by George Wier
“He won’t kill you,” I whispered back. “He’s been letting you get away with bloody murder for far too long as it is. This is just temporary. We needed an excuse to talk to him anyway.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Please take these cuffs off of me. Don’t tell him I’m under arrest. Just tell him I had an accident. If you tell him about the chase...I think he might...”
“Might what?” I asked.
“He might just kill me.”
“Is your uncle in the habit of killing folks?” Holland asked.
Abner pivoted his head from me to Hank and then to Holland, and said, “usually only when there’s money involved. But he’s threatened me before. We’ve...” he swallowed, and I noted his swollen Adam’s Apple bobbing in his throat, “...had our differences. But I figure this will be the last straw.”
“Okay,” Holland said. “But once you’re out of this office, I want you to go wait by my car until I come back. I’ll tell him I found you and rescued you. That I suspected you for driving drunk, but that I had second thoughts about it after you told me a deer ran out in front of you.”
“Yeah,” he whispered. “A damned deer. I can do that. Hell, it’s happened before.”
Ranger Holland fished out his keys, bent down and unlocked the handcuffs. At that moment, Sheriff Simon charged into the room, his face redder than a pickled beet.
“What’s this I hear! You running from the Texas Rangers?”
“Hold on, Sheriff,” I said. “Abner here had himself a little accident. Ranger Holland pulled him out of his Mustang. Apparently, your nephew tangled with the wrong deer.”
“You wrecked the Mustang?”
“It’s totaled,” Ranger Holland said. “But I reckon insurance will cover it. You’re nephew is one lucky fellah.”
“He wasn’t running?” Sheriff Simon asked.
“I’m sorry if it looks bad,” Holland said, “but anyone going for a ride in my cruiser gets handcuffed. Abner’s mental state was a little fuzzy after the wreck, so I cuffed him for his own protection.”
“The hell you say,” Sheriff Simon said.
The color began draining from his face. In a minute, I knew, the swagger would return, and all would be right with the world.
“You’re free to go, Abner,” Holland said.
There was a brief pause, and Abner looked uncertainly from his uncle to me.
“You heard the man. Git out of here! As far as I’m concerned, you can walk home. Hell, the walk would probably do you some good.”
Abner bolted from the chair and moved briskly down the hall.
“No,” he said, “my eyes ain’t deceiving me. There’s three Texas Rangers standing in my office.”
“We just deputized Mr. Sterling,” I said.
“Is there going to be some trouble?” Sheriff Simon asked.
“I’m hoping not. Are you aware that Tanya Holdridge has bonded out of your jail?”
“What!?”
“Tanya Holdridge,” Ranger Holland said. “She bonded out early this morning.”
“How did this happen?” He turned and raised his voice. “Amos!”
“Amos had nothing to do with it, apparently,” I said. “We’re not ones to stick our noses into domestic issues, but it appears she was bonded out by your wife.”
“Loraine wouldn’t do that. You people are crazy.”
“Loraine would,” I said. “And did.”
“Bond was a quarter of a million bucks. That batshit crazy Tanya didn’t have a quarter million anything.”
“Maybe your wife did.”
“I’ll kill her,” he said under his breath.
“You’ll what, Sheriff?” Ranger Holland asked.
“I mean—I mean that I’ll have a few words for her.”
“Of course that’s what you meant,” Hank said. “Tell us, where do you think Ms. Holdridge could have gone?”
“How the hell should I know?” Something new came across Sheriff Simon’s face in the next instant. It was the inkling of a thought, perhaps. “Say, just how did you fellahs hear about her shooting Carswell?”
I noticed that the room had begun backfilling with Sheriff’s deputies, jailers and secretaries.
“Did Ms. Carswell call you last night?” I asked.
He didn’t have to answer. I knew that it was true. I’d been right about that much, but what I had been wholly wrong about was how fast he would figure things out. Sheriff Simon was two or three parts of the one thing, and that thing was bluster. There simply wasn’t room enough left over for high grade intelligence. I began to relax.
“She did.”
“There’s isn’t much that goes on that we don’t know about,” I said. “Thus far, you’ve done a good job keeping this out of the press. The State of Texas thanks you for that, Sheriff.”
“Why are you so all-fired hep to talk to Tanya?” he asked.
“Because,” Ranger Holland said. “We’d like her side of the story. We’d like to rule out the possibility of self defense.”
The Sheriff was primed to say something at that point, and I had every suspicion that it would be a refutation of the self defense claim, but before he could speak, Holland chimed in. “Before you say another word, Sheriff, this case is now the purview of the Texas Rangers. We will expect you to cooperate in this investigation. By which I mean...fully.”
“Well...of course I’ll cooperate. Of course. Why wouldn’t I? You’ve got this whole office behind you.”
The room had been slowly filling up with people. I counted half a dozen deputies back there, along with a handful of jailers, and the secretaries taking up every available wedge of space along the back wall and over the tops of cubicles. There was a short one back there who kept hopping up to see over the cubicle. Finally she must have found something to stand on, because her eyes peeked over at us.
“We’ll cooperate with these Rangers, won’t we, people?” Sheriff Simon said, and the smile was suddenly back on his face. A draught of coldness opened up in my stomach, as if someone had left a window open in there.
“That’s mighty fine,” Ranger Holland said.
Hank tapped me on the shoulder. I knew that tap. It was time to make an exit.
I made a show of nodding, and shortly the whole room was nodding and shuffling, as if all God’s chilluns were in solemn agreement.
“We’ll take our leave, now,” I said.
As if on cue, the three of us turned and walked out of the Atchison County Sheriff’s Office.
*****
Once we were outside, Ranger Holland said, “I see what you mean, Bill. Shit.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
And sure enough, living up to his promise, across the parking stood Lil Abner with his butt planted against the hood of Gray Holland’s cruiser.
“Now this is the fellah we should have a long talk with before anybody else in this Godforsaken town,” Hank said.
*****
So as not to further attract the attention of the Sheriff’s Department to Miss Bee, I decided to confine our meetings to some place away from her office. Ronson’s was out, because it was the local hangout for the Department come lunch and dinner time. I knew of no other likely locale, so I asked Gray Holland to follow us back to the hotel. In the meantime I had Hank call Miss Bee and get whatever lowdown she had managed to cobble together.
After he hung up, he told me.
“Both Loraine Simon and Tanya Holdridge are missing. That’s unofficial. Neither are at their homes. It’s not that they’re home and not answering. Miss Bee had someone go and knock on their doors, walk around their houses and look through windows and such. And they’re not answering their phones.”
“Maybe they left the county,” I said.
“Could be. I wish I could hear the conversation going on back there.” Hank gestured to Ranger Holland’s cruiser, following us, a reference to the fact that Gray Holland was likely busily grilling the local speed demon on the subject of h
is Uncle Paul and murder for hire.
“We’ll hear it all soon enough,” I said. “How did Sheriff Simon strike you?”
“Wonder Boy? Not the sharpest stick in the woodpile, I’d say.”
“Yeah. I keep thinking about the Trinity Trio.”
We turned off on the main highway and headed in the direction of the hotel.
“The three women? What about them?”
“All three graduate from Trinity University back in the day, they return home to Carter and each of them marry; one to a man that would one day become a United States Senator, another to the man who would become the Sheriff, and the third to the man that would run the town’s gambling, prostitution, and drugs.”
“All about the same order of magnitude,” Hank said. “But yeah, I follow you.”
“It’s almost too good to be true.”
Hank remained silent. He knew I was trying to work it all out. Thus far, though, I didn’t have enough to go on. I had met only the first two, maybe two of the sides of the triangle. There was still the third, possibly the hypotenuse, and she had just rescued the first one. Or had she?
The cold feeling in my gut thickened and sent out tendrils, as if it were a living thing.
“You know,” I said, “the answer to something isn’t the answer unless it resolves everything. What I mean is, if you have an answer that doesn’t clear up the problem, then it’s the wrong answer. But there is a right answer, somewhere. Always.”
Hank nodded, as if to say, “Go on, old son. Don’t let me stop you.”
“It’s not the Sheriff,” I said. “That’s too easy. There are good lawmen and bad lawmen, and fortunately there are far more good ones than bad ones, by a factor of about ten. Also, it’s not the Senator, although I believe that ratio is a hell of a lot lower with them. Maybe two or three to one. And it’s definitely not Tanya Holdridge’s former husband, Tasker, or whatever his name is. Because he’s dead, although I should like to know the circumstances of his demise.”
“I’ll have Bee find out and tell me about it,” Hank finally stated, as if clearing that one off the slate for me. Then he lapsed back into silence.
“So,” I continued, “you can rule out the men. The answer is these women. These three.”
“The Trinity Trio,” Hank said.
“Yeah.” I pulled us into the new hotel parking lot with its gleaming white concrete and freshly-painted parking stripes. Most of the vehicles that had been there the evening before were gone now, should have been the case.
Ranger Gray Holland and his charge pulled in beside us, and we all got out and walked up to the sliding doors of the hotel and on inside.
I checked in with the desk clerk and yes, our rooms were still reserved.
The four of us rode up the elevator in relative silence and I carded us into my room. The two king-sized beds had been freshly made. There were only two other chairs in the place, an easy chair and a hard-backed chair at the computer table. I gestured for Abner to take the easy chair and for Hank to take the wooden one. Ranger Holland sat on the edge of the bed closest to Abner, and I took up position to his right.
“I haven’t interviewed him at all yet,” Gray stated.
“Well,” I said. “That’s fine. I don’t want to do an interview anyway, actually.”
“What do you want, then?” Abner asked.
I smiled at Abner. “What I want is for you to spill it. And by it, I mean everything. But start with Billy Tasker, if you please.”
CHAPTER NINE
A bner shuddered as if I had poked him with a cattle prod.
“Touched a nerve,” Ranger Holland said just above a whisper, but the rest of us heard it clear as day. Light streamed in through the gauzy curtains and there was no traffic out on the main highway, and consequently no sound. Even the air conditioning unit was silent.
“I need a cigarette,” Abner said.
“No smoking in the hotel,” Hank said. “But you can have one after you tell your little story. About Billy Tasker.”
“Yeah,” Abner said. “I guess that’s when everything in my life start going to shit.” And we listened, rapt, as it all fell out of him.
*****
“This was during the summer when I was seventeen, in the Year 2001. It was right before the twin towers fell and the whole world started going crazy. But by that time, my life was already a nightmare.
“I called him Uncle Billy, but he wasn’t my uncle. Not really. All of them were my...” he held his fingers up in air quotes... “ ‘uncles.’ Uncle Paul was my real uncle, but there was Uncle Jack and Uncle Billy, too. Uncle Paul was Sheriff then too. He thinks he’ll always be the Sheriff. He owns the department, just like he owns this county.
“I was out on the Bottoms—it’s the bottom lands where Kickapoo Creek runs into the Neches River; a hundred-year flood plain that nobody can build on. I’m not sure who owns it. Maybe nobody owns it. I was out there by myself when I saw Uncle Paul’s cruiser stop on the main road. I was on top of Lover’s Lookout, smoking a joint. My buddy, Kenny Hodge would have been there with me, but he was in jail. Uncle Paul didn’t want me running with Kenny, so he arrested him. It was all bullshit. Anyway, as I’m watching I see Uncle Paul open the back door of his cruiser and take somebody out. It was only a few hundred yards away, but I was pretty sure it was Billy Tasker. Billy was handcuffed with his arms behind him, and Uncle Paul pushed him along. They went through where the fence was down and into the Bottoms.
“I don’t mind telling you, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but I had a really bad feeling about it. I wanted to shout out something, but I didn’t have the voice for it. I think twice I tried to make a noise with my voice, but only a squeak came out.
“Fifty feet from the road, Uncle Paul must have told Billy to stop, because he stopped and turned around to face him. Billy yelled something at Uncle Paul. His voice echoed through the valley and I don’t know what he said. Then Uncle Paul shot him. And he didn’t just shoot him, he emptied his gun into him. Even after Billy fell down dead, Uncle Paul kept shooting him. Then Uncle Paul walked back to the car, opened the trunk and brought out a shovel and came back with it. He used the shovel to push Billy’s body down into one of the little gulleys down there and started shoveling dirt on him. With all that loose bottom land dirt, it didn’t take him two minutes to cover Billy up.”
“Do you think you can find the exact spot where this happened?”
“I know I can,” Abner said.
“We’ll have to arrange a forensics team,” Gray Holland said to me and Hank, “but before I make the call, I’ll want to find the body. Okay, that’s second on the list.” He turned to Abner. “Abner, do you think that Tanya Holdridge’s life is in danger?”
“I don’t know,” Abner said. “I don’t fully understand what’s going on here. But I’ll tell you, I’ve thought about this for a long time and I’ve been back down there a time or two. There’s ribs and hands and feet sticking out of the gulleys of the Bottoms down there. Nothing but skeletons. Either there’s Indians buried there from a long time ago, or Uncle Paul has been mighty busy.”
Gray Holland looked at me and a silent communication passed between us. I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, “we’ll need to look into all missing persons reports in this county going back the last twenty years or more, pull as many dental and hospital records as we can based on the list of names, then get a whole team of investigators on-site.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Hank stated.
At that moment, Hank’s phone rang.
He held it up and looked at it. “It’s Bee,” he said, then answered it and clicked the speaker button. “Yes ma’am?”
“Hank, I’ve found her.”
“Ms. Holdridge?”
“Yeah. She’s at the Smudge Pot.”
“How do you know?” Hank asked.
“Mrs. Simon’s car is parked around behind it,” Bee said. “And if Mrs. Simon and Ms. Holdridge aren’t in there,
then there’s no finding them.”
“Got it,” Hank said. “Thank you, Bee.”
“And Hank, I found my favorite book of poetry...the really hot one I told you about...”
Hank quickly hit the speaker button again, turning it off. His face had flushed instantly red. He stood up and walked to the hotel room door and out it, whispering as he did so.
Gray Holland raised an eyebrow and chuckled.
“Huh,” Abner said. “Miss Bee and that old geezer?”
“Apparently it’s a poetry thing,” I said. “Us common people wouldn’t understand. I just realized something. I have no idea where the Smudge Pot is.”
“I’ve got no clue,” Holland said.
“I know right where it is,” Abner said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said, “until we’re ready for you to show us the spot where Billy Tasker was murdered and buried. You’re witness to a murder. That makes you valuable to the State of Texas. No, you’re not leaving this hotel room. Tell me where the Smudge Pot is.”
“Take the main highway back into town,” he said. “Go out the other side and keep going until you pass the City Limits. You’ll see it on the right, about two miles outside of town. Yellow building with black squashed rectangles on it, like it’s a big strip of roadwork tape. Can’t miss it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Those are the kind of directions I can work with. A straight shot with no turns.”
Hank re-entered the room, his phone back in his pocket. His face still had a tint of red to it.
“What are you people waiting for?” he asked.
“Gray, do you mind staying with the Star Witness here?”
“I’ll fire up the coffee pot,” he said. “Call me if you need me.”
*****
Hank and I raced through town and out the other side, looking for the Smudge Pot. When we found it, I came into the parking lot a little too quickly and slid on the gravel lot when I braked. Whoever was inside would know someone was there.
