Hidden Scars

by Mark de Castrique

  “Thanks,” I said. “We should be back mid-afternoon, if that’s not a problem.”

  “No problem at all. Mind if I take Blue for a spin at lunch? The temperature’s mild and I’ll crack the windows.”

  Hewitt drove a Jaguar, a far cry from Harlan Beale’s pickup. Ol’ Blue was cultivating expensive tastes.

  “That’s fine.” Nakayla handed Hewitt the leather leash Shirley had purchased.

  An idea struck me. “Hewitt, I know you only do defense cases, but do you think Shirley or Cory could do a little corporate work for us? It’s for a case.”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “I’d like to find out about a local seller of construction materials. Phillips Building Supplies.”

  He repeated the name. “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever. Are their corporate filings up-to-date? Any liens or judgments against them? Who are the owners and what’s the company structure?”

  “Are they culpable for anything?”

  “Maybe some invoicing irregularities. Right now it’s just a due diligence test. But I want it done thoroughly and professionally. I know you’re a hack, but Shirley and Cory are top-notch.”

  Hewitt tossed his head in mock indignation. “Come along, Blue. These people wouldn’t know a habeas corpus from a haberdasher’s corpse.”

  “Spoken by a haberdasher’s nightmare,” I said.

  But Hewitt and Blue were already out the door.

  Chapter Twenty

  Nakayla and I were on our way to pick up Violet Baker when I got a call from Captain Bret Nolan, the officer at Fort Bragg I’d contacted regarding Paul Weaver. Nolan was a lifer and we’d served together in Iraq.

  “Well, I’ve got some information for you,” Nolan said. “I’d feel more comfortable just telling you rather than sending anything in writing.”

  I knew a paper trail could circle back to bite him since he’d undertaken the personnel search without an official request.

  “That’s fine, Bret. If I need something official, I’ll come back through proper channels. Is it okay if I put you on speaker so my partner can hear?”

  “Sure.”

  Nakayla pulled a notepad and pen from her handbag as I activated the phone’s speaker.

  “Okay, give me what you’ve got.”

  “Your information about Weaver’s attachment to the Black Panthers really narrowed the search.”

  Nakayla looked at me quizzically. “Black Panthers?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Nolan answered. “That was the nickname for their battalion. They had a black panther for a patch and the motto ‘Come Out Fighting.’ Weaver was one of a few white officers assigned to them. He would have been at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, the unit was deactivated in June of 1946. Weaver had been given an honorable medical discharge a month earlier.”

  “Medical?” I asked.

  “Yes. A diesel storage tank exploded at one of the occupational sites. Suspected sabotage. Weaver wasn’t burned but he suffered severe smoke inhalation. He was transferred stateside to the VA hospital in Asheville.”

  “That’s where I had rehab.”

  “He received some small disability payment for chronic asthma aggravated by the explosion and was receiving medication at the time of his death.”

  The inhaler Leah Rosen described, I thought. “If he was under the care of the VA, would they have received an official death notification?”

  “Not in the records I have. But if the disability checks were returned, they would have eventually been discontinued. I also expect Weaver would have been required to see a VA doctor periodically to monitor his condition.”

  “You mean to see if he should still get his benefits,” I said.

  “Hey, you know the drill, Sam.”

  “All too well. Listen, I don’t know much about the 761st. Were they involved in any liberations of concentration camps?”

  “Yes. The satellite of Mauthausen, a smaller camp named Gunskirchen. One of the lesser-known but still filled with walking skeletons and littered with corpses. Must have been a hell of a thing to witness.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “must have been.”

  I thanked Nolan and disconnected.

  “What are you thinking?” Nakayla asked.

  “That we need to learn more about Paul Weaver’s medical condition. Everything Leah Rosen said checks out with what Nolan just told us. I think it’s time for me to revisit my caregivers at the VA.”

  Violet Baker was watching for us from the bay window of her Golden Oaks cottage. She came out wearing a smartly tailored gray pantsuit, but with no jewelry. Her makeup was more lightly applied than when we’d first met for lunch, and I deduced she was trying to strike a balance between sophistication and her down-home roots. After all, we were headed to see a woman who was probably in a housecoat and talking to her pet raccoon.

  We’d gone a few miles exchanging pleasantries when I said, “I’ve learned from Leah Rosen and U.S. Army records that your brother had a medical discharge from the service. Do you remember anything about that?”

  I glanced at Violet in the rearview mirror and saw her stare out the side window as she searched her memory.

  “Are you talking about the breath?”

  “Yes. Did you ever see him have trouble breathing?”

  “Paul usually carried an inhaler with him. He called it his breath. Told me he always kept a few extra ones in it.”

  “Did he use it often?”

  “No. At least not in front of me.” She hesitated. “I do remember one time that really scared me. We’d had three days of heavy rain, and the creek behind our house was transformed from a babbling brook to a roiling river. Paul had been home a few weeks and we walked out to survey the mountain runoff. The normally clear water was brown with soil swept from the hillsides. I ventured too close to the edge, not realizing the current had carved out the bank beneath me. The lip broke away and I tumbled in. The torrent propelled me downstream.

  “I heard Paul yelling, ‘Feet first,’ and I swung around so that any collision with a rock or log would not be with my head. About a hundred feet downstream, the channel veered sharply right and I was able to latch onto an exposed tree root in the left bank. Paul called from above me to hold on tight. He lay down on the wet ground and reached for me. Clutching my wrist, he told me to let go of the root. He hauled me to safety.

  “I was crying, but when I looked at his face, I stopped. He’d gone red as a ripe tomato and was breathing in short gasps. ‘My breath,’ he managed to say.

  “I ran to the house as fast as I could in my soaked clothes and shoes. I’d seen the inhaler on his dresser. I screamed for mother and father as I tore through the house. They followed me back to my brother who crammed the inhaler’s nozzle in his mouth and gave three hard pumps.

  “It took several minutes before his gasps slowed to deep breaths. ‘Thanks, Vi,’ he told me. Then he laughed and tousled my wet hair. ‘Bet I looked like a fish out of water. Good thing you were with me.’

  “Then it struck me that he had pulled me from the water and if he hadn’t been with me, I would have drowned.”

  “How old were you?” Nakayla asked.

  “This was in August of 1946. Paul moved out of the house the next month when he started at Black Mountain College. So, I would have been nine.”

  In the rearview mirror, I saw her look out at the passing pastures. “Funny,” she said, “I haven’t thought about that day in years, but I can feel my heart racing just talking about it.”

  As we started down the road to Nadine Oates’ house, I suggested that Nakayla and Violet stay in the CR-V until I’d spoken with Nadine. That way she wouldn’t feel outnumbered until I explained why we were there. Actually, I didn’t want either Violet or Nakayla exposed to a woman whose initial greeting incl
uded a shotgun.

  The maroon Taurus was still in the metal carport. I parked farther away from the house than on my previous visit, and before I left the driver’s seat, I noticed Nakayla bury her hand inside the handbag on her lap. She gave a slight nod and I understood her fingers were wrapped around the butt of her Colt semiautomatic.

  I had walked about ten yards toward the house when Nadine burst through the front door, her shotgun barrel in the crook of her left arm.

  “I thought I told you to stay the hell off my property. Can’t you hear?”

  I kept walking. “I heard. I also heard you say you hardly knew Paul Weaver, and we both know that’s a lie.”

  She immediately jerked the shotgun butt to her shoulder and fired. The boom of the twelve-gauge sounded like a cannon. As the echo reverberated through the hills, pieces of shredded leaves from the tree behind me drifted past. I wasn’t stupid. I stopped.

  “Naydee!” The cry came from my car.

  I turned to see Violet Baker running toward me, an eighty-year-old unconcerned that she was charging an armed lunatic.

  “Naydee, stop!” Violet halted in front of me, placing herself in the line of fire.

  Sam Blackman, combat-tested, thirteen-year U.S. Army veteran, was being shielded by an octogenarian.

  “I’m Vi. Vi Weaver. Why would you deny my brother? What happened to him?”

  I moved to the side where I could see Nadine Oates. In my peripheral vision I saw Nakayla step up on the other side of Violet Baker, her hand still in her handbag.

  Nadine lowered the shotgun. “Vi? Is that you?”

  “Yes, and you have no call to welcome us this way.”

  “I didn’t know you were with them.” The old woman’s voice cracked as she stifled a sob.

  “No. I’m not with them. They’re with me. I want to know what happened to Paul. If you are hiding something by denying you knew him, then you are being cruel, Naydee. Cruel and complicit.” Violet started walking toward Nadine. “And that’s not who you are. Not the girl I looked up to.”

  Nadine’s eyes dropped down to the shotgun. Her shoulders started shaking. Then she hurled the weapon into the weed-strewn yard and collapsed.

  Nakayla and I lifted the sobbing woman onto the old sofa on her porch. Violet sat beside her but said nothing.

  Between gasps for air, we heard her mumbling, “Communists. Somebody had to stop them. Somebody had to stop that Communist whore.” Then she stiffened as if a steely resolve infused her backbone. She turned to stare at Violet as if trying to find the face of the little girl she’d known nearly seventy years ago. The initial shock of hearing what must have been her childhood nickname had worn off, and the hardened personality of the recluse reasserted itself.

  “I did nothing to Paul. It was them.”

  “Who?” Violet Baker asked.

  But Nadine ignored the question. Instead she eyed the shotgun lying on the ground. I could tell she was calculating how quickly she could retrieve it.

  “Git off my property. Git before I sic the law on you.” She stood. “Or worse. We’ll see how you like the men in the suits.”

  Violet reached out and grabbed Nadine’s arm. “Please, Naydee. What happened to my brother?”

  But Nadine Oates struggled free, jumped from the porch, and hurried toward the gun.

  “We’re leaving,” I yelled. “So you can take your conscience back into the dark with your raccoon. We’ll find the truth without you.”

  I helped Violet from the sagging sofa and kept my eye on Nadine as I backpedaled to the car. She stood holding the gun by her side, her stringy, white hair blowing in the breeze like jellyfish tentacles. A Medusa who had turned her own heart to stone.

  I strongly suspected she’d contributed to Paul Weaver’s death.

  Now, I had to prove it.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Our encounter with Nadine Oates led to a revision in our plans for the rest of the day. Since a connection between the death of Paul Weaver and the murders of Harlan Beale and Nancy Pellegatti continued to be elusive, we needed to treat them as separate events and not be limiting our interpretation of facts to what might be an invalid theory—namely, that our search for the truth about Weaver’s death had unleashed a present-day murderer. Theories follow facts, not the other way around, although in several of our earlier cases, past murders decades-old had done just that.

  We took Violet Baker back to her cottage. She was shaken by Nadine’s hostility and extremely disappointed that the old woman appeared to be a dead end. I assured her we weren’t discouraged and that the confrontation was merely a setback. We would keep her updated.

  As soon as Violet disappeared through her front door, Nakayla asked, “What do you want to do now?”

  “Split up. I’ll drop you at the office. See if Shirley or Cory have had any luck with the background check on Phillips Building Supplies. And do you think you could find out if there was ever any conflict between Black Mountain College and law enforcement agencies?”

  “What kind of conflict?”

  “I don’t know. I realize that makes it difficult to research any police records that might not be indexed in a way that any complaints or incident reports can be easily retrieved.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “See Roland Cassidy. And since I believe he’s enamored with you, he might be more forthcoming, with less preening and posturing, if it’s just me. Then I’ll go after the common thread to both Violet’s and Nadine’s stories.”

  Nakayla smiled. “I wondered when you’d get to that.”

  “Get to what?” I asked, teasing her to prove she really had picked up on the significant point.

  “The heart of our case. The men in suits.”

  ***

  Roland Cassidy lived in a moderately sized stone house on a side street off Macon Avenue, the road that wound its way up Sunset Mountain to the historic Grove Park Inn. I’d called ahead and told Cassidy I wanted to see him about Harlan Beale. I’d said I knew they weren’t shooting today and asked if he would have some time to talk. He’d jumped at the chance.

  The first words out of his mouth when he opened his front door were, “The police came to my house in the middle of the night. They thought I’d killed Nancy.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Can you believe it? Nancy and I had a misunderstanding yesterday that someone must have overheard. But there was nothing to it. Fortunately, I was at The Thirsty Monk when she was killed.”

  “Roland, may I come in?”

  Only then did he realize I was still standing outside with the threshold between us.

  “Oh, my, yes.” He stepped aside. “Please come in. I’ve got coffee set in the den.”

  I entered a black-and-white-tiled foyer and followed Cassidy to a room on the left that was paneled in rich chestnut and furnished like the movies portrayed a British gentlemen’s club—overstuffed sofa and chairs, a Persian carpet, fox-hunting prints, and a few deer heads that I figured he bought on eBay. A silver coffee set was centered on a wooden table in front of the sofa.

  Cassidy beamed at me. “Here’s where the magic happens.” He pointed to a rolltop desk in one corner. “I wrote Love Among the Ridges right there. Refused to budge until I’d penned my fifteen-hundred-a-day word quota.”

  “Does the chair double as a toilet?”

  Cassidy jerked his head back like I’d thrown a phantom punch. Then he laughed. “No, but that’s a good idea. I could probably turn out two thousand words a day.” He gestured for me to sit in a wingback chair and then went to the serving tray. “How do you like your coffee?”

  I didn’t want any, but I saw he’d gone to the trouble to impress me. “Black is fine.”

  “Good, because I don’t have any real cream or unrefined sugar. My last live-in girlfriend was a cashier at Whole F
oods and a stickler for organic.”

  “Last live-in girlfriend?”

  Cassidy gave an exaggerated shrug. “We broke up a few weeks ago. Same story. They want to get married, which I find so conventional.”

  Translation: the dweeb couldn’t find someone to marry him, I thought. No girlfriend and now he’s sniffing around the lead actress, Nicole Madison.

  “Well, no one can call you conventional,” I said, looking straight-faced at the writer who evidently sat in his house wearing his tweed jacket that must insulate him from irony.

  “So true, sir.” He filled a bone china cup and brought it to me. Then he poured one for himself and sat on the sofa. “I take it you have news regarding Harlan?”

  “Roland, what I can share must go no farther than this room. Certainly not into your wordsmith creations…at least not until our investigation is finished.”

  His eyes brightened. “Of course. Even Dr. Watson wouldn’t chronicle Sherlock’s case prematurely.”

  The prospect of Cassidy being our witness to the public flipped my stomach.

  “Fine,” I managed to say. “Nakayla and I believe Harlan had discovered that your uncle and his investors are being cheated.”

  “Cheated? How?”

  “Some of the construction materials that were stolen showed up again in the replacement delivery. We don’t know whether the supplier was behind it or if some third party committed the theft and then resold the lumber to the supplier.”

  “Have you told my uncle?”

  “No. What do you think he would do?”

  “Blow his stack.”

  I nodded. “That’s why we can’t tell him until we have more evidence to present.”

  “What are the police doing?”

  “At this point, they’re quietly asking questions and they might discover the culprit behind the scam.” I leaned forward. “But, Roland, the sensitive part is that there’s a good chance this theft goes to the inside of the film staff. Nancy Pellegatti had an argument with the state accountant, Raymond Braxton, because he wouldn’t produce the two invoices for the construction materials. He claimed they’d already gone to Raleigh.”