A Killing at Cotton Hill (29 page)

Loretta and Greg come pounding into the room. I see car beams through the kitchen window and someone drives up. In a half a minute Rodell strolls in through the back door, red eyes blinking at the sight before his eyes.

“What the hell's going on here? Why have you got Jackson all tied up? And where's Elvin?”

“Jackson killed Dora Lee,” I say.

“The hell he did!”

I hear groaning from the other room. I'm glad that Elvin isn't dead, and even gladder that he didn't die in the fire Jackson had planned to set.

“Go on in the front room there and help Elvin,” I say. “I hear him groaning in there. Jackson must have done something to him. Lucky he didn't kill him. And call your troops to get out here.”

Being ordered around seems to suit Rodell, since things seem to be out of his control. He scoots out of the kitchen.

I tell Loretta to stop making a fuss and if she needs something to do, get us some coffee. I send Greg to find some rope so I can secure Jackson a little better. It occurs to me that my success in corralling Jackson has made me a little bossy.

Once Rodell gets going, he doesn't hold back and before long the whole police force of Jarrett County arrives along with the highway patrol and they haul Jackson out of there.

There's hardly anything I like about the next few days. It takes some time to find my Thiebaud, and in the end it's Jackson's poor wife who finds it stashed in his apartment along with about $20,000 in cash that he's systematically skimmed off the business. I meet her at the apartment to pick up the painting.

Anne greets me at the door. Her eyes are sunk so deep in shadows that she looks like somebody gave her two black eyes. She asks me to have a glass of iced tea with her, and I can't turn down the chance to talk to her. I'm still hoping to understand something about Jackson's turn of mind.

“I blame his daddy,” Anne says. “He was a miser in every sense of the word. He couldn't spare a drop of affection for Wayne. Poor Wayne did everything to try to get that dried-up old man's approval.”

“Wayne managed to marry a fine woman and raise three kids,” I say. “I just wonder why that wasn't enough for him.”

“I've asked myself that same thing. You heard about the money I found? How could he have kept that from his kids?” She's crying now, which seems to me to be the right response.

“Maybe he thought he could invest it somewhere and surprise you with making a lot more of it. It seems to me when somebody starts out not having enough money and not having approval from their parents, it's hard to catch up. Seems like maybe Wayne was always trying to get over that hump.”

She wipes tears from her face. “It's good of you to put it that way. It's something I can tell my kids to help them cope with what he's done.”

She tells me they're going to have to move out of Houston. “The kids won't be able to hold their heads up here.”

“Where will you go?”

“My folks live down around Corpus Christi. I'd like to be closer to them anyway.”

After I leave her, I'm not nearly done with the hard things. My next stop is to meet the curator of the Houston Museum of Modern Art. I turned down his suggestion that he invite the whole board to have a big dinner with me to celebrate my temporary gift of the Thiebaud. So it's just the two of us meeting.

Before I go inside, I take the Thiebaud out of the packing I've wrapped it in and take a good long look at it. Giving it up feels like giving away a little part of Jeanne. This museum will have to turn it over to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth when I die, as Jeanne wanted, but I'm giving the Houston museum temporary custody because I want the painting to be close enough so it will be easy to visit.

The curator has still managed to fuss up our meeting with a little bit of pomp. The president of the board and his tiny little wife are there to shake my hand. They've already given me what I wanted in return, and that is a guaranteed place for Greg at the University of Texas in the art school. I'm not pleased with the fact that they did it just on my word and never even asked to see any of Greg's work. It makes me wonder how many places in art schools are taken up by people who get there by money rather than talent. But I can't solve the problems of the world; I can just do what I can for one artist.

My last call has to be in the early evening, because Caroline doesn't get off work until six o'clock. I've arranged to take her out to dinner, telling her I want to discuss financial matters. It took me some time to track her down, since she wouldn't return her phone calls and I had to find her at her place of work.

We go to an Italian restaurant that she chooses. She's more confident in her own setting, dressed for work, knowing she makes her own way, but she still eyes me with caution. As well she might.

I like spaghetti just fine, so that's what I order in spite of Caroline telling me that in a fancy Italian restaurant like this I should be more adventuresome.

Caroline can't help but know about Wayne's arrest for Dora Lee's murder and the recovery of my Thiebaud. The TV news made a big fuss over both of those things. But they hardly mentioned the theft of the William Kern painting, even though it was the motive for Wayne killing Dora Lee. The Thiebaud was big money. Up beside it, I guess they figured the little Kern landscape was trivial. So, since she's been holed up in Houston, theoretically Caroline shouldn't know a thing about what the Kern was worth.

“You were pretty mysterious on the phone,” she says. “Not to mention persistent. I don't mind saying I thought I had put this all behind me.”

“I want to discuss the money you'll be getting from your mamma's estate,” I say.

“Oh, did Greg decide to sell the farm?”

“No, but he's prepared to buy you out.”

“Well, that's good then. Whatever he thinks is fair.”

“Don't you wonder how he can afford it?”

She takes a sip of the fine red wine I've ordered. I've become partial to a good glass of red wine. “Why don't you tell me?”

“I think you already know.”

She tries to stare me down, but she blinks first. “Things just got out of hand. I didn't think Wayne would go as far as he did.”

I look for any sign of distress, but she's dry-eyed and calm. “When did he tell you he'd done it?” I ask.

She takes another sip of wine. It's too good for the likes of her, but it's too late to unorder it. “He came to my place that night. He was a wreck. He hadn't even cleaned the blood off his clothes.” She shakes her head, as if talking about a bad child, not a man who killed her mamma.

“I don't understand why he had to kill her. He had the painting. He could have just given her a little bit of money and told her that's all it was worth.”

“Oh, believe me, that's exactly what he planned to do. But she found out how much it was really worth.”

“From looking it up on the computer?”

“That's right.”

I think about the first time I was at Dora Lee's desk and how I didn't bother to open the computer, thinking she probably didn't use it much. If I'd opened it right then, I might have saved myself a fire.

“Who would have suspected that an old country woman like my mother would even have a computer?”

I have to remind myself why Caroline was so bitter toward her mother. It doesn't excuse her part in what was done, but at least it keeps me from telling her what I think of her. “So when your mamma told Wayne she knew what he was up to, he decided to kill her?”

“You make it sound easy, but he told me that he had a hard time deciding what to do. He went out to the farm twice and sat outside trying to work up his courage.”

“Courage? That's not a word I'd use to describe a man who stabs a vulnerable old woman in her home.”

At least she blushes.

“How did you and Jackson hook up in the first place?” I say.

“I called him about a year ago, after my divorce. I was lonesome one night.”

“How'd you know where he was?”

“I called Leslie and he told me.”

“So you thought nothing of taking up with a man with a wife and three children.”

She shrugs. “He had his choice. I didn't want anything permanent and he knew it.”

“At some point he started talking to you about his money worries?”

She nods, sipping the wine, looking at me over the top of the glass. She just can't stop being seductive, even when we're talking about her part in murder and thieving. “He wouldn't shut up about it, worried half to death that Leslie was going to find out he'd lost everything. I remembered that painting. Mother was always going on about it, how it was going to be worth something one day.” She shakes her head and her mouth goes all bitter. “I remember once Teague was complaining about the price the cotton crop brought. Mother said, well, if worse comes to worse, we've got that painting. You know what he did?”

I wait. She'll try to win some sympathy by telling me.

“He knocked her down. She had a bowl in her hands, putting our dinner on the table. It broke, and he made her eat it off the floor.”

“Don't tell me that.” I'm affected, in spite of my revulsion for Caroline.

“You know what still bothers me most about that? Neither Julie nor I made any attempt to help her. We didn't yell at him or beg him, or anything. We just sat there and let it happen. How can one man have managed to get complete control of three women?”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen? Something like that. Old enough to do
something
.”

I don't try to comfort her. My spaghetti comes, but I've lost my appetite.

I thought a lot about what I was going to do with Caroline. If only she had turned in Wayne. Wishful thinking. She may or may not be found guilty of being an accessory to murder and theft. Anyway, I figure no prison is going to keep her locked up the way her upbringing did. I don't like that she'll benefit from the money the painting will bring, but I'm pretty sure there's not enough money in the world to give her a good life. All those things considered, I could have let Caroline's part in the murder slide.

But there's the matter of the little lie she told me to throw me off Wayne's trail. That Wayne had said the painting was sold a long time ago. If she had just let it alone, she might have gotten away with it. I could have argued to myself that she was a victim of Wayne as much as any of us. But that lie told me she knew exactly what Wayne had done.

“What are you going to do with the money from the picture?”

“Quit my job. Maybe go back to California.”

She doesn't ask me a thing about her nephew and I don't tell her. I don't feel like tainting his fresh new world with her old, spiteful one.

I've asked Rodell to wait outside the restaurant. He's arranged with the Houston police to take Caroline back to the jail in Bobtail. I'll turn her over to him when we leave. I figure it's best to mend fences with him by giving him this arrest. I just needed to satisfy myself that I was doing the right thing by turning her over. And I'm satisfied.

I'm wishing I could stay away from Houston for a while, but the next week rolls around and it's time to use those baseball tickets I got from Best Land Use Enterprises. The day before the game, Fred Bachman calls to make sure I'm all set up and don't need anything else. He tells me the Four Seasons let him know I had reserved a second room and that his company will be paying for that, too. I tell him it isn't necessary, but he says it's not every day he meets somebody who gives him important information and doesn't want anything in return for it.

Then he tells me their committee met last week and decided to situate the racetrack a few miles further north of Dora Lee's farm, in an area that is flatter and won't need so much excavation. I ask him if it would be appropriate for me to mention this to a few people who might be looking to buy around there. He tells me I can do as I please, that they still have a lot of permits to get before the racetrack happens. “It's all speculation at this point,” he says, “so just like any other investment, it involves some risk.”