4 The Marathon Murders (9 page)

I found Jill at one of the Nashville Room microfilm readers
scrolling through 1914 newspaper files. She had been there by herself for
almost an hour. I hated to get close enough to blow my breath on her, but it
wouldn’t have been neighborly to refuse a client’s offer of a Scotch and soda.
I reached over her shoulder and held out a red-striped box of chocolates.

“Thank you, Mr. McKenzie,” she
said, looking up with a grin.

That “Mr.” tag meant I was back in
her good graces. If I were in the doghouse, it would have been “Colonel.”

She laid the box beside the reader
and pushed the control to focus on a large advertisement. “It’s hard to keep
from stopping on these old clothing ads. You wouldn’t believe the prices. What
did you accomplish?”

“I got the info on the man we’re
looking for. Terry wanted to talk, of course, so I spent some time cementing
client relationships.”

She gave me a beady eye. “Did the
cement have plenty of ice in it?”

“Okay, super-sleuth. No putting
anything over on you. What have you found about Marathon Motors?”

“Not much as yet. I finally figured
out the paper had a Sunday feature on automotive news. I’ve been reading
through those. So far things sound like they’re going great.
New
dealers, new distributors.
The man who was sales manager got involved in
a separate company that took over as national sales agent for Marathon. I’m
afraid it’s going to take several hours to go through all of these files.”

I looked at the microfilm boxes she
had stacked beside the machine. “Without any kind of date to go by, we’re
strictly shooting in the dark, babe. Let’s hold off until we see what
Kelli’s great-great-grandma can tell
us.”

We got on the road in the early stages of rush hour. The
downtown streets hadn’t slowed to
crawl
mode yet. We
had just reached the I-40 on-ramp when the cell phone rang. Jill answered it.
Kelli asked our location and what we wanted to do about getting the letter
copies.

“Are you at your motel?” Jill
asked. And, after a pause, “We’ll just come by there.”

They were staying near the airport,
which was on our way to Hermitage. Before we got that far, one of those pesky
scattered thundershowers blew into our path. A few monstrous raindrops pelted
our windshield, mutating into what my dad always called a gully-washer.

“Slow down, dear,” Jill said in an
urgent voice.

“I was about to anyway.” I gave my
usual excuse. I sometimes chided her that I didn’t drive nearly as fast as she
flew in her Cessna.

“I don’t want to end up in a creek
like the plunge Pierce Bradley took into that lake.”

“
Which reminds
me, I should probably call Wayne Fought and see if the Medical Examiner has
made a ruling.
”

“You think he’d tell you?”

“Why not, as long as I tell him what
a great job he’s doing.”

Rain blew across the hood at a
sharp angle as I pulled up to the motel, a three-story brick structure with a
covered entrance. Jill hurried inside, and I moved back out into the deluge,
looking for the nearest parking place. We kept a couple of small, collapsible
umbrellas in the Jeep, but those wind gusts made them of doubtful use. I
parked, jumped out, and ran for cover.

I found Jill waiting in the lobby.
We took the elevator up to the third floor and looked for Room 317. Kelli
opened the door when we knocked.

“Sorry about the rain,” she said as
I followed Jill in. “I should have brought this out to the car and you wouldn’t
have had to park.”

“Don’t worry about it. I like
playing duck.” I glanced at the water splotches on my tan knit shirt. Though I
don’t play the game, I like what they call golf shirts because they have a
pocket for my pen and small note pad.

Warren stood near the window beside
a round table. “Come on in and have a seat. You might as well wait till this
blows over.
Shouldn’t take long.”

He wore a tie and his jacket hung
on the back of a chair. “Have you had your audience with the junior
prosecutor?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It wasn’t as bad as
I’d feared. I explained in fairly graphic detail our version of what happened,
and he seemed to accept it.”

“I’m sure he wanted to know what
the PI was after.”

“Yes. I told him we had no idea
unless it somehow involved the missing Marathon Motors papers.”

I took the chair across the table
from Jarvis. Jill sat at a small desk and Kelli perched on the queen-size bed.

“How did he take that?”

“Actually, he got real interested.
Seems he’s an antique car buff. He was familiar with the Marathon, said he’d
been over and looked at a couple of them at the old building they’re remodeling.”

“That probably helped your case.”

“Right.
I
think maybe I’m off the hook.”

“That’s a relief.”

Jarvis’s eyes had a new twinkle.
“My boss at the Pentagon said the same thing when I called him.”

“Have you two come up with anything
new today?” Kelli asked.

I told her about
Audain’s
pending return and Jill’s digging at the library.
“We’re looking for more info on the situation at Marathon in 1914. I hope your
letter stash can shed some light on it.”

“They do. My great-great-grandma
gave a lot of details on what happened at the company both before and after
Sydney’s death.”

“Good. We’ll take them home and—”

My cell phone rang, interrupting
things as usual. It was Sheriff Driscoll.

“Did you check out Malcolm Parker?”
I asked.

“Yeah.
He’s got an airtight alibi for Monday night. That little car wasn’t his,
anyway. I talked to him shortly after you called, but we’ve been damned busy
the last couple of hours.” He sounded harried.

“What happened?”

“We’ve got ourselves another body.”

The little phone seemed to get heavier.
“Who?”

“Casey Olson. Some kids hiking
along the river came across his car at the edge of the woods. It was off
Highway 141 down in
Puryear’s
Bend.”

“Was he in the car?”

“No. The body was found in the
underbrush nearby. Shot in the head and back and arm.”

“Sounds like whoever did it wanted
to make sure he was dead.”

Jill, Kelli and Warren stared at me
with puzzled looks.

“Yeah.
That shot in the back makes it look like he was trying to get away,” Driscoll
said.

“Any idea when it happened?”

“I don’t get enough killings around
here to make a good guess, but the TBI boys say it looks like maybe two or
three days.”

“Is Agent Fought investigating this
one, too?” I asked.

“He and his crew are still at the
scene. The main reason I called is I thought you’d like to know about Olson’s
car.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a 1990 red Corvette.”

My audience barely moved a muscle as I repeated Sheriff
Driscoll’s story. When I got to the part about the red car, Jill’s eyes flashed
like a pair of headlights suddenly switched on.

“I knew it,” she almost shouted.
“He must have been at Bradley’s house Monday night.”

“You may be right,” I said. “But if
so, somebody else had to have been with him.”

Kelli folded her arms and cocked
her head. “Sounds like co-conspirators who had a falling out.”

I glanced through the window, where
the sky had begun to brighten and the rain had stopped. “You may be right, too,
Kelli. But we’re no closer to establishing a link between those murders and the
missing papers.”

“Do you still believe there’s a
connection?” Warren asked.

For no good reason, the question
rankled
me. I pushed up from the table and stood there,
hands on my hips, staring out the window, hoping for a ray of sunshine to
penetrate the confusion. It failed to arrive. All of a sudden I felt tired,
more tired than I had any cause to be. Was I getting too jaded for this
business? I wondered. For a moment I considered giving back their retainer and
saying sorry but I want the hell out. Whether it was pride or loyalty or a pure
streak of stubbornness, I couldn’t do it. I looked back at Warren.

“My instincts say yes, there is a
connection. I’ve always been a firm believer in the intuitive process. I think
what it really amounts to is perception. We gather a bunch of information from
lots of different sources. It churns around somewhere deep in our brains and
gets distilled into something useful by the subconscious. But right now it
doesn’t seem to mean shit.”

“Greg!” Jill had a shocked look on
her face. “We don’t need that language, and just what are you talking about?”

I kicked the table leg out of
frustration, damned near injuring my toe. “This case is getting under my skin,
babe. Everything we’ve learned so far leads absolutely nowhere. In 1914, some money
went missing and a man died. Now some papers that might solve the mystery of
the money are missing, and two men have died. Is that a link? Where is it
headed? What’s going on?”

Jill picked up the large envelope
Kelli had put the letter copies in. “If you’ll pardon us, folks, Greg and I
need to get home and see if something in these letters won’t steer our
intuitions onto the right path. Let’s go, Greg.”

I apologized on the way, and by the time we reached the
friendly confines of our weathered log walls, Jill had talked me into viewing
the situation from a different perspective.

“You’ve always been a man who
believed in action,” she said. “Let’s get busy doing something instead of
mulling over what isn’t happening.”

She decided we needed a good dose of
“brain food” to beef up our deductive abilities before tackling the letters.
She brought a couple of generous servings of salmon (“high in omega-3 fatty
acids,” she said) from the freezer, sprinkled spicy looking stuff on them and
shoved them into the oven to bake. To accompany the fish, she prepared corn and
string beans with slivered almonds. A salad of romaine lettuce, red cabbage,
carrots, tomatoes, and radishes topped off the menu.

After that tasty—and healthful, she
assured me—meal, we sat at the dining room table and spread out the sheets of
neat though faded handwriting. I started with 1914. Jill worked downward from
1919.

“This is a refreshing exercise,” I
said. “People don’t know how to write letters like this anymore.”

“So true.
This lady didn’t mind pouring out her soul.”

 After I had studied several
of them, one particular letter caught my attention.

“Listen to this, babe,” I said,
then read:

“Dearest Sister,

“I was happy to hear that Elmer’s
gout has improved. I wish I could say the same for the situation here, but I
fear it is getting no better. It seems to have become worse than any physical
affliction I have ever encountered. After hearing disturbing rumors from
another Marathon wife, I finally prevailed on Sydney to confide in me. He swore
me to
secrecy, that
I would talk to no one but him
about it. Since writing is not talking, and since you are so many hundreds of
miles away, I see no problem in relating this to you.

“Sydney said the national sales
representative keeps making glowing reports about all the cars being sold and
new deals made. But the cash coming into the company fails to reflect such
success. He said bills to suppliers are being paid late and the workers
frequently don’t get all of their pay. Sydney says this isn’t good for morale
and has resulted in poor workmanship in many cases.

“Sydney has talked to the Treasurer
about all of this, but the man insists there is no problem, everything will be
all right. It is just a temporary condition, he says, but Sydney is quite
worried and is determined to find out what is causing the problem.

“Tell everyone we are in good
health and hope to see you in a few months.

“
Your
loving sister, Grace.”

I could always count on Jill to
catch little idiosyncrasies in people’s behavior, and she came up with one
right away.

“Have you noticed she never uses
his boss’s name? It’s like she has a deep-seated antipathy toward him.”

“You’re right,” I said. “In one
letter she wrote something like, ‘I cannot abide the man. He has no moral
compass.’”

Jill sorted through several sheets
in her stack. “Here’s one that pretty much sums up the final chapter. It was
written five years after Sydney Liggett disappeared.”

“What does she say?”

“She refers to her son’s recent
wedding,
then
says, ‘I know I should be happy about
Henry’s marriage, but the enclosed newspaper story crushed all my hopes for
seeing Sydney again.’ Kelli copied the old clipping, which must have been
yellowed and faded.”

Jill summarized the story. In the
fall of 1919, a hunting party in Dickson County, about forty miles west of
Nashville, ran across a dilapidated barn on a farm unused since being tied up
in an estate controversy for several years. The land was located near the
original highway between Nashville and Memphis. One of the hunters looked inside
and saw a car. When he investigated further, he discovered a human skeleton on
the front seat. The car was a Marathon. A check of the license plate showed it
belonged to Sydney Liggett.

Liggett’s body was identified by
what was left of his clothing, and papers in his wallet. Finding no obvious
signs of foul play, the county coroner ruled it death by dehydration or
starvation. After consulting old news reports of the disappearance, he reasoned
that Liggett had pulled his car into the barn to hide. His fear of being
detected caused him to stay there too long to survive in the extreme summer
heat. Apparently the weather that year matched what we were experiencing now.
The coroner also reported evidence of animals around the car, possibly feasting
on the remains. Although no money or papers were found, the local sheriff
speculated they could have been carried off by animals.

“Mrs. Liggett objected to this line
of reasoning but got nowhere with her protest,” Jill said, glancing back at the
letter. “By that time, Marathon Motor Works had gone out of business and the
case was considered closed.”

She looked up at me, her eyes
narrowed. “Sydney Liggett was railroaded.”

“Sure sounds like it. The coroner
probably wasn’t a doctor, more likely an undertaker. All he had was a bag of
bones. Without any knowledge of forensics, he’d have had no clue if it was a
natural death or homicide.”

She placed the letter back onto the
pile. “And without those papers, we’ve got no chance of proving it was murder.”