy paper napkin and gulped, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Isn’t that the craziest thing?” I said. “Ghosters running loose.”
“Seems to me if you were psychic or whatever,” Rudy said, “you could ride around and find ghosts on your own. Shouldn’t have to advertise for them like you were looking for a used mobile home or a single white female.”
“You believe in ghosts?”
He graced me with only a shake of his head. “Used to like to scare people who did, though.” His smile grew as he enjoyed the memory.
“Okay, you can’t keep that to yourself. What?”
“Just kid stuff.” He wiped his mouth and pushed away his empty bowl. “You know that little cement bridge that turns off the highway north of town, a mile or so before it heads up the mountain?”
“I—think so.”
“No side rails, just raised curbing at the sides. You might not even think of it being a bridge. Bottomland pasture on both sides of the road, with a little creek.”
I nodded.
“Some of us were out one night, after a football game or some such. Telling ghost stories. Must’a been near Halloween. We drove across the bridge and stopped to see if we could hear the baby crying.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory. “Ol’ Campbell
decided he’d impress his girlfriend, so he got out to walk back across it.”
“What baby?”
“You never heard tell of the crybaby? Suppose to hear a baby crying if you walk across the bridge at midnight under a full moon.” He snorted.