Buried Memories (16 page)

“The fire started in this back bedroom,” the fireman explained. “Someone stacked papers and documents on the bed, then poured diesel over it. It’s a hell of a mess.”

Burton knew he needed to report what he’d seen. He glanced up the hill again to substantiate his story.

Betty had vanished.

Gerald Albright was married, had two children, a pretty wife, a beautiful home, and an appetite for other women. He liked to hang out and drink at the Cedar Club in the afternoon after spending the morning at his real-estate business. He found Betty Beets good company, and whenever she’d laugh at his jokes, she had a way of falling into him, teasing him with her generous breasts.

“That’s some body, girl. What I wouldn’t do for a roll in the hay with that.”

Betty laughed. “I’m used to your kind. All whiskey talk and no action.”

“You’re right. If I have any more whiskey, there’ll be no action.”

They both laughed a bawdy laugh and then quietly stared at each other.

“Don’t look at me that way, Gerald. You know I’ve got Ray at home. It would be kinda crowded.”

“Place ain’t important. There’s a motel up the street called County Line or Country Lane, something like that.”

“Yeah, I know where you mean.”

“What say I leave now and you follow me over there in about ten minutes? I’ll be ready and waiting.”

Betty had had a verbal blowout with Ray the night before and she still smarted from it. Running off for the afternoon with Gerald would do Ray good, if only to let him know other men were still interested.

“I’d need more time,” she said. “Got to come up with some excuse to take off early. I’ll work on that and see you in about a half hour.”

Gerald chugged his drink. “You got yourself a date, lady. See you in thirty minutes.”

Betty saw Gerald’s sport coupe parked outside Room 8 at the motel. The motel’s exterior sported yellow peeling paint, revealing its previous white coat. With the noise of cars and trucks from the nearby highway, it looked anything but romantic.

She knocked softly on the door, and whispered, “It’s Betty.”

In a split second, the door opened and Gerald grinned a lopsided smile. “Thought you weren’t comin’.”

“And miss a chance like this?” Betty said.

“I brought your favorite vodka,” Gerald said.

“Anything’s my favorite. What do you have to go with it?”

“You need something?”

Betty thought for a moment, then shrugged. She grabbed the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and raised it to her lips, taking a generous slug. “Mmm. Makes me warm all over.”

“I’m hot all over,” Gerald said, roughly pulling her closer and smashing her breasts against his chest as he kissed her lips.

“Let me have a little more of this,” Betty said, raising the vodka to her lips again.

This time Gerald held her close and unzipped her dress. Then his hands found the back of her bra and unhooked the clasp. His fingers worked their way to her chest.

“God, a guy could get lost in all this flesh,” he said, kissing Betty’s neck. He peeled off her dress and bra, then his lips found the hard centers of her breasts.

She briefly interrupted him to reach for the bottle of vodka and guzzled down several more gulps.

He kissed off the remaining vodka from her lips and took her hand, placing it on his extended fly. “Feel what’s waiting for you?”

Betty stumbled to her knees and unzipped his pants. When her lips took hold of him, he groaned with pleasure.

“Lady,” he said hoarsely, “why haven’t we gotten together before now?”

An hour later, the empty bottle lay on the floor. They sprawled nude on the bed with their arms wrapped around each other. Everything seemed warm, happy, and funny. The vodka unhinged Betty’s mouth, evaporating any control over her words.

Gerald giggled at something she said and started to mount her again. Betty pushed him away.

“Here we are fuckin’ and having so much fun. You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew that one guy I fucked is buried in my front yard.”

FOURTEEN

“Someone burned down my house, for God’s sake,” Betty bellowed into the phone. “It’s been months ago. What do you mean your company won’t pay?”

“There’s still questions that have to be answered,” the woman from Southern Casualty Insurance told her. “Our investigator’s pretty sure the fire was arson, and until that’s cleared up, we can’t make any payment.”

Betty paced back and forth over her living room floor. Jimmy Don had paid those fire insurance premiums for years, and she had continued paying after he died. This wasn’t right. She needed a lawyer. She thought of E. Ray Andrews, the counselor she used when her son Robby had been accused of stealing the swords. E. Ray had two personalities. She had seen him in the clubs falling-down drunk, but when he defended Robby, he was sober and did a fair job. She phoned him.

E. Ray Andrews had a law practice and a cult following. He didn’t need a last name. Everyone in Henderson County knew him as “E. Ray.” His clients proved easily recycled. He’d represent them and they’d go to jail. Then they’d get out, get into more trouble, and land back in E. Ray’s office. He also received many referred clients—brothers and cousins of previous clients. He had more than his fair share of success because of his ability to create sheer havoc in the courtroom. Asking bizarre questions that caused a mishmash of justice, he could confuse jurors until they knew no better than to let his client off scot-free.

He liked to brag that he had received the highest grade of anyone who ever took the bar exam in the state of Texas, but some wondered whom he had sent to take the exam for him. For trials, the articulate man spoke a hillbilly type of English, sounding like a good ole country boy, or just someone incapable of constructing a proper sentence.

Nineteen months after her husband disappeared, Betty traipsed over to E. Ray Andrews’s office, ostensibly to force the insurance company to pay for fire damage on the Oak Street home. If she were only after collecting on the fire, she received more than she bargained for. Betty entered his small, unimpressive office and closed the door.

E. Ray insisted that whatever transpired in his office that day was his doing, and Betty Beets was only a willing but innocent participant. He remained emphatic that Betty had never questioned him about the insurance carried by Jimmy Don or the pension that would give her a lifetime of security.

Once she was seated in front of his desk, he asked if Jimmy Don Beets had any life insurance she would inherit. He said that Betty didn’t know, so out of the goodness of his heart, he investigated the matter for her, almost pushing her to go after the benefits he considered hers for the asking.

He first suggested she seek a “Determination of Death” for Jimmy Don Beets. That way they could fast forward the seven-year waiting period and Betty could inherit over $153,000 in insurance and the widow’s pension.

Andrews, a criminal defense attorney, had little practice in civil law, so he suggested the firm of Roberts and Roberts from Tyler, Texas, to represent her in her bid to have Jimmy Don declared legally dead.

Betty filed for the death certificate on a cold winter day in February 1985. Outside the Henderson County courtroom, the oak trees stood bare as icy waves of air rushed across the lake causing everyone to secure their crafts and hover inside their warm homes. However, Betty didn’t feel the chill. Heated with excitement, she stood beside Harry Loftis, one of Roberts and Roberts’s attorneys.

Before the judge, Betty reiterated every painful memory of Jimmy Don’s disappearance, and included the fact that he died without a will. She testified that the people closest to him, she and his parents, would normally see him daily, but after August 6, 1983, no one had had any contact. She asserted that she was his legal spouse and entitled to inherit his entire estate.

She told the judge, “I really need to get this declaration because there’s at least two debts against the estate that need to be paid.” Betty didn’t elaborate on what debts existed. She also asked to be appointed the administrator. Lastly, she waived the appointment of an appraiser. She knew what Jimmy Don had.

The judge took her request under advisement.

Now three weeks later, March showed more promise as white blossoms began flowering on the Bradford pear trees, and the Carolina jasmine vines were covered with yellow blooms. Amid the reassurance of spring, Betty happily went back to court and signed the papers to become the administrator of Jimmy Don’s estate. The court officially decided that Jimmy Don Beets died on August 6, 1983. Betty could now inherit thousands of dollars in insurance, pensions, and everything else Jimmy Don had ever owned.

FIFTEEN

Seven Points enhanced its honky-tonk reputation with the opening of Plowboys, a bar and dance hall that attracted local residents, in addition to summer visitors looking for local color. The cement-block structure had previously been known as Jokers, just one in a line of rehashed and refurbished bars. Instead of Jokers’ white exterior, Plowboys now sported a coat of happy coral paint, and sat near Highway 274, competing for business amid the string of bars on the highway.

After Jamie Beets’s divorce, he picked himself up and began dating Kay Ruthledge, a pretty divorcée with two small children. On Saturday night, February 23, 1985, Jamie invited her to Plowboys. They were out on the dance floor, talking and laughing, and for once he forgot about how he could connect Betty with his father’s disappearance. That would soon change.

The music ended and Jamie escorted Kay back to their table.

“I’m going to order another beer, do you want one?” he asked.

“That’d be great. I’ll run off to the ladies’ room.”

Kay reached for her purse. “That’s strange, I don’t remember leaving my purse open like this.” She picked it up from the floor and gasped. “My billfold’s gone. Damn. I had at least forty dollars in it, and worst of all, the pictures of my kids.”

“Maybe it fell out in the car,” Jamie said.

“No. Remember, I had to show my ID when we came in?”

“That’s right.”

Jamie searched under their table. Nothing. He scanned the people around them, wondering if the culprit sat nearby. No one seemed to be paying them any attention and, besides, all the surrounding couples looked more interested in each other than filching a billfold.

“Let’s tell the manager. See if anyone’s turned it in in case it just fell out of your purse.”

They went to the manager, who listened to their predicament and told them nobody had turned in a billfold. He suggested they report the theft to the police.

Four days later, on the following Wednesday, Jamie’s apartment’s phone rang. He picked up the receiver and heard a tough-sounding male voice on the other end.

“Jamie? This is a warning. If you go out tonight, we’re going to get you!”

He heard a click; then the line went dead. He wrote it off as a prank and went out anyway, returning around midnight. Again, the phone rang.

“Listen up,” the same male voice said. “Your dad is gone. You had better stop looking for him.”

Jamie knew this was no random nuisance call.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang for the third time. The man identified himself as Sam Dickerson and asked Jamie to meet him at the Cherokee Shores entrance at l:15
A.M.
Jamie knew Sam Dickerson had a cousin, Bud Wilson, and both men were friends of Ray Bone’s.

At the same time, Kay had her own problems. On that Wednesday, she drove to Seven Points with her children. A brown-and-beige long-bed pickup closed in behind her, and stayed there for a few minutes before it began repeatedly pushing her car. Hysterical, she knew she couldn’t deal with the two big men inside, so she pushed down on the accelerator and hurried to find more traffic. Once surrounded by other drivers, the men backed off, turned the corner, and were gone.

Shaken, Kay stopped in front of a grocery store. She helped her children out of the car and hurried in to buy the few items she had come to get. When she returned, she found a note inside her car. Written in true cloak-and-dagger style, someone had cut words and letters out of the newspaper and glued them onto a piece of paper. It read: “You love the wrong man. Your [sic] in it now. Did you lose a handbag Kay?” “Handbag” was not the right word, but apparently the note’s author couldn’t find “billfold” in the newspaper. Most chilling of all, someone had attached the pictures of her children to the note.