by George Wier
DEATH ON THE PEDERNALES
A Bill Travis Mystery
GEORGE WIER
Copyright © 2011 by George Wier
Published by
Flagstone Books
Death On The Pedernales—A Bill Travis Mystery
1st Kindle Edition
January 24, 2012
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes written in connection with reviews written specifically for a magazine or newspaper.
The Bill Travis Mysteries
(in chronological and publication order):
The Last Call
Capitol Offense
Longnecks & Twisted Hearts
The Devil To Pay
Death On The Pedernales
and coming soon:
Slow Falling
(Prologue and first chapter at the end of this book)
DEDICATION
To the memory of Milton T. Burton—author, historian, mentor and friend. I miss you.
CHAPTER ONE
The body was brought out of the hangar on a stretcher by a uniformed paramedic doing double-duty as a deputy coroner. That’s sometimes the way it’s done in the hinterlands, where demand crosses swords with budget and the tax base is more of a tax ditch. A gray blanket covered the large mass. One stray finger was there beneath the edge, the hand threatening to fall from the jostling it was taking as the stretcher trundled past us.
“You’re the closest thing to family here,” Deputy Ladd Ross told Denise Lipscomb, who stood beside me in a state of shock. “You can ride with me. We’ll follow Burt’s ambulance.” The deputy and the paramedic exchanged nods of agreement.
“Nice to meet you, Burt,” I told the paramedic, who gave me no more than a curt nod.
“What about Bill here?” Denise asked.
“I’ll ride with Burt,” I volunteered.
“Fine,” Burt and the deputy said simultaneously, and I would have laughed aloud but for the intensity of the moment.
“How did he die?” Denise asked the deputy as Burt began to make a great ruckus with loading the stretcher, so much so that I decided to help him.
“Crowbar to the face,” the deputy said. “Repeatedly.”
*****
For me it always begins when I least expect it. One time it started while I was driving to work one gorgeous morning and on another occasion it was in the middle of a meeting with a client. Regardless of when, they all have one common element: I’ll get the call from an old friend who has fallen hip deep in the proverbial, doesn’t know which way to turn and desperately needs a certain old friend with certain known special skills—or, one of my clients has rubbed the wrong person the wrong way and needs me to smooth everything out come hell or high water. Whatever the situation, I wind up interposing myself between destruction and the seemingly innocent and after that it’s all like one long train-wreck that lasts for hours, or days, or even longer.
But that’s me.
I’m Bill Travis. The name alone should tell you something.
And it always begins with a feeling in the gut, with a nervous prickle among the small hairs on the nape of my neck, with a parched throat and a black gulf somewhere in the area near to my feet as if the ground underfoot is astride a crevasse of amazing dimension. And it means little sleep and guesses in the dark to come.
My regular workaday job in the real world is as a financial consultant. I developed the knack early on in life of making money make more money, and with my degree from the University of Houston, the state and federal certification allowing me to roll investments over, around and generally through the hoops, both for myself and for my clients, I’m pretty well set. But on occasion I am confronted with something that no one else—including, in many instances, the local law—is able to handle, and it’s then that I step up and take a hand. Usually, in those cases, the problem has little to do with balance sheets or figures or tax shelters. Those times are just—trouble. And it’s not that I like trouble, particularly, it’s just that I have found that trouble has always had a way of finding me. So I keep an office for my business just west of downtown Austin on San Antonio Street in an old Greek Revival home built in the 1890s. I wouldn’t dream of working anywhere else. My partner is Nathaniel Bierstone, Texas’ Lieutenant Governor as well as my wife’s uncle. As far as family is concerned, there’s my wife Julie, our adopted daughter, Jessica, and our two beautiful little miscreants, Jennifer and Megan. I spend a great deal of my life energy supporting them. But when trouble comes calling it’s like anything else—it’s by degrees, one step after the other until my toes are mired in it up to my collar bone.
Here’s how it all got going this time, innocently enough.
*****
“Are you ready?” she asked me.
“Yes. Definitely.”
“Let’s go, then. Throttle full. Release the brakes.”
The cockpit rumbled, setting up a vibration throughout my entire body. That same feeling came back to me, that sensation I recognized from age seventeen when I taxied my first airplane down a runway and took to the skies.
We began to pick up speed. From memory, I used the foot pedals to keep the nose of the Cessna as close to the center stripe as possible. The brownish, dying grass by the side of the runway flashed past as we gained speed. I glanced at my instructor, gave her a quizzical look: Is everything right, here? She gave me a curt nod.
At fifty knots I pulled back gently on the yoke and the front of the plane came up. Within a few heartbeats the ground was dropping away beneath us and there was nothing but blue sky with distant, puffy clouds ahead.
I had been promising myself I would return to flying lessons in the nebulous future, in that mythical time when there was time. Time enough to devote to it. Time enough away from other pursuits. No such continuum, I have found, truly exists. We have to make our time right now, or else it will never be.
“Good, Bill,” Denise Lipscomb said over the roar of the engine. “You’re a natural.”
I gave her a faint smile and made sure both the altimeter and the airspeed were increasing at approximately the same rate.
When I was seventeen I took flying lessons for awhile. I never fully completed the training, however, never got a certificate to fly solo. And since then I had regretted it. The feeling of total freedom that flying affords had been just out of my reach since. It felt a little too much like taking a prisoner from his cell for a day, taking him out to the wide-open outdoors, giving him the feel of the wind and the sight of mountains in the distance, and then locking him away again when darkness fell once more. I vowed then and there, as we reached and passed a thousand feet in altitude, to make sure my kids would enjoy this same feeling of freedom in the sky. I would teach them myself.
I leveled us off at five thousand feet and flew west. We were flying to Trantor’s Crossing, a rustic little berg nestled in the rocky, rolling hills fifty miles due west of Austin, to do touch-and-go practice landings at the small municipal airport there, then back home.
“Trim us up a bit,” Denise said.
I adjusted the elevator trim tab and eased back on the power. The only real difference between flying and driving is the added dimension of up and down. While you correct your right and left attitude by moving the yoke like a steering wheel—which moves the ailerons on the wings and banks you the desired direction—controlling up and down is accomplished by a pull or a push on the yoke. The trim tab on a plane is a fine-tuning control which makes constant up- and-
down correction unnecessary and makes for a much smoother flight. Picture the wheel tab for channel-tuning or volume control on any old radio, make it as big as small coffee-cup saucer and you got it. What I know about flying you could probably write on a yellow sticky note, but I got that much from ground school.
Below us the city played out to the brown hills west of Austin. And then I had twenty minutes of flight which seemed no longer than about two.
*****
When I lined up for the runway at the Trantor’s Crossing Municipal Airport I saw flashing red and blue lights in the distance, over by an aircraft hanger. Police and emergency vehicles.
“Um...” Denise began. “Set us down, Bill. I know people here. I want to see what’s going on.”
“You’re the boss.”
I concentrated on the upcoming approach and landing. A landing is, after all, no more than a controlled crash on a smooth surface. And prior flying time and the ground school instruction looked like it was paying its dividend. Flaps at full, keep the plane lined up, watch the whisper of a cross-wind, crab into that wind a bit, reduce power down to about a quarter, nose up, come in gently on the numbers. It’s really a piece of cake, except, of course, when it’s not.
For me a good landing is like a perfect golf putt or making the basketball shot with nothing but net. And that’s what happened. We landed like a leaf sighing down from a tree.
“Perfect,” Denise said.
Power back up, I rolled us on down the runway and taxied in, already missing the feeling of flight. I guided us over to the edge of the tarmac and killed the engine, turned the magnetos and radio off.
We watched the tableau unfold before us in front of the hangar.
*****
There were four county deputy sheriff’s cruisers, a City of Trantor’s Crossing black and white police cruiser, an ambulance, a fire department vehicle and half a dozen uniformed men and women milling around outside the open hangar doors. Whatever was going on, it was a big to-do. The municipal airport lay five miles from the town on a long, narrow plateau in the Texas Hill Country, and it wouldn’t be a usual event to have representatives of all local law enforcement so far away from town unless something terrible had occurred. I couldn’t help the cold place I felt blossom and expand deep down in my gut.
“What do you think—” I began, but Denise cut me off.
“Bad. Something bad. I hope it’s not—”
“Somebody you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go see,” I said.
We climbed out of the aircraft and walked across fifty yards of tarmac. A sheriff’s deputy glanced our way and then went back to his discussion with another deputy.
As we walked up, the deputy gave us his full attention. “You can’t go in there,” he said.
“What’s happened?” Denise asked.
“Who are you folks?” the deputy asked us.
“I’m Bill Travis,” I said and stuck out my hand. When you do that, they have to take your hand and act neighborly, or refuse, and end up looking like a jerk. The deputy, to his credit, shook my hand.
“This is Denise Lipscomb,” I said.
“I’m Ladd Ross. Sheriff’s deputy. You two just up and flew in here?”
“Yes, sir. I’m from Austin. Denise is teaching me how to fly.”
“Whatever in the world for?” he asked.
“Well. Because, you see—it’s there. And I already know how to drive and how to dive. In water, that is. Flying is all that’s left.”
“What’s happened here?” Denise asked again.
“A killing,” Deputy Ross said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Somebody killed old Edgar Bristow, that’s who.”
“Oh no!” Denise said. The shock was evident on her face. I put out my arm behind her, just in case she was about to faint. Denise was about my own size and if she went down I wanted to be ready. Clearly, she knew the deceased. Or, what’s the word they use nowadays? Decedent. A cold word, that one.
I had known Denise for no more than a couple of months. She had come highly recommended by a good friend of mine. Also, her fees were nominal compared to that of the large, corporate-scale flight training schools. During our first meeting at an old hangar where she kept her plane, I found myself instantly liking her.
I waited until the shock was replaced by grief, which is ten times better than shock, and far more safe. People have been known to drop dead from receiving bad news.
“Who was this fellow to you, Denise?” I asked.
“He was like the father I never had,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
I rode shotgun with Burt from the Trantor’s Crossing Municipal Airport as we had decided while Denise and Deputy Ladd Ross followed as the sun climbed to the uppermost arch of the sky. It was a hot day. A desiccated, brown day. And death not only followed, it was company that had come home to roost.
“Who was he?” I asked Burt.
“Edgar Bristow? A legend. A friend to Man. You’ve never heard of him?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry. What can you tell me about him, and about how he died?”
I looked at the driver. Burt was a middle-aged fellow, busily going prematurely bald, thin, bored with life. The kind of fellow that daily dreams of taking a month off to a dude ranch in Montana or a trek across the Matto Grasso in search of the world’s largest anaconda. But mostly, given an appearance of chronic ill-health and ensuing weakness, I was sure he dreamed of the women he would never have.
From the I.D. tag hanging from the rearview mirror I saw that his name was Burt Sanderson. Burt looked very much like a Burt. He shrugged, yawned, blinked his eyes at the highway before us, and then, in a tone reminiscent of a story told too many times, proceeded to educate me.
*****
Edgar Bristow came to Texas to stay at the end of World War II. He had walked into an enlistment office in Orangeburg, South Carolina in February of 1942, told a lie to the recruiter there with regard to his majority at the not-so-tender age of sixteen, and after six weeks of boot camp was headed for Europe with a gleam in his eye and bound by a personal oath to find Adolph Hitler and put a bullet between his eyes. Bristow had been a tall, strapping fellow with prominent features even then, so it was no mystery that the recruiter didn’t question him about his age.
Over the course of the war he had been in one of General George S. Patton’s tank divisions, had fought Erwin Rommel in North Africa, Italy and France, survived and was decorated after the war for single-handedly destroying a line of Rommel’s crack Panzers who were shelling a squadron of pinned-down infantrymen. He won the battle, all on his own: Bristow had not only driven the tank himself after his commander was wounded at the outset of the battle but had sighted-in on each enemy tank in turn, loaded each forty-pound shell himself, fired, then moved and dodged the tanks and fire coming at him, only to then stop and repeat the procedure, hitting the mark each time. The fact that his tank commander survived, along with more than ninety percent of the pinned infantrymen, had made Edgar Bristow an instant war hero, another Audey Murphy.
When he arrived stateside in the Summer of ‘45, he headed to Texas and a job with his Uncle Latimer Bristow, a lumber supply yard owner in the sleepy little town of Trantor’s Crossing, Texas. Surrounded by peach groves, the hot summer sun, and bored girls looking for a new last name that didn’t brutally rattle the ear with a Germanic timbre—in a town where the population was over seventy percent German immigrant descendant—Edgar played the field, slew one heart after another, drank beer, and worked his backside off. He took over the lumber yard after his Uncle was run over by a lumber truck driver, and proceeded to go after and win a number of lucrative state and government builder contracts. He was a millionaire at age twenty-one, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell it to look at him, a tall, rangy fellow with his sleeves rolled up, his stringy muscles corded about his spare frame like bass piano wire, and his perpetually sun-baked countenance etched
with a constant sardonic shit-eating grin.
It was the summer of 1949 when Edgar Bristow began to show evidence of being one of the genuine good guys. He began giving away money by the sackful.
This began when a tent revival came to town. The preacher, a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal, had a healing service in which a child with polio and steel braces bound about each stick-like leg was brought up and hands laid upon her frightened head. After the “healing” the girl took off her braces, took two steps, and fell into the arms of her weeping mother. She was pronounced “cured” by the Holy Ghost. The following Monday her braces were back on. The story goes that Bristow was there at the edge of the crowd during the healing and the next morning he was on his way to work when he saw the girl trudging to the covered bus stop her father had built for her at the end of their long, kalechi driveway, her braces gleaming in the sunlight.
That evening Bristow assembled a number of community doctors in a local tavern, handed them a hurriedly-drawn rough sketch for a hospital and wrote a check for half a million dollars with which to begin construction.
Whether this particular story was true or not, then and there as the coroner’s wagon passed the City Limits of Trantor’s Crossing, a certain knowledge came over me. Over the next few hours, days, and perhaps weeks, I would come to know Edgar Bristow like a long-lost friend, and I would, as if I had been standing there when it happened, come to know the circumstances of his untimely demise.
