Out Of Time (3 page)

“Why are you staring at me?” he demanded. “Are you trying to be alluring or something?”

I shoved him so hard he almost fell off his stool.

“Sorry,” I said. “I had a weird day is all.” I told him about the office full of country ladies, all related to Gail Honeycutt Taylor. He did not exactly react as I had hoped. He shifted into indignant overdrive and committed one of my personal seven deadly sins: he tried to tell me what to do.

“Jesus, Casey—let it lie,” he ordered me. “That case is over and done with. She popped him. He was a fellow officer, for god’s sakes. Don’t tell me you’re going to try and help her? Stay away from it.”

I stared at him incredulously, both because he knew about the case—which had been well before his time—and because he’d done it again. “Don’t tell me what to do,” I warned him in a voice that usually worked with twenty-six year olds, but had damn little effect on the forty-four year old before me.

He shook his head angrily. “Casey, that mess was bad enough when it first happened They were still talking about it when I joined the force down here, and they’re still talking about it today. I’ve heard the rumors; the family’s been saying Roy was a dirty cop and I’m not going to buy it.”

That interested me. “Really?” I asked. “I hadn’t heard those rumors.”

“You always get them when a cop goes down like that,” Bill explained. “It doesn’t mean they’re true.”

“It doesn’t mean they’re not true, either,” I said.

“See, that’s my point.” hes my po He inched away from me. “That’s why civilians shouldn’t go poking around in police business. The first thing that comes to your mind is that he was dirty and now your whole investigation is going to revolve around that rumor, whether it’s true or not.”

I was indignant. I slammed my beer bottle down on the bar and a couple of the old coots looked my way. I considered flashing diem, but didn’t want to be responsible for performing CPR on them if I did. “I think I’m experienced and intelligent enough to be able to separate fact from fiction,” I said. “I believe I have just about as much experience as you, in fact.”

“Doing what? Following around cheating spouses and lousy bartenders?”

“What brought this on?” I asked. “A little touchy on the subject of cheating spouses, aren’t we?”

Wrong point to bring up. It was why he had moved south in the first place. His anger edged up a notch. “Casey, I can tell that you’re in over your head with this one. It’s a bad case, is all I’m saying. A good officer was killed. His wife did the killing. She was a drunk. The evidence was there. She deserves her punishment. Let it lie.”

“You mean let her die,” I countered angrily. “And I can’t let that happen if there’s a chance she didn’t do it. It seems to me that she hasn’t had a whole hell of a lot of competent help in proving her innocence.”

“I suppose you’re one of those bleeding-heart liberals who opposes the death penalty,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Now I was madder than a bull on the wrong side of the fence. Politics had nothing to do with it. I knew what it felt like to walk around with anger burning in my heart, searching for someone to blame, aching for someone to punish. I understood why people wanted the death penalty, and I didn’t appreciate being labeled by some paranoid cop who thought it was us versus them—and who was a little confused about which side I was on.

“You haven’t got a clue as to who or what I am,” I snapped back. “Or what this case is about.”

“Neither do you. Just stay away from it,” he ordered me abruptly. It was enough to seal his doom. No one tells me what to do twice in one night. Not ever. Not now. Not in the future. And certainly not Bill Butler.

“I knew this date was a bad idea,” I said.

“Non-date,” he corrected me. Another big mistake. I shot him my version of the country-lady glare and marched out the door.

The effect was spoiled a bit when I caught one of my idiotic heels on the entrance-hallfonntrance rug. I heard him snicker, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that he had watched me go.

I hate waking up alone on Sunday mornings. Having sex while everyone else is at church is my idea of a good time. Besides, forget reading True Confessions and eating bonbons. It is my god given right as a bawdy woman to lounge among plush pillows while a strapping young man feeds me bits of fresh apple fritters from Harris Teeter.

So what was I doing on a spring Sunday slouching around in my torn chenille bathrobe and pink bunny slippers searching for a clean coffee cup? I refused to admit that, perhaps, my pride had gotten me in this predicament. Instead, I blamed it on the weather.

We’d had no winter that year, a Carolina phenomenon that happens more and more these crazy-current, ozone-impaired days. The skies had stayed a steady gray for several months straight, with only occasional cold blasts and blue skies, courtesy of the Great Lakes. It was like being forced to watch reruns of the same unfunny television show day after day. And now, like millions of my fellow Carolinians, I was desperate for warm winds and those silly daffodils that pop up in every traffic median around here. I pulled a chair up to the window that overlooked my little patch of backyard and surveyed the pathetic stubs of green dotting my tiny lawn. I sighed. Daffodils were a long way away. How depressing. So was being alone.

Oh, what the hell, I told myself. Get a grip, girl. Life could be a lot worse. For example, I could have been up early slinging hash and cleaning house for some fat-ass husband who was parked on the couch frantically flipping through the channels for a sports event so that he could avoid talking to me. When I thought about it that way, living alone didn’t seem so bad after all.

I roused myself with a weight-lifting session performed to Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hits and then enjoyed a long shower while I pondered the mystery of Bill Butler. I couldn’t decide if he was turning out to be a lot of trouble because I really cared for him and it irked me—or if he was simply a plain-old garden-variety pain in the ass. What I needed, I decided, was a sign from the gods; what I got was a blast of cold water when my meager hot water supply ran out. Shivering, I dressed in my favorite sweat suit and selected a pair of red high-tops for comfort. Hey, I was going to spend the day behind a computer and at the women’s prison. I didn’t exactly need blue velvet and pearls.

Since it was Sunday, I devoted a good five minutes to feathering my nest. In other words, I looked at the vacuum cleaner and considered cleaning the kitchen counter. The rest of the mess I could live with since the chaos was confined to two rooms. I may be the only person in all of Durham County who prefers apartment living. I have several big rooms in a converted tobacco warehouse—there are a lot of those around here—just a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks that run through downtown Durty mham. I love the sound of the train whistle and the wheels clacking down the track in the afternoon and deep into the night. The train always seems to be heading south. I imagine it pushing slowly through the flat fields of South Carolina, skirting the edges of the coastal swamp and sandy shores of Georgia, plowing ahead down into Florida to pass by my grandfather’s fields in the heart of the panhandle, that no-man’s-land of hopeless soil and unforgiving skies. One day, I’ll be on that train, but sometimes it seems like going home is a lifetime away.

Once I had whipped my domestic department back into shape, it was time to get to work. I hacked my way through the lobby; the owner had recently gone nuts with the potted plants, hanging them willy-nilly from every rafter she could reach in an attempt to fool yuppie Duke students into thinking they were living in a SoHo loft. I didn’t see lights on in any other apartments, and regret reared its ugly head once more. I imagined all the other residents luxuriating behind closed doors, snuggling with assorted significant others, stretching lazily and eyeing one another for another go- around while they chatted about that poor lonely old maid who lived on the first floor.

Geeze, I needed to get a grip. At this rate, I’d commit suicide before I reached I-40. I was loved, I reminded myself. Deeply. By my landlady. She kept my rent cheap because I lived at ground level and seemed impervious to the usual fears of women living under such circumstances. I did not stay awake at night wondering if some hulking rapist might climb in my window and overpower me. Not only was I pretty tough to overpower, but I’d also been through worse and it took a lot more than that to scare me now. Besides, she knew that I was packing an Astra Constable .380 semiautomatic pocket pistol, a Spanish knockoff of the Walther PPK. I kept it locked in a drawer in my office much of the time, but just remembering that I had it made me feel so much better that I abandoned my pathetic whimpering and drove to Biscuitville, where I broke the bank ordering a boatload of their miniature country-ham biscuits. Hey, those suckers are small. It takes two dozen to last a girl the thirty miles to Raleigh.

I arrived at the office with my monthly sodium intake taken care of and a powerful thirst for a cold beverage. Fortunately, Bobby D. was still beached at home and I was able to snag a Bud from his wastebasket without fear of drawing back a bloody stump. The can was still cold from the night before. Yes, I know, it’s disgusting to drink beer on a Sunday morning, but the water cooler was out of action. Trust me.

Even as I turned on my beloved Mac, I knew that I would probably take the Gail Honeycutt case. The fact that Bill Butler opposed it made it a near certainty. Otherwise, I would not be going through my new case ritual: connect to the World Wide Web, access NandoNet—a locally based database with former ties to the News & Observer, Raleigh’s only major newspaper—then hack my way into the bowels of the N&O’s archives via an outdated access route they failed to block when they sold the network. Finally, I would pull up every article and photo I could find on the case.

There was plenty on Gail Honeycutt Taylor. I’d lived in Raleigh for twelve years and should have remembered the scandal better. But my early years had been a blur of alcohol an upf alcohd odd jobs, which gradually gave way to semi-sobriety and doing office chores for Bobby D. Finally, I started taking on a few cases of my own, mostly following soon-to-be ex- husbands or wives or locating missing persons. It wasn’t for another few years that my cases got much more interesting than that. In short, I hadn’t given the newspapers much of a look when the Taylor case broke eight years back.

It had been a doozy. The murder of Roy Taylor had gotten bigger headlines than the time our lieutenant governor was caught frolicking nude in the downtown Hilton fountain with a well-known transvestite. And no wonder: the Taylor murder had it all—a decorated policeman shot to death in his home, a wife gone bad who was found passed out a few feet from the body with the murder weapon in her hand, a child sleeping through it all in a nearby bedroom and an anonymous call alerting the cops to the event.

I kept reading: Roy Taylor had been shot with his own service revolver, a Smith & Wesson 4506-1 model, standard issue of the Durham Police Department. Six bullets had been discharged. Two had lodged in the pasteboard walls, high above the doorway where Roy Taylor was found sprawled. Four bullets had lodged in the victim. Some serious shooting had gone down. Three of the slugs hit his chest—one drilled him right through the center of his heart, for god’s sake— and the fourth bullet took off a chunk of his head. It was damn fine shooting, though I doubted Roy Taylor would have agreed.

Lord, I hoped the kid hadn’t stumbled in and found him. I kept reading for more mention of the child. She had been nearly four at the time of the killing; that made her eleven or twelve today. She had not testified in court, and I hoped she had slept through the entire mess.

To my surprise, Gail had not been defended by a public lawyer. Nanny Honeycutt had forked out some big-time dough for the services of a well-known feminist lawyer who specialized in representing battered wives. I’d run into her on a few major divorce cases some years back. She looked— and acted—like F. Lee Bailey in drag and had the personality of Margaret Thatcher on steroids. But she’d been effective as a lawyer. Gail had been one of her few losses. It would have helped to talk to her, but a few years ago she choked to death on a piece of ham in a local restaurant while arguing with her husband over their impending divorce settlement. Move over Mama Cass. It was sort of a Greek tragedy, if your idea of Greek is a cross between Animal House and animus. At any rate, I wouldn’t be able to ask her a whole lot of questions about Gail’s case.

The judge was another surprise. Peyton Reynolds Tillman came from not one, but two, old North Carolina families, bringing a better pedigree to the bench than the last winner of the Westminster Dog Show. But unlike his forebears— one of whom held the Confederate flag at Gettysburg—Peyton Tillman was a firm opponent of the death penalty. What the hell had motivated him to approve the jury’s sentence of death?

In North Carolina, where juries are inevitably working class and not exactly hesitant about sending convicted felons to their maker, the law required the presiding judge to sign off on every death penalty recommendation ofcommend. Judges were also given a lot of leeway in how they could instruct the jury, and often swayed them one way or another during the sentencing phase. Signing off on Gail’s death had been a first for Judge Tillman, as was the wording of his jury instructions. Before then, he had barely stayed within the confines of the law in urging juries to consider life imprisonment over death. In Gail’s case, he had been objective—which meant that, while he had not technically sprung the trapdoor, he had certainly helped to tie the noose.

I wondered if his subsequent tumble from grace had anything to do with fallout from the Taylor case. The story of Judge Tillman was not one of North Carolina’s finest: about five years ago, he took to drinking, which was certainly not unusual around these parts, but not advisable either, especially as a public vice for an unmarried judge in a god-fearing, church-going state. Two drunken-driving arrests had put a dent in his credibility, as had the tender young ages of the coeds found with him in each instance. During the Republican sweep that balanced Clinton’s first election, Judge Tillman had been defeated by a fundamentalist candidate running on a family-values platform. The voting public did not seem to find it unusual that his opponent was acting as a spokesperson for family values even though she’d been divorced twice and her stepchildren had gotten a restraining order against her. They were more concerned that Judge Tillman was tooling around town tipsy with twenty-year-old babes—and not seeming to care that he was caught. If only he’d been polluting the rivers with hog waste or accepting illegal tobacco-company campaign contributions, he might have been forgiven by the voters. But his transgressions smacked of someone who was enjoying his sins, and that was a big no-no in these parts.

I also suspected that his attitude had done him in. He never spoke publicly about his arrests, never apologized to his mama for sullying her name and never appeared on “NC People Today” to weep his repentance for everyone’s entertainment. His silence might have translated into arrogance for N.C.‘s no-nonsense folk, though I thought it might simply have been outdated dignity in a tabloid-mentality world. I also wondered if his motives for remaining silent hadn’t included embarrassment, shyness or something much deeper— like regret at sending a woman to her death.

After he was defeated, the public learned that Judge Tillman had a whole lot more to him than a law degree and liberal leanings. An enterprising reporter who, in my humble opinion, missed the boat by about six months, uncovered his war record: Peyton Tillman had served two tours of duty with the Marines in Vietnam, and saw the heaviest action possible for a young man in the late ‘60s—and that had been heavy action indeed. Why hadn’t he capitalized on his war record, I wondered. It could have saved him the election.

I wanted to get my hands on Tillman to ask him about the Taylor case, but the chances of that were slim. I made a note to find out about his current whereabouts and kept plowing forward through the newspaper accounts.

Gail’s case had gone through the usual appeals process without any apparent success. Judge Tillman’s skill in the courtroom had left little grounds for appeal on a technicality, and the evidence against Gail had been strong. She did not take the stand p>

Blood analysis had also revealed traces of antidepressants, barbiturates and various other prescription drugs, but nothing in significant quantity. There were no witnesses to support her lawyer’s contention that she was a battered wife. There was no medical evidence either, and much had been made of the fact that she weighed at least as much as her husband—though what that had to do with the price of tea in China Grove, I could not fathom. Weight has nothing to do with meanness. I’ve seen a ninety-pound woman on crystal meth knock a 280-pound biker on his ass.

I read the summaries of testimony with interest. Numerous people took the stand to testify that the Taylors had been experiencing marital problems, and at least five people had sworn that they witnessed a public screamfest by the couple the night Roy Taylor died. This display had taken place in a police bar called the Lone Wolf that was located on the outskirts of Durham. Presumably, the Taylors stumbled out of the Lone Wolf to weave their way home for a final battle.

They had also instigated divorce proceedings against one another, and, according to some witnesses, Gail was worried she might lose her right to ownership in the couple’s fishing cabin up at Lake Gaston.

Roy Taylor seemed like a pretty good guy. A string of commanding officers testified that he had been the perfect cop. No one mentioned any possible dirty dealings. I was at a loss as to how and why Bill Butler kept hearing all those rumors. There was a leak somewhere, but it hadn’t been to the media and it hadn’t been during the trial.