The next few hours were a hazy blur. I vaguely remember being wheeled into the emergency room at the local hospital, but my first real clear recollection was coming awake the next morning in the intensive care unit after they had successfully pulled Bradshaw’s slug out of my shoulder.
After assuring myself I still had two arms, hands and legs, I managed to find the call button and summon a nurse. A middle aged broad in surgical scrubs answered the buzzer.
She gave me the once-over and then picked up the phone next to my bed and paged for the doctor who operated on me. A few minutes later, the Doc was in my room, checking out my shoulder and asking me to move the fingers on my left hand.
I could.
Satisfied, he said that he’d allow me to have a visitor for a few minutes, but no longer. He motioned to the nurse, and she stuck her head outside the door and called. A minute later, I was treated to the sight of Ernie limping into my room, lime green polyester suit and all. He leered at the nurse as she and the doctor left my hospital room.
“Well, kid, they say that other than losing a bit of blood and being a bit stiff for a while, that you’re going to be okay. I heard about the little speech you gave at the church and so have the cops.”
“What about Cheryl Slatterson?” I asked. “Last thing I want is for her to waltz in here and blow me away.”
“Don’t worry, kid, I already got Sandy Milton working on it.”
“Damn it, have they got her under arrest or what?”
“Oh, they got her alright, but keeping her in the slammer depends a lot on you, or should we say, your memory.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “She’s the one that killed the Bowman broad, and she blew away her own husband and son for Christ’s sake. She’s one mean bitch, and I don’t want her running around free.”
“Don’t worry. I got it under control. You got to do just one thing until I get things worked out, and that is don’t talk to the cops or press until I give you the go ahead. I got the Doc to agree to say you’re in no condition to talk to anyone but close relatives for the next day or two, and I hope to have things all worked out by tomorrow morning. Now just go to sleep.”
I was too beat up to argue with him and didn’t try. The drugs were working on me, and I slept the rest of the day away.
It was mid-afternoon the following day before I was awake and alert enough to have visitors. It was Ernie again and this time Sandy Milton accompanied him. I smelled a deal in the air, and I was right.
Sandy brought me up to speed as to what had transpired while I was recuperating.
Stan Bradshaw’s apartment had been searched, and a small supply of cocaine and heroin had been found. By the looks of it, Bradshaw had been stealing drugs that had been confiscated by the Sheriff’s department in earlier drug busts and then mailed the drugs to Susan Bowman to use on Sonny Slatterson.
The police figured the Bowman woman had been hired with the express purpose of corrupting Sonny and making him an unfit heir to the Slatterson textile empire. This would have opened up a window of opportunity for Bradshaw once the elder Slatterson passed on and left everything to Mrs. Slatterson.
The consensus was that the Bowman woman got greedy, threatened to talk and was bumped off to keep her quiet. Whether or not Sonny was purposely given an overdose was debatable and probably would never be known now that both Sonny and Susan Bowman were dead.
I always felt that last minute switch from cocaine to heroin was meant to trick Sonny into an overdose.
Cheryl Slatterson, through her lawyers, was denying any involvement in the scheme and was laying the whole mess at the feet of her now dead son, Stan. She admitted she was Stan’s mother. With her husband’s blessing, She had helped him after he left the orphanage, sending him to college and helping him get a job with the local Sheriff. However, that was all she did.
No one really believed her protestations of innocence, but it was becoming increasingly and uncomfortably clear that it was going to be difficult to prove her guilt in a court of law. The defendant had money to burn on high-powered lawyers, and all the key players in this melodrama were now dead, so the whole case was dependent on circumstantial evidence.
Both the District Attorney and the Sheriff were anxious to see this whole mess go away. D.A. Anderson had no desire for it to become common knowledge that he’d been tight with Stan Bradshaw and Sheriff Crump just wanted to retire quietly.
On top of that, many of the local citizens were more concerned about the economic viability of the area’s biggest industrial engine rather than seeing justice served. Times were getting tight and people were worried about their jobs.
After Sandy was finished talking, he looked anxiously over at Ernie and waited. Ernie just looked at me, his eyes shining in anticipation.
Slowly, it dawned on me what was going down. The drugs must have been fogging up my mind not to have seen it coming sooner.
“How big is my cut?” is all I asked.
Sandy let out a sigh of relief, and Ernie just smiled.
“We haven’t got the all the details settled out with her lawyers or how the money is going to be paid, but we’re thinking it’s going to be along the same lines as the Whippy case,” said Ernie. “You just got to be sure not to be able to identify Cheryl Slatterson as the person that drove off Bradshaw’s car the other night. Everyone else, more or less, is ready to play ball. The press will raise a ruckus for a day or two, but that will pass.”
I let my head fall back on my pillow for a minute and shut my eyes.
On one hand, we had a woman who murdered four people. There now wasn’t a bit of doubt in my mind that it was two women I heard arguing in Susan Bowman’s house that night. That meant it had been Cheryl Slatterson that caved in Bowman’s skull with a hand-axe and left Sonny to die of a drug overdose.
I also had no doubt that Cheryl Slatterson, when confronted by her husband and his lawyer over her past, decided the best thing to do was grab her husband’s gun and kill them and then finish the job on Sonny.
She’d worked, whored and married her way to a fortune, and by damn, no offspring from her husband’s previous marriage was going to rob her of her due. So she called in her own flesh and blood and together, they worked out a plan to have it all, and it’d have succeeded if it hadn’t been for yours truly getting involved.
On the other hand, I couldn’t prove she was the one in Susan Bowman’s house that night, and I damn sure couldn’t prove that it was she, and not her drug-addled stepson, who had killed her husband and his lawyer.
As for Cheryl Slatterson being the one who drove off in Bradshaw’s car the other night after he bounded into the woods after me, well I was fairly sure it was her, but I couldn’t swear.
I raised my head up and looked at Milton, then at Ernie.
“Okay, but I insist on a sixty percent cut on the final amount. I did all the bleeding. You two can fight over the remaining forty percent. I don’t give a damn. Now let’s get the cops in here so I can tell my version of events and get this thing over with. I want to get out of this damn hospital and go home.”
So that’s the story of how Cheryl Slatterson got away with four murders.
No charges were brought against her, and the whole thing was quietly laid to rest. Stan Bradshaw was portrayed as the heavy in all of this, with Susan Bowman as his partner in crime and poor Sonny Slatterson as their unwitting and tragic dupe.
Cheryl Slatterson got control over her husband’s textile empire, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. It was soon common knowledge around town that she had once run a whorehouse and, unlike quadruple murder, some things just couldn’t be forgiven. Most of what passed for high society in those parts shunned her.
Then to make matters worse, the bottom fell out of the double knit polyester market, and the fashion industry began moving back to using cotton and wool. Within two years, the company Cheryl Slatterson had taken over lay in tatters and was bankrupt, never to recover.
She sold what little she could and
moved to Huntsville, Alabama. There she lived in a small two-bedroom house on the outskirts of town, a recluse who only ventured out of the house for groceries and booze.
She died, alone and unloved, in 1985. The coroner said she’d been dead a month or so when they found what was left of her body, slumped over in a chair in front of the TV set. Empty vodka and gin bottles were strewn about the house, and her two cats had been gnawing on her body for sustenance during the weeks they were stuck inside the house.
I guess in the end justice was served. For a woman who was once so beautiful, Cheryl Slatterson must have left one ugly corpse.
It probably was still better looking than her soul.
The End
About the Author:
E. R. White, Jr. makes his home in the Florida Panhandle. This novel is his "Plan B"….
Scrambled Hard-Boiled Page 46
