by Paula Boyd
"No, she wouldn’t have anything to do with me then." He gave me a look that implied I was also guilty of this grave transgression.
"But things changed later?"
"It was after I’d already graduated. I was working cattle for my daddy. She was a senior. Kind of met her by chance out on the road to the ranch. She was having car trouble."
Well, now, this was becoming quite interesting. "When was it, I mean, what time of year?"
"Oh, it was in the spring. March, April maybe. I remember it was raining so we sat in the car and talked until the cloud blew over. Then I fixed her car, a hose was loose, I think."
"So you two hit it off right away?"
He shifted around a little on the bed and twiddled his thumbs in nervous little circles. "How come you want to know all this stuff? I don’t see that it makes any difference."
"It probably doesn’t make a bit of difference. What I’m really trying to figure out is timing on some things, what Rhonda was doing at certain points, that’s all."
Leroy bent his head forward. "I thought she really liked me," he said softly. "At first."
At first? I knew it would be completely uncouth--not to mention none of my business--to ask him to elaborate on that. It would also be crass and completely out of line to inquire if he’d had sex with Rhonda. Still, I had a theory I needed to test. "Did you know she was pregnant--that she had a child about that time?"
Leroy shot straight up in bed, spun his hulking self to the side and thumped his feet down to the floor. His eyes bulged and his jaw worked up and down as he gulped in immense mouthfuls of air.
"Calm down, Leroy, you’re going to hyperventilate and I don’t have any paper bags."
He didn’t calm down so I forced myself up from the desk, took his hands, cupped them and held them around his mouth. After a minute or so he settled down and started breathing semi-normally.
I grabbed the remote and muted the TV. "I assume this means you two were lovers."
He started gasping again, and I pushed his hands back up.
"Knock it off, Leroy, people do that, you know. Sex is just a part of life." It wasn’t a part of mine at the moment, but that was a temporary technicality. "We’re all human."
"You...you...think…" Gasp. Gasp. "I knocked her up?"
I hate that phrase. But hearing Leroy say, "Do you think I may have impregnated her?" would have been more ridiculous. "I doubt it."
He heaved a huge sigh of apparent relief, and it concerned me that he was so eager to accept my dubious opinion as fact. How would I know anything for sure? I figured Rhonda was already in trouble before she started fooling around with Leroy Harper. Even she wasn’t that desperate. Or at least she hadn’t been until she found herself pregnant and in a big bind that made marrying Leroy Harper look like a good way out.
Leroy dug a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. "She started talking about getting married a lot. Made me real nervous. That’s kind of why we split up. I wasn’t but nineteen and I sure wasn’t ready to settle down. She sure was pretty, though, back then."
Yeah, weren’t we all. "I think maybe she was already pregnant before you two started dating."
"Hmmm." He sat there, just staring, and one might presume, thinking. After a few minutes he said, "I bet you’re right. She had put on a little weight." He rubbed his belly. "I didn’t figure I was one to be talking so I didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t stick out though, just got fat. I wouldn’t know about that stuff, I’m a guy."
I nodded. "Some women do that, put on weight all over, not just in the stomach. I didn’t. By the time I was two months along, I looked like I’d swallowed a propane tank."
Leroy didn’t seem to know what to say to that. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t need to be throwing my personal pregnancy stories into the fray. That I’d thrown up sixteen times a day for four months didn’t need to be shared either.
"I think I know who the father had to be," he said. "Mr. Pollock."
He was right, of course, but how’d he know, and why hadn’t I suspected? Maybe because I was too busy fending off the fool myself. In a weird way, it was kind of a blow to the ego, learning that Pollock had been trolling elsewhere--particularly the Rhonda pond--when I’d assumed I’d been the only one he'd been after. Having this sort of thought and personal admission was strange enough, but then I had an even stranger one: If Rhonda and I had been friends instead of enemies, we might have been able to take the old pervert down sooner rather than later. These mental musings were neither pleasant nor relevant, so I took a few steps back. "How do you know for sure it was Pollock?"
"Well, I guess I don’t for positive, but she sure did talk about him all the time. Always going on about how much she hated him and how she wished she could get him back for what he’d done."
That wasn't an automatic confirmation of fatherhood, of course. I’d ranted and raved about similar things and the only intimate understanding Pollock and I had shared was that if he tried to touch me again I’d tell his wife--after I broke his fingers. Hardly the same at all. "What exactly did she say he’d done to her?"
"Nothing personal or anything, just school stuff. Different things, and not always the same story. I guess that’s what made me think something just wasn't right. Sometimes she said he was going to kick her out of school for one thing or another. Then, she said he’d messed up her grades, credits or something, and she wasn’t going to be able to graduate. When she took off, I figured that some of it was true and she was just too embarrassed to stay around."
Yeah, that sounded like Pollock since he'd tried similar things with me. And, Leroy was no doubt right that she’d been embarrassed, but for a slightly different reason. "Did you ever see her anymore after she left town?"
He nodded and looked away. "I saw her off and on for a couple of years. But I quit going back to her after awhile."
Back to her? Unusual phrasing. You go back to a store, not a girlfriend. "So she left before graduation and came back to Kickapoo when?"
"A year later maybe. But not to Kickapoo. She moved to Redwater. She called me up and told me she was back and that she had a new job."
"Where was she working?"
"Out of her house."
Uh-oh, this was not sounding good at all. "I take it she wasn’t selling Tupperware or Mary Kay."
"I don’t want to talk about it."
No doubt he didn’t. Of all the jobs that Rhonda could have done out of her house, having Leroy as a client narrowed the choices down to about one. I propped my elbows on the table and rubbed my temples. "She was a hooker, yes?"
He didn’t say anything, just stared down at his hands.
Oh, my, but this was not good, not good at all. I thought about Rhonda, her situation. Surely she hadn’t been forced to be a prostitute. If she’d given the baby up for adoption she’d only have had herself to support. She could have done that working at McDonald’s, couldn't she?
"What ever happened to her mother?"
Leroy shrugged. "Never saw her that I recall. Anytime I went to the house, Rhonda said she was working."
Boy, did I hate to ask the next question. "What about her father, um, stepfather?"
"He ran off when she wasn’t very old, junior high maybe. It was a funny deal, but I don’t really remember. Never heard anything about him again."
"So she and her mother lived there alone when she was in high school?"
Leroy shrugged again. "As far as I know. Her mom had a good job, worked out at the glass plant for years and years. She died about ten years ago, I think."
Thoughts were zipping rapidly. Junior high. That’s when Jerry had discovered the stepfather problem. Maybe he’d made more of a difference than he thought. If by telling his father, Jerry had somehow set the wheels of change in motion to rid Rhonda of her evil stepfather, it would ease his guilt considerably. And it would darn sure ease mine.
Rhonda hadn’t had an easy life to be sure, but I was glad to know that the abu
se hadn’t continued on through high school, or at least it sounded like it hadn’t. Yes, I needed some details on that. Maybe Rick would have some information since he’d no doubt done an extensive history. I’d be asking him about it shortly.
"Jolene," Leroy said, a definite pleading in his voice. "Don’t tell Jerry, okay?"
Oh, boy, this was going to be tough. "We’ve got a killer on the loose, Leroy. The fact that Rhonda was a hooker could certainly play into that."
"Well, I don’t think she was anymore. I think she quit right after I stopped seeing her."
According to Rick’s information, Leroy’s assessment was correct, but I wanted to know why he thought she went straight. "What makes you think that?"
He rubbed a big hand over his face, jiggling his chins. "She called me up and told me she was getting married, then asked me if I cared." "Did you?"
"Yeah, a little, but I didn’t let on to her. If she’d found somebody she really cared about I wasn’t gonna stand in her way. Sometimes I thought she really liked me and other times it seemed like she just wanted the money."
Why, oh why, after all the rotten things I’d thought and said about Rhonda, did I now think that she actually wasn’t a hooker? Yes, that intuition thing again. "When was the last time you saw her?"
Leroy pushed himself up off the bed and stood. He paced to the door then back again. "I saw her about a week ago. She stopped by the courthouse with her son. Good-looking boy, just out of the army. He was needing a job and thought I might could help him. Told her I’d put in a good word if he wanted to apply to be a deputy."
I leaned back in my chair and stared at Leroy, stared for a long time, too long in fact.
"What’s the matter, Jolene, you’re looking at me like I’ve grown horns or something."
Or something was the correct answer. "Did Harley--Rhonda’s son--"
"Oh, I remember his name. Me and him had a nice long talk."
I nodded. "Did he ever give you the idea that he could be violent?"
Leroy puffed out his chest. "If I’d thought that I sure wouldn’t have offered to recommend him. He seemed like a real nice kid to me. And awful devoted to his mother and his boy."
"You didn’t say anything to anyone about their visit, did you?" "No, don’t guess I did. I did give Harley an application though."
"How did Rhonda seem to you?"
Leroy shrugged. "Nervous, I guess. But I was kind of nervous too. Made me sort of queasy seeing her again after all those years."
"You were in love with her." I didn’t phrase it as a question. There was no need since I already knew the answer. "And when you saw her again, you realized you still were."
He hung his head and turned his back to me. "I hate it real bad that she’s dead. If I find out who did that to her, I’ll kill him myself."
"I have to tell Jerry about this, Leroy."
He grumbled and mumbled, then finally said, "She’s dead, Jolene. I don’t see how what I did twenty years ago or how I felt about it could make any difference. And just because she came to see me lately don’t mean nothing. No reason for Jerry to know."
I wish I had better instincts about when to try to help and when to keep my mouth shut. It's a perpetual problem of mine, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it right. I could very easily wait, tell Jerry my suspicions and let him tell Leroy, but that seemed kind of cowardly and dishonest. Besides, there was a slim chance that Leroy’s misconceptions might not ever have to become common knowledge. "Leroy, I don’t know how to say this, and I don’t know that I even should, it’s just that--"
"Jolene," he said, spinning around and facing me. "I know you hated Rhonda, but I loved her."
I held my hand up to stop him. "I know that, Leroy. And, funny thing is, I think she loved you too."
That idea put a scowl on his face. "Don’t be fooling around with me, Jolene. I told you what she was doing back then. I was paying her!"
"I don’t want to get into the specifics of how that came about, but do you know for sure that she was seeing other guys?"
He huffed and heaved, his big belly quivering. "I don’t know that she wasn’t!"
The possibility of him having a heart attack over this was not to be taken lightly. His face was red and his breath was only coming in heaving gasps. Still, it was now or never. "I don’t know either, Leroy, but what I do know is that Harley Danvers looks a helluva lot like Leroy Harper."
Leroy’s eyes widened to the size of baseballs, and for a second, he looked like he’d stopped breathing.
I ran over, grabbed his arm and shook him. "Leroy, are you all right?"
He just stood there, staring, but he wasn’t clutching his chest so I figured we weren’t quite to the 9-1-1 point just yet. I guided him to the leather chair in the corner, sat him down and coaxed him to put his feet up on the ottoman.
After a few more minutes of staring, he said, "Good, Lord, Jolene, you’re right. I bet that’s why she brought him out to see me. He didn’t really seem interested in working as a deputy." He blinked a couple of times then looked at me. "You really think I’m his...father?"
"It’s highly likely, Leroy. Do the math." I knew that would confuse him so I backtracked--about twenty-three years and nine months--from the date Rick had given for Harley’s birthday.
That time frame struck a chord and his red face turned pale. "How come she never told me?"
Probably because he’d made it clear he didn’t want to get married. I also guessed she’d made some decisions about her own life. The turning point Rick had noted. I wasn’t going to say all this to Leroy, however, at least not right now. What I had to tell him now was that his potential son might not be such a good guy.
"You need to remember, Leroy, that we don’t really know much of anything about Harley. He might not be…" I swallowed hard. "As nice as you are." The comment elicited only a grunt so I plowed on. "I ran into Rhonda in the grocery store yesterday."
He nodded. "Yeah, I heard."
"Harley was with her. He was nice as could be until Rhonda told him who I was. Then, he literally looked like he wanted to kill me right there in the store. He’s got a mean streak, Leroy, and we can’t begin to guess what all Rhonda told him about any of us."
Leroy gripped the arms of the chair. "Just what are you trying to say?"
"He’s a suspect in the murders."
Leroy slammed his hands down on the arm of the chair and shoved himself up, roaring like a bull elephant.
I jumped back.
"By, God, I’ll see about that!" He thundered toward the door.
Oh, shit. Now, I’d done it. I didn’t have a clue what he was going to see about, but I knew I’d better not let him out to do it. "Leroy, you can’t leave me here alone," I said, following at his heels. "Jerry will be real mad."
He stopped in mid-stomp, spun around. "You're right," he said, grabbing me by the arm. "So, you’re going with me."
Chapter 15
Leroy dragged me down the hotel hallway to the elevator. As we waited for the doors to open, I convinced him to let go of my arm by promising that I wouldn’t run away. As we marched through the underground parking garage, I noticed our undercover cop was conspicuously absent. No doubt he’d been given a break since Special Agent Leroy was on the job. Lovely, just lovely.
By the time he started his car, he’d toned down his irrational rampage a little so I suggested we rethink our plan--not that I knew what the actual plan might be. He snorted and huffed and told me he was not going back up to the hotel room that he had things to do. Apparently, he considered those things to be of the urgent nature because as we pulled out of the garage, he turned on the flashing blue lights. He reached for the siren switch, but I gave him a very stern look and he put his hand back on the wheel.
I buckled my seat belt, leaned back and crossed my arms. "Now, just where is that we're going, Leroy?"
"To the funeral home."
"I see," I said, nodding thoughtfully, although I didn't at all. "
Will any funeral home do, or is there one you usually hang out at?"
"Don’t get all smarty-mouth with me, Jolene. I’m going to the one where Rhonda’s supposed to be."
"Uh, sorry to break the news to you, but Rhonda’s at the coroner’s. I doubt she’ll be going anywhere for quite a while."
He turned and gave me a smirk. "Shows what you know. The autopsy got done this morning. Heard Jerry and Rick talking about sending her on over to Harding-Burrell on Twelfth Street. She should already be there."
Great.
It only took a couple of minutes to reach the funeral home, and that wasn’t nearly enough time for me to figure out what to do. I thought about refusing to go inside with him, then calling Jerry once the door closed. The problem with that plan was that Leroy-the-crazed-buffalo could do some serious damage to people and property before anyone, including me, could get there to stop him, not that I could necessarily stop him if I was standing right beside him.
Most of the time, Leroy Harper is just plain dumb. However, there have been times through our decades of acquaintance when he has seriously terrified me. About five minutes ago in the hotel was the latest, because when Leroy goes off the deep end, he goes hard, and anyone in the vicinity goes with him.
We pulled up in front of an austere blond brick building, our patrol car lights still swirling. White limousines lined the side of the building beneath a portico. There weren’t a lot of other cars around, so apparently there wasn’t a service in progress--thank goodness.
"Listen, Leroy, why don’t I go in and see what the situation is, then I’ll come back out and we’ll decide how to handle it."
He killed the engine, leaped out of the car and stomped toward the funeral home door as if I hadn’t said a word.
Obviously, I hopped and ran after him.
As he swung open the front door, a blast of frigid air scented with vanilla hit me in the face. I darted around Leroy and made a dash inside. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I scurried toward the information window and rattled off a spiel about looking for Rhonda.
I thought I’d done a fairly good job of saying who and why, but the lady behind the desk seemed at a loss for words. This is not an uncommon experience for me, except that she wasn’t exactly looking at me, she was looking behind me. I jerked around, expecting the worst, although with Leroy I didn’t know what that might be.
