A Killing at Cotton Hill

by Terry Shames

  The curator has still managed to fuss up our meeting with a little bit of pomp. The president of the board and his tiny little wife are there to shake my hand. They’ve already given me what I wanted in return, and that is a guaranteed place for Greg at the University of Texas in the art school. I’m not pleased with the fact that they did it just on my word and never even asked to see any of Greg’s work. It makes me wonder how many places in art schools are taken up by people who get there by money rather than talent. But I can’t solve the problems of the world; I can just do what I can for one artist.

  My last call has to be in the early evening, because Caroline doesn’t get off work until six o’clock. I’ve arranged to take her out to dinner, telling her I want to discuss financial matters. It took me some time to track her down, since she wouldn’t return her phone calls and I had to find her at her place of work.

  We go to an Italian restaurant that she chooses. She’s more confident in her own setting, dressed for work, knowing she makes her own way, but she still eyes me with caution. As well she might.

  I like spaghetti just fine, so that’s what I order in spite of Caroline telling me that in a fancy Italian restaurant like this I should be more adventuresome.

  Caroline can’t help but know about Wayne’s arrest for Dora Lee’s murder and the recovery of my Thiebaud. The TV news made a big fuss over both of those things. But they hardly mentioned the theft of the William Kern painting, even though it was the motive for Wayne killing Dora Lee. The Thiebaud was big money. Up beside it, I guess they figured the little Kern landscape was trivial. So, since she’s been holed up in Houston, theoretically Caroline shouldn’t know a thing about what the Kern was worth.

  “You were pretty mysterious on the phone,” she says. “Not to mention persistent. I don’t mind saying I thought I had put this all behind me.”

  “I want to discuss the money you’ll be getting from your mamma’s estate,” I say.

  “Oh, did Greg decide to sell the farm?”

  “No, but he’s prepared to buy you out.”

  “Well, that’s good then. Whatever he thinks is fair.”

  “Don’t you wonder how he can afford it?”

  She takes a sip of the fine red wine I’ve ordered. I’ve become partial to a good glass of red wine. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I think you already know.”

  She tries to stare me down, but she blinks first. “Things just got out of hand. I didn’t think Wayne would go as far as he did.”

  I look for any sign of distress, but she’s dry-eyed and calm. “When did he tell you he’d done it?” I ask.

  She takes another sip of wine. It’s too good for the likes of her, but it’s too late to unorder it. “He came to my place that night. He was a wreck. He hadn’t even cleaned the blood off his clothes.” She shakes her head, as if talking about a bad child, not a man who killed her mamma.

  “I don’t understand why he had to kill her. He had the painting. He could have just given her a little bit of money and told her that’s all it was worth.”

  “Oh, believe me, that’s exactly what he planned to do. But she found out how much it was really worth.”

  “From looking it up on the computer?”

  “That’s right.”

  I think about the first time I was at Dora Lee’s desk and how I didn’t bother to open the computer, thinking she probably didn’t use it much. If I’d opened it right then, I might have saved myself a fire.

  “Who would have suspected that an old country woman like my mother would even have a computer?”

  I have to remind myself why Caroline was so bitter toward her mother. It doesn’t excuse her part in what was done, but at least it keeps me from telling her what I think of her. “So when your mamma told Wayne she knew what he was up to, he decided to kill her?”

  “You make it sound easy, but he told me that he had a hard time deciding what to do. He went out to the farm twice and sat outside trying to work up his courage.”

  “Courage? That’s not a word I’d use to describe a man who stabs a vulnerable old woman in her home.”

  At least she blushes.

  “How did you and Jackson hook up in the first place?” I say.

  “I called him about a year ago, after my divorce. I was lonesome one night.”

  “How’d you know where he was?”

  “I called Leslie and he told me.”

  “So you thought nothing of taking up with a man with a wife and three children.”

  She shrugs. “He had his choice. I didn’t want anything permanent and he knew it.”

  “At some point he started talking to you about his money worries?”

  She nods, sipping the wine, looking at me over the top of the glass. She just can’t stop being seductive, even when we’re talking about her part in murder and thieving. “He wouldn’t shut up about it, worried half to death that Leslie was going to find out he’d lost everything. I remembered that painting. Mother was always going on about it, how it was going to be worth something one day.” She shakes her head and her mouth goes all bitter. “I remember once Teague was complaining about the price the cotton crop brought. Mother said, well, if worse comes to worse, we’ve got that painting. You know what he did?”

  I wait. She’ll try to win some sympathy by telling me.

  “He knocked her down. She had a bowl in her hands, putting our dinner on the table. It broke, and he made her eat it off the floor.”

  “Don’t tell me that.” I’m affected, in spite of my revulsion for Caroline.

  “You know what still bothers me most about that? Neither Julie nor I made any attempt to help her. We didn’t yell at him or beg him, or anything. We just sat there and let it happen. How can one man have managed to get complete control of three women?”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen? Something like that. Old enough to do something.”

  I don’t try to comfort her. My spaghetti comes, but I’ve lost my appetite.

  I thought a lot about what I was going to do with Caroline. If only she had turned in Wayne. Wishful thinking. She may or may not be found guilty of being an accessory to murder and theft. Anyway, I figure no prison is going to keep her locked up the way her upbringing did. I don’t like that she’ll benefit from the money the painting will bring, but I’m pretty sure there’s not enough money in the world to give her a good life. All those things considered, I could have let Caroline’s part in the murder slide.

  But there’s the matter of the little lie she told me to throw me off Wayne’s trail. That Wayne had said the painting was sold a long time ago. If she had just let it alone, she might have gotten away with it. I could have argued to myself that she was a victim of Wayne as much as any of us. But that lie told me she knew exactly what Wayne had done.

  “What are you going to do with the money from the picture?”

  “Quit my job. Maybe go back to California.”

  She doesn’t ask me a thing about her nephew and I don’t tell her. I don’t feel like tainting his fresh new world with her old, spiteful one.

  I’ve asked Rodell to wait outside the restaurant. He’s arranged with the Houston police to take Caroline back to the jail in Bobtail. I’ll turn her over to him when we leave. I figure it’s best to mend fences with him by giving him this arrest. I just needed to satisfy myself that I was doing the right thing by turning her over. And I’m satisfied.

  I’m wishing I could stay away from Houston for a while, but the next week rolls around and it’s time to use those baseball tickets I got from Best Land Use Enterprises. The day before the game, Fred Bachman calls to make sure I’m all set up and don’t need anything else. He tells me the Four Seasons let him know I had reserved a second room and that his company will be paying for that, too. I tell him it isn’t necessary, but he says it’s not every day he meets somebody who gives him important information and doesn’t want anything in return for it.

  Then he tells me t
heir committee met last week and decided to situate the racetrack a few miles further north of Dora Lee’s farm, in an area that is flatter and won’t need so much excavation. I ask him if it would be appropriate for me to mention this to a few people who might be looking to buy around there. He tells me I can do as I please, that they still have a lot of permits to get before the racetrack happens. “It’s all speculation at this point,” he says, “so just like any other investment, it involves some risk.”

  He doesn’t mention the Underwoods at all, as if they are erased from his line of sight. Which they might as well be. Rumor has it they’ve moved on to Dallas and have put their farm up for sale.

  I call the real estate outfit in San Antonio that put me onto their trail and have a chat with them about the racetrack in case they might have a need to know. It’s fair and square all the way around as far as I’m concerned.

  Jenny and I have a fine time in Houston. The Astros win, and the rooms at the Four Seasons are so plush that I feel like I have to tiptoe around in mine. At dinner we work out the details of how Jenny’s going to let her horses into the pastureland where I’ve got the tank, and then we get onto other subjects. We laugh a lot and drink a good bottle of wine and I have a better time than I have in many weeks.

  The only awkward time is when we finish our dinner and head for our penthouse floor. Jenny seems a little uneasy on the elevator and I know what it’s about. I see her to her door and we stop outside. We both start to say something at the same time. I let her go first.

  “This has just been the nicest gift anybody could give me. I just don’t want you to think anything more will come of it.”

  “Jenny, you are a first-rate woman. Getting to know you has been one of those silver linings they talk about in a cloudy situation. But I’m not looking for a girlfriend.”

  She breaks into a big grin and her cheeks are pink. “If I was out for a man, you’d be right up there at the top.”

  I give her a kiss on the cheek, not having to bend down far. She’s a tall woman. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  I don’t sleep that well because something has been nagging at the back of my mind, a loose end I haven’t wanted to pick up. But the job won’t be finished until I do.

  A couple of days after the ballgame, when the crew that’s going to be putting my house right is set up and ready to begin, I need to get out of there for a few hours. I give Dora Lee’s best and oldest friend, Ida Ruth, a call. She tells me she has time to see me this afternoon.

  When she opens the door, she says. “I wondered when you would be calling.” She leads me inside and sets us up with iced tea and homemade cookies. She goes over and turns off the television before she sits down.

  “I’m thinking Dora Lee confided in you,” I say, when we are all settled.

  “Yes, she did. People don’t think an old woman can keep a secret in a small town, but they’re wrong.” Her eyes glint in defiance, but her voice is tinged with regret.

  I am beginning to grasp the truth of that. “I’m trying to make sense out of Dora Lee’s story with artist William Kern.”

  “I guess I can help you with that. Dora Lee once told me if it ever came to it, you’re the one person I could talk to. She trusted you, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell you what happened.”

  The story goes back to when Dora Lee’s family moved to Austin for a time. Ida Ruth says she doesn’t know how they met the artist, William Kern, but he was a frequent visitor in their home. “He was one of those typical starving artists you hear about. Dora Lee’s mamma bought the painting from him to tide him over. They didn’t have money to speak of, but her mamma was a sweet woman, and she wanted to help him out. If she’d have known what it would lead to, she would have sent him packing.”

  “So Kern and Dora Lee took up with each other?”

  “I don’t know that it was like that right away. She was fifteen at the time. All I know is that they did take a shine to each other. After Dora Lee’s family moved back here, Dora Lee pined away for him, and he lit out to California for a number of years. So Dora Lee married Teague. I guess you know how that turned out. He was a mean man, no doubt about it.”

  “That’s a fact.” I don’t know if she is aware of the whole of it, but I’m not about to bring it up.

  “Anyway, eventually this Kern fellow came back to Texas. This was in the days when all that ‘free love’ stuff was going on out in California. When he came back, he brought some of those ideas with him.”

  I nod, remembering when Jeanne and I went out to San Francisco in the seventies and became aware of social changes we wanted no part of.

  The phone rings, but Ida Ruth just looks at it until it stops. “At any rate, Kern came back and got in touch with Dora Lee. She and Teague were married and Caroline was a little girl.” She looks at me, as if pleading for me to understand. “It’s sometimes hard on a woman living out on a farm, and with somebody like Teague. I expect Dora Lee had kept the idea of this man in the back her mind, him coming to rescue her, some romantic notion. I don’t know exactly what happened, whether he called her, or just showed up here. She didn’t tell me the details. I didn’t really want to hear them. All I know is that Julie was the end result.”

  I bow my head, thinking that Greg has come by his talent in a way he may never know about. I, for one, will keep it to myself.

  Ida Ruth crosses her arms and the scar at the side of her head has reddened. “I don’t judge Dora Lee and I hope you don’t, either. She was a good friend to me. I try to leave those judgments to the Lord.”

  Who would have thought this old Baptist woman would take that forgiving attitude? “You were a good friend.”

  Ida Ruth dabs at her eyes with a tissue. “It was a terrible burden. She couldn’t carry it alone. I wisht she hadn’t have told me. But I swore I would keep it between her and me, and I did.”

  “She was awful lucky to have you.”

  Ida Ruth and I sigh at the same time, and then smile at each other. I wonder in that moment how many secrets lie hidden in our small town that I can’t even guess at. We sit for a time, quiet with our own thoughts. Then Ida Ruth’s phone rings again and she tells me she’s expected down at the church. I can’t help thinking what the Reverend Duckworth would make of all this. Maybe I’ve underestimated him; he might know secrets that he keeps to himself as well.

  I get up and put my hat on and tell Ida Ruth I’ll see her around. I get in my truck and head back to my place.

  The crew that came in to repair the fire damage is well into it now. They say it will take two weeks to finish. I’m planning on having Tom and his family come to see me then. I’ll take them to a football game and maybe we’ll go eat Mexican food.

  I’m looking forward to the time I can start putting my art back into place. There will be new pieces to find a place for. George Manning is sending somebody to bring me that little picture I saw when I was at his gallery. I think Jeanne would have liked it, and she’d like the idea that I’m continuing the interest we pursued together. I’ll also be hanging a couple of pictures I bought through George, wanting to help out a certain artist I’m betting will make it big in the future.

  The generous support of my fellow writers cannot be exaggerated. Special thanks to my writing buddy Susan Shea, who dispenses encouragement and elegant suggestions. My writing groups critique, praise, and nudge me in the right proportion—thanks to John Gourhan, Martha Jarocki, Ruth Hansell, and Carole Taylor in the Wednesday night mystery writers group; and to my “everything prose” group members—Laird Harrison, Robert Luhn, and Anastasia Hobbett (who is always with us, no matter how far away she is). To the late mystery writer and editor Marilyn Wallace for her unfailing encouragement: you owe me a glass of champagne. And a shout-out to writer Judy Greber for the famous Price Club talk.

  Thanks to Sherry Fields, Carol Valk, Mary Ann Boddum, Anne Poirier, and the hiking group—the best cheering squad any writer could have.

  Deep appreciation to my
agent, Gail Fortune, for believing in me, and to my editor, Dan Mayer, for spinning the brass ring in my direction. This is only the beginning.

  A special salute to my grandfather, Sam Gaines, for not going along with the posse. To my dear departed friend Charlie Boldrick, as upright a man as Samuel Craddock, thank you for allowing me to channel your crusty opinions. My love to Geoffrey, a constant source of pride and joy. And abundance of love and appreciation to David, who, along with his many other qualities, indulges my writing habit.

  TERRY SHAMES grew up in Texas. She has abiding affection for the small town where her grandparents lived, the model for Jarrett Creek. A resident of Berkeley, California, she lives with her husband, two terriers, and an eccentric cat. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America.