The Red Scream (19 page)

Roses are red

Violets are blue

We all end up dead

Whatever we do.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

M
olly’s town house in Northwest Hills was her refuge from the world. It was perfect—sunny, compact, tranquil, and, best of all, she didn’t have to share it with anyone. No child, no roommate, no dog, no husband. Only recently had she admitted to herself how much she loved having a space that was all her own, where she could arrange things as she liked and have them stay that way, where she could live according to her own time schedule. Her single women friends all said they would sell their souls for the presence of a good man in their lives and Molly could see their point for sure. She’d enjoy a good man in her life, but not in her house. One of her goals in life was never again to share a bathroom with a man.

The phone rang just as she walked in the door; uncanny, as if someone were watching her.

“Molly Cates, Grady here. You’re home finally. Listen, how about dinner tonight?”

“Grady, was there anything in my mail?”

“Well, now, it’s real interesting you should ask. That’s one of the things we can talk about over dinner. How about the County Line? I’m in the mood for some serious grease.”

“I can’t, Grady. Jo Beth and I exercise tonight.”

“Exercise? Molly! You? Since when?”

“Grady, you don’t know me anymore. I’ve been exercising regularly for years now,” she lied.

“Hmmm. I’d have to
see
that.”

“So, what about my mail?”

“Can’t discuss it over the phone, Molly, you know that.”

He was playing with her. She wouldn’t let it get to her.

“But I could come in and deliver it to you,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“Outside your front door.”

Molly set the receiver down on the table and walked to the door, smoothing her hair. She opened the door and looked out. The white Ford Tempo parked across the street had a long straight antenna on the back.

She closed the door and walked back to the phone. “You don’t give much notice when you drop in, do you?”

“I called first, didn’t I?”

He was waiting at the door when she opened it, looking freshly shaved and showered, his shirt creamy white, his suit surprisingly unrumpled. Jane, or whatever her name had been, had certainly upgraded his wardrobe and his grooming.

He looked around and whistled in appreciation. Then he pulled some envelopes out of his pocket. “Oh. Here’s your mail. Two bills, one that’s overdue, your car registration renewal, a note from your agent about possible British rights at a nice figure, and a letter from one Charles Logan, attorney-at-law, who says he still thinks about those nights in Abilene.” He looked down at her with a sour expression. “Still at it, huh?”

Molly reached out and grabbed the envelopes from his hand.

He took a step back and said, “But nothing from your poet pen pal today.”

She leafed through the envelopes. They were all sealed, looking as though they had never been disturbed. “Why did you open them?”

“Just to be on the safe side. Now that he’s threatened you directly.” He glanced at his watch. “Five fifty-nine,” he said. “I’ll be off-duty in one minute.”

He wandered around the living room, looking it over, then settled himself in her most comfortable armchair and checked his watch again. “Six on the nose,” he said, leaning back. “Officially off-duty.”

She ignored the hint for a drink. “Do sit down, Grady. Make yourself at home.”

He smiled up at her, his tanned skin breaking into a sunburst of lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes.

“Now,” Molly said, still looking through her mail, “you can tell me what you’ve found out about David Serrano.”

He crossed his legs. “Same thing you found out when you went by his cousin’s house last night. He’s vanished, leaving behind his clothes, his briefcase, and his high blood pressure medication. We know he’s not back home in Brownsville. There’s a BOLO out for him and his vehicle—a black Lincoln Town car.”

Molly put the mail on the hall table and walked toward him. “This is bad news, isn’t it?”

“He’s either on the run or he’s belly up somewhere. You know him. What do you think?”

Molly recalled Serrano’s nervous gestures, the sweat on his upper lip. “I think he was afraid of something. I told you he was armed, but he looked too nervous to shoot straight. I think he may be dead.”

Grady nodded again. “Molly, why don’t you stand Jo Beth up and come to dinner with me?”

“Because I want to go to exercise class with her and I don’t want to go out to dinner with you.”

He leaned his head back on the wing chair and ran an index finger along his mustache, just above his long upper lip. “Oh, Molly, that’s one of the things I’ve missed about you.”

Molly found herself watching his finger and thinking about how it would feel to run her own finger along his lips. Damn. She promised herself not to do this. “Grady,” she said in a hard voice, “are you courting me, or did you just come to spy on my correspondence?”

He frowned. “Are those my only two choices?”

She sat down in the other chair, across from him. “Tell me about the postmortem and I’ll tell you something juicy sometime.”

He sighed. “All right. The postmortem. Forty-eight-year-old Caucasian female. Dr. William Mixter, Travis County Assistant Medical Examiner, began with a Y incision, the standard cut from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, and then a straight line down to the pubic bone.”

“Come on, Grady, you don’t think you can gross me out, do you? I’ve probably seen as many posts as you have.”

“Oh, you just want the results? Why didn’t you say so? Death
resulted from a forty-five-caliber hollow point bullet—what we police like to call ‘controlled expansion’—that entered her back at the left shoulder and nicked the heart. A second bullet entered the middle of the spine and lodged in the left lung. We’ve got the bullets, but those dumdums tend to self-destruct so they aren’t in good shape for a ballistics comparison even if we had a weapon, which we don’t. We’ve checked all the McFarland guns and there isn’t a .45 among them. The shots were fired from more than two and a half feet away. The head was neatly shaved, with a safety razor, probably after death. She does not appear to have been sexually assaulted. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Time of death?”

“Well, I wish this were a more exact science like on TV where the ME says the deed happened between 7:42 and 7:44, but Mixter tells us it happened between 6 and 9
A.M.
Maybe. The month he can pinpoint exactly.”

“So it’s not going to help eliminate any of the family members as suspects, is it?”

“No.”

She leaned forward. “Grady, something’s been worrying me and I want you to be honest with me.”

“I will,” he said.

She took a deep breath. “When I got the first master poet letter, you know the I-may-give-his-craft-a-try one, it seemed like it could possibly be a threat, some sort of general threat. You may find this incomprehensibly stupid, but it never occurred to me it might be a threat to the McFarlands, in spite of the fact that the pages he sent with the poem were about Tiny McFarland’s murder. I got it at about five o’clock and later, when I showed it to Jo Beth, she said we should call you right then and let you look at it. I wouldn’t let her do that. I took it to Stan Heffernan the next day at noon and he didn’t think it was anything to get excited about. Of course, Georgia was already dead by then, lying out there in the sun with ants and buzzards at her.”

Molly took another deep breath. “What I want to know is, if I had shown it to you Tuesday night, would you have seen in it a threat to the McFarlands and would you have warned them?”

He studied her face. “This has really been worrying you.”

“Yes. Of course it has. It’s bad enough having this master poet
creep saying he’s going to use my book as a blueprint for killing, without thinking I’ve contributed to it with my negligence, too.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“Well? Would you have warned them?” she demanded.

“No.”

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

He smiled. “Actually Jo Beth did call me after she got home. She’d memorized the poem—clever girl. I told her it sounded like business as usual. So if there’s blame here, Molly, we can split it.”

She felt an urge to get up and kiss him on the cheek, or maybe on the mouth.

He leaned closer to her. “It’s no fun being brought into this as a participant, is it?” he asked.

“No. While I wrote the book, I kept telling myself that writing about a real-life crime with the purpose of entertaining readers was possibly a bit voyeuristic and sleazy. But I couldn’t see any way it could do any harm. And on my best days, I thought it might even be educational in some way.”

“I think it’s very unlikely that it’s done any harm, Molly.”

“Don’t you think those poems are from the killer?” she asked.

“They could be. But even if they are, I think it will turn out to be someone trying to focus attention away from the likely suspects on to some crazy Louie Bronk copycat. I believe Georgia was killed by someone she knew well.”

“Why?”

“Several reasons. Here’s one. You remember the Thermos?”

She nodded.

“Guess what was in the pocket of her robe?”

“What?”

He stood abruptly. “Let’s continue this conversation over dinner. And a drink, especially a drink.”

She reached up and took hold of his arm. “Tell me what was in her pocket and I’ll get you a drink here,” she said.

“Deal.” He sat back down and crossed his legs.

“So—” she said, “what was in her pocket?”

“Two foam cups and a packet of Sweet’n Low. Now how about that drink?”

Molly headed to the kitchen. “She was expecting to meet someone for coffee at the gazebo,” she said back over her shoulder.

Grady got up and followed her. “Looks that way doesn’t it? If your master poet is the killer, it’s also someone she’d have coffee with in her robe.”

The thought made Molly queasy. “What do you want?” she asked, opening the fridge.

“I don’t suppose you’ve learned how to make a strawberry daiquiri.”

“How about a beer?”

“Okay. A beer.”

She got two Coors Lights out of the refrigerator and opened them. Then she took two tall glasses down from the cabinet. When she turned he was watching her, his head tilted to one side.

“A glass?” she said.

“Of course. What do you think I am? Some crude cop who drinks out of the can?”

“Did she use Sweet’n Low in her coffee?” Molly asked as she poured a beer into one of the glasses.

“No.”

She poured the other beer into a glass and handed it to him. “Who in the family does?”

“Sweet tooth seems to run in the family. All of them use it, including Mark Redinger, who turns out to have a juvenile record.”

“For what?”

“Those records are sealed, you know.”

“But you looked at them anyway,” Molly said.

Grady held his glass up waiting for her to touch hers to it.

As she reached her glass up to his, he moved in a step so he was looking directly down into her eyes as their glasses clinked. “To you, Molly,” he said. “Redinger had three arrests. Two were for peeping in windows, when he was sixteen. The third was assault. He got into a fight with the husband of a woman he’d been seeing. He was fifteen, the woman was thirty-five.”

Molly moved back a step and leaned against the counter. “What else makes you think Georgia was killed by someone she knew?”

“Oh, I suppose I’ve been at this too long. But you know the odds. If it turns out Charlie didn’t do it, then one of the kids or Mark Redinger did it. Did you know that Charlie had written Georgia into his will in a big way?”

“No. How big?”

“Half his estate—about ten million probably. The other half is to be divided between the two children, in trust, with Georgia as trustee until each is thirty. Don’t you think that must have pissed them?”

“Yes. I do. Especially since a large chunk of that came from their mother.”

Grady nodded. “Experience tells me when you have children, a second wife, and lots of money around, that’s a real combustible combination.”

Molly had to nod in agreement. “What else have you learned about Georgia?” she asked.

“A nice woman by all accounts. A widow. He’d known her forever. Her husband died of a heart attack seven years ago. Charlie courted her for four years before they got married two years ago. Everyone agrees he loved her madly and she got along well with the children, better than Charlie did, actually. She had very little money of her own coming into the marriage and he wanted to give her something. Hence, the will. But we’re still working on it. Even nice women sometimes have affairs, I’m told.”

Molly walked into the living room. “Have you read the Louie Bronk file yet?”

“Stayed up all last night reading it.” He took a long sip of his beer. “Interesting. But like I told you before, ancient history.”

“So you’re going after Charlie,” she said.

He followed her into the living room. “I’m sure as hell interested in Charlie. Molly, I’ve told you more than I should have here. Now—I know you need to earn a living. And God knows it looks like you make a better one than me, but we are agreed, aren’t we, that you won’t write anything about this until we’ve made an arrest?”

She sat down. “Charlie was really surprised yesterday, Grady. And horrified. I
know
it.”

He leaned forward and patted her knee. “Well, Molly, I’m not sure you’re an unbiased judge here. I think you like the man—I recognize the signs. He’s that type you have a soft spot for. Reminds you of your daddy, I expect.”

She moved her knee away from his hand. “Time for you to mosey, Lieutenant. I’ve got to change clothes.”

“That’s okay. We can continue our conversation in the other room while you change.”

She walked to the front door and opened it wide. “Thanks for stopping by.”