Bad To The Bone (37 page)

"That doesn't mean anything."

"It means you were being used. She just
wanted your money. That's all she ever wants. Why else would Jeff
have met you here?"

She was scornful. "That's how much you know.
I told Tawny at the start that we better have a backup in case
someone political started to believe her ex-husband was innocent."
She smirked at me. "Your ex just seemed like the perfect patsy,
know what I mean? After all, he'd been stupid enough to marry you.
He's only here to take the blame."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Keep telling yourself
that. But you and I both know that Jeff can get Tawny drugs, and
when push comes to shove, she's going to go with someone who can
feed that nose of hers. She was getting ready to double-cross you,
cupcake. Wake up and smell the coffee."

I quit while I was ahead—and before I got
any hungrier from all my talk about food. Amanda was also quiet for
the rest of the trip to the Marlboro County Jail. I didn't
care.

Neither did Deputy Castleberry. She gave me
a thumbs-up as I was led into processing. The black recording
device from my knapsack was tucked under one of her arms. What
Amanda Cockshutt had just said would be enough to indict her,
probably convict her, and it would sure as hell get her talking
about a plea bargain. It would stand up in court, too. There is no
expectation of privacy in the backseat of a police car and I had
agreed to the tape.

I had brought them both down. Women's prison
would never be the same with those two works of art in
it. 

The cops in that little South Carolina town
didn't appreciate my accomplishment. They strip-searched me, threw
me a jumpsuit and fingerprinted me along with the rest of the dreck
being dragged in to keep the peace.

It was the worst thing that had happened to
me yet. I'd told Deputy Castleberry I was a private investigator,
and now they were sure to get a hit on my fingerprints. They'd find
out I had a felony record and know my P.I. license was a fake. If
they cared enough to do it, they could ruin my life in Raleigh.

It made for a very long night. Getting
caught in a lie always does.

I was put in an eight-by-eight-foot cell. It
reminded me of bad times and I found it hard to breathe. I had
scratches on my face from where Tawny had slashed me and my cheek
was starting to burn like a son-of-a-bitch.

Tawny was brought in an hour after I
arrived, huge strips of white tape over her nose. They put her in a
cell to my left. Amanda Cockshutt was in the one to my right. I was
glad for the bars between us.

Amanda lasted two hours before she broke.
She'd been thinking about my comments in the car, brooding over the
possibility that Tawny had been planning to double-cross her. That,
plus Tawny's constant coke-induced rustling—her sniffling, her
pacing about her cell, the incessant thump as she threw herself on
her mattress again and again—combined to push Amanda over the
edge.

It was just after five o'clock in the
morning when she called across my holding cell to her lover. "I
know what you tried to do to me, you bitch," she whispered to
Tawny. "I'll get you for it."

"What are you talking about?" Tawny was on
her feet in an instant. Her tiny body looked bloated in the
oversized jumpsuit, making her seem like a grotesque orange neon
tick that glowed in the dim night light of the jail.

This was what I had been waiting for: show
time. Tawny was coming down from what might well be a yearlong coke
high. Who knew what she'd do or say? And I had a front-row seat for
the fall-out.

"I know you were setting me up," Amanda
hissed. "Don't think you can treat me like everyone else in your
trailer trash life and get away with it. You're not getting a dime
of my money. I'll teach you to try to screw me over."

Some people might have had the sense to make
up with the person who held her fate in her hands. Not Tawny
Bledsoe. Not when she had just lost everything, been stripped of
her drugs and plopped in a cell next to me, her hulking blond
nemesis, the one with tree trunk legs and no appreciation for her
charms.

At first Tawny said nothing. That worried
me. If Tawny's feelings for Amanda were genuine, they probably
confused her. She needed a nudge.

"Yeah, Tawny," I said casually. "You seem to
be losing your touch. Did you really think Amanda would stand for
treatment like that? Screwing around on her with a guy. You must
think she's stupid. Jeff told me you called Amanda 'that rich
bimbo' the whole time you guys holed up together in your love nest
apartment and stayed up every night screwing your brains out. But I
didn't think you really believed she was that dumb."

Wee doggies. With those words, a cat fight
erupted, the likes of nothing I venture either Carolina has ever
seen. Tawny began screeching and ripping apart her pillow, then
throwing herself against the bars that divided us. She fastballed a
shoe at me, but let go too early in her wind-up. It hit the only
light bulb in her cell, shattering it. That would get the guards'
attention.

The names she called me after that exceeded
any she had dredged up in the past. It was a veritable volcano of
invective, and somewhere around the middle of it, Amanda Cockshutt
got it into her head that Tawny was talking to her. She replied
with some Northern expressions I'd never even dreamed of, and while
they lacked the colorful vernacular of the South, they were loud
enough and foul enough to bring two officers running.

"You're gonna carve the zee-zee on her what
with a knife?" I asked Amanda as the corridor door slammed and
footsteps headed our way. "What's a zee-zee? Some sort of gypsy
curse?"

I never got my answer. Tawny went batshit
when she saw the guards. She pulled her mattress from the bed,
tried to rip off her clothes, and then transferred her verbal fury
to the officers. They were afraid to go into her cell. When she got
a whiff of their hesitation, she escalated the volume and stepped
up the insults until both guards went running for help.

"I'll get you," she hissed at me through the
bars.

"And my little dog, too?" I suggested.

This unleashed a new episode of fury. It was
like watching a human hurricane unfold before my eyes. She was
unstoppable ferocity, pure energy, the essence of destruction.
Forty years of getting her own way had been thwarted at last. She
imploded with frustration. The display was awesome. It was a temper
tantrum of evil proportions.

And not a second of it was lost on Amanda
Cockshutt.

She had grown still as she stared in horror
at her partner through the cell bars. She'd finally figured out
that she was in deep trouble, and that Tawny was going to drag her
down even further.

Tawny unleashed another round of curses.

"Does she eat you with that mouth?” I asked
Amanda.

Amanda only stared at me in reply.

The guards returned with reinforcements. It
took three men to pin Tawny facedown on the mattress. Two other men
gripped her arms, and still two more held on to her feet. One of
them was a janitor and the other looked like some poor guy who had
dropped by the station to say hello to his friends. The Marlboro
County Jail didn't have enough manpower to take on Tawny Bledsoe.
They were borrowing bystanders, and still she was bucking and
shrieking like a rodeo bull with a hot coal up its ass.

"Enjoy rehab," I called after her as she was
dragged screaming down the hallway. Even Sheriff Charlie had heard
enough for one night. Tawny was on her way to the psych ward.

The last I ever saw of Tawny Bledsoe, her
mouth was running a mile a minute as she went through the family
tree of her captors, insulting every member she could name. It was
a sight to see and hear: Tawny Bledsoe, unplugged.

And I will never forget what Amanda
Cockshutt called out as the guards rushed her lover past that
night. The words rang in the hallway, reverberating off the high
ceilings, burning themselves into my memory. They would become the
words that Bobby D. and I always remember Tawny Bledsoe by:

"You blond bitch," Amanda screamed after
her. "You're not even really a blond!"

Dawn was a long time in coming. When it
arrived, it brought a rainy winter day with it. It was noon before
they came for me: Deputy Castleberry and another man I didn't
recognize. She was holding a cup of coffee from McDonald's. I
thought that was a good sign. Especially when she smiled at me.

"Okay," Castleberry said. "You're out of
here. The cavalry has arrived."

"The cavalry?"

"Well, at least a knight in shining armor."
She pointed to the far end of the hallway where Bill Butler stood
waiting, out of Amanda Cockshutt's sight.

"Why's she getting out of here?" Amanda
complained.

"Shut up," the deputy told her.

Amanda shut up.

"You look good in orange," Bill offered when
I rewarded him with a kiss.

I made a face. "Seen my clothes?"

"Upstairs." Deputy Castleberry unlocked my
handcuffs.

"Thanks for believing me," I told her.

"Thank him." She nodded at Bill. "Someone's
going to have a hell of a cellular phone bill." She was discreet
enough to leave us alone at the bottom of the steps.

I slapped Bill a high five. "Thanks,
Butler," I told him. "I owe you one."

"Actually," he reminded me. “This whole
episode makes us even."

"Oh, yeah," I said, remembering the times I
had pulled his bacon from the fire and thrown an arrest his way.
Those had been other cases but, right then, they seemed like they
had happened in another lifetime to some other creature on a
different planet in an alternate universe.

I wanted to go home.

"Come on," Bill said, "I've got to get back
to work." He gently touched the scratches on my cheek. "She do that
to you?"

"Yeah. You don't look too good yourself, you
know."

He sighed and ran his hands through his
hair. He suddenly looked very old. "When I heard all that gunshot
over the phone last night," he said, then stopped and just shook
his head. "I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I knew it
was bad. It scared me, Casey. It scared me bad."

We looked at each other and a tentative
smile took hold between us, one that turned into an outright grin.
"I guess I'm invincible," I said.

"I guess so." He looped an arm over my
shoulder. "Ready to go home?"

I nodded as we started up the steps. "How'd
you do it?" I asked.

"You've got friends in high places," Bill
explained. "One in particular."

"Oh, yeah," I remembered. "The tubby guy in
the little gray socks with heavy leather accents. And not much
else."

"That's right," Bill confirmed. Neither one
of us felt it prudent to discuss further why a high-ranking police
officer in Raleigh, North Carolina, had taken it upon himself to
pull enough strings to spring me from a South Carolina hoosegow.
But I made a mental note to return a certain set of black-and-white
photographs plus the negatives of them once I got home. Hell, I'd
send everyone their photos, and a lot of sleepless nights would be
history.

"Did you get the rest of the photos?" I
asked Bill. "I think Tawny had them on her."

"Down, girl. They're coming."

"Here you go," Deputy Castleberry said,
handing me a neatly folded pile of clothes.

They smelled, but who cared? "You folded
them for me," I said. "How nice."

Her smile took effort. She looked tired and
her dark face was etched with sleep lines. They'd stuck her with
the paperwork. How typical.

"Give me a moment?" she asked me
unexpectedly. "With him."

I stared at Bill, then stepped away. "I'll
just go change in the bathroom," I offered, anxious to reclaim my
right to the use of the public areas. My stomach bubbled with fear.
Fingerprints, I thought. Mine. They'd gotten a hit. This was the
end of the line. What would I tell Bill?

I put my clothes on with lightning speed,
arriving back in the foyer in time to see Deputy Castleberry
handing Bill a cardboard box and a piece of green-and-white
computer paper.

Oh, shit. She was handing him my NCN
printout.

Bill nodded as he took it, checked the
contents of the box, seemed satisfied, signed a clipboarded form
she held out to him, then grasped her hand firmly in farewell.
Well, weren't they just the best of buddies? Officers of the law
united against some poor schmuck like me trying to live down her
past.

"Let's go, beautiful," Bill said, his hand
resting on the small of my back as he guided me down the stone
steps of the jail. A light mist was falling and the air was cold.
It felt wonderful on my face. I gulped in the fresh oxygen.

"Your chariot awaits." Bill opened the
passenger side door of a white sedan.

"That car looks official," I said, more than
a little nervously.

"Relax. It's a final favor from our friend,
who was anxious to get all evidence back in my capable hands. You
don't think I followed the speed limit on the way down, do
you?"

His smile made me suspicious. Why was he
being so nice?

"Where are we going?" I asked as I slid into
the front seat.

"Home," Bill promised. He placed the box on
the seat behind us. "That's where the heart is, right?"

"What's in the box?" I asked casually. Other
than my sordid past, of course.

"My gun," he said. "Potential evidence in a
murder case, you know. But only until I get it home. You were
worried about that, now weren't you?"

Not as worried as about other things, I
thought. "What else?"

"A nice fat stack of photos from Tawny's
suitcase."

"The rest of them?"

"You got it. Including two of yours truly.
Nobody recognized me. I guess I have a forgettable face."