by George Wier
I ate up hot summer miles like so much sticky taffy.
I skirted Bryan this time. There were going to be no run-ins with Officer H. Leonard if I had anything to say about it.
A late evening sun found me parked in Mary Jo’s driveway.
The house had that empty look about it. It is amazing to me how quickly a place goes south when there is no one around to imbue it with life. It looked lonely. Desolate and cast-off.
Possibly I’d find Brad’s ghost in there and maybe we’d finally get a chance to talk.
I sat for fifteen minutes, just looking at the place. Then, with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, got out of my car and walked up.
*****
The front and back doors were locked. The windows were either locked tight or painted shut. I scanned the horizon, noting an absence of traffic along the highway. I went around back, found a good-sized stone in the weeds and stove in the lowest window.
Standing on top of one of the picnic table benches, I cleared away as much glass as possible and managed to get the window frame raised.
I went inside.
The electricity was off and the interior was gloomy. I moved from the kitchen down the long hallway to the living room and stopped in front of Brad’s desk.
There were stacks of papers, neatly arranged, books on electro-magnetic field theory. Leafing through these I noted complex mathe-matical equations and chicken-scratches in Brad’s own hand in the margins. Comments like: “not true!” and “so it is thought.” I dropped the book on the floor beside the desk and the echo throughout the house gave me a brief case of the chills.
The next book down was an exhaustive treatise on the high-frequency patents of Nicola Tesla. Many of the pages were dog-eared and there were even more hand-written notations in Brad’s hand. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. I dropped the book with the other on the floor.
I sat in Brad’s chair and began going through his desk.
*****
I knew who the killer was.
It had come over me while on my way back to Austin two weeks previously, what seemed like a lifetime ago. It had shaken me so badly that I had to stop the car at a roadside park and listen to the moan of the cicadas and crickets and the drone of the passing cars and trucks.
What I didn’t know was how. And why.
And I was determined to answer those two questions before I made my move.
*****
In the left-hand bottom drawer of Brad’s desk, behind a stack of books that had to be removed one by one, I found it.
A tape recorder wrapped in a set of blueprints and held together with a large rubber band.
There was a tape inside, cued up, ready to go. The batteries were still fresh.
Sitting there in Brad’s chair in his empty house, in his lost world, I listened. And the longer I listened, the madder I got.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I left in the near darkness, locking the front door behind me. I’d have to come back in the near future and do something about the kitchen window. For the time-being, I had fish to fry.
*****
The Brazos County Sheriff’s Department is on the ground floor of the six-story Court House building, which houses most of the county departmental head offices, including the County and District Courts. The upper three floors of the building are all jail.
I was buzzed through an inner door by a uniformed girl sitting behind a bullet-proof enclosure who looked like she should still be in high school. She looked bored beyond all patience, but when I smiled, she smiled back.
Larrabeth Williams greeted me and I followed her back to her office.
“Let me get a few things, Bill, then we can go. You’re riding with me.”
“Fine,” I said.
I watched and waited as Larrabeth gathered up a closed file box and a box of zip-lock bags, the kind used for evidence. I wondered.
I offered to carry the box and she let me. There was no adornment to the box, no tell-tale scribbles on it to give me a clue what was inside. It was heavy, though, and felt like papers — about seven or eight reams worth.
“What’s this?” I asked, as we walked out the back door of the Sheriff’s Office and into her private garage.
“Business records,” she said. “Had hell getting them. It took a court order.”
“The power company?” I asked.
She smiled at me and opened the trunk. I deposited the box and wiped the sweat from my brow.
We climbed inside and she started up the engine, switched on the police radio and reported to dispatch she was leaving. I recognized the code: “Out of Service.”
“You’re one smart white boy,” she said. “Damn right it’s power company records.”
“Who are we going after?” I asked.
She backed out of the garage and into the street. Larrabeth cranked up the air conditioning.
“First, we’re going to see Sandy.”
“And then?” I asked.
“That’s up to you,” she said.
*****
I knew from the direction of our travel that we weren’t heading to Sandy and Dorothy Jones’ home.
“What gives?” I asked her.
She turned to me.
“You give,” she said. “Starting now. Two weeks ago when you left town without telling me, there were a few things we didn’t cover. We talked about core rods and everything in the du Orly journal — which we both agree needs to be in a museum somewhere — and about your little trip down there with Sandy and that he took a bag of gold but everything else, including the skeletons, are missing. But a whole lot we didn’t cover. You held out on me.”
“What do you want to know?” I asked her.
“Who killed Brad Fisher and why and how? Who killed his brother and why and the same how? You see, the why is not the same why in those two cases.”
I sighed.
“Talk,” she said.
“It’s all on a tape.”
“What tape?”
“Brad’s tape. It was on a tape recorder in the bottom desk drawer of his desk. His confession to me or to whoever else found the tape. It’s in my car, along with the journal and Brad’s mechanical drawings of how to re-create the blue bone. What it does and how it does it.”
“Anything else there?” she asked me.
“I said it was a confession. It’s an admission of something I already knew.”
“Like what?”
“Like who killed him. And why.”
“Shit,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“I want to hear that tape. We have to make copies. It’s evidence.”
“It’s not exactly a dying declaration, but...”
“It’s close enough,” she said. “Anything else?”
“One thing,” I said. “The Chief of Police is Mike Fields’ father. You know him?”
“Sure I do,” she said, and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll bet Mike’s name is all over those CTL&P records.”
“It is.”
“And his father?”
“You know a lot for a skinny white man,” she said.
“I thought so. Do you know an Officer H. Leonard of the Bryan Police Department?”
She whistled.
“Thought so again,” I said.
“Mike killed Brad Fisher?”
“No,” I said.
“He had Harvey Leonard do it?”
“No.”
“I want to hear that tape,” she said. “Anything else you want to tell me right now?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Fine,” Larrabeth said. “But you’ll have to spill the rest of it soon. We’re here.”
*****
To take a line from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Brazos County Mental Health and Mental Retardation is its own higher power. It runs what is known as “residential treatment centers” throughout the twin cities. The Residential Treatment Center to which Sandy Jon
es had been taken was a two-story orange-brick house on the west side of Bryan. The first floor windows had black wrought iron bars on them, not so well-hidden by overgrown ficus and oleander. The second floor windows were likely nailed shut. Once inside, there was no way out except the front or back door.
We pulled up in front and walked across a yard that was weeks overdue for mowing.
The front door was locked. Larrabeth rang the doorbell.
A pair of eyes and arched eyebrows appeared in one of three high and narrow front door window panes.
“Open up,” Larrabeth said.
A key rattled in the front door. It opened.
“Yes?” the male attendant in blue nursing scrubs asked.
“Sandy Jones,” she said. “I want to see him. Right now.”
“Uh. Um.” The attendant stood there, his eyes shifting around.
“Better get a move on,” I said. “The last person that said ‘Uh’ and ‘Um’ to her winded up in a holding cell with fifty gang rapists.”
“Uh. Um. This... this way.”
He closed the door behind us, turned the key in the lock, then dropped the grungy elastic necklace holding it back around his neck.
We followed him up a flight of stairs and to the second floor. A strange, heavy-set woman in her early fifties walked toward us, then past. She held curled hands out before her and shook as though she had an ague. Her expression was mindless.
“You’re looking at their product here,” I whispered to Larrabeth as she turned to watch the woman pass.
“Shit,” she said.
The orderly stopped before an open door, pointed limply inside.
Larrabeth glanced in the room and at the strait-jacketed form on the bed, then told the orderly: “Scat.”
The fellow scatted.
Sandy Jones had seen better days. I was amazed at the difference two weeks could make in a person.
He lay there, staring up at the ceiling with blinkless eyes. He mumbled something, the same thing, over and over.
“Jesus,” Larrabeth said.
I knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear.
“Sandy,” I said. “Wherever you are, I need your help.”
He blinked, once. The soundless words failed on his lips. His body relaxed. I wondered how long he had been tense.
I waited. A minute passed. Two.
I looked at Larrabeth.
“Ma’am,” I said. “I’m going to have to say something not very nice to him. I’m apologizing in advance.”
“Go ahead and do it,” she said.
The house was still and quiet but for a distant repeated dull thump on a wall somewhere.
“Sandy? What do you say when they come knocking on your door and threaten to burn the niggers out?”
He blinked, a thrum of eye bats faster than a person could count. Then he turned slowly toward me.
“Don’t... threaten... my FAMILY!”
“Right,” I said. “Sandy. I’m going to count from five to one and snap my fingers. When I do you will be fully awake and aware. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”
I snapped my fingers in front of his face.
His body jerked. He sat up, fast.
“What the shit?” he said.
“Sweet Jesus,” Larrabeth breathed.
“Bill?” he asked, his face forming the saddest frown I believe I have ever seen.
“It’s me,” I said. “You’re in a psych ward. We’re getting you out of here.”
“My God,” Sandy said. “It was terrible. Oh my Lord.” His eyes probed mine, begging for understanding.
“They’ve got it,” he said quietly.
“Got what?” Larrabeth asked.
“The blue bone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We made quick work of the strait jacket.
Sandy walked between us. We went down the long hall and the stairs. The orderly was waiting in the foyer by the front door.
“Uh. You... He can’t —”
“Unlock that door,” Larrabeth said.
“Uh. Can’t... uh, do that.”
“Fine,” she said.
I knew what was coming long before she went through the motions.
Sheriff Larrabeth Williams pulled out her Smith & Wesson service revolver, aimed it at the front door lock and fired. The door knob and the lock mechanism blew outward into the night with a crash. The door drifted back on its hinges, as if welcoming us to leave. A curl of blue smoke hung in the air. The house had gone completely quiet. My ears rang.
“Thank you,” she told the orderly, who was flat against the wall and as white as a ghost. “I’ve been wanting to fire this thing ever since they gave me this damned badge.”
She turned to Sandy and me and smiled.
“Come on,” she said.
*****
You have to know how a company is put together...
Mike Fields had said that.
Who better to run everything than the man that knows everything?
“Tell me where we’re going, Bill?” Larrabeth said.
“The hole,” Sandy said from the rear seat.
Larrabeth turned and looked at him. They exchanged some kind of silent communication.
“Who among your deputies do you trust the most?” I asked the Sheriff.
“There’s only two of them. You’ve met them. Jim Cook and Lawson Cooper.”
“The reserve deputies that were the first to Mary Jo’s?” I said.
Larrabeth nodded.
“Get one or both of them on your cell phone. No police radio for this one.”
“We’ll need Hot Papa suits,” Sandy said.
“What?” Larrabeth said.
“Anti-radiation suits,” I said. “Lead-lined with leaded glass.”
“We’ve got some of those in the fallout shelter below the court house. They’re pretty old.”
“They’ll have to do,” I said. “Can Cook or Cooper get them?”
“I think so. Let me make the call.”
We wended our way through night traffic and out towards the edge of town as the Sheriff made her calls.
“They’ll meet us there,” she said finally.
“I don’t have my key anymore,” Sandy said.
Larrabeth and I exchanged knowing glances.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Larrabeth’s got one.”
We waited at the gate for an hour before the county cruiser pulled off the road. During that time I had my chance to get a few things out in the open between me and Sandy Jones. Larrabeth stood there between us, as if listening to the night. To her credit she never said a word.
“Why did you do it, Sandy?” I asked him.
“How much to you know?”
“Everything,” I said.
He sighed, then began.
“We thought you would be happy with just the journal,” he said. “Then, when Throckmorton came and... I shot him through the door, I was really protecting my family.”
“In more ways than one,” I said. “You were protecting them also from your lie.”
“I had to,” he said.
“What are you going to tell Dotty?” I asked him.
“If I tell her... she’ll divorce me. We won’t...” Sandy choked and broke down into a brief fit of tears. “We won’t be a family anymore. Not without Dotty. I’ll be back in prison inside of six months. If I go back there, I’ll kill myself. I’ll do it.”
“You’re not going back to prison,” I told him. “You didn’t kill Brad. You didn’t kill his brother. You didn’t even know who did it.”
I allowed him to get the hard, festering lump that he had been holding onto out where he could look at it. The truth, though painful, I’ve found, is always best.
“I have to tell her?” he asked.
“You have to, Sandy,” I said.
“It’ll never be the same between us.”
“No. But in many ways it will be better. At least there won’t be a lie between the tw
o of you and between you and your own children. Brad had the same lie going. He couldn’t face it. And now he’s dead and gone.”
“I’ll try,” he croaked. “God help me, I’ll try.”
“I’ll help you,” I said. “I know the duress you’ve been under. She’ll understand.”
“You don’t know my woman, Bill,” he said, his tears beginning to dry. He was beginning to accept it: To step to the right side of the curtain he had drawn between himself and his own world.
“Maybe I don’t,” I said. “But I know people. They’re good. Almost all of them are basically good.”
“Yeah,” he said, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Almost all.”
Almost, I thought. I wished it could be different from that, not for the first or the last time.
*****
Deputies Cook and Cooper climbed out of their cruiser and joined us.
“We need a warrant to go in there,” Lawson Cooper said.
“Got it, right here,” Larrabeth said, and hefted her pistol.
I turned to Cook and Cooper. “I have reason to believe,” I began, “that if we don’t move now, then the evidence we’re looking for will be long gone by the time we get back. There’s no time for a warrant.”
“Oh,” Cook said. “Then what are we waiting for?”
Flame coughed from a gun in the night. The gate lock was massive and tough. It took three shots from Larrabeth’s revolver before the lock flew away into the high weeds.
We followed the narrow roadway through the pastures, our headlights bouncing in the dark, revealing mounds of sleeping cattle, which on two occasions we had to skirt completely.
“We may have to shoot off the lock that goes to the hole,” I said.
“No,” Sandy said. “We’re not going that way.”
“Then where?” I asked.
“We’ll do it the easy way this time,” he said.
“What’s that?” Larrabeth asked.
“Why, the elevator, of course,” he said.
*****
It was a concrete power substation. The caliche and dirt path approaching it became smooth blacktop in the last hundred yards, and widened into a turnaround, apparently for eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rigs.
