Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead

by Livia J. Washburn

  “Yes, ma’am, but that, uh, doesn’t really have anything to do with my orders.”

  “And I really need to talk to the lieutenant.” I pointed at the little walkie-talkie clipped to the deputy’s belt. “Can you raise him on the radio and ask him if it’s all right for me to come down there and see him?”

  He nodded. “I suppose so. He didn’t give me any orders not to do that.”

  He took the radio off his belt and pushed whatever button it was that connected him with Farraday. “Lieutenant, Ms. Dickinson wants to come down to the command post and talk to you.”

  Farraday’s voice crackled back. “What? What does she want?” He sounded annoyed.

  “I don’t know, sir, but the lady’s right here if you’d like for me to ask her.”

  “No, no, that’s all right. Let her come on down. Straight to the command post, though. No wandering around.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant.” The deputy broke the connection, hooked the radio to his belt again, and told me, “You heard the man, ma’am. Please do like he said so I won’t get in trouble.”

  The deputy was young, probably no more than twenty-two. Just a kid, really. Young enough to be my kid. So I smiled at him and said, “Don’t worry, Deputy. Straight to the command post it is.”

  I knew my way around the plantation house pretty well, so when I reached the bottom of the stairs I was able to turn toward the ballroom without any hesitation. The double doors stood open, I saw as I approached. The brilliant crystal chandeliers were still lit up, as if the room were filled with men in tailcoats and hoop-skirted ladies twirling gracefully around the dance floor.

  Instead the big room was empty except for Lieutenant Farraday, who sat at one of the tables with stacks of papers in front of him. I guessed that they were the statements that had been given earlier in the evening by everyone who had been questioned.

  He looked up at me and grunted. “What can I do for you, Ms. Dickinson?”

  I didn’t answer him right away. Instead I waved a hand toward all the papers and asked, “Sorted out who the killer is yet?”

  He grimaced. “If I had, we’d all be going home by now.”

  I pulled back one of the chairs at the table and sat down. It was a deliberate move in a way, an attempt to put things on a more equal, informal basis between us, like we were allies instead of adversaries. And it was just my nature, too, the sort of friendliness that even under bad conditions comes naturally to anybody who was raised in the South.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” I said. “I reckon I knew you hadn’t found the killer. Can’t blame a girl for hoping, though.”

  He shook his head. “No, I suppose not. What can I do for you?”

  Lord, the man was a bulldog. If you didn’t answer a question, he waited a minute or two and then asked it again. I said, “I need to talk to you about Mr. Wilson Cobb.”

  “The bus driver? What about him?”

  “He says you won’t let him go home. There’s no reason to keep him here, Lieutenant. He didn’t know Steven Kelley, doesn’t have anything to do with anybody on the plantation, and he wasn’t even here when Kelley was murdered. He drove us here this morning and then went back home to Atlanta. He didn’t come back until after the murder.”

  “How do you know that?”

  The question made me blink. “Well…he told me so.”

  Farraday nodded. “I’m sure he did.”

  Something about his attitude set me off again. I leaned forward in my chair and said, “Now wait just a doggone minute. It almost sounds like you consider Mr. Cobb a suspect now, and that’s just crazy!”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why is it crazy?”

  “Because it is!” I couldn’t keep myself from waving my hands around a little. “Why in the world would you think that a nice old man like Wilson Cobb would kill anybody?”

  “Because he has before,” Lieutenant Farraday said.

  CHAPTER 16

  There had been too many of these unexpected revelations since the discovery of the murder. I was getting jaded, I supposed, because although I stared at Lieutenant Farraday, I wasn’t as shocked as I had been a couple of times earlier in the evening.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me that sweet old man is a murderer?”

  Farraday shrugged. “I don’t know how sweet he is. And I didn’t say that he was a murderer, just that he’d killed somebody.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Not always.”

  He was right, of course, and if I’d been thinking straight I would have realized that right away. There are all kinds of situations where you might wind up being responsible for another person’s death and still not have committed an actual homicide. Like a car wreck, or self-defense, or involuntary manslaughter…

  “Cobb was convicted of voluntary manslaughter twenty-five years ago,” Farraday went on. “He was sentenced to ten to twenty years in the penitentiary, but he was released after six years. Then the governor pardoned him. That’s why he was able to get a commercial driver’s license and be bonded by the bus company, because his record was wiped clean. All the records of the case are still available to law enforcement agencies, though. I have a laptop that’s connected to the computer network back in the sheriff’s office, and Cobb’s history popped right up when I ran his name.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “What, run him through the computer?” Farraday shrugged. “I’ve been doing that for everybody. Well, one of the deputies has handled most of the actual computer work, not me personally.”

  That was exactly what Luke had said earlier, so I wasn’t surprised. I was still mighty curious about Mr. Wilson Cobb, though.

  “You said Mr. Cobb was pardoned. That means he didn’t do it, right?”

  Farraday shook his head. “No, that means the governor felt there were enough mitigating circumstances to set aside the conviction.”

  “So he actually did kill somebody?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “And he meant to, because you said it was voluntary manslaughter.”

  “Not much doubt about that, either.”

  “Enough so that the governor pardoned him.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t say I agreed with the pardon, though.” Farraday’s mouth twisted. “It made for some nice publicity for the guy who was governor at the time. Maybe I’m being too cynical about it, but it didn’t hurt him with the civil rights people or the federal government, either, since Cobb’s black and his victim was white.”

  Twenty-five years ago, Farraday had said. I tried to remember any high-profile criminal cases from that time period but came up blank. I’d been a young mother with a baby at the time, so I’d had other things to occupy my mind…not to mention the fact that I hadn’t been sleeping much then and was in sort of a daze most of the time like all parents of infants, especially cranky ones. And Melissa had been cranky.

  Mr. Cobb had served six years of his sentence, which meant it had been nineteen years since he’d been released and pardoned. From the way Farraday talked, the pardon had received quite a bit of press, but again, nothing jumped out at me as I searched my memory. By that time Melissa had started school and I’d been busy juggling those responsibilities along with work and being married to Dan. I was trying to be Super-Mom, in other words—a common ailment among my generation. It didn’t leave much time for paying attention to what was going on in the rest of the world, outside of home, school, dance lessons, soccer practice, and the like.

  “All right,” I said to Farraday. “You’re gonna have to tell me the rest of the story, like Paul Harvey.”

  He hesitated, a frown creasing his forehead. “That wouldn’t be proper. You’re a civilian, not law enforcement personnel.”

  “Oh, come on. If you weren’t going to tell me all of it, you shouldn’t have brought it up, especially makin’ a dramatic pronouncement of it like you did.”

  “I didn’t do
that.”

  I just crossed my arms and gave him a caustic look.

  After a second he sighed. “All right, maybe I did. I still can’t share official information with you. For God’s sake, you’re still a suspect in this murder, to put it bluntly.”

  “That’s blunt, all right. Allow me to be equally blunt, Lieutenant. We both know there’s not a chance on God’s green earth that I killed Steven Kelley.”

  “He made improper advances to your nieces—”

  “For which I might’ve slapped him upside the head if I’d known about it at the time, but I didn’t.”

  “You’re the mother-in-law of another leading suspect.”

  “Who didn’t do it, either.” I was tired of arguing with Farraday, so I played my trump card. “Anyway, you already told me enough so that five minutes on the Internet would get me the whole story. You said the governor got some nice publicity out of it, so I’m sure there were newspaper stories galore, stories that are now archived online.”

  He looked at me for a long moment and then nodded. “You’re right about that. I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm. Might be a good idea for you to know the sort of man you’re attempting to defend.”

  “I believe in Mr. Cobb.”

  That was my stubbornness talking. I didn’t know Wilson Cobb, didn’t know what he was capable of doing. But I wanted to find out, and Farraday was the one who could tell me.

  “I won’t sugarcoat it,” he warned me. “Cobb beat a man to death with a piece of iron pipe. I’ve seen the crime scene photos—which you can’t get on the Internet—and they’re not pretty.”

  I didn’t think they would be, when I heard that about the iron pipe. It would be hard to beat anybody to death with anything and leave a pretty picture, I thought.

  “Twenty-five years ago, someone was attacking teenage girls in the neighborhood where Cobb lived,” Farraday went on. “The Atlanta police tried to catch him, but they hadn’t had any luck.”

  That rang a bell in my brain. “I remember a case where some little boys were killed….”

  “The Wayne Williams case.” Farraday shook his head. “This one was completely unconnected to Williams. He was never a suspect in the rapes, because he was already in custody at the time. The cops didn’t really have a suspect…until Cobb caught the guy attacking a girl who lived in the same apartment building as he did.”

  “It was just luck, then?”

  Farraday nodded. “Good luck for the girl, because Cobb heard her cries from a stairwell and got there before the rapist could hurt her. Bad luck for the guy, because Cobb took that pipe to his head. And the worst luck of all for Cobb, I guess, because he went to prison for saving a girl and killing a worthless piece of trash.”

  “How in the world does something that unfair happen?”

  “An ambitious prosecutor and a certain ambiguity in the facts of the case. Also the fact that Cobb hit the rapist in the head thirty-seven times. If he’d clipped him once and killed him, there might not have been any charges filed. But thirty-seven times? That shows that he really wanted the guy dead.”

  “You said something about a certain ambiguity in the case?”

  Farraday leaned forward. “Yeah. You see, the girl could testify that the man attacked her, and Cobb could testify to what he’d seen before he started swinging that pipe—namely that the girl was struggling and the man was hitting her and trying to tear her clothes off—but there was no direct evidence linking him to the other rapes.”

  “DNA,” I said.

  “It was twenty-five years ago,” Farraday said heavily. “Using DNA evidence in criminal cases was in its infancy then. None of the other victims were able to make a positive identification, because the man always wore a ski mask when he attacked his targets. There weren’t any credible eyewitnesses to the crimes, because until he slipped up and went after the girl in Cobb’s apartment building, he always struck when his victims were isolated and alone. He was a bad actor, let me tell you.” Farraday paused. “And I mean that literally.”

  “You mean he was an actor?”

  “Yep.” The informality took me by surprise. I supposed that the lieutenant was getting more comfortable talking to me. “Mostly dinner theater stuff, local TV commercials, things like that.”

  “So his face might have been easily recognized. That’s another reason he wore the mask.”

  “Right. It concealed his features. Didn’t do a thing to stop that iron pipe from crushing his skull, though.”

  I shuddered. I could see it in my head: the dimly lit stairwell, the terrified girl, the sinister ski-masked figure, and Mr. Cobb with that pipe in his hand, rising and falling, rising and falling, with more blood on it each time….

  Farraday wasn’t the only one who had gotten a mite dramatic, I told myself as I forced my thoughts back to what the lieutenant was saying.

  “The rapist came from a fairly good family, and of course they didn’t want to believe that he was the monster he really was. They denied that he’d had anything to do with the other attacks. They said that the girl was a prostitute and had lured the guy into the building. They even hinted that she and Cobb were working together in some sort of robbery scheme that had gone wrong and turned into murder. Enough people believed it so that the district attorney presented the case to the grand jury, got an indictment, and then took it to trial. He couldn’t prove that Cobb and the girl were planning to rob the man, but those thirty-seven blows with the iron pipe…” Farraday shook his head. “The jury just couldn’t get past that. They wouldn’t bite on murder one, but they did go for voluntary manslaughter.”

  “What changed six years later to make the governor pardon Mr. Cobb?”

  “New evidence. Cobb still had his defenders, and they kept pushing to have the investigation reopened. The political climate changed, too. There was a different district attorney, a different chief of police, more media pressure…. Eventually, the investigation was reopened, and the detectives found a witness who had seen the man Cobb killed taking off a ski mask after one of the earlier attacks. He had alibis for some of the attacks but not all of them; he was smart enough to know that if he had alibis for all of them, that would look a little suspicious, too, like he’d set them up. The investigators were able to break down some of the alibis and place him near the scenes of the earlier crimes. Cobb had been a model prisoner, so after all this came out, the parole board recommended that he be released early. That wasn’t enough, though. The governor pardoned him. That was showboating, in my opinion. I mean, Cobb did kill the guy, and to hit him thirty-seven times…Anyway, that’s the story.”

  I had taken it all in, listening carefully, and now I said, “It’s not a pretty story, but there’s not a dad-gummed thing in it to make you think that Mr. Cobb might’ve killed Steven Kelley.”

  “You mean other than the fact that Kelley had a thing for teenage girls, like your nieces?”

  And some of his students, I thought. I didn’t know if Farraday was aware of that yet.

  I didn’t have to wonder about it for long, though, because the lieutenant went on, “He had a reputation on the campus where he taught, too. Supposedly he liked some of his female students a little too much.” He paused, then asked, “You know who goes to the same college where Kelley taught?”

  I had to shake my head. A bad feeling started to dog me.

  “Wilson Cobb’s granddaughter,” Farraday said.

  “Oh, now, come on!” I said. I couldn’t hold in the reaction. “You really think that Kelley might’ve made a pass at Mr. Cobb’s granddaughter, so Mr. Cobb got the job of driving the bus out here for my tour group so he could murder him? That doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, he drove the bus back to Atlanta! Surely you can check with the bus company and find out if it’s where it’s supposed to be.”

  Farraday nodded. “It is. I already checked. Cobb returned to the city on schedule and turned in the bus. I don’t know what he did after that, though. He could have driven back out here,
parked somewhere in the area, and walked onto the plantation grounds after dark. He could have hidden in the garden and waited for a chance to kill another actor who liked to take advantage of young women.”

  I supposed the logistics of it were possible, and there was that link of Kelley being an actor to consider, too.

  While I was pondering that, Farraday continued, “Then after he killed Kelley, he went back to his car, waited a little while, and drove up here openly, making sure one of my men grabbed him so he could establish that he didn’t arrive on the scene until well after Kelley was killed.”

  I didn’t want to believe it for a second, but it made sense. Too much sense. Except for one thing.

  “Why would Mr. Cobb wait in the garden for Kelley? How could he know that Kelley would even come out there during the dance?”

  Farraday shrugged. “He probably didn’t know. He was just lurking around the place, waiting for a chance, and Kelley handed it to him.”

  “Where did he get the knife?”

  “It’s just a regular kitchen knife. He could’ve brought it with him.”

  “Isn’t it more likely it came from the kitchen here in the house?”

  “We’re looking into that,” Farraday said. “Nothing’s been established conclusively yet.”

  But I knew more now about the murder weapon than I had before, which was a good thing. At least I thought so. The more I could find out about everything, the better. That would mean I was closer to figuring out who the killer was, so I could bring this disastrous tour to a close. Of course, it would have been just fine with me if Farraday had found the murderer and gotten a confession. That was his job, after all. I didn’t care who solved the case, as long as it got solved. Soon.

  “So you can see why I don’t want to let Cobb go right now,” Farraday went on. “I plan to question him and see if he can account for his whereabouts after he left here with the bus this morning.” He grunted as he looked at his watch. “I mean yesterday morning. Midnight was a long time ago.”

  That was true. And it was going to be even longer because I had to go back upstairs and tell a sweet old man that he couldn’t go home yet.