Two Bits Four Bits (2 page)

A heavily paneled pocket
door slid open behind me, and I turned to see two men in sport
coats and golf shirts emerge from a small sitting room, where Kandy
Chilton sat talking with John Donnelly, a local attorney I was
using for my parents’ estate. The men both nodded at me, and then
went out the back door to join the forensics team. When Kandy saw
me, she stood and began walking away from Donnelly, who was still
talking. Wearing a look of urgency as he spoke, Donnelly stopped in
mid-sentence and changed his expression to one of solemnity when he
noticed me.

“Thank you for coming,”
Kandy said, giving me a tight hug. Her eyes were bloodshot and she
looked much older without her makeup. She smelled freshly scrubbed
and her hair was damp and combed flat.

“I’m so sorry, Kandy. Is
there anything I can do?” I asked as I shook Donnelly’s
hand.

“No, I don’t think so,”
she said. “The girls are both flying in. One of my girlfriends is
going to meet them at the airport.”

She looked off toward the
kitchen, fixing her eyes on something there.

“Oh God, I can’t believe
it,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “They loved their Daddy so
much.”

With that she broke down
and sobbed loudly. The woman who had met us at the door rushed over
and guided Kandy to the sofa, where they sat and rocked together
quietly. Donnelly was standing by the large window that looked out
on the pool. I joined him.

“This is horrible,” I
said. “Was he in the pool when he was shot?”

Donnelly looked at me for
a moment. I could see the wheels turning in his head. It was an odd
sensation, watching the attorney I was using for my parents’ estate
try to decide how much he could share with me. His instinct as
Kandy Chilton’s attorney told him to treat me as if I were still in
law enforcement.

“It’s too early to tell,”
he whispered, glancing toward were Kandy sat. “But, they think he
probably was.”

“How many
shots?”

“They’re still trying to
sort things out.”

“Did Kandy see it
happen?”

“No. Russell wasn’t in bed
when she woke up this morning. She took a shower and decided to go
check on him when he hadn’t shown up by the time she finished.
Apparently he was in the habit of taking a swim early in the
morning, so it wasn’t unusual for her to wake up alone.”

“Do they have any idea who
did it? Or why?”

“No. Still too
early.”

He glanced around and
lowered his voice.

“Confidentially, Russell
Chilton had more than one run-in with jealous husbands over the
last few years.”

“Oh, by the way,” I said.
“Are we still meeting for lunch today?”

He looked at his watch and
paused.

“I should be able to make
it. We may be a couple of minutes late. I’ve got your cell number
in case something comes up.”

“Those guys you were
talking to earlier, Elmore PD?”

“Uh huh. The older one
that looks like Robert Duvall is Bob Clemmer, and the muscle-bound
kid with him is Reese Puckett.”

“They any
good?”

“They really are,” he
said. “They’ve got a pretty good track record as far as murders go.
But, they work other types of crimes too, so sometimes they’ve got
more on their plate than they can say grace over.”

We stood watching them for
a few minutes, and then Donnelly thanked me for coming and then
went back to sit with Kandy. I offered my support again and then
excused myself. I glanced out the back window on my way out and saw
the three members of the forensics team huddled over an area of
patio halfway between the house and the pool with the two
detectives standing nearby watching.

Something in Donnelly’s
comment about jealous husbands set off an alarm in my head. I spent
my law enforcement career dealing with people and trying to read
their minds by their actions and words. Donnelly’s comment, coupled
with the urgent look on his face during his private words with
Kandy troubled me. I had a vague feeling that he intended his
comment to divert attention away from Kandy as a suspect. In any
unsolved murder, especially one that takes place in the home, the
spouse is always a prime suspect in the early stages of an
investigation. Although Elmore saw very few murders, and it was
probably rare for Donnelly to be involved in a murder defense, he
was smart enough to know he needed to get out in front of any
suspicions about Kandy, no matter where they originated. He knew
about the class reunion, as I had mentioned it to him on the phone
a few days earlier, and I suspected he was planting a seed about
Russell Chilton’s infidelities in the hope that any reunion gossip
about a murder suspect would move in that direction. I may have
been overestimating Donnelly’s skills as a defense attorney, but my
street instincts told me he was trying to play me.

* * * *

CHAPTER THREE

The home I grew up in was
a big ranch style house sitting on a couple acres of dried
tumbleweeds, five miles west of town. A single lane dirt driveway
led two hundred yards from the highway to the house.

As I pulled off the
blacktop on the way back from town, I stopped beside the battered
mailbox attached to the top of a rusted metal pipe. I remembered
helping my Dad mix and pour the cement footing that we set the
piece of salvaged oilfield pipe into, and then watching as he
fashioned a crude bracket out of scrap metal and attached the
mailbox to it. He spent his entire adult life working in the
oilfield, working his way up from floor hand on a drilling rig to
area supervisor for Phillips Petroleum before retiring. He could
make anything, from a bicycle part to a flower planter, out of a
pile of scrap metal that most men would’ve hauled off to the
dump.

I’d visited the house a
few times over the last few years, on quick visits to check on my
ailing parents. But since the funerals, within three months of each
other, I hadn’t been back. Nor had I much reason to, since I kept
in regular phone contact with John Donnelly about the estate. When
my folks had both entered the local eldercare facility, it had been
Donnelly who suggested hiring a local caretaker to keep an eye on
their place, at least until my brothers and I could get it sold.
And, since none of us lived close enough to check on things
regularly, I had arranged through Donnelly to hire a man named
Roberto Avila to keep the land around the house mowed and things
cleaned up so it wouldn’t look abandoned.

I probably wouldn’t have
come back to town until the house sold except for the reunion. It
was a combined reunion of four of the graduating classes from
Elmore High School with events scheduled for Friday and Saturday
nights, along with other activities, like the golf tournament. My
own class had failed to muster enough interest for a 25th year, but
the turnout this time had been pretty good so far. Coming back for
the reunion would give me a chance to check on my parents’ house,
maybe get rid of some of their old stuff and do any necessary
repairs while I was in town. The depressed real estate market in
Elmore meant there wasn’t any hurry to get the house ready for
sale, but I knew what a few months of neglect could do to
property.

The mailbox contained a
couple of catalogs that I tossed into the passenger seat of my
pickup as I rolled on up the driveway to the house. Although the
house had been vacant for more than a year, it looked like whoever
lived there might have simply taken a short vacation. It was
obvious the Roberto had done his best to straighten things up a
bit, but I knew somebody was going to have to spend a lot of time
cleaning up around the place, then either selling or hauling off
all of what my folks had accumulated over sixty-two years of
marriage. I also knew that I was the most likely candidate for the
job. It was the sort of task you couldn’t delegate to strangers,
and neither of my brothers had been exactly jumping at the chance
to help.

Down deep, I didn’t really
mind being the one responsible for settling of the estate and
disposing of belongings, but I wished they would at least offer an
opinion about what they thought I ought to do. I was the oldest,
and for that reason alone I had become used to accepting
responsibility for things. From a practical standpoint, it made
sense for me to be the one to take care of things. My schedule was
flexible, even more so now that I was retired from the APD, so it
was easier for me to make the trips home to take care of whatever
came up than it would have been for either of my
brothers.

And, having the house and
the settlement of the estate to take care of had actually helped
with my transition to whatever it was that was coming next. After
being a cop for so long, it was taking some time to adjust to not
being one. I had thought that working for Capitol Security would
make that easier, but it hadn’t. Being back in Elmore helped take
my mind off that strange sensation of being a civilian in a city
where I’d always been a police officer. I guess that’s because I
never was in law enforcement before I left Elmore, and this was the
one place that letting somebody else wear the badge felt almost
normal.

As I pulled up to the
house, I noticed a big orange tomcat lying in a weedy flower bed
next to the driveway. Ever since I could remember there had been
various cats living around the property, most of them wild and
unapproachable, being descendents of cats abandoned on the highway
by their owner decades earlier. There wasn’t enough wildlife in the
area to keep even the most skillful feline hunter alive, so Mom
began putting out scraps and the cheapest dry cat food available.
As a result a perpetual community of cats existed around and under
the outbuildings and equipment scattered around the
property.

I expected the big orange
tom to jump up and run when I got out of the pickup, but he just
looked up at me and with squinted eyes and watched.

“Hey big fella, what’s
your name?” I walked over to see if he would spook, and then
offered a hand for him to sniff. He seemed to approve, butting his
head against my hand in the universal cat gesture for ‘you can pet
me if you want to mister’. I obliged for a few seconds before
leaving him to his sunbathing.

There was so much to do to
get the house ready to sell that I had been trying to pick an area
to focus on every time I had a few minutes to spare. I needed to
meet Donnelly for lunch later and couldn’t get into anything that
would mess up my clean clothes, so I decided to look through the
pantry and throw out everything but the canned goods with good
expiration dates.

One of the things I’d
brought with me from Austin was my iPod and a portable stereo
docking station. I’d lived a pretty Spartan life since my divorce
from Peg eight years earlier, but one of the luxuries I allowed
myself was an extensive music collection, which I had stored on my
home computer, with the best of the best copied to the iPod. I used
the iPod sometimes when I ran and the docking station had sat on my
desk at the APD before I retired.

I set up the docking
station on the kitchen table and set the iPod for random play and
turned it up loud enough to hear throughout most of the house.
Then, I brought in a big plastic trash barrel from the back porch
and opened up the pantry door. First to go were the boxes of
cereals and crackers along with packaged dry foods with expiration
dates well over a year past. I had the trash barrel full within a
few minutes and carried it out to the small dumpster I had arranged
for earlier with the local trash pickup service, knowing there
would be plenty to fill it up. The big orange tom seemed interested
in what I might be carrying in the trash barrel so he got up out of
the flower bed and followed me to the dumpster.

“Sorry big guy, nothing
for you,” I said as I dumped the contents.

He followed me back across
the driveway and to the front porch. I squatted and rubbed his head
some more.

“You can’t come in, but
I’ll see if I can find you something to eat and drink. And, you
need a name if you’re gonna be hanging around here.”

I could hear the music
from inside the house as a song by James McMurtry began. The orange
tomcat could have written the lyrics himself.

I'm not from here, I just
live here,

Grew up somewhere far
away,

Come here thinking I'd
never stay long,

I'd be going back soon
someday.

“What about McMurtry? You
like that name?” He squinted and butted against my hand in
approval.

“Okay, McMurtry it is.
Now, let’s see what we can do about finding some food.”

I left McMurtry on the
front porch and carried the trash barrel through the house and out
the back door. Mom had kept the big value-sized bags of dry catfood
she bought in a covered steel trashcan on the screened-in porch.
The can was still there and the bag inside was almost full. An old
Cool Whip tub lay inside the bag to use as a scooper, so I filled
it and carried it back into the house.

I picked the two oldest
saucepans from underneath the cupboard and carried them along with
the catfood out the front door. McMurtry seemed to know what I had
in mind because there was a little more pep in his step as he
followed me around the side of the house and toward the area
between a storage house and the well house where Mom had always fed
the local felines.