by David Bishop
When I turned toward the printer to pick up my notes, I saw a woman I knew had to be PQ’s daughter, Tedy. She walked through the cinnamon fragrance and approached me with a small, round, white band-aid clinging to her thigh just below the well-pressed cuff on her khaki shorts. From the size of the band-aid, the hurt was minor. Still, I did work for PQ and this woman was his daughter, so, if the opportunity arose, it would be not only my pleasure, but my duty to kiss it to make it better.
She smiled and turned toward me, her chestnut hair moving easily across her shoulders. She was the saloon girl in the painting. The difference being that old-west saloon girls didn’t wear modern bras. If they had, I doubted Wyatt Earp would have been able to tame Dodge City, Kansas, and Tombstone, Arizona. I introduced myself. She welcomed me to the PQ Ranch, and we sat talking about her family and her trips to Las Vegas where she worked a weekend a month in a shelter for battered women. She had started three years ago after a girlfriend had been a victim, and never gave it up.
Chapter Two
The next morning my plans got changed. PQ invited me to accompany him to his Copper City headquarters to meet his key people and learn more about PQ Industries, with an eye toward enhancing his personal security. The morning was consumed with his showing me around and introducing me to his leadership group. Cord had not come into the office that day. Instead he had duties related to his being foreman of the ranch.
PQ’s headquarters and his own office were outfitted much like the study at his ranch, leather and an overall masculine feel. The major difference, his office lacked the picture of his daughter Tedy, done up like a saloon girl from the heyday of Hollywood westerns. His secretary’s office, departing from the masculine theme, had been furnished with early American, including a painting of two cats tumbling around with balls of yarn.
PQ Industries appeared to be completely modern, least as far as I could tell. There were computers everywhere, an employee lunchroom that seemed first class, even a designated outdoor smoking area. However, the phones were answered by real people. “Our customers don’t wanna talk with any danged computer,” PQ explained. “We ain’t never doin’ that.”
We took lunch with several of his executives. After lunch, PQ told me we would have dinner at home so I could meet his wife Robyn, and his two sons: Cord and his youngest, Quentin. I spent the afternoon reading through the personnel records of his key staff and talking on the phone with Axel. I gave him the names and Social Security numbers of PQ’s executive staff and department heads, along with the details on a Jonathan Gruder, a former sales manager who had spewed a lot of hate and threats upon termination. Axel would discover if any of these people had a record of any kind or were experiencing money troubles. It was all busy work. I still couldn’t put any meat on the bone about PQ being under a threat. There had been no phone calls or threatening letters, nothing to grab hold of.
We got back to PQ’s ranch late afternoon. I drifted out to the casita to change for dinner and Tedy came there to let me know PQ had, that morning, told the new cook, Gretchen, to prepare a holiday feast. “Daddy loves turkey and jellied cranberry sauce, and thinks it absurd to eat it only on Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
* * *
Several hours later, I joined PQ and Tedy in the study. A few minutes later Cord came in. The next to arrive was Mrs. Robyn Rutledge who wore a skirt short enough to allow the whites of her thighs to participate in the family gathering. After the introductions, we all sat at a long rustic dining table. PQ took the armchair at the head of the table. Robyn sat to her husband’s left, sided by PQ’s oldest son, Cord, and then Quentin. Tedy sat across the table from Robyn between her father and me.
Gretchen came in carrying the turkey platter. She held it close for PQ’s inspection before placing it center on the table. Gretchen was a very large woman, not tall, but wide with a round face and a puffy chin that maintained a touchy-feely relationship with her neck. Her snow white hair stacked above her head like it had been coiffed at Dairy Queen.
“Gretchen, you surely cook a beautiful bird,” PQ said, “nearly as good as my first wife.” His jowls jiggled while he laughed.
The cook stepped back. The polished heels of her heavy black shoes touched, her body hinting at a bow that never came. The grin on her face held no joy.
After we were served, Tedy said, “Daddy, please pass the gravy.”
“Here you go, Theodora.” PQ said while passing the gravy boat just as the handle of the ladle slid beneath the surface. The surface of the thickened brown sauce quickly mending itself as if the invasion had never occurred.
“Daddy, you know I prefer being called Tedy, everyone else does. From now on I won’t answer to Theodora.” She ignored the drowned ladle and dipped her spoon.
Cord’s blunt nose flared slightly with each breath. Otherwise his face remained stoic, as if it had been chiseled from a ranch stump. The face of a bully, nasty, the grown up face of a seventh grade lunch money thief.
“Sis,” Cord said, “do you spell that like the undergarment or the former senator from Massachusetts?”
“Neither. T-E-D-Y.”
PQ thumped the handle of his knife against the table. Tedy had alerted me he had been doing that ever since he watched the judge at Cord’s trial get absolute silence by banging his gavel. It seemed to work the same way for PQ.
“Theodora was your great-grandmother’s name.”
“Maybe I’ll take it back when I’m a great-grandmother,” Tedy said, “but I doubt it. It evokes an image of a tall, slender woman with her hair in a tight bun, and no tits.”
Robyn laughed suddenly, raising her napkin over her mouth and nose. The she glanced sideways at Cord.
“Tedy, not at the dinner table.”
“Now you’ve got it, Daddy, Tedy,” she said, pointing at her father. She winked as she passed me the chilled Sauvignon Blanc.
If people thought of tall, slender, and flat-chested when they heard the name Theodora, she had been right, for Tedy had tits. Not just every day, see ‘em at the supermarket boobs, but round, firm breasts that worked on a man the way bubbles worked on champagne.
She reached under the table and squeezed my thigh, then turned to her father. “Daddy, I believe you hired this handsome Mr. Kile to investigate us.”
PQ’s voice boomed. “If Matt Kile is here to investigate one of you, Tedy dear, he certainly has a fascinating group to pick from.”
“Just plain Tedy will do, Daddy, without the dear.”
Cord balanced his knife across the edge of his plate. His bearing suggested he would rather have driven the point into my chest, or at minimum into the table. “I think Kile’s here to investigate me.” His ‘investigate me’ fading into a low growl.
I decided I’d do my best not to cross Cord Rutledge. I stood well over six feet and had never been called slim, but Cord stood tall enough and wide enough to have a real person on the crucifix that hung from his neck, burrowed into his chest hair.
Quentin, PQ’s youngest, a pimply-faced nineteen-year-old with red-orange spiked hair, sat across the table to my right. PQ had been fifty-six when Quentin was born. From the old man’s references to his ex-wife I assumed she was of similar age. Quentin’s frequent glances at his older sister said his body was mass-producing testosterone, a dangerous state even for the few males who might be described as well-adjusted, whatever the hell that meant.
As I saw things, most folks, men and women, thought of themselves as normal and those who were different as having either a quirk or being maladjusted. Truth being, most people consider idiosyncrasies to be things other folks have.
When Gretchen went back into the kitchen, Quentin leaned forward, toward Tedy. “I don’t like that old witch. She’s always watching me.”
If memory served me well, Quentin is Latin for the fifth child and PQ had only three. On the drive he had told me that Quentin had been his grandfather’s name, who had been the fifth child of his father, Phineas. That filled out the rest of PQ
’s name: Phineas Quentin Winston Rutledge, while also explaining why he preferred simply being called PQ.
The newest member of the family was Robyn, PQ’s wife of five years. At twenty-eight, Robyn was the same age as her stepdaughter Tedy, nineteen years younger than I, and forty-eight years younger than her husband. The articles Axel had printed out that I read in the plane reported that PQ met Robyn during Cord’s trial. Tedy had not come home for the trial, choosing to stay at college where she was in her last semester. The heartsick father had sat alone the first day watching the story of his son’s skullduggery being presented in cold, calculated step-by-step detail. The next morning, Robyn introduced herself outside the courthouse. From that day through the end of the trial Robyn sat quietly next to PQ, the two of them holding hands. They were married eleven days after Cord’s conviction.
I had asked PQ if he and Robyn had signed a pre-nuptial agreement. They had and he had brought me a copy about an hour after we arrived at his home. I spent part of that afternoon reading it with my feet on the steps in the shallow end of the pool. Their prenup had lots of provisos, but no matter what happened Robyn got a minimum amount that to regular folks would seem more like a maximum. It also stipulated that if they stayed together until he died, she would share equally with his children, an amount that would dwarf her minimum.
Well, you’ve got the idea. PQ had no ordinary family, but a collection of oddballs with a bloodline, and a wife his daughter’s age.
Chapter Three
That night, sometime after I fell asleep, I heard a tapping on the window, as if a woodpecker had become a glasspecker with an uneven cadence. Then I heard a woman’s voice.
“Matt. It’s Tedy.” Tap. Tap. “Matt! Matt!” Tap Tap. “Wake up. It’s Tedy.”
I got up, twisted my boxers straight enough to escape the full nelson they had applied while I slept, and opened the door.
Tedy stood in the doorway, panting, her face streaked with tears, the moon casting a faint nimbus around her black satin robe. “You didn’t answer your door. I knocked.”
“I’m a sound sleeper. What’s wrong?”
“Daddy’s been shot.” She stared at the floor. “He’s dead.”
“Who shot him?”
“We don’t know. Whoever did it is gone.”
She collapsed against me, her head fitting under my chin, her tears blotting on my naked front. I pushed Tedy back from my wet chest hair and spoke softly.
“Did you find PQ?”
“No. The cook. Daddy had called her for a cup of tea.”
“Tea?” I said with the inflection of a question. PQ seemed easy to imagine leaning on a dusty bar, sided by Randolph Scott or Duke Wayne. Such men would smirk at sarsaparilla, and laugh out loud at the mention of tea.
Tedy undid her satin robe, revealing a white chemise, and used the tie to wipe her tears. “Daddy has drunk hot tea at night for as long as I can remember.” She went back into my arms, the sound of a little girl sobbing for her dead father. But Tedy was a full-grown woman crying against what would have been my lapel, if I were wearing something that had a lapel.
Tedy’s crying eased and I had to get to the main house. I gently nudged her back until she stood on her own. “Where was PQ shot?” I held my pants open and slid in one leg, quickly followed by the other, a slight hop kept my balance.
She crossed her arms below her breasts. “In his bed.”
After pulling on a polo shirt, I touched her shoulder and spoke softly. “I meant, where did the bullet strike him?”
“In the head.” She swiped the back of her hand across her wet cheeks. First one, then the other, her fingers curled outward. “In his head,” she repeated, quieter this time. Her face revealing she knew now, emotionally knew her father would not be back.
“Were there any visitors tonight? Visiting anyone in the household?” Tedy shook her head. “Deliveries? Emergency repair crews? Anyone at all?”
She had kept shaking her head while I asked, then added, “No one, Matt. Only the family and you have been in the house in the past two days.”
I stepped into my tan loafers. “Did you hear the shot?”
“No.”
We ran through a hot desert wind with enough fury to blow the light out of the stars. The cattle seemed restless. The wind probably, or maybe the herd somehow knew the lead bull was dead.
Gretchen met us at the front door, the smell of leftover turkey saturating the space around her. “I called the sheriff,” she said.
“Have all the family members been told?”
“They know,” Gretchen said.
“Where are they?” The cook pointed.
I walked into PQ’s room with Tedy close behind. Quentin sat sidesaddle on the wide wooden footboard of his father’s bed, his ears clear of his music plugs, his hands not holding his smart phone. Robyn stood beside Cord, her arms crossed, her eyes pointed toward Quentin’s bare feet. They were all in sleep clothes except for Cord who wore all black with a pewter belt buckle the size of an all-you-can-eat salad plate.
“Did any of you hear or see anything?” No one spoke. Most shook their heads. “Gretchen, apparently you were awake, what about you?”
“Nothing, Mr. Kile.”
“Everybody out.”
“You can’t order us around,” Quentin said, his teary face rainbowed with smeared colors from his sleep-blunted spikes. He had apparently used some washable coloring on his hair rather than having it dyed. “This isn’t your house.”
I turned to the oldest and largest family member. “Cord, the sheriff’s on his way. Take your family into the living room. Gretchen, please wait in the chair just outside the door. And close the door as you go out.”
Cord, the new big bull, took the point and led his small, two-legged herd out of the room, leaving his father there with me, only PQ didn’t know I was there. He likely didn’t know he was there either. Most of us hope to die at night in our own bed. If that had been PQ’s wish, it had been granted.
Gretchen left last and closed the door as I had asked.
PQ had taken a single shot just about square in the center of his forehead, a quick death. I felt glad of that. There were no stippling or burns around the entry, so he hadn’t committed suicide, something pretty much ruled out by the angle of the shot. PQ’s pants were draped over the back of a leather recliner, his wallet bulged the pocket. This was no robbery that had gone bad. That no one had heard the shot probably meant a silencer. The dead-bolted door to his private patio and the windows were all locked from the inside. The shooter had gone back into the main part of the house before leaving.
That is, if, in fact, the shooter had left.
The cup of tea Tedy had mentioned sat on a rough-cut table next to a book with a playing card placed as a bookmark. The card inserted in the long side of the pages rather than the more common position: from the top. I dipped my finger into the tea and touched my lips. Slightly warm. No sugar. No whiskey. The lamplight showed the book to be Daphne du Maurier’s classic, Rebecca. Like his drinking tea, the book didn’t fit my impression of PQ. The same thing was true for his choice of a bookmark. He hadn’t used the ace of spades or one of the kings, but rather, the Old Maid card from the game of the same name. I held the book firmly and opened it without letting the card move. The edge underlined the famous passage: “You think I loved Rebecca? I hated her.”
Chapter Four
PQ’s grandparents had nested the first ranch house in the valley near a spring, a good ways outside Copper City, the last half a dirt washboard road. I had maybe forty-five minutes to figure what all this meant before the sheriff would start chewing my hide for contaminating his crime scene.
I opened the door and asked Gretchen to join me in the kitchen. When we entered, she pointed. “My room’s through there. No one could’ve gotten outside through the kitchen without me hearing them, but there are four other outside doors.”
“What time did PQ call for his tea?”
“Two-fi
fteen. He woke me.”
I glanced at my watch: two-forty-two. The state of PQ’s body and the temperature of the tea fit that timeline. I opened the dishwasher: empty. I picked up a teapot from the drainboard where it sat with its lid up: wet inside. I put the pot back letting the lid fall closed.
“Is this the teapot you used?”
“Huh? Oh, yes. Can I get you anything, Mr. Kile?”
“No.” I opened the door into her room. Everything looked orderly, including the neatly folded back sheet and blanket. A lonely magazine centered a small table. “No outside door?”
“No,” she said.
“The turkey smell in here is wonderful.”
She angled her head toward a black iron stove, “My favorite part. I started the soup before going to bed.”
“Why isn’t the teapot in PQ’s room?”
“He never wanted a pot. Just one cup of Chamomile and he liked it very hot.”
“Talk to me about when you took in the tea.”
“His room was dark except for a little light from the nightlight in his bathroom. I put down the cup and turned on the lamp to wake him. That’s when I saw he had been shot. I guess my screaming woke up Tedy. She came down. Then she called Cord.”
“Who else came right away?”
“Only Tedy. Quentin sleeps with that music thing in his ears. He’s in another world, that one.”
“What about his wife Robyn?”
“Her bedroom’s right at the top of the stairs,” Gretchen said.
“Closer than Tedy’s room?”
“Yes.”
“But she didn’t come down?”
“No.”
“You have an opinion as to why she didn’t?”
“Maybe she took a sleeping pill. Not my business to know these things.”
I leaned against the counter. “How long have you been employed here?”
“Two weeks.”
