The Big Gamble

by Michael McGarrity

  Kerney sat at the large antique Spanish colonial table, where he’d spent many pleasant hours chatting with Fletcher, and told him about Jack Potter’s murder. On an open shelf above a kitchen counter, a small menagerie of hand-carved, wooden folk-art animal figures—two chickens, a rabbit, and a pig—overlooked the scene.

  Fletcher’s cheery expression vanished. “You can’t be serious,” he said, his voice filled with dismay. He filled Kerney’s coffee cup with a shaky hand and replaced the carafe in the coffeemaker. “This is tragic.”

  Kerney nodded solemnly. “What can you tell me about Jack that I don’t already know?”

  “You can’t be thinking that Norman had anything to do with it,” Fletcher said as he sat down across from Kerney.

  “Norman is in London. He doesn’t know what happened, unless of course, he hired a contract killer.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Fletcher replied. “This will break the poor man’s heart. They were such a loving couple, perfect for each other. How familiar are you with Jack’s private life?”

  “Until he came out, I just figured him to be the confirmed bachelor type,” Kerney said. “I’ve met Norman socially, but Jack never talked to me about any of his personal relationships or his family.”

  “Until Jack met Norman he’d kept his sexual orientation out of public view,” Fletcher said. “His love for Norman helped him realize that being gay was something to openly celebrate. As far as family goes, he was an only child and both his parents are dead. He is close to an aunt who is retired and lives in Tucson. Jack and Norman visit her several times a year.”

  “Do you have a name?” Kerney asked.

  “Maude is her first name, I believe,” Fletcher said. “But I’m sure Norman will know how to get in touch with her, or Jack’s secretary should.”

  “Did he have any lovers before Norman who caused him trouble?” Kerney asked.

  “He had a long-standing affair with a rather troubled young man whom he supported on the q.t. for several years. Jack paid the rent, gave the boy expense money when he wasn’t working, and bought his clothes. It was a May-December affair. The lad was a good twenty-five years younger than Jack. It was also common knowledge that the boy was not mentally sound.”

  “How so?” Kerney asked.

  “He was in and out of the psychiatric ward for fits of depression and suicidal tendencies. When he was stable, he worked as a waiter. But as time went on, he became more unbalanced, less able to hold a job, and totally promiscuous. Jack had no choice but to end it.”

  “Did it end badly?”

  “In chaotic uproar,” Fletcher replied. “But Jack kept it under wraps from the straight community.”

  “Do you have a name to give me?” Kerney asked.

  “That’s a story in itself. The young man’s name was Matthew B. Patterson. It’s now Mary Beth Patterson. He had a sex-change operation up in Colorado six years ago. It made a world of difference for him.”

  Kerney finished his coffee and put the cup aside. “In what way?” he asked.

  “Matthew was small-boned, almost petite, and very feminine, with soft doe eyes and pretty features. But he wasn’t at all the swishy queen type. There was a woman hiding inside his body, and once Mary Beth emerged, his depression and self-destructive tendencies seemed to vanish, at least for a time.”

  “Aren’t sex-change operations expensive?” Kerney asked.

  “Indeed. Jack paid for it as a settlement to the affair.”

  “And to keep it quiet?”

  “That also,” Fletcher replied. “All this happened before Jack and Norman became an item.”

  “So did the problem with Matthew go away?”

  Fletcher nodded. “Only to be replaced by the arrival of Mary Beth on the scene. She came back fully expecting Jack to marry her, which of course he did not do.”

  “Then what happened?” Kerney asked.

  “Mary Beth took on the characteristics of a hysterical, wronged woman. She tried every ploy to get Jack back, including stalking him for a time.”

  “Did she make any threats?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How was the situation resolved?”

  “When Jack rejected her advances, she mutilated herself with a knife by cutting her arms and then called for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed her as a borderline personality. Jack paid for her medical care, sorted out her disability benefits, and got her into a group home for mentally ill adults. She met another patient there and fell in love with him. They’ve been living together ever since they moved out of the group home.”

  “How do you know all this?” Kerney asked.

  “Partially from Jack, but Mary Beth’s lover is my new gardener. I’ve only employed him for a couple of months. His name is Kurt Larsen. He’s much older than Mary Beth and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Where can I find Mary Beth?”

  “They live in an apartment complex run by a mental health clinic.”

  “I know the place,” Kerney said.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Tell me about Larsen.”

  “Kurt is quiet but pleasant, except when something triggers his war experiences. Then he becomes agitated, out of sorts, and drinks heavily. When he comes to work sullen and hungover I always know that he’s had one of his episodes. He’s a Vietnam veteran, an ex-marine.”

  “You’ve been very helpful, Fletcher,” Kerney said as he went to the sink and rinsed out his coffee cup.

  “I’d like to say it’s always a pleasure to assist the police,” Fletcher replied with a rueful smile. “But this is so very sad. I must do something to help Norman get through this.”

  Kerney nodded in agreement. “I may need to talk to you about this again.”

  “Of course, as you wish. But you can’t just jump up and leave until you agree to bring your lovely wife here for dinner. I think it would be best to do it before the baby arrives and you both become totally preoccupied with the exhausting tasks of parenthood. Are you free Friday night?”

  “That should work,” Kerney said.

  “You must promise not to be called away on some pressing police matter.”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  Fletcher raised an eyebrow. “Really? One would hardly know it.”

  Kerney laughed. “No police business, I promise.”

  “Perfect. I’ll pull out my cookbooks and start menu planning. We’ll have a grand feast.”

  “As always,” Kerney said.

  “Neither Mary Beth nor Kurt strikes me as a killer,” Fletcher said.

  “Killers come in all flavors,” Kerney said as he patted Fletcher on the shoulder and left to the soft sounds of Beethoven.

  In his unit, he got on the horn to Sal Molina and gave him the rundown on Mary Beth Patterson and Kurt Larsen.

  “Well, at least now we’ve got something to follow up on,” Molina said.

  “No luck at the crime scene?” Kerney asked.

  “Not so far,” Sal replied.

  Kerney arrived home to find Sara waiting expectantly for him. Their first day of vacation together was to have started with a visit to the construction site of their new house. Up to now, Sara had only seen the photographs Kerney had taken and mailed off to her. Last night she’d been excited and eager to see it first-hand. But their early morning spat had left Sara less than enthusiastic. She nodded curtly when he asked if she was ready to go, walked quickly to his pickup truck, then sat looking straight ahead and said nothing as he wheeled out of the driveway. Feeling guilty about the squabble, Kerney matched Sara’s silence with his own.

  Halfway through the drive, Sara looked at her hands, twisted her wedding ring with her thumb, and asked about the homicide.

  Kerney gave her a brief summary. “It could be a tough one to solve,” he said in conclusion.

  “You were so long getting back, I thought you had abandoned our plans for the morning,” Sara said.
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  “I wouldn’t do that,” Kerney replied. “I stopped by to talk to Fletcher. He had some interesting information about Jack Potter that might prove helpful.”

  “You could’ve sent a detective to meet with Fletcher,” she said flatly, her eyes still fixed on the road ahead.

  “Yes, but I wanted to cool down a bit,” Kerney said.

  “Besides, seeing Fletcher got us a dinner invitation to his house for Friday night.”

  “If we’re talking to each other by then, I suppose we should go.”

  “Aren’t we talking now?”

  Sara squinted against the sunlight and lowered the visor. “Not really.”

  They left the highway and drove along the ranch road to the cutoff that took them through a pasture on their new property and up toward a long ridgeline. Kerney had spent several weekends improving the road with a borrowed grader, spreading and packing vast amounts of gravel base course to make it usable year-round. No longer rutted, narrow, and rocky, it climbed gently to a large sheltered bowl below the crest where several low courses of new adobe walls stood on the recently poured concrete pad.

  Sara made no comment about the road, nor about the new red prefabricated galvanized-steel horse barn that had been erected a good half a mile from the house. She was out of the truck and moving toward their contractor, Bobby Trujillo, before Kerney set the parking brake and killed the engine.

  Trujillo met Sara halfway across the open field. Together they walked around the outside perimeter of the partially raised adobe walls, inspecting the work in progress. Kerney decided to let them go on without him and took a hike in the direction of the horse barn to check on Soldier, the mustang he’d trained as a cutting horse.

  Soldier had been pastured at Dale Jennings’s ranch down on the Tularosa for the past several yeas. Two weekends ago, after the barn and corral were completed, Dale, Kerney’s boyhood chum and lifelong friend, had brought Soldier up by trailer along with his own mount. The two men camped out on the property overnight and covered all of Kerney’s two sections—twelve hundred and eighty acres—by horseback the following day.

  It had been Kerney’s best weekend away from the job in several months. Dale had left shaking his head in wonder and amusement at the beauty of the land with its magnificent views of the distant mountains, the size of the house Kerney was building, and the fact that his old buddy had put up a six-stall barn that for now would serve one lonely animal.

  The corral gate was closed and the stall door was open, but Soldier wasn’t inside the arena or under the covered shelter that ran the length of the barn. Inside the corral, Kerney inspected the water trough and freestanding hay rack he’d filled yesterday before leaving to pick up Sara at the airport. Both looked untouched. He glanced into the empty stall, which he’d purposely left open to give Soldier access to the corral. The interior gate to the center aisle was closed and latched.

  Kerney stood in the corral and did a three-sixty looking for his horse. He was nowhere in sight. Kerney doubted Soldier could have gotten out without assistance. He’d carefully padlocked all the other exterior doors to keep rodents and other small animals from gaining access.

  He walked around the barn. Except for Soldiers stall it was secure. He unlocked the barn doors, pushed one back, and saw Soldier lying on the concrete pad that ran the length of the center aisle. He stepped in and inspected the animal. Soldier had been shot three times in the stomach and left to die. In his death throes, he’d kicked and dented the steel wall with his forelegs. Blood from the wounds had stained the concrete pad and soaked into the dirt floor in front of a stall door.

  Because he was starting out with just one animal, Kerney had jokingly named the spread the One Horse Ranch. Now, it wasn’t even that anymore. He bent down and stroked Soldier’s head. He’d been a fine horse, a smart horse. Who would do such a thing? And why?

  Outside, he used his cell phone to call Andy Baca, his ex-boss and the chief of the state police. He told Andy what had happened to Soldier and asked him to dispatch a patrol officer.

  “Do you want me to send an agent also?” Andy asked.

  “No, I’ll handle the crime scene myself,” Kerney said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” Kerney said.

  “This doesn’t sit right with me,” Andy said.

  “With me either,” Kerney replied. “Somebody went out of his way to kill my horse as painfully as possible.”

  “You got any idea who did it?”

  “Only a handful of people knew Soldier was on the property, and none of them carry any grudges against me as far as I know.”

  “Well, somebody’s sending you a message,” Andy said.

  “It looks that way.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a wacko on the crew building your house.”

  “Maybe,” Kerney said. “But I’ve gotten to know the guys pretty well, and none of them strikes me that way.”

  “You never know.”

  “True enough,” Kerney said.

  “Any leads on the Jack Potter homicide?”

  “Nothing worth talking about yet,” Kerney answered.

  “Keep me informed, and if you need help, just ask.”

  “I will, and thanks.” Kerney disconnected and called Tug Cheney, a veterinarian he knew from his days as a caretaker of a small ranch on the Galisteo Basin. Tug told him Soldier could be sent to Albuquerque for an autopsy or he could do a quick and dirty one himself.

  “I know what killed my horse,” Kerney said. “What I want are the bullets out of Soldier’s stomach. When can you get out here?”

  “Give me directions to your place, and I’ll be there in an hour,” Tug said.

  Kerney supplied directions, thanked Tug, stuck the cell phone back on his belt, and turned to see Sara walking slowly in his direction from the construction site.

  Today he’d argued with a woman he adored, seen the murdered body of a man he liked, and found a horse he loved maliciously destroyed. It was a crummy way to start a vacation.

  He started toward Sara to give her the news.