Legwork (4 page)

“Hey, thanks,” he said, genuinely grateful. Food was nothing to joke about to Bobby.
“What’s the occasion?”

“A favor,” I replied.

“Can’t do it without me, huh?” he asked, cramming another doughnut into one cheek like some grotesquely overgrown chipmunk.

I swallowed my retort.
“Can you find out who called in the body?” I asked.
“I need to know if it was a man or a woman, that sort of thing.”

“No problem, doll,” he said, adjusting his waistband as if shifting around the fat might make more room for the biscuits.
“When do you need it?”

“Yesterday.” I sighed and went back to my desk for the bottle of aspirin I kept in the top drawer.
My box of Tampax had been moved to the other side.
What a snoopy bastard he was.
“You been going through my drawers again, Bobby?” I asked.

“I’ve been trying to go through your drawers for years!” There was that laugh again.

Why do I ever, ever ask him that question? He always answers the same damn thing.

Bobby D.
has one good point.
He pays my rent.
But he also fancies himself a poor man’s Nero Wolfe. Unfortunately, we’re not just talking poor here, we’re talking destitute.
They have two things in common: private investigator licenses and huge rolls of fat estimated at 350 pounds plus.
The similarity ends there.
Brainwise, Bobby is a long way behind Nero. And Nero actually moved from his chair every now and then.
Bobby is plopped on his butt when I arrive each morning and, as far as I know, stays there the rest of the day and maybe even through the night.
He must go to the bathroom, but beyond that conclusion, I haven’t the stomach to wonder.
Fashionwise, Bobby favors stained polyester jackets.
Probably because they go well with his pants.
He lounges about in this sartorial splendor each day, occasionally bobbing his huge neck, which is as thick around as a tree and a startling contrast to his small, tomato-shaped head and button features.
The tomato motif is enhanced by his dark brown toupee, which is styled like a 70’s lounge singer, except for a large cowlick that sticks straight up like a stem.
He accentuates this showstopping look with heavy gold jewelry which, frankly, I can’t see Nero wearing.

Besides, Bobby D.
is real.
Nero, I’m sorry to say, is not.

But I leave Bobby to his illusions.
He pays me well.
Technically, I’m his receptionist.
But only because, technically, I can be no more than that.
There is the small matter of a drug smuggling conviction fourteen years ago when I was twenty pounds lighter, very much younger, and a whole lot dumber than I am now.
I was carrying just enough to catapult me into the hallowed ranks of felons.
Just enough to keep me from obtaining my own investigator’s license.
Just enough to make me quickly divorce the son-of-a-bitch who’d asked me to drive his car for him then disappeared forever.
But not enough to keep me locked away for long.

Eighteen months behind bars in a Florida women’s prison did a lot for me.
It made me into a voracious reader and one smart cookie who can spot a phony at twenty paces.
It also made me into a feminist who doesn’t like women and a woman who doesn’t like men but dates them with misguided optimism anyway.

My attitude serves me well when it comes to following cheating spouses or poking into the lives of the betrothed.
Which is what I usually do for Bobby while he sits around and shovels down enough beer and sandwiches to sustain a third-world country for a week.

Why do I do it?
I find it reassuring to watch other people screw up their lives.
Participating in my own is a bummer.
One day I might decide what I want to be when I grow up. For now, I work for Bobby and live in North Carolina.
And that’s better than being where I was.

Me and Thomas Wolfe—we can’t go home again.

In fact, I won’t even admit where home was. The closest I’ll come to confessing to where I’m from is to say that, back home, we’re too busy running from alligators to stop and make pocketbooks out of them.

It doesn’t matter anyway.
I have a new life. I even have a new name.
It’s not technically Casey Jones since the divorce, but it’s the name on my MasterCard, so why argue?
Besides, call me sentimental, but a new last name was the one thing my ex gave me that can’t be cured with penicillin.
So I kept it.

Anyway, I don’t deserve to use my own name. My ex took care of that when he convinced me to take the fall for the smuggling charge.
I was young, I was in love, I was a sucker for a pretty face.
Never again.
I did the crime so I did the time. But I never thought of how it might affect Grandpa.
He’d raised me on his own ever since my parents had been found lying dead in a field of soybeans, shot from behind by assailants unknown.
I don’t even remember what my mother or father looked like anymore, it happened so long ago.
But I do remember the shame on my grandfather’s face when he came to visit me the first—and last—time in prison.

One day, I will go back and prove to him that all those years he spent feeding and caring for me weren’t in vain.
And when I do, I know of at least one ex-husband who’s going to pay.
And one murder investigation that will be reopened.
In the meantime, I’m learning what I can and I call Grandpa every other week from pay phones.
I never talk long.

But enough about me.
Let’s talk about what Bill Butler thought about me.
I examined his card carefully.
The fact that he was carrying one at all meant he was a little different from the rest of the jackbooted crowd a few blocks west of McDowell Street.
What was a nice Long Island boy doing here in the wilds of North Carolina?

More importantly, how could I weasel information out of him while still retaining a chance to get his skinny bones in bed when I was done?

I wasn’t sure it was possible.
I sighed and put the matter on the back burner.
It was time to get to work.

Five minutes later I was pulling up archived photos and articles from the local newspaper—the News & Observer, or N&O, as we locals call it—on my trusty Macintosh. Bobby never moves from his chair; I never start a case without my Mac.
We all have our rituals.
I learned everything you would ever want to know about computers in the office of that Florida prison. A nice lady from vocational rehab taught me how to turn one on.
A not-so- nice lady, formerly of a bank in Miami, taught me how to really make it purr.
She was serving a fifteen-year sentence for bank fraud and, like most of the inmates, she’d only been caught because some guy she was dating screwed up and got greedy.

NandoNet had started as the News & Observer’s computer network before they sold it off for a tidy profit.
It lets you surf the Internet cheaply and review reprints from their current and past issues by pressing a few convenient buttons here and there.
I was interested in deeper access and knew how to get it, courtesy of a young lady who’d been caught with her hand in the ad space money jar.
She sold the code out to Bobby about a week before the feds came to haul her away.
They ought to call it pink-collar crime.
Believe me, it’s the wave of the future.

I started by reviewing the society pages.
I wanted to get a better look at Thornton Mitchell, the victim.

The South was changing, no doubt about it. The society page was nothing like it used to be.
No smiling debutantes.
No grinning daddys.
No homage to the same five last names.
Instead, old money had given way to the new elite: businessmen and political leaders.
People like the CEOs of nearby research and development firms, flanked by their thin northern wives.
They were joined by the well-groomed homegrown politicos and their well-groomed but not always so thin wives.
That was one thing I liked about the South.
The really rich might still be really thin—especially the nouveau riche—but, face it, when you have homemade pound cake and pork barbecue and mounds of hushpuppies waiting at every fundraiser, who the hell can expect a woman to retain her girlish figure?
Not the tubby male veterans of the campaign wars.
In North Carolina, it was accepted practice to put on five additional pounds for each year you were in office and if your wife got a little plump too, you didn’t turn her in for a new one like those northern heathens did.

I found Mary Lee all over the damn place. She was at home in society.
And her weight was not an issue.
She was neither thin enough to arouse envy nor plump enough to lose the babe vote.
She was just right and I suspected her advisors polled the populace each week on how well-fed they liked their lady politicians to be.
She had something about her, I had to admit, a shining intelligence that made everyone around her look just a little bit dull, even in photographs.
Maybe it was no more real than that bright brittle cheer you find plastered all over beauty pageant contestants, but it looked real and that was what mattered. I spotted her standing next to the governor and his wife at a benefit concert, welcoming the vice president at the airport in another photograph, and opening up a new Sunday school for an acre of small black children somewhere down in eastern North Carolina. She looked at ease in every single setting.

Thornton Mitchell was a different story.
For one thing, he had attended different functions.
And he wasn’t at the pinnacle of power like Mary Lee.
He was one of those back-room guys, the kind that circles the candidates like lamprey eels searching for a soft spot.
He popped up regularly in photographs of conservative fundraisers, his sleek black hair, tanned brown skin, and tailored suits making him look like a well-fed seal rising from a sea of attendees.
The archivist had done a good job of bringing the N&O into the twenty-first century.
I found shots of Mitchell in the photo library going back thirty years.
I suspected he’d had a face lift or two over the years since his chins had a habit of disappearing.

One thing, however, never changed: the age of the girl hanging on his arm.
In every single photograph taken during the last fifteen years, Thornton Mitchell held a drink in one hand and a very young blonde or redhead in the other.
Put his repertoire together and you’d have a six- pack of Barbie dolls, all hairsprayed and squeezed into tight short dresses.
I could see them now, sitting in front of the mirrors in the powder room of the governor’s mansion, examining minute flaws in their mascara, adjusting their silk sheen control top pantyhose and practicing that blank stare young babes get when they don’t want to say the wrong thing and are a little awed by the company.
God, what were they doing with a drooling old geezer like Thornton?
The thought of letting him touch me made my skin crawl.

I tried to find some sympathy for Mitchell, but failed.
He was a real estate developer and, in my family’s book, that made him no better than the carpetbaggers that my grandpa hated so much—a hatred passed down from his own father. Carpetbaggers had been the ones to take away our land, leading us down that rutted road to rusty trailers and broken-down trucks.
How was Thornton Mitchell any different?
He was destroying the South just as surely as opportunists after the big war.
Just because he was raised here didn’t excuse him.
It only made it worse.

I noticed a funny thing about Thornton Mitchell when I pulled up all the photos side-by-side and compared them.
He was old.
I figured his corpse was close to sixty-five. That gave him about forty years of behind-the-scenes maneuverings and contributions to political causes.
So how come he was never in the forefront of a photo?
Never standing beside a candidate?
Never once taking center stage?
And how come I never saw him in a single shot with the esteemed Senator Boyd Jackson, Stoney Maloney’s fairy godfather uncle, the puppetmaster behind Mary Lee’s opponent?
It was pretty damn odd to be a conservative in this state and never shake hands with Boyd Jackson.
Maybe they’d had a feud going.
Or maybe something cozier.

I filed the tidbit away for further reference just as Bobby D.
bellowed to me from the front office.

“I got the info you need, doll face,” he hollered.

I logged off NandoNet and marched in to find out what he’d uncovered.
I was smart enough not to expect him to come to me.
“What’s up?” I asked.

“A dame called it in,” he told me.
“A young woman reported the body about two a.m.
last night.
Said she and her boyfriend had been out parking and they’d seen a lady pull her car into the driveway then get out, acting funny.
When the lady went inside the house, they looked in the car.
Saw what looked like a body rolled in a tarp.
Sped away and called the cops.”