The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

Molly sighed. “I’ll be there,” she said. “Have you finished the afghan?”

  Addie laughed. “Not quite. That was the real reason I was hoping you might get a thirty-day reprieve. For me. So I could finish this dratted thing. Well, I need to get on the road, dear. Thanks for your good efforts on Louie’s behalf. We tried.”

  Molly put down the phone and checked her watch. Seven-forty. She didn’t want to go home and she didn’t want to go out for breakfast. And she absolutely did not want to go to the office.

  She put her coffee cup in the circular holder between the seats and headed the truck toward South Austin. What she really wanted to do, had to do, was talk to Alison McFarland about her testimony ten years ago. The discrepancy was driving Molly crazy.

  She headed south on Guadalupe, crossed the bridge over Town Lake, and took Congress Avenue. When she pulled up in front of the house on Monroe it was not yet eight. Hell of a time to be making a surprise visit. But that was the least of it. What she was about to do was probably inexcusable, just what Charlie had asked her not to do—put more pressure on an unstable young woman on a day that was sure to be monstrously difficult for her anyway.

  Molly walked up the cracked sidewalk to the front door. She frowned when she saw that the door was standing open. For a flash she wondered if they felt safe because they knew for a fact there was no murderer loose outside their house.

  She knocked on the wood door frame and waited.

  Mark Redinger came to the door in a pair of white shorts and nothing else. His tanned chest was finely muscled and covered with just the right amount of curly black hair. Molly wondered what he had looked like at seventeen. Pretty spectacular, she imagined. A handsome, wild boy—according to Stuart and Charlie both, a real bad influence. A boy who liked older women, who liked to spy on people. A boy who had reason to hate Charlie McFarland, then and now.

  Through the screen she thought she saw Mark scowl when he recognized her. Well, who could blame him. “Good morning, Mark,” she said. “I know it’s ungodly early, but I wonder if I could have a word with Alison.”

  “Well, Mrs. Cates,” he said in a cold voice. “She isn’t dressed yet.” He looked down at himself—his flat belly, narrow hips, and long muscled legs, and when he looked up he wore his flirtatious grin, as if he had just remembered to put it on. “Neither am I actually,” he added.

  “It’s important,” Molly said. “If she could spare me a minute I surely would be grateful. And I don’t mind whether she’s dressed or not.”

  “Just a sec,” he said, and faded into the darkness inside.

  When he reappeared, he’d thrown on a short-sleeved shirt but hadn’t buttoned it, so a generous expanse of chest still showed. He opened the screen for her and said, “I’m going to put on some coffee. Will you have some?”

  “I’d love some,” Molly said as she entered. The hall was filled with cardboard boxes and large green garbage bags full of clothes and books. “Someone moving?” she asked.

  “Alison’s moving back home.” Mark led the way back to the sunny kitchen.

  In the kitchen, she watched as he went about the business of making coffee with graceful, efficient motions. Molly said, “I suppose Alison feels she can be more helpful to her father right now if she’s home.”

  “I guess,” Mark said, his eyes down, fixed on the coffee he was measuring into a filter.

  In a minute Alison walked into the room. She carried a small calico cat in her arms. She was wearing dirty gray sweatpants, a huge blue T-shirt, and no shoes. She looked at Molly and said, “Today’s the day.”

  “For Louie Bronk, you mean?” Molly asked.

  Alison nodded.

  “I think of it as today, too,” Molly said, “although really it’s tomorrow. The law reads that it has to be done between midnight and sunrise on the date the court has set, and the date’s the twenty-ninth.”

  Alison shrugged. “Well, in any case, we’re about to see the end of it.”

  “Maybe not,” Molly said, watching her face.

  Alison stopped still. “Oh? Has something happened?” The cat made a sudden twist as if it had been squeezed too hard. Alison leaned over and let it down on the floor.

  “Yes,” Molly said, “and I wanted to ask you about it.”

  Mark finished the preparations and switched on the coffee maker. He turned and leaned a hip against the counter, nonchalant, his shirt hanging open.

  Molly paused. What she was going to ask would be best done in private. Maybe she should ask Mark to leave. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see his reaction to it.

  “I’m not going to take the time to go into details,” she said, “but in the past two days I’ve unearthed some new evidence. It’s enough to convince me that Louie Bronk did not kill your mother, and that there was no white Mustang with a brown door at your house that morning. Louie did own such a car, but before the ninth of July, it had been painted bright blue and sold to a scrap yard in Fort Worth for junk. It could not have been in Austin.”

  Neither of the two young faces changed expression.

  “So I wonder,” Molly continued in a slow, neutral voice, “if you could have been mistaken about what you saw that day, Alison?”

  Mark reached out and put his arm in front of Alison the way a driver reaches out to stop his passenger from flying forward when the brakes are applied suddenly. “Charlie was right,” he said between tight lips. “You are a troublemaker. What are you trying to do here?”

  “I’m just trying to find out what really happened that day,” Molly said. “And I wish you’d both help me.” The coffee maker emitted a loud grinding noise, very much like a Bronx cheer.

  Mark kept his arm out in front of Alison. “Help you? Help you do what? Drive Alison crazy with this? Don’t you think it’s hard enough for her?”

  Molly directed her words to Alison. “I think it’s very, very hard. But I hope you’ll answer the question, Alison. Could you possibly have been mistaken?”

  The delicate lavender skin under the girl’s eyes wrinkled; it was the only movement she made to show she was considering the question.

  “This is enough, Mrs. Cates,” Mark said, finally lowering his arm and standing up straight. “We don’t need this today.”

  Molly held up a hand. “Wait. I’m talking with Alison. Give her a chance to answer please.”

  Mark turned toward Alison, but the girl didn’t look at him. She continued to stare down at her toes. She said, “It’s always possible to be mistaken. Maybe I was. But David, he was sure of what he saw.”

  “No,” Molly said, “he wasn’t. When we talked Tuesday night, David hinted that he was having doubts. I don’t think he was sure at all. Alison, please tell me about the car.”

  Alison took a quick bite at the side of her thumbnail. “There’s not much to tell. I was kind of sluggish and bleary-eyed, the way you are after a nap. And I was only a kid. When I looked out the door, I thought I saw a car. David made me promise to stay in the house, in the TV room, even though I was scared to be alone, and when he came back in, we talked about the car and I remembered it was white. He thought it had a brown door and I thought I remembered that, too. That’s it. That’s what I remember.”

  Molly felt a buzzing in her fingertips. “But David always said he stayed with you in the house after the two of you saw the car drive away.”

  “Did he? I think he was out of the house for a little while.” Alison shook her head. “I’m just not sure.”

  Mark took a step forward. “Come on, Mrs. Cates, what are you trying to accomplish here? This guy was convicted five times. He’s a killer. He confessed.”

  “That’s all true, Mark. He’s also a liar and has been known to confess to crimes he didn’t commit. I think he lied when he confessed to Alison’s mother’s murder. Now, that means someone else killed her.” She looked him in the eye. “Don’t you think we need to know who it was?”

  He didn’t flinch from Molly’s stare. “Wait a minute. If yo
u really had some new evidence you’d have given it to the court and gotten Bronk a pardon, or whatever they call it. You don’t have anything.”

  “Well, I don’t have enough to interest the courts, that’s true,” Molly admitted. “But I have enough to convince me. Mark, that coffee smells done. After my rudeness, do I still get a cup?”

  He smiled, though it looked like his lips had to make a real effort to do it. “Coming right up.” He turned to open the cabinet behind him. “What do you take?”

  “Oh. Nothing. Black, please.”

  He took out a glass jar containing little packets of Sweet’n Low, reminding Molly of what Georgia McFarland carried in the pocket of her terry-cloth robe. After he had poured coffee into three mugs he handed Molly one and then emptied a packet into each of the other two. He pushed one mug down the counter to where Alison was leaning. She didn’t even glance at it.

  Molly took a sip of her coffee. “Sorry to barge in like this so early, but I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yes, I guess I do,” Alison said. “Is there anything else you found out? Anything you haven’t told us?”

  Molly thought about Charlie—his cancer and the payments to David Serrano. Nothing she could tell. “No,” Molly said. “That’s it so far. I don’t want to scare you, but I believe now that David was murdered because of something he was going to tell about your mother’s death. When he and I talked Tuesday night, I think he was on the verge of telling me something important, something that had been eating at him. Do you have any idea what that might have been?”

  Alison shook her head. “You know, when I woke up that day, I thought it was just another long, hot, boring summer day. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything. If you only knew what moments in life were going to be important, you’d pay more attention to them.”

  “Amen,” Molly said.

  They drank coffee in silence until Mark said, “Sorry if I’ve been inhospitable here, but this is one hell of a hard day for Alison. I hate to see her made more unhappy. Anyway, who can blame a man for what he does before his first cup of the day? We’re just going to have to agree to disagree here. I don’t buy your theory for a second. Alison’s always done just the right thing and this Bronk guy is as guilty as they come.”

  Molly took a sip of her coffee and watched the cat rubbing against Mark’s ankle, meowing. Mark got a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and took it to the back door where he leaned over and poured it into a small bowl. The cat went for it right away. Then Mark put the carton back. Well damn, Molly thought, who knows? Maybe Alison has herself one hell of a man here. Maybe she ought to stay right here with him and not move back to her father’s. Maybe it’s safer here.

  Molly took another sip of her coffee. “Mark, did you have any luck with the attorney general’s office?”

  “About attending the execution? No. They said I wasn’t official enough. They do not allow the general public to attend executions and I guess that’s what I am. I’m going over anyway, to drive Alison. I’ll just wait outside for her.”

  “What about Stuart?” Molly asked.

  “I think he’s already left, early this morning, planning to do a little hunting on the way.”

  “What’s in season?”

  “That doesn’t matter to Stu,” Mark said.

  Molly put her cup down on the counter and said, “Well, have a safe trip to Huntsville, you two. I’ll see you there, Alison. Did they tell you where to go?”

  Alison was chewing hard on her thumb. “Yeah,” she muttered, “to the Information office across from the prison at eleven-thirty.”

  They both walked her to the front door.

  Walking out to the truck, Molly felt she was only marginally wiser than when she’d arrived and she hadn’t been very wise then.

  The rest of the day was the worst writing day Molly could remember in all her twenty-two years in the business, and she’d had some bad ones before. She’d sat down determined to stay at the keyboard until she had something she could fax to Richard—a start for the article, a teaser to interest him. But all she did was make false starts and erase them in disgust, stare at the wall, and eat microwave popcorn—two full bags of it. She might just as well have gone shopping or watched soaps all day for all she accomplished.

  At five-thirty Grady called from across the street and gave her an excuse to quit. She opened the door and was surprised to see that he was carrying a bottle of champagne.

  Once inside, he wrapped his arms around her and, holding the bottle in both hands, rolled it up and down the small of her back.

  “Oh, feels good, nice and cold,” she murmured. “Too bad I can’t drink it with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m leaving for Huntsville in an hour.”

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  “I have to, Grady. I promised.”

  He kissed her quickly. “Please don’t go.”

  “I have to. What’s the champagne for?”

  “To celebrate the doggedness of cops the world over.”

  Molly held her breath. “You’ve got something new.”

  He leaned down and kissed her—a long involved kiss during which the champagne bottle eased slowly down her back and ended up rubbing the backs of her thighs. “Here’s a question for you,” he said into her neck, his breath hot, his lips moving against her skin. “Would you rather go upstairs and make wild love or stay here and talk about some dull police work?”

  “Those activities aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?” She unbuttoned two buttons and slid her hand inside his shirt. “What have you got?”

  “I can only do one thing well at a time,” he said, sliding his hands, champagne bottle and all, down the back of her baggy warm-up pants and pressing her hips hard against his.

  “Champagne’s losing its chill.” She was suddenly short of breath. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “It can wait,” he said, pulling her down to the rug.

  They never made it upstairs. It was nearly an hour before Molly got to the kitchen to put the champagne bottle in the refrigerator.

  When she came back, Grady was dressed and sitting on the bottom step.

  Molly sat down next to him. “Now tell me.”

  “Okay. Darden Smith, the detective from the Fort Worth Assault Unit, called. Marcus Gandy told all. He was hired by a local McFarland foreman named Carl Manning. When Detective Smith leaned on Mr. Manning some, he finally admitted the orders came from the home office in Austin, from the highest level.”

  “Oh, Grady, I am sorry to hear that.”

  “I thought you might be.” He rested his hand on her knee. “We’ll charge McFarland tomorrow. For criminal solicitation. We need you to come sign the affidavit.”

  Molly’s thoughts were spinning. “But I wonder how he could have known. Louie said he told only three people about the car: me, Tanya Klein, and Sister Addie.”

  “Maybe Sister Addie’s a spy,” Grady said. “On the McFarland payroll.”

  “Maybe Tanya Klein is,” Molly said mostly to herself. She looked down at her watch. It was almost seven o’clock. She stood up. “It’s a three-hour drive. I’m going to take a shower and get dressed.” She started up the stairs, but stopped halfway. “Grady, you must know about things like this. What do you wear to an execution?”

  He leaned back on the stairs and looked up at her. “I’m fond of that red shirt you wore last night—the one with the missing button at the neck so it gapes open when you lean forward.” He smiled. “Bronk might like that one, too.”

  Molly sighed and ran up the stairs.

  When she was showered and dressed, not in the red blouse, but her usual khaki pants, white shirt, and orange blazer, she came down the stairs. Grady was sitting in the wing chair reading the newspaper. He looked up. “So when can you come in tomorrow to sign the complaint?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Molly, they could have killed you.”

  “Even a
dog gets one bite. Let’s give him a break.”

  “Molly, don’t be crazy. This is serious business. McFarland’s a killer. This gives us cause to bring him in.”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s sick. Dying.”

  Grady put the newspaper down on the chair with a slap. “That, at least, appears to be true. I talked with Gerald Brumder, an oncologist Charlie’s doctor sent him to. He confirms that he gave McFarland the diagnosis.”

  “Has Brumder told anyone else?”

  “Just the son, Stuart McFarland, who’s a colleague of his. Charlie asked him not to tell anyone, but he told Stuart as a professional courtesy, Brumder says.”

  “I see,” Molly said. “That’s interesting.” She sat down. “I wonder if Stuart told his sister and his cousin the news. If he did, that gives both children, and Mark, a real powerful financial motive for killing Georgia before Charlie dies.”

  “I’d call ten million a real powerful motive, yeah.”

  “Better than any motive you’ve been able to come up with for Charlie.”

  “That’s for sure,” Grady said, “since I haven’t come up with any motive at all. He had multiple motives for killing the first wife, but none that I can find for Georgia.” He came up behind her chair and leaned down, resting his cheek against her head. “Molly, I wish that just this once you’d take my advice: stay home tonight.”

  “Come with me. When it’s over we can find a nice place to spend the night.”

  “I can’t. I have to go back on this drive-by. We’ve got a suspect to interrogate. I could send a uniform to drive you.”

  “No. If you’re not coming I don’t want anyone. I’m going to work in the car, talk into the tape recorder, and figure out some things.”

  “Well,” Grady said, “they’re predicting a norther. Bundle up, at least.”

  chapter 24

  A rolling stone,

  A restless bone

  Ain’t got no boss,

  Don’t grow no moss.

  I make do with what I find.

  I don’t leave nothing behind.

  LOUIE BRONK