“I don’t remember seeing it,” Sergeant Payne said. “No doubt he left it in the condo. With what he was planning to do to himself, he knew he wouldn’t need it anymore.”
Fortunately, Sam wasn’t listening in this time. And the deputy’s dogmatic views were starting to get to me. He was too reminiscent of a hardheaded Metro Nashville detective who had wound up costing me my job with the DA. “Did you see a key in the condo?” I asked. It was a loaded question.
His reply was a somewhat smug, “Matter of fact, I did. It was hanging on the wall just inside the kitchen.”
“That was our beach key,” I said. “It’s on a string so you can put it around your neck when you’re wearing a swim suit.”
I could have grinned, but I knew I hadn’t scored any victory. The sergeant hadn’t changed his mind in the slightest, and I still had to face my friend with the unpleasant verdict.
Chapter 5
After hanging up the phone, I turned to Sam, who was seated at the kitchen table, chin resting in the V formed by his upraised hands. “I guess you gathered they didn’t find any note,” I said. “But Payne still insists it was suicide. Maybe you should go to Pensacola and have a look around, ask some questions of your own. Jill has been bugging me to go down to the condo. You could come with us after the funeral on Monday, pick up Tim’s stuff and claim his car.”
Sam sat back and crossed his arms, looking thoughtful. “I should probably stay here and help Tara. There will be a mile of red tape to cut through. Could you and Jill pick up his things for us?”
“Sure,” I said, “but we’ll be going down in my Jeep. Jill isn’t able to fly her Cessna yet, and she’s in no shape to drive much. What about Tim’s car?”
Walt Sturdivant had wandered in as we talked, followed by Jill and Tara. The small kitchen was getting crowded. “I want to go down there and take a look at what happened,” Sturdivant said. “I can bring the car back.” He looked around at Tara. “Will you need it?”
She shook her head. “It belongs to the company, doesn’t it?”
“Right. But you’re now the owner of the company.”
“Oh, God. I hadn’t even thought about that. You can do whatever you want with that Blazer. I never want to see it again.” She stared at the floor, her thoughts turned inward.
I looked across at Jill. “I told Sam we’d drive down to Pensacola after the funeral. Walt can ride with us.”
She gave me a rueful smile. “Sure wish I could fly. It would save a lot of time.”
Flying would also save me a lot of driving. Jill had run her own charter service for several years during my Air Force career. She still had a Cessna 172 she kept at Cornelia Fort Airport, not far from our home in Hermitage. The doctor would not clear her to fly again for at least a couple of months. Frankly, I’ve never been all that keen on flying, which most people think odd since I spent all those years in the Air Force. I’m a member of that breed known as “white knuckle” fliers. Maybe it stemmed from the crash that killed my parents. Anyway, I occasionally found myself holding my breath when Jill headed in for a landing, even though I knew she was as good a pilot as any around.
“I’ll be ready to go as soon as we leave the cemetery,” Walt said.
A Sunday School classmate of Tim and Tara brought over a platter filled with sandwiches, including my favorite, tuna salad. We were just finishing lunch when Tara received a call from the Medical Examiner’s Office in Pensacola.
She spoke so softly I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but after she hung up, she dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “They ruled it a suicide.”
The word of Tim’s death had spread like the winter flu. The living room soon began to resemble a family reunion as close friends from church and from New Horizons stopped by to offer their condolences. Jill and I decided it was time for us to bail out and give the Gannons a little breathing room.
Sam walked us out to my dusty brown Jeep Grand Cherokee.
“Don’t hesitate to call us if there’s anything we can do,” I said.
Sam, who towers over me by several inches, looked down intensely through the open window as I sat behind the wheel. “There is one thing I’d really appreciate your doing, Greg.”
I nodded.
“Find out who shot my son.” His voice was as cold and sober as I’d ever heard him.
For a moment, I sat there unsure of what to say. Finally, I asked, “What makes you think somebody shot him, Sam?”
“I know he didn’t shoot himself. So somebody had to.”
I couldn’t question that kind of logic. But it left me in something bordering on limbo. I had pondered the idea of getting into the private investigator business on more than one occasion lately, even discussing the possibility with Jill. But most of what I knew about the field indicated it involved mainly digging into the dirty laundry of people with shaky marriages. That held as much appeal as shoveling manure on the horse farm that backed up to our property. I didn’t have to work. With my Air Force pension, plus the stock, bond and real estate portfolio Jill’s father had left her, we were in great shape financially.
“I don’t have a PI license,” I said.
“Is that necessary?”
“I guess not, since I wouldn’t be working for a fee.”
“I’d be willing to pay you,” Sam said, “but I know you don’t want that. Your young OSI friend down at Arnold Air Force Base told me you were the best investigator he’d ever known. I’m sure you can find out the truth.”
He was referring to Ted Kennerly, whose first assignment was under me as special agent in charge. That was the position he now held at Arnold, seventy miles south of Nashville. I appreciated the compliment, but I wasn’t sure how well I might do as a sleuth-without-portfolio. I would have no official status or access to any of the conventional tools of the trade.
“Wilma and I will be forever grateful,” Sam said as I hesitated.
I felt Jill’s hand squeeze my arm and knew that meant do it—I’m with you. “Okay, Sam,” I said. “But you need to realize that what I find out may not be the answer you’re looking for.”
I put in a lot of time that evening reflecting on the assignment I had reluctantly taken on. In some ways it seemed exactly what I needed, a break from the monotony of idleness imposed by circumstances over which I appeared to have no control. I had been fired by the DA after my off-the-record comments about a Metro Nashville detective wound up on the front pages and the nightly news, suggesting falsely that I was demeaning the entire police department. A fair-sized clique on the force proceeded to make life miserable for me. And even after my position had been vindicated when the woman the homicide officer declared murdered showed up quite alive, my reputation had been so tarnished I doubted I could get another investigative job around Nashville.
Florida was a distant locale. And I had serious questions about how my efforts would be received down there. I would be just another John Q. Citizen poking his nose into matters the authorities would likely declare none of my affair. I doubted they would escort me to the state line and give me the boot, but they might find the idea tempting. I would have no legal standing. And if I tried to pose as a professional investigator, I could be charged with operating without a license.
When I broached the subject with Jill, she gave me a skeptical grin. “Going against what other people think you should do never seemed to slow you down in the past.”
She had me there. In and out of the Air Force, I had pretty well charted my course according to McKenzie’s two laws of motion—don’t be deterred by what others think proper (or improper), and pursue the facts to judgment regardless of whose toes get trampled.
What bothered me as much as anything was the prospect that I might wind up proving exactly the opposite of what I hoped to. Could Tim Gannon have somehow botched The Sand Castle project, caused some people to die, and killed himself from remorse? I didn’t want to believe that, but I climbed into bed that night knowing I would peek under ev
ery grain of sand on Perdido Key until I was satisfied I had found the truth.
Chapter 6
Sunday was not a day to write home about. The Gannons, understandably, didn’t make it to church that morning. When Jill and I found ourselves bombarded with questions about what had happened, we adopted the old military keep-it-vague attitude, while striving to shoot down some of the unsavory rumors that had begun to take wings. The story of the faulty balcony and Tim’s death, ruled a suicide, had made the morning headlines. I was painfully acquainted with the aftermath of unfavorable newspaper publicity.
“Did you read about Sam Gannon’s boy?” one nattily-attired worshiper told me in a condescending tone. “I heard the whole shaky building might come tumbling down like one of those World Trade Towers in New York.”
The Tennessee Titans were playing a home game at noon that day, sparing us any further badgering after the sermon. Those who didn’t skip the eleven o’clock service for seats at the stadium headed for the nearest TV as soon as the final notes of the postlude faded from the organ pipes. We had only the preacher to stop us on the way out.
“I presume you’ll be at the funeral home this afternoon,” said Dr. Peter Trent.
I nodded. “Four to eight. Sam and Wilma, not to mention Tara, need all the support we can give them.”
Dr. Trent was a towering former basketball player whose ecclesiastical robe made him resemble a cloth-draped lodgepole pine. He frowned down at us. “I’m afraid some of our flock haven’t been terribly understanding. Fortunately, I think the number is small, and they won’t likely be at the funeral home.”
“True,” I said. “But it takes only one fruitcake to blunder out with a terribly painful gaffe.”
“Hopefully, that won’t happen. Were you a bit surprised that Tara wanted to have the service so early? I’m sure most of their friends work, so eight o’clock would cause the least inconvenience. She’s a very considerate young woman.”
“It’s good for us, too,” Jill said. “We’re leaving for Pensacola right after the service. The early start will give us a chance to get there before dark.”
The pain we had experienced that morning was mental or emotional. In the afternoon, it got physical. Vickie, Jill’s white-haired physical therapist, had instructed her to do her exercises three times a day. They included lying on her back, holding her left arm out and raising it as high as possible, then moving it from side to side. The goal was once again to extend her arm straight up, an angle of 180 degrees. At Jill’s therapy session on Friday, Vickie had measured the achievement of just over sixty degrees.
“Problems?” I asked.
I stood in the doorway of our oversize bedroom, watching her exercise on the king-size bed. The room was an example of dimensions throughout the large log house we had bought on moving to Tennessee. The place had to have been built by a man with visions of structural grandeur. Jill let her arm flop to her side, a frown on her face.
“I can’t even get fifty-five degrees,” she said.
I tried to boost her spirits. “Just keep at it, babe. It’ll get better.”
She got up and moved to the walk-in closet, where she sat on a chair in front of the door. I had rigged a pulley with a rope suspended by a web belt attached to the top of the door, the rope ends tied to short sections of garden hose for handholds. One of her exercises was to pull down on the rope with her right hand, stretching the left arm upward. Then she would pull with the left hand, elevating the right arm. She began to grimace as she pulled and stretched.
“Is that pain or discomfort?” I asked.
“It’s about as discomfortable as you can get.” Her lips flattened into a straight red line.
We had a running joke about her therapy. Vickie, the PT, had instructed her to keep working despite the discomfort but to stop if she suffered pain. Though we chuckled about the terms occasionally, I knew Jill experienced no fun at all when she rubbed up against that gray area where the misery became too difficult to categorize.
I had turned to head back downstairs when a sudden crash froze me.
“Oww!” Jill cried out.
I looked around to see the web belt had slipped loose, letting the metal pulley fall. I hurried toward her. “What the hell happened...hurt your shoulder?”
“No. It hit my leg. It only hurt my feelings. That does it. I’m done for the day. If I’d known I was going to have to go through all this, I don’t know if I’d have agreed to that surgery.”
The rotator cuff tear had resulted from an incident in Israel a year ago. The situation developed after we found ourselves caught in the middle of a struggle between Palestinian and Jewish groups out to recover an ancient parchment scroll. During my effort to rescue Jill, one of the assailants had shoved her to the ground. She was sore after the ordeal but did not realize until later that her left shoulder had been injured. The pain plagued her off and on during the months that followed, finally reaching the point that something had to be done.
Dr. Vail, the orthopedic surgeon, had assured her she should be nearly as good as new if she followed her exercise routine faithfully. I was a little envious. I had no idea what it would take to get me back on track after the derailment I had suffered from my encounter with Metro’s finest.
Chapter 7
The funeral home had started out as a large plantation-style house with stately white columns in front. The sort of place Rhett Butler might have galloped up to on his wild black stallion. Inside, the high-ceilinged parlors had been turned into “viewing rooms” and chapels, conservatively decorated with cool colors and jungles of fake greenery. Jill and I were among the first to sign the guest register in the hallway beside a sign that read Timothy Gannon. Tim’s closed casket sat on display inside the room, covered by an American flag and surrounded by photos of him as a stalwart high school tailback, helmet tucked beneath his arm, a Navy lieutenant in dress whites, gold wings on his chest, and as a blue-suited businessman a year ago when he had received an award from the architects’ association.
His popularity was obvious in the mass of fragrant flower arrangements, sprays and potted plants that crowded one side of the room. The younger Gannons’ Sunday School class was a large one, and the area filled quickly with couples in their thirties and forties.
Sam introduced us to Tara’s parents, Barney and Gladys Johnson from Columbia, forty miles south of Nashville. They had been on a trip to North Carolina when their daughter received the call from Sergeant Payne and were unable to reach her house before Jill and I had left. When the Johnsons drifted off to where Tara stood near the casket, Sam turned with a wan smile.
“Barney recently retired from a bank in Columbia,” he said. “They’re good people.”
“How did Tim and Tara meet?” Jill asked.
“It was at UT. They dated for a couple of years as students. She was in broadcast journalism and after graduation landed a job with Channel Five in Nashville. Tim wanted to get married, but he was dead set on flexing his wings as a naval aviator. Tara couldn’t pass up the TV job, so they parted company on a rather unhappy note.”
I smiled. “I bet she’d still look good on TV. Was she a reporter?”
“A pretty good one, from what I hear.”
“So how did they manage to get things back together?”
“Tim called her a few times when he would come to Nashville to visit Wilma’s mother. After he got out of the Navy, he went to work for an engineering firm here and started courting Tara again. Hot and heavy. A couple of months later, they were married. When Tom was born the following year, she quit her TV job.”
After Sam and Jill drifted away, I staked out a spot at one side of the room to study the dynamics of funeral home visitation. It was an intriguing exercise. Those I would call true friends lingered at length with the Gannons, offering condolences and recalling incidents from Tim’s past that would bring fond memories and smiles from everyone around. The opportunists, those who came to see or be seen, would shake hands briefl
y with the family, then turn away to spend their time chattering with acquaintances they thought important to know they were there. A third category I labeled duty-bound friends. These were people who appeared to feel the visit compulsory, despite the discomfort they experienced. They would walk in with barely a look to right or left, say a few words to the Gannons, do an about face and depart.
As I was completing my clinical analysis of the shifting crowd, Sam strolled up with a small woman who appeared to be in her mid-fifties. Dressed in a simple brown suit, she had short, chestnut hair and gazed out through large round glasses with troubled gray eyes.
“Greg McKenzie,” Sam said, “meet Robbie Renegar, Tim’s secretary. She did her best to keep him in line.”
She held out her hand, which I shook gently. “Nice to meet you, Robbie,” I said.
“It was your condo he stayed in down in Florida, wasn’t it?” A catch in her voice told me she still hadn’t come to terms with Tim’s death.
“Right. We’re going down tomorrow to look into things.”
“Greg’s a former Air Force investigator,” Sam said. “I’ve asked him to see what he can find out. I just can’t accept that Tim committed suicide.”
“Neither can I,” she said. “He wasn’t the sort of fellow who would do something like that. This is the most awful thing that’s happened since my husband died.”
“How’s your daughter?” Sam asked.
Her face brightened. “She finally got pregnant. I’m going to be a grandma next April.”
Sam hugged her. “Congratulations. I’m so happy for you, Robbie. Have you told Wilma?”
“No, not yet.” Her face darkened. “How’s she holding up?”
“It’s been rough, but she’ll be okay. She’s a tough lady.”
Recalling what Tim had said when he came after the condo key, I asked a question that had been bugging me. “Mrs. Renegar, was Tim having problems with The Sand Castle project?”
Greg McKenzie Mysteries Boxed Set—Books 1-4 Page 26
