by JM Gulvin
Quarrie indicated the window. ‘You found Mary-Beth’s body. You saw how badly she’d been beaten up?’
With a shiver Mrs Perkins nodded.
‘Me and the chief here,’ Quarrie glanced at Billings, ‘we believe that whoever did that to her wanted something. We don’t think they got it and that’s why they beat her up. We think that was done out of frustration, and if she had something they wanted then it’s possible she knew them from somewhere. It’s possible they might’ve spoken to her on the phone.’ He looked at the chief once more where he was sitting across the room. ‘The police department’s already asked for Ms Gavin’s records, isn’t that right, Chief?’
Billings colored a little before he nodded.
Where she sat on the couch Mrs Perkins tucked her legs underneath her and looked from one of them to the other.
‘Right now we know nothing about her.’ Quarrie’s tone was gentle but firm. ‘We have no idea who she was or if she had any family or where she lived before. You say she didn’t really talk?’
Mrs Perkins shook her head. ‘Like I said just now, she kept pretty much to herself. I asked of course, made conversation, but she wasn’t one for giving much away. She wasn’t married – I know that much – because she was on her own of course, and she had no ring on her finger. Whether she’d ever been married I can’t say. She only stayed with me that one week and it wasn’t even a full week now I come to think on it. It was only four days before Mr MacIntyre told her she had the job permanent. After that she moved into the house down on the corner and I only ever saw her at work.’
Twelve
Dr Beale spent the night in a motel in Bonham a few miles west of the Bowen house. Fetching some food from the local diner he ate in his room and when he’d finished he got up and went to the window. Easing the drape aside he gazed across the darkened parking lot. Nothing moved; nobody out there. Even so, he checked the dead bolt to make sure the door was secure just the same. The tape recorder was on the bed and he unhooked the microphone.
‘May thirty-first, 1967. Dr Mason Beale in a motel room in Bonham – that’s Fannin County, Texas.’ He paused for a moment looking down where the spool still turned. Clearing his throat he sat straighter. ‘Icarus Bowen is dead. According to the sheriff’s department he shot himself, but his son is at the house right now and he believes it was murder.’
*
Isaac woke in his father’s house. He lay in bed gazing at the white-painted ceiling then got up and took a shower. Combing his hair back from his forehead, he dressed in his uniform and went to the garage where the keys were still in the pickup. Climbing behind the wheel he drove the short distance to the town of Bonham.
The sheriff’s department was a modern, flat-roofed building built across the street from the courthouse. A couple of cruisers in the parking lot, Isaac went in through the glass-panelled doors and found a young woman seated in front of a telephone switchboard.
‘My name is Isaac Bowen,’ he told her.
‘Yes, sir.’ She offered a shallow smile. ‘I thought it might be, on account of your uniform. We’re all so sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you, mam. That’s kind of you.’ Isaac rested a palm on the counter. ‘I want to talk to the deputy who came by my house yesterday.’
‘All right, sir. I’ll see if he’s around.’ Plugging a lead into the switchboard the woman asked if Collins was back there and then she looked up at Isaac. ‘He’ll be right out,’ she said and indicated a pair of plastic chairs set next to a fake orange tree. ‘Why don’t you take a seat?’
Isaac did that. Tunic buttoned, he straightened the flaps and sat with his head bowed and hands clasped together. A couple of minutes later the deputy with the pock-marked face appeared from behind the counter.
‘Mr Bowen,’ he said. ‘You asked to see me, sir. What can do for you?’
Isaac was on his feet. ‘The detective you told me about – the one who said my dad shot himself. I don’t think that’s what happened and I’d like to talk to him if that’s OK?’
The deputy looked at him with his brows knit. Briefly he glanced over his shoulder at the switchboard girl and then he looked back.
‘Lieutenant Crowley you’re talking about. He ain’t here right now, I’m afraid. They got him giving evidence in a trial down in Houston.’
Pushing open the glass doors he led Isaac outside. The sun climbing a cobalt sky, the heat shifted tar macadam into mush so it stuck to the soles of their shoes.
‘Look,’ Collins said, ‘I know how this is for you. I lost my own father when I was fourteen and I understand, I promise you.’
Isaac stared at him. ‘Did somebody shoot him?’ he asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Did anybody tell you that he killed himself?’
‘No, he died of liver cancer.’
‘Then I’m sorry, but you don’t know how it is. I want to see him. My dad – where is he?’
The deputy drove him across town to the hospital off Rayburn Drive. Parking the cruiser he led the way through a side door where a coroner’s ambulance was parked. They went down a flight of steps into a short corridor where a set of fire doors faced them. Collins opened those and beyond them they found a clerk in a white coat sitting at a metal desk. A white-tiled anteroom, he listened to the request the deputy made, took a swig from the coffee cup perched at his elbow, then led them into a smaller room at the back where a rack of metal drawers were fixed in vertical rows. Studying the names on the drawers he pulled out a gurney from the row at the bottom.
Isaac stared at his father’s face. Colorless and empty, a tick started up at the corner of his mouth; he ground his jaws so the teeth scraped across one another audibly. At his sides his hands had knotted into fists. His father’s eyes were closed; the skin on the right eye purple and puffy. Pacing around the gurney Isaac bent to study the hole at his temple where a hint of soot lay scattered in all but invisible pinpricks.
With a sigh the deputy folded his arms. ‘The Ranger told me how that wasn’t a contact wound, but the lieutenant said it didn’t matter. Your dad had a lot of guns, Mr Bowen; he knew how to use them and it didn’t matter that the barrel wasn’t pressed right up to the skin.’
Isaac was still inspecting the wound. ‘My dad was 82nd Airborne. He fought in Africa and took a bayonet in the stomach.’ He was shaking his head, looking from the deputy to the clerk and back again to his father’s body. ‘There’s no way he would’ve shot himself. I don’t care what your lieutenant said.’
They drove back to the sheriff’s department and Isaac sat with the window rolled down and his tie loose at the collar. He had his top button undone and sweat scrolled from his temple.
‘Deputy Collins,’ he said. ‘I can’t talk to your lieutenant right now because he’s not here.’ He looked sideways at him. ‘That Texas Ranger you told me about – how do I get a-hold of him?’
*
When Beale drove back to the Bowen house he found the pickup gone and there was no answer when he rang the bell. He rang a second time but still nobody came to the door so he walked round to the back of the house and peered through the kitchen window. No sign of anybody inside. Walking back to his car, he seemed to ponder before he got in.
Back in Shreveport a few hours later he showed his pass to the guard at the hospital gates. Collecting the tape recorder and his briefcase from the trunk of the car, he walked the length of the road to the main entrance, glancing at the patients who were stable enough to work in the garden.
Inside the building it was cool as he crossed the polished parquet floor to the elevator where an orderly ensured no patient made it up to the suite of offices. He nodded to the doctor and Beale nodded back, and when he got to the third floor he spoke to his secretary.
‘How are things, Alice? Has anyone been in touch?’
A middle-aged woman wearing pearl-white cat-eye spectacles, she looked up from behind the weight of her typewriter. ‘Nothing that was urgent, Doctor: everything
here is fine. There’s nothing to report, though don’t forget the meeting with the trustees later.’ She paused briefly before she added. ‘Unless you want me to cancel that, of course: I did tell them you’d gone away and that you might not be back.’
Beale had his office door open. ‘Do that, Alice, would you? Tell them I am back, but I’m busy as hell right now so if it could be rescheduled I’d appreciate it.’
Inside his office he closed the door then placed the tape recorder on the coffee table and unhooked the reel of tape. Sliding that into a cardboard case he marked the label then locked it in the safe with the others. Behind him the phone buzzed on his desk.
‘Yes, Alice?’ he said as he pressed the speaker.
‘Orderly Briers is asking to see you.’
Beale seemed to think about that. ‘Is he out there now?’
‘No sir, he just called from downstairs. Said he saw your car in the parking lot and that he needs to have a quick word.’
Beale made a face. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Have him come up.’
A few minutes later the orderly was standing before Beale’s desk and seemed to regard the doctor a little cautiously.
‘Dr Beale,’ he said, ‘Alice told me you were away for a day or two but she didn’t say where you’d gone.’
Beale looked up. ‘That’s because I didn’t tell her.’
Briers colored slightly, hovering on the balls of his feet. ‘I spoke to Nancy. We talked, the two of us. What’s happening, Doc? What’s going on?’
Beale looked at him for a moment longer then his expression softened. Allowing a little trapped air to escape his lips he sat back in the chair and gazed beyond Briers to the photo of Freud.
‘I went to Texas,’ he said. ‘I went to see Ike Bowen.’
‘Did you?’ Briers’s brow was furrowed. ‘And what did he have to say?’
‘Nothing,’ Beale shifted his attention back to the orderly. ‘He’s dead, Charlie. He blew his brains out.’
Thirteen
When he left Mrs Perkins house Quarrie told Billings he would be back when the phone records came in and then he made the long drive home.
It took him a little over five hours and he found James watching TV in the cottage with Eunice keeping an eye on him. The house was one of three Pick Feeley had built in whitewashed adobe, set alongside the bunkhouse on a piece of flat land a little way below the remodelled ranch house. Quarrie slipped Eunice an extra ten dollars and asked if her brother was about. Eunice told him that he’d been in Houston with Mrs Feeley but the airplane was back in its hangar and he was probably over at the bunkhouse now.
When his son was tucked up in bed, Quarrie crossed the yard to the low-lying building where he found Pious playing cards with the Uruguayan foreman. At twenty-three years old Nolo Suarez was the single most accomplished horseman Quarrie had ever seen. His father had been a gaucho all his life, working a spread south of Montevideo, and his mother was part Comanche and part Tejano. The bearer of an American passport, Nolo had come north when he hit eighteen and ended up in the panhandle. Pick Feeley was still alive back then and he gave the kid a job. Now Pick was gone Mrs Feeley couldn’t do without Nolo, not unless she decided to turn all the land she owned over to oil and get rid of the stock completely.
Mama Sox had a half dozen bottles of Falstaff sweating in the fridge. Pious’s mother, she ran the bunkhouse along with Eunice, and Quarrie had known them since he was a fourteen-year-old kid. When Pious was locked up in Leavenworth, Quarrie found his mother and sister work at the ranch and they had been there ever since. Grabbing a long neck he snapped off the top and sat down at the table.
‘You look beat, John Q,’ Nolo said.
‘Do I? Fact is I been on the road so long I could sleep on a chicken’s lip.’
Nolo laughed. He indicated the cards. ‘You want to play? We could deal you in?’
‘No, sir.’ Quarrie shook his head. ‘I’m a worse poker player than Pious even and that’s saying something.’ With a grin he glanced at his old friend. ‘James told me he talked to you about that train wreck up on the Red.’
‘Yes, he did.’ Pious was concentrating on his hand.
‘You never said to him what we found there?’
Pious shook his head. ‘Nope. You told me how you’d tell him when you were ready and I figured you meant what you said. Did you talk to the sheriff yet?’
In his mind’s eye Quarrie could see those bones in the river again. ‘Not so far,’ he said. I was going to but then this business kicked off in Marion County. James told me he’s going to write something up for school though, and I figured I wouldn’t tell him about the skull until I saw what it was he had. Meantime I’ll get a-hold of Sam Dayton and have one of his boys come up here so you can show them where we were fishing at.’
‘You know what?’ Pious said. ‘We could bring those bones up and give them a proper burial, but the way I see it they’re pretty much buried as it is. I guess I told you that wreck happened forty years ago but I was wrong about that. On the way down to Houston Mrs Feeley said to me how that bridge actually came down in nineteen hundred and three. That’s sixty-four years, John Q, and those bones been there ever since. If this was up to me I’d leave them where they’re at rather than go disturbing them over again.’
‘I’d kindly like to oblige you, Pious, but the fact is I’m a cop.’ Taking another swig of beer Quarrie got to his feet. ‘I can’t be leaving human bones lying around for someone else to come up on. You ain’t the only catfish grabbler knows about that wreck. Sooner or later somebody else will make the same discovery we did. We need to gather those bones up and I should’ve done it right off. I’ll get hold of the sheriff first thing in the morning. And you never know, if James does this project thing properly, maybe he’ll come up with a name for the kid.’ He took another pull at the bottle. ‘He told me you said you might help show him how to look stuff up, and seeing as how I’m on the road right now, I’d be obliged if you did.’
After he dropped James off at the bus stop the following morning, Quarrie drove to Wichita Falls and Sheriff Dayton’s office where he was able to commandeer a desk. He had the sawn-off section of twelve-gauge barrel as well as the slivers of metal he had recovered in two separate evidence envelopes and he sent them to the forensic lab in Austin. He was about to wire the newly formed National Crime Information Center to see if they had anything on the fingerprints, when a call came in.
‘Dispatch here, John Q. We got someone on the line wants to talk to you.’
‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Who is it?’
‘He says his name is Bowen and he’s calling from Fannin County.’
Quarrie waited for the operator to put the call through with his knee resting against the lip of the desk.
‘Sir, I’m sorry to bother you.’ The voice sounded a little emotional. ‘My name’s Isaac Bowen. My dad was Icarus Bowen, though everybody called him Ike.’ He broke off for a moment then he said. ‘The deputy from Fannin County told me it was you that found his body.’
‘That’s right,’ Quarrie said. ‘I was passing when your father’s gardener called the sheriff. It’s their deal though; you need to be speaking to them.’
‘Yes sir, I know that and I have done. The thing of it is Deputy Collins said you told him my daddy was murdered but they think he killed himself.’
Back at the ranch Quarrie found Pious working on one of the trucks. ‘Bud,’ he said, ‘does Mrs Feeley have any plans right now for the plane?’
Standing tall Pious wiped his hands on a rag and glanced from the barn to the hangar up on the plateau where the ranch house was built. ‘Not that she told me.’
‘I need for you to fly me to Fannin County. You figure you could do that? Department’s paying for the gas.’
‘Sure.’ Pious jerked a thumb at the truck. ‘I’d rather be flying that plane than working on this piece of shit. Just give me a minute to make the checks.’
Thirty minutes later they were in the co
ckpit of a ’63 Piper Cherokee – a model that had been brought out to compete with the Cessna. A two hundred and thirty-five horsepower unit with a pair of tip tanks holding seventeen gallons a piece. Pious said they did that to enhance the load capacity, and along with the existing tanks that made a total of eighty-four gallons. Quarrie wasn’t up on the pay load or any kind of avionics, but when they were kids Pious had been able to fix just about any ailment on any engine that was placed in front of him. A couple of years after he started working the ranch, Pick Feeley had been so impressed he paid for him to get his pilot’s license.
Seated at the controls Pious glanced across the cockpit, a pair of mirror-lens Ray-Bans pressed high on the bridge of his nose.
‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me if I got this right. The sheriff is saying suicide and you reckon homicide. Is that about how it is?’
Quarrie nodded.
‘You sure he’s wrong and you’re right? I mean, I know how you like to think you ain’t ever been wrong, but I’ve known you twenty-two years, John Q, and you been wrong a bunch.’
‘Pious, do I tell you how to fix this plane?’
‘Nope.’
‘Do I tell you how to take off or land?’
‘Wouldn’t pay you any mind if you did.’
‘So, I’ve seen enough gunshot wounds to know when it’s a suicide and when it ain’t, and people don’t shoot themselves with a gun held two inches away from their head.’
Pious eased the sunglasses a little lower. ‘And that’s how it was with this guy?’
‘That’s how it was with this guy.’ Quarrie stared through the spinning prop. ‘Somebody took a twenty-two automatic from his gun cabinet and stood alongside him as he sat at his desk. After he was dead they sat him a little more upright and put the gun in his hand. I know that not just from the powder burns but the way blood settled after he was dead.’
Pious put the plane down a few miles south of the lake. On the phone Isaac had told Quarrie that a farmer named Palmer had an alfalfa field that had been sheared right back to the dirt. Quarrie knew Pious could land on that and he settled the Piper on its wheels before rolling to a stop just ahead of a ragged-looking barn where most of the paint was peeled off.
