Nights of the Red Moon

by Milton T. Burton

  “Move over then,” I said and sat down beside her on the piano bench. I put my drink on a coaster and flexed my hands a few seconds to limber them up, then began to play.

  “I know that one,” Sheila said after a couple of minutes. “It’s ‘Clair de Lune.’ ”

  “Right you are,” I said. “The Ferrante and Teicher arrangement. Try this.”

  “I haven’t got a clue,” she said after a few bars. “But it’s pretty.”

  “ ‘The Waltz You Saved for Me.’ That was your grandmother’s mother’s favorite song.” I played on for a while, then closed the lid on the keyboard and took her hand. “Let’s go back to the kitchen. I’ve got to have something to eat, and I want to fill you in on the pieces you’re missing from this odyssey. Are you hungry?”

  “No, I went home after I got my story off to the paper and had supper with Mom and Mindy.”

  “How is Mindy?” I asked.

  “Fine. She’s been wanting to know if you’re going to take us riding again once the weather cools off.”

  “Of course I am. I’ve got my eye on a real gentle little Welsh gelding I’m going to buy for her and board out at my place. I’m going to get her a nice saddle to go with it too.”

  “Bo, no…”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” she said.

  “I don’t see any way you can stop me. Now will you quit all this senseless commotion and let me get something to eat?”

  * * *

  A little later we were sitting at the big round oak table in my kitchen. As I made my way through a corned beef sandwich and sipped on my second drink, I brought her up to date on the case, including what I’d learned from Muldoon and Hotchkiss that morning.

  “Did you talk to Zorn?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Did you learn anything that might tie him to the killing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Maybe her demands had become intolerably irritating,” she said.

  I gave her a sage nod. “Yes, I’ll admit that many a woman has been killed for getting on some old boy’s last nerve. But when that happens, it’s almost always a passion murder, and I’m convinced there was no passion involved in this killing.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “For one thing, she was shot in the back. Passion murders usually happen in the heat of an argument, and the victim oftentimes gets it right in the face. And secondly, if it had been a passion killing, I think the perpetrator would have tried to hide the body instead of dumping it in her front yard. Somebody was trying to send a message with that move.”

  “Well, you don’t really have to have a motive to prove guilt. Even I know that much about the law.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted.

  “So kudos to Uncle Bo. You solved this one in record time.”

  “I ain’t solved nothing yet, girl. I’m just getting started.”

  “But you’ve got Doyle Raynes locked up and charged with the crime.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he knows who did it because there’s no doubt the body was hauled in his car. He may have even been present, but as far as pulling the trigger goes?” I shook my head. “That clown no more killed that poor woman than you did.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  On the way to the office the next morning, I dropped in on Dotty Fletcher. Dotty had been the town’s leading doctor for almost sixty years. Now in her early eighties and slowing down a bit, she still scurried around with the energy of a gerbil. Her clinic was in back of her father’s hundred-plus-year-old drugstore on the square right across from the courthouse. The place looked its age with an uneven, hilly floor, an ancient soda fountain of marble and mahogany, and the better part of a century’s worth of patent medicine advertisements decorating its walls. The clinic in the rear was another matter—shiny and modern, a narrow hall lined on both sides with examining rooms.

  It took me a few minutes to get to see her. The receptionist led me back to her personal office, a cozy room with an old-fashioned examining table and knotty pine paneling like my own sanctuary in the courthouse. It wasn’t long before she hurried in, blood pressure cuff in hand, and sat down with hardly a word and began rolling up my sleeve.

  “My blood pressure is fine,” I said.

  “It was elevated a couple of years ago.”

  “Yes, but I lost twenty pounds like you told me to, and it settled down just where it should be. You said so yourself.”

  “Hush. I’m going to check it anyway. I suppose you’re here to pick my brain about Amanda Twiller.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Instead of answering, she pumped up the blood pressure cuff until my arm felt like it was going to explode. Eventually she began to bleed the air off.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “It’s good. How’s your heart?”

  “It must be working okay or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “I mean have you had any irregular heartbeats or anything like that? Any sudden, unexplained nausea?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about dizzy spells?”

  “Not since the last time I drank a half gallon of Thunderbird.”

  She laughed. “You’re a scoundrel, Bo Handel. I don’t know why I keep voting for you.”

  “It’s because I do a good job, which is what I’m trying to do this morning, but you keep bringing up my blood pressure.”

  She looked down my throat and in my ears and poked and prodded some more until she finally gave up on finding any major disasters and admitted defeat. “Okay, you seem healthy enough,” she said. “What do you need to know?”

  “Anything you can tell me that won’t violate doctor-patient confidentiality. Mostly I just want to get your take on her as a woman. What motivated her. Why did she throw over a decent husband and do what she did? Please remember that we’re off the record here. Also remember that I’m in her corner and not some reporter trying to dig up embarrassing dirt about her. If I can catch her killer I’ll be the last person who can ever do her a service, and I’d sure like to do it.”

  “I think I can answer your questions without violating anything. In the first place, she’d had two vertebrae fused six years ago in Dallas on account of a ruptured disc. I can tell you that because she told everybody who would listen about the surgery. Secondly, many people who have successful back surgeries still suffer severe back pain for years. Nobody really knows why, but it’s a medical fact. Thirdly, every doctor is in a difficult position with chronic pain sufferers. You want your patients to get the relief they need, yet at the same time you don’t want to contribute to their becoming addicts, or abet their behavior if they already have. And lastly, I was no longer treating Amanda when she died.”

  “So she was just a natural-born addict?”

  “I think the drugs were just a symptom, Bo. I think what was bothering her was something a lot deeper.”

  “What?”

  “She reminded me of a book called Madame Bovary I read back in college for some literature course or other. It was about a French woman who was married to a small-town doctor. Things went along fine until her husband cured a minor nobleman of some ailment. Out of gratitude, this nobleman invited them to dinner and a ball at his chateau. It was really a pretty dull affair, but to her eyes it was the height of glamour. The experience made her unsatisfied with her life as it was. She began to daydream about an endless round of parties and soirees. She had affairs. She ran up huge bills with their creditors until she brought financial disaster down on herself. Then she committed suicide by taking arsenic. She wanted life to be something that it couldn’t be, and that was Amanda. She wanted excitement, romance, brilliant friends, adventure in faraway places, exotic tropical nights. What she got was the First United Methodist Church of Sequoya, Texas.”

  “And the Reverend Bobby Joe Twiller,” I said. “Let’s not forget him. I guess living with that poor
guy could make even a drugstore cowboy like Emmet Zorn seem dashing.”

  She laughed and reached over and whacked me on the arm. “Get out of here, you rascal. I’ve got patients to see.”

  * * *

  As usual when I arrived at the office I found too many things that demanded my attention and too little time to deal with them in. The sheet said that the department had answered three domestic disturbance calls during the night, none resulting in an arrest. There had also been two shootings in the county the evening before, one an accident and the other a semi-accident. In the first one, a man had simply blown off two of his toes with his own shotgun.

  “He’d just bought himself a new bird gun,” Maylene said. “He was sitting there on the sofa with his feet propped up on the coffee table admiring it when he decided to check the trigger pull by aiming at his foot. He thought it was unloaded.”

  What complicated the matter was that the man had been taken to the hospital in Nacogdoches County, while the incident itself had occurred in Caddo County. More paperwork. “Write it up and send it in to the Darwin Awards,” I told her.

  The semi-accident was one of those East Texas things. A woman had been aiming for her husband, but missed and put a .22 bullet through her daddy’s arm. It all started when the family sat down for supper. As soon as the blessing had been pronounced, her husband made a disparaging remark about the gravy, and gunfire erupted soon afterward.

  “The husband doesn’t want to press charges,” Maylene said, “and neither does the father.”

  “Good. Call the jail and have them turn her loose right now. Her kids need her. And maybe her aim will improve next time.”

  “Bo!”

  “That man is an ill-tempered troll, Maylene. I’ve suspected him of abusing that woman for a couple of years. This ought to put the fear of God into him.”

  “Maybe so. But I doubt it. Those guys never learn.”

  I looked at her thoughtfully for a few moments over the tops of my reading glasses. “You know, here lately I’ve been wondering if anybody ever really learns anything. It seems to me that we all make the same mistakes over and over again.”

  “Well, I learned the Texas two-step,” she said pertly. “It took me might near a month, but I learned it.”

  I was rendered speechless. I know that we live in a time of rapid change, and I’ve been able to accommodate myself to most of it. Women’s lib was hardly a blip on my radar screen, and I can live with the idea that all the gays are coming out of the closet. But the notion of a Baptist woman Maylene’s age dancing was too much to absorb. I just pretended I never heard her and went on about my business.

  The bullets from Amanda Twiller’s body had been delivered to the Feds, and the search of Raynes’s apartment had turned up a half ounce of marijuana and, as Zorn had claimed, some unscripted Valium and about a dozen Tylenol Number Four capsules, also unscripted. But no gun. Or anything else of importance. The blood type from the car matched Amanda Twiller’s, but DNA analysis would have to wait.

  My deputies had canvassed the Twillers’ neighborhood, and no one had seen or heard anything that morning. The fingerprints on the beer can we found at the scene didn’t match Doyle Raynes or anybody else on record. The tentative conclusion was that the can had nothing to do with the crime, and had probably been thrown out by some unrelated late-night revelers.

  The pathologist had faxed the autopsy report over, but it didn’t tell me much that I didn’t know except that the vaginal swab was negative for both semen and spermicide. It was impossible to determine if a mature woman her age had recently indulged in intercourse. The blood tests had revealed evidence of both opiates and cocaine in her system. The cocaine surprised me a little. I’d pegged the lady strictly as a downer fan.

  “Where’s Linda?” I asked Maylene’s retreating back.

  “Domestic disturbance call, Bo. She’s on her way back to the office.”

  “I want to talk to her when she gets here.”

  * * *

  I was about fifteen minutes into my computer work when my other female deputy, Carla Wallace, came by and stuck her head around the door. Carla was ex-army, a couple of years past forty, tall, slim, and shapely with short, dark hair and a no-nonsense attitude. Because she had never been married and only rarely dated, most of the male deputies assumed she was a lesbian. I knew better, but since people are generally happier with illusions they’ve cobbled together on their own than they are with the truth, I didn’t bother to straighten them out.

  “Come on in,” I said. “Sit down and take the load off your feet.”

  “My feet are fine,” she said with a smile. “And I’ve got desk duty at the jail today so I need to get on back there.”

  “Then what’s up? And why aren’t you there?”

  “Billy Don is filling in for me so I could come to see you. In return, I’m saving him a trip up to Henderson.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You wanted to know about Wayne Pierce, and I’m your girl. His sister is married to my baby brother. I know him well. So what do you need to know about ole Wayne?”

  I quickly told her about Zorn leaving the Sawmill Club and later meeting Doyle Raynes and Amanda Twiller. “I guess I want to know if you think he’d lie to alibi somebody out on a deal like this.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He’d have too much to lose. Wayne has his degree in landscape architecture from Cornell and a growing business. He’s straight-up, honest, and has never given his family any trouble. That is, if you take into account that he’s thirty-five years old and still a child about his social life.”

  “And Mom and Dad want him to settle down and produce grandchildren,” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “How about his girlfriend?”

  “What’s her name? He has a pretty fast turnover.”

  “Chelsea something or other.”

  “That would be Chelsea Wicks. Hmm … maybe he’s getting serious. He’s been with her since last spring. She’s a portrait photographer, and a damn good one. Got a studio in Henderson.”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it on Wayne and company. Zorn claims they left the Sawmill together the night Amanda Twiller was killed. He said they dropped him off at his house. Would you call and check that out for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t help but wonder why a guy like him is hanging around with Zorn.”

  “Wayne likes the clubs, likes people, and from what I hear Zorn is pretty good company. Supposed to be a heck of a piano player. Gets invited to a lot of parties.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “I’ve never seen that side of him.”

  “Just face it, Bo. Not everybody is as dull and antisocial as you and I are.”

  I laughed, then said, “Speaking of sociable, you need to come over to the house for supper one night this week.”

  “Call me and say when,” she said and blew me a kiss as she slipped through the doorway.

  * * *

  Two minutes later the door opened again and Linda Willis stepped into my office. Linda was about thirty and recently divorced for the second time. A little plump, a little cheeky, and more than a little aggressive, she had a pretty face, a pug nose, and mop of short hair that seemed to change color every time the wind shifted direction. What I appreciated most about her was that she was tough-minded and smart and willing to charge hell with a bucket of water.

  “What’s up, boss?” she asked.

  “We have verbal permission from Reverend Twiller to search his wife’s room. I want you to do it, and I want you to be thorough.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Anything to tie her to anybody who might be a suspect. Whatever else that looks interesting.”

  “That’s pretty vague, Bo.”

  “I know it is, but you’re a smart girl, and this is a good chance to exercise your creativity. We know she’s been r
unning around with Emmet Zorn and whooping it up with prescription painkillers. Use your judgment, but tag and bag and date anything you take out of the house.”

  “Who do you want me to take with me? Otis is outside.”

  I shook my head. “Nobody. I’m not comfortable with any of my male deputies rooting through this poor woman’s underwear.”

  “You’re positively Victorian, Bo.”

  I laughed. “Maybe so, but I am the boss.”

  “You be da boss man, all right,” she agreed.

  “Report directly back to me on this. Don’t pass go, don’t collect two hundred dollars, and don’t—”

  “Tell anybody about anything I might find, right?”

  “You got it. Now get rolling.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I finished my paperwork on Raynes and went upstairs to have a talk with District Attorney Tom Waller. Tom was in his first term and getting his feet on the ground as chief prosecutor. He’d had three years of prior experience as assistant DA, and before that two years in private practice with a big Houston firm. But like many of us, he’d hearkened when his hometown sang its siren song, and he was settled in, probably for the rest of his life, in the county where he’d been born and bred. From my standpoint he was easy to work with because he remembered me as sheriff from back when he’d been a kid, which gave me a definite advantage.

  “So this is it on the Twiller murder?” he asked.

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “Why not?” he asked in surprise.

  “That boy had no reason to kill her, and he didn’t have the balls to do it even if he’d had a reason. There’s more to this mess, and you can bet on that. When is the arraignment? This afternoon?”

  He shook his head. “Tomorrow morning. Meg McCorkle was reluctant to set the bonds on anything this heavy. She just passed the buck on upstairs to Judge MacGregor, and he had to be out of town until late this evening.”

  “Who’s Raynes’s attorney?”

  “The judge appointed Walter Durbin by phone.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Durbin was one of the two best trial lawyers in town, a six-foot two-inch cattleman, real estate investor, and attorney with a general practice. He was reasonable, and he would give the boy good representation without holding out false hopes.