Bad To The Bone (11 page)

"Thanks. I'm going to go see Boomer
Cockshutt's widow. I want to ask her some questions."

“The widow? Why the hell would you do that?"
Bobby asked.

"If Tawny is involved with Cockshutt's
murder, there's one big question that bothers me," I explained. "I
don't think she ever does anything unless it benefits her in some
way. And I can't figure out what she stood to gain by killing
Boomer Cockshutt. Maybe the widow can help."

Boomer Cockshutt had been dead for six days.
His funeral was over. The grieving friends had departed. His widow
would be left alone with two dozen frozen casseroles, facing lots
of empty hours to wonder about what she was going to do with the
rest of her life.

On the other hand, maybe not.

The surviving Cockshutts lived in North
Raleigh on a piece of wooded land worth at least a half million. An
old woman who looked like a giant vulture answered the door of the
huge house. She was hunched and dressed in black, with dark eyes
set deep into crepey gray skin. Her sharp voice gave the impression
she was about to tear out a chunk of my flesh.

"We're not talking to the press," she
snapped.

"I'm not the press."

"Go away anyway." She tried to shut the door
in my face.

"Excuse me," I said loudly, jamming my foot
in the way. A television blared loudly in a back room, the distant
electronic voices sounding like a static quarrel.

I peered over the old lady and spotted four
adults lounging in various poses around an elegantly furnished
sunken living room, highball glasses in hand. How quaint. A
cocktail party wake.

"Let me in," I said. "I'm a private
investigator and I want to talk to Mrs. Cockshutt." I was hoping my
conviction might make up for the fact that I had no right to be
there whatsoever.

The keeper of the gate was not impressed.
"My daughter needs her privacy. She's in mourning."

Laughter broke out in the living room.
"Sounds to me like she's managing okay."

The old lady glared at me sourly.

"Who is it, Momma?" a voice called from the
living room.

"No one important, Amanda," the old battle
ax yelled back. "I'll take care of it. Just some private
investigator dressed like a slutty war refugee."

"Slutty? I'm not the one wearing combat
boots."

Her eyes moved automatically to her feet
just as a slender woman with short brown hair appeared in the
hallway behind her. Amanda Cockshutt was tall, with a strong face
and wide-set eyes that were an unusual greenish-gray. Her hair had
been cut short in a style that emphasized the wide angles of ber
cheekbones. No black for this widow—she was wearing an expensive
silk warm-up suit patterned in pink and purple geometric
shapes.

"A private investigator?" she asked.
"Whatever for?"

"I'm looking into your husband's death." I
handed one of my cards over the head of the glowering old lady.
Momma glanced at my hand like she was thinking about biting it. I
quickly returned it to my side.

Amanda Cockshutt turned the card over in her
hand curiously and stared at the back, as if seeking further
explanation there. "Who hired you?"

"I can't tell you," I said. "It's
confidential."

"Secrets," the old lady snapped, then
actually spit on the front stoop. "More secrets. Tell her to go
away."

Amanda Cockshutt ignored her mother and
gestured for me to step inside. "Please come in. If it's important
for someone to know more about my husband's death, I'm happy to
help. Some friends and I were sharing memories of Boomer, but they
were just leaving."

Her eavesdropping guests took the hint. They
obediently placed their drinks on nearby tables and started
mumbling about their coats.

I waited in the hallway as Amanda Cockshutt
distributed coats, scarves and gloves. The old lady glowered at
each guest as they left, leaving no doubt that she thought they had
the family silverware stashed in their pockets.

"Mother, I'd like to talk to Miss Jones
alone, if I may," Amanda Cockshutt requested. The shrieks of two
small children fighting deep within the house erupted. "Perhaps you
could get Tommy and Alyssa to stop fighting for five minutes and
give us all a break." There was an edge to her voice.

I stared as the old lady clomped
belligerently away.

"Don't pay any attention to her," Boomer's
widow said. She put a hand on my shoulder and guided me into the
living room. "My mother is old-style Italian from New Jersey. She
feels out of step down here. She's been living with us for two
years now, and she gets crankier every day. Hates the South. But
she's an amazing housekeeper. No one wields a broom like my
mother."

"Really?" I asked. "Does she sweep with it
or ride it?"

"Now, now, Miss Jones," my hostess chided me
calmly as she reached for a bottle of gin. "She's my mother, not
yours, so I'm the one who gets to make fun of her." She raised her
eyebrows and gave me an unexpectedly raffish grin.

"Point taken," I said.

I turned down an offer for a drink and
waited until she had settled herself on the sofa and put her feet
on the coffee table. Her legs were long and her feet were tiny.
They made my size nines look like clodhoppers.

"Your client is confidential?" she asked
over highball glass.

"Yes, I'm sorry."

"The police?" she guessed.

I had to laugh at that one. "No. Not the
police."

"Robert Price, then? You're trying to get
him off the hook?"

"I really can't say," I said politely.

"My husband's insurance companies? They said
there were no problems."

I tried shrugging, but she was not to be
stopped.

"I know—some lady friend of Boomer's?" she
suggested.

I was unable to resist the opening. "Did he
have a lot of those?"

"Oh, yes." Her feet fell from the coffee
table with a clunk. She leaned forward, a strange smile on her
face. "Boomer had more lady friends than I did. And I'm in the
Junior League. Am I surprised he was killed by a jealous husband?
No. The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long."

"Why did you put up with it?"

She gestured at the room. "We all have a
price. Boomer made a very good living. I enjoy not having to work.
What can I say? I've never been all that interested in romance, so
I was happy to be left alone. Perhaps I am the cold fish Boomer
always said I was." She shrugged. "I never put much stock in that
romantic crap anyway. It's all an illusion and illusions don't last
long."

"Do you think Robert Price killed your
husband?" I asked bluntly.

"Sure, why not? And if not him, some other
husband. Boomer didn't care where he dipped it. And he didn't
particularly care who knew it."

"Wouldn't it bother you if an innocent man
went to jail?"

"I did time with Boomer and I deserved
better. Let Robert Price do his."

Talk about frosty. Compared to her, the
latest cold snap was nothing.

"Did your husband have a lot of life
insurance?" I asked, remembering her earlier guess that I worked
for an insurance company.

"Of course. He had coverage up to his
eyeballs. So do I. Boomer was a smart man financially, if nothing
else. I'm rolling in the bucks. But then, I was rolling in them
before. The police have already gone through all this with me. I'm
sure they're looking at it as a possible motive. Isn't that the
first motive everyone thinks of? Money?" She stared at me,
amusement in her eyes.

"Not me. I find that money runs a poor
second to sex and love."

She gave a sort of bark that was supposed to
pass for a laugh. "That rules me out. I haven't seen a pecker in so
long, I couldn't tell you what one looks like."

"That's okay. I don't need any pointers." I
stood to go. There was no point in questioning her further. She
didn't know anything. Or care, for that matter.

"What are your plans now?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"What are you going to look into next?"

"I'm not sure. His business dealings,
maybe." It was as specific as I wanted to get. I like to keep my
cards as close to my chest as a 38D bustline will allow.

"Was he active in any businesses outside the
car dealership?" I asked as we headed for the door. If Tawny
Bledsoe was involved in something financial with Boomer, that might
give her a motive for killing him.

Amanda Cockshutt shook her head. "I don't
know where he would find the time to have outside business
dealings. Between his dealership and all the women he saw, my
husband was booked solid. But I suppose it's possible."

"There is one more thing," I said, hoping to
get something useful out of the interview, no matter how small. "I
don't want to upset you by asking this, but did you know the woman
your husband was seeing when he died?"

She shook her head again. "I didn't need to
know her. They were all alike. Killer bodies. Empty brains. Willing
to settle for a schmuck like Boomer."

"Unlike you," I pointed out unkindly.

"At least I got this out of it." She raised
both arms in a sweeping gesture.

I wouldn't have called it a good bargain. A
great-looking house is still an empty shell filled with dead
objects. It was no substitute for a life.

"Thanks for your time," I told her, suddenly
anxious to leave Amanda Cockshutt's cold world behind.

"Sure." She touched her throat with a
slender hand. "And tell your client, whoever she is, that Boomer
didn't really love her and she needs to move on with her life. He
didn't love anyone but himself."

"I don't think it was like that with my
client," I said evasively.

"Sure it wasn't." She shut the door in my
face.

I returned to my car, wondering what it
would be like to spend your nights inches away from the body of the
person who betrayed you regularly, to count out your days together
locked in mutual hate, each unwilling to be the first to crack and
show the weakness of true emotion, each silently daring the other
to crumble and reveal they had once cared.

It just didn't seem like a game worth
playing to me.

Bobby'd had no luck with his routine
inquiries, but he promised to keep trying. So far, Tawny Bledsoe
had vanished without leaving a trail. But he had come up with a
name and an address for her family. Her maiden name was Worth. Her
parents lived near Lizard Lick, about twenty-five miles northeast
of Raleigh. It was late afternoon and, if I hurried, I could beat
the commuter traffic.

The obvious blue-collar status of Tawny's
ex-husband Joe Scurlock had perplexed me when I interviewed him. He
hardly seemed to satisfy Tawny's cashmere-and-fur tastes. But one
look at the home where Tawny had been raised told me that she had
come from far humbler roots than blue collar. At the time she
married him, Joe Scurlock had probably been a step up.

The Worth home was a sagging clapboard
structure barely set back from the highway. The land was muddy and
rutted, the house sinking on its foundation, the exterior badly in
need of paint. It was a piece of property good for nothing except
hanging on to.

As I picked my way over puddles and patches
of gravel, a light went on in an upstairs room. There was a flash
of white as someone shoved a curtain aside. I caught a glimpse of a
face peering out into the twilight before the curtain was pulled
shut again.

I climbed the concrete steps to a rickety
front porch and reached my hand through a torn screen door to
knock. I knew someone was home, but no one answered. I knocked
again, and this time heard odd scrambling noises inside. There was
a small window to the right of the door, so I wiped a patch of the
surface clean with a corner of my coat sleeve and peered through
the dingy glass.

A shrunken head topped with wisps of gray
hair peered back at me, its toothless grin and vacant look
terrifying in the deepening twilight.

I almost peed in my pants from the shock. I
still hadn't recovered when the door flew open a moment later. A
small man well into his seventies and dressed in denim coveralls
stood in the doorway. There was no sign of the creature I'd just
seen.

"Got no money to buy nothing," he said in a
gravelly voice as he started to shut the door on me.

"Wait," I told him. "I'm not selling
anything. I'm a private investigator. I want to talk to you for a
few moments. You are Mr. Worth, aren't you?"

The old man's face turned fearful. His chin
was stubbled with whiskers that made a rasping sound when he drew a
weathered hand across them. "What's this all about?"

"It's about your daughter, Tawny," I
began.

"Ain't got no daughter named Tawny," the old
man informed me. A crash echoed in the house behind him, followed
by an eerie howling. "Got to go now." The slam of the door was
final.

I turned to go, perplexed. Had Bobby gotten
the address wrong? Who the hell was that awful shrunken face in the
window?

Darkness had fallen during our brief
conversation and there was no porch light to guide me back to my
car. I bumped my shin on a discarded refrigerator littering the
yard and cursed. As I stopped to rub my leg, I heard the groans of
a window being opened after years of disuse.

"Pssssttt," a voice floated across the yard.
"Wait. Don't go yet."

I looked up at the second floor. A round
face seemed to float in an upper window. "I'm coming down," the
voice called out.

Nothing about this house was restful,
nothing about it inspired confidence. But there was no way I was
going to walk away. My curiosity has gotten me in trouble many a
time, but I'd rather be curious than bored.

A minute later, a heavyset woman with brown
hair permed into frizzy curls stepped out onto the porch. She was
wearing tight purple leggings and a screaming pink sweatshirt
decorated with a plastic decal of yawning puppies. Her cheap tennis
shoes were neon green. If I had been dead, I would have come back
from the grave to keep from being buried in an outfit like
that.