The Devil To Pay (The Bill Travis Mysteries Book 4)

by George Wier

  It was cold inside, like the chill of a murderer’s heart.

  “This is the place,” Jessica whispered. Her eyes were round and her gaze flicked everywhere, seemingly at once.

  “May I be of assistance?” a voice said.

  “Maybe,” I replied, and turned toward him.

  He stood there leaning against a tall immaculately-refurbished cabinet, the picture of esteem and aplomb in a black silk Saville Row suit, middle-aged and beginning to gray. His eyebrows jutted far out past his face, about even with the plane of the tip of his nose.

  “Oh good,” he said. I looked for sarcasm in his voice, but couldn’t detect it. One word summed the fellow up: ‘practiced.’ His demeanor, his clothes, his aura. All affected with deliberation.

  “Mr. Stadtler?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Bill Travis,” I said.

  “I shall call you William,” he said, stepping forward as if over some invisible object, and extended his hand.

  I shook it out of reflex, then felt the urge to wash my hand with soap and water.

  “Just Bill,” I said.

  “And to what fair occasion may I attribute your esteemed presence, and that of this pretty young Miss, in my humble establishment?”

  “You really talk like that?” Jessica asked. She turned to look at me then back to Stadtler again. I didn’t so much as twitch. “All the time? I mean, when you’re going to the fridge, do you say: ‘I estimate that I shall imbibe a delicate and refreshing beverage?’”

  Stadtler was not amused. A very thin smile pursed his razor-thin lips.

  Jessica turned her head to look up at me and waited.

  “Phil Burnet,” I said.

  If there was shock on the man’s face, I couldn’t detect it.

  “Ah. Ah,” he said, whatever that meant.

  “He has recently demised,” I said. “And his estate is unsettled.”

  “Ah. Ah,” Stadtler repeated. “And your capacity is his administrator?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah. Ah,” Jessica said, trying out the fellow’s strange accent and stealing this thunder.

  “Um. What then, would you say, is your capacity?”

  “Disinterested third party.”

  “Yes. Well. Um. Thank you for stopping in.”

  “Now you’re talking like a real person,” Jessica said. “He’s talking like a real person now,” she said to me.

  “Satan,” I said.

  “What did you say?” he asked me.

  “Satan. The Devil. Black Magic.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know of what you’re speaking,” Stadtler said.

  I had him. He was unbalanced. His upper lip quivered once, then quieted.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Has Mrs. Bingham been by in the last day or so?”

  “Um... Whom?”

  I could tell he knew exactly who and what I was talking about.

  “Mr. Stadtler, Phillip Burnet was murdered. Mrs. Bingham, a.k.a. Sarah Banks, faked her own death, destroyed evidence at the crime scene of Mr. Burnet’s murder, and is, as they say, At Large. Someone has attempted to pin the murder on Texas Ranger Walt Cannon. Mr. Burnet has a house full of objects of an antique nature, and of question-able provenance, very likely obtained from your ‘impeccable’ and ‘discrete’ establishment. Mr. Burnet also has an entire room of his home dedicated to religious rites and sacrifice. Said religious rites are likely to include aforesaid Mr. Satan. Now, since Mr. Burnet kept meticulous documentation of all of his purchases, a veritable catalogue with dates and amounts, and since you are likely to have some books, somewhere, why don’t you talk to me as if we both know what we’re talking about. Then perhaps we can get somewhere today. Sir.”

  It was the longest speech I had ever made, but I said it carefully so I didn’t have to gulp air when I was done.

  Jessica’s eyes were wide as she leaned forward into my periphery and looked up at me, but I kept my gaze intently focused on Stadtler.

  His nose twitched.

  “Yay, dad,” Jessica said.

  “Well?” I waited.

  “Would you please come into my office?” Stadtler said.

  “We would be delighted,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Stadtler’s office was deja vous all over again, very nearly a carbon copy of Burnet’s.

  Jessica and I sat in polished leather chairs and looked a mile across an eighteenth century desk at the unsettled but beginning-to-settle Eric Stadtler. That’s what the etched and very modern gold nameplate read, anyway.

  “Mind if I smoke?” Stadtler asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said and leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what you want to know, but I want to know something first.”

  “Dad, he left his accent out in the store.”

  “I know, honey,” I said.

  “I’m from Cleveland. Give me a break on the accent, alright?” He said pointedly to Jessica.

  Jessica’s held out her palms parallel with the floor and her head bobbed side to side as she said: “What-EV-er.”

  “What do you want to know first?” I asked.

  His question had me floored, but only for a second.

  “Just one thing. Who the hell is Perry Reilly?”

  *****

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He’s been calling me since last night. Today he’s called me a half a dozen times. I hung up on him.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Her. He’s looking for her. Last night it was that second name you gave, Banks. Sarah Banks. This morning it was Candace Bingham. I don’t know who the hell he’s talking about.”

  “Do you know how he got your number?”

  “No idea.”

  “Okay. Perry Reilly, with the help of his young female associate, found Burnet’s body in Barton Creek in Austin. Against my own better advice, I took him with me when I went to check out Burnet’s digs and there he, that is, we, met this Candace Bingham, except she was calling herself Sarah Banks. Bingham, or Banks, if you prefer, sort of suckered Perry in and they were to be married. Then, like I said, she pulled a fast one, blew up a marina while faking her death, and took off. There’s more. A lot more. But is that enough for you now?”

  “Sure. I just wanted to know who the hell the guy was. Very insistent.”

  “It’s the dog gene in him. Hound dog.”

  “Alright.”

  “Now,” I said. “Satanic worship.”

  “I sold Burnet some items. At first it was straight stuff. One of my best clients for a number of years. Always had money. Always had a list. He loved my office here. We spent many hours smoking and saying little while he admired the furnishings and leafed through lists and pictures I downloaded from the internet. He bought all kinds of stuff.”

  “Then?” I prompted him.

  “Then he began to get...weird. Look, I know you don’t like me. I know your kid there hates me. That’s fine by me. But really, I’m just an ordinary businessman. I’ve been trying to keep this place going for twenty years now. I would have closed the doors years ago if it hadn’t been for guys like Burnet.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jessica asked, and then she surprised me. “Who else besides him?”

  I looked at her and she sort of scrunched down in her chair. I gave her the slightest of positive nods, as if to say “good going” and she smiled and straightened back up.

  “Another guy. Friend of Burnet. Wanted the same stuff. I get most of the weird stuff from Pakistan and India. Some of it Sikh stuff from hundreds of years ago, back when they had cults raging around. They’re not so much like that today.”

  “A name?” I asked.

  “Well. . .” he paused. “I shouldn’t tell you. Client confidentiality and all that. This guy, this main guy, is still alive.”

  “I understand,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  He paused.

  “Uh. . . That’s the funny part.
Or what you might call the ‘not-so-funny’ part.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, you said his name already,” he said, and leaned back in his chair and blew air up against his bushy eyebrows.

  “I did?”

  “Yeah. Cannon. Walter Cannon.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Oh no,” Jessica said.

  “You say he’s a Texas Ranger?” Stadtler asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What position did he play?”

  We both looked at him as if he were a very stupid man.

  “Just kidding,” he said. “Look, like you said, I’ve got the full list right here of everything he’s bought from me.” Stadtler opened a desk drawer and one of those moments hit me: one of those eerie, surreal moments. Gun, the thought was, and for an instant I could feel the shape of it, but instead he brought out a black ledger, laid it on the desk in front of him, flipped back a few pages, oriented it toward me and slid it across.

  I leaned forward.

  ‘Cannon, Walter’ the entry at the top read. Following that was a list of dates from the early 1990s on up to a few years ago where the entries abruptly halted, leaving nothing but plain green lines below. But the figures. The figures leapt out at me.

  “Seven thousand dollars,” I read. “For a ‘hooded figurine’. What was that?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Stadtler said.

  “Did he pick it up personally?” Jessica asked.

  “No. I only met him the one time, and that time he didn’t buy anything. It was in connection with an investigation.”

  “Ramirez?” I asked. “Or Fenton?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “Dad,” Jessica said. “We’ve been to Mr. Cannon’s house. He never had any weird stuff there.”

  “I know, honey,” I said.

  “Mr. Stadtler,” I said.

  “Eric.”

  “Fine. Eric, could you make a photostatic copy of your files for everyone—and I do mean everyone—who’s bought the kind of stuff Burnet was into?”

  He sighed. “I suppose.”

  “I liked you better when you talked funny,” Jessica said.

  “Me too,” Stadtler said. “Me too.”

  *****

  We waited while Stadtler made the copies.

  “I’m hungry,” Jessica said.

  “Me too.”

  He came back in and handed me a manilla envelope.

  We stood and left.

  *****

  “Dad?” Jessica asked as we got back into our car.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “We’re going to see Mr. Cannon,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “But lunch first.”

  “Dad,” Jessica said. “Sometimes you’re—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sort of okay.”

  “Good,” I said. And then it hit me. My fourteen-year-old really did know everything.

  And then I remembered something. “Say. You owe me something.”

  “Uh...uh,” she stammered. “What’s that?”

  “Change. From the concert tickets.”

  She visibly sagged in her seat. She reached in her blue jeans pocket and pulled out a fifty folded around a few other bills.

  “Tell you what. Keep it. That’s for finding the right box.”

  A slow, satisfied grin spread across her face. She tucked the money back where it had come from.

  As I pulled into traffic, I heard her say “Yes!” under her breath.

  *****

  The trip from Waco back to Austin took nearly two hours. By the time we rolled past the Austin City Limits sign it was getting on toward three o’clock and the sky was bright and clear with not a trace of cloud.

  We turned off on 290 East and after fifteen minutes of freeway traffic, we were rolling through the quiet neighborhood of the quaint town of Manor, one of Austin’s many satellite towns.

  Walt Cannon’s pickup truck was in his dust and gravel driveway. It needed a good wash. The house itself — a 1970s-style trailer home — stood up on blocks without skirting. Blue, Walt’s blue-tick hound dog stood in the shade and bayed at us. A good dog is always the most efficient alarm system. I wondered, absently, what our dog Franklin was doing at the moment.

  Dust hung in the air.

  Jessica petted Blue and the dog nearly knocked Jessica down in trying to climb up on her where she could give him what he deemed was the proper amount of attention.

  I banged lightly on the side of the trailer.

  No answer, no sound from inside.

  Blue wasn’t simply greeting Jessica. He was whining, a sound I’d never heard from him before.

  And, of course, I felt it again: the blow of a chilling wind there in that windless, cloudless, unseasonably hot afternoon.

  “Dad?” Jessica said. I could hear it in her voice.

  “I know, honey.”

  I climbed slowly up the front porch steps and placed my hand on Walt’s old but steady doorknob and slowly turned it.

  When the latch cleared the faceplate the door popped outward an inch and I very nearly leapt backwards.

  There was a smell there, escaping with the pent up air from inside. The odor of burnt matches, extinguished candlewicks. And there was another smell there. A creepy yet familiar tang that made my mouth abruptly dry up.

  “Dad?” Jessica said again, her voice far away.

  “Shhh,” I turned to her and she nodded.

  I opened the door and went inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  What I remembered from past visits as an orderly, well-kept and humble home was a complete shambles. Papers were strewn everywhere. Every piece of furniture had been turned over and the linings were ripped and cut and cotton wadding covered every surface in a patchy, snowy blanket. Pictures had been pulled from the walls, the glass smashed and the photographs ripped away. An old stereo system was broken apart and lay in many pieces across the living room rug.

  “Walt?” I called out.

  No answer.

  I stepped carefully over strewn and smashed chairs and tumbled and rent furniture and into the kitchen. The hallway leading to the back bedroom was essentially clear, but for shards of glass and cotton wadding.

  I knew the smell, suddenly, and shook.

  *****

  When I was just a toe-headed lad of five, my sister and I came across a very sick dog. It was lying beneath a tall cottonwood tree amid the weeds of a vacant lot. Our neighbor, a crusty old man, came over and asked us what we were looking at. We motioned to the dog and he took one long look, then turned around and walked off. Within a few minutes he was back, bearing a rifle. He made us get back, took careful aim, and shot the dog right through the heart, killing it instantly. The sound of the shot echoed in my head for mere moments, but the smell remained with me forever after. The sharp, electric odor in my nose of burnt gunpowder, blood, and excreta.

  The front door creaked and I turned from the hallway to see Jessica poking her head inside, her eyes wide with amazement. What courage it must have taken her to climb those steps and place her hand on that doorknob I could never know. But at that moment, I was both proud of her and glad she was there.

  I shook my head ‘no.’ She got the idea and the door slowly closed.

  I moved down the hallway to the inevitable closed door to Walt’s bedroom.

  “Walt?” I called quietly, knowing it was foolish to do so and at the same time hoping beyond hope he wasn’t home.

  I passed the closed door to his bathroom on my right and there I noticed the blood. A trail of it leading to the closed bedroom door.

  “No,” I said aloud.

  I sprang for the bedroom door and threw it open.

  The bedroom matched the living room as a disaster area. There was blood on the bed, soaking into the sheets and a spray of it on the window shade on the back wall. But no Walt.

  The bathroom. The
door I had passed was the only other door.

  I sprang back down to the hallway and nearly wrenched the knob off the bathroom door getting it open. And there, blood-covered with feet splayed on the floor with his back against the bathtub, was my friend, Walt Cannon.

  I bent down to him, felt for a pulse in his throat. There was one, very faint. I put my cheek and ear close to his nose and felt the faintest whisper of breath.

  He had a bath rag, scarlet with blood, pressed into the hole in his upper chest. The blood flow had stopped. He didn’t have long to live. Minutes, possibly.

  I stood and ran back to the hallway, through the kitchen and into the living room, leaping everything in my path. I snatched the front door open.

  “Walt’s been shot,” I told Jessica. “Run to the neighbors and get them to call an ambulance.”

  She turned and ran, Blue trotting beside her.

  “And hurry,” I called after her. “Please hurry,” I whispered to myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  One word, a name, spoken quietly from a gurney while being loaded into the ambulance: “Esperanza.”

  In modern times I knew of only two Rangers who had lost their lives in the line of duty. One of them while defending the life of a little girl and the other during a gunfight with bank robbers. As the ambulance door closed and they took Walt Cannon away and toward the fight for his life, I found myself praying silently that there would not be another name added to the list.

  “Who?” Jessica asked me. “Who is Esperanza?”

  The sun was climbing down the sky and thin slivers of purple and orange cloud hovered over the horizon, far away.

  “I don’t know, honey,” I said.

  A Sheriff’s deputy turned to me from his conference with a local policeman, and then the questions—as they always do—began.

  *****

  I was relieved when Patrick Kinsey showed up. Jessica brightened and threw her arms around him and his face flushed scarlet.