The Last Death of Jack Harbin (12 page)

I tell her about the gentle way Lurleen had with Jack and how well he responded. “Might have been good for Jack. He might have enjoyed the kids. 'Course, there's no need to ponder that now.”

Taylor sets her beer down with a thump. “Samuel, do you think Curtis knew Jack was thinking of getting married?”

I get her drift right away. “I know what you're thinking. That he killed Jack for his money. But Curtis was supposedly at a gun show in Dallas when Jack was killed.”

“Supposedly. But what if he was lying? What if he snuck into town and killed Jack?”

“It should be easy enough to find out if he was really at the show, the way he claims.”

Taylor groans. “It would make things so easy if he killed Jack. Then I'd have a reason to get Sarah and her kids out of that place.”

After Taylor leaves, I sit for a time at the table. Something Taylor said about Jack and Lurleen jiggled something in my mind that doesn't seem quite right, but I can't put my finger on it.

I wonder if Jack asked anyone else to help him kill himself—Lurleen or Walter Dunn, for example. Or Woody. I only have Woody's word for it that he and Jack made up. I come back to the horrible sight of Jack's body after his struggle with his killer. I told Taylor I didn't think someone who cared about Jack would have chosen that way to kill him. But people don't know how much someone who's in danger of death fights to live—even if they think they want to die. Whoever stabbed Jack might have thought stabbing would be easy.

I should have been expecting it after what Loretta said, but I'm surprised the next morning when I get a call from the mayor, Alton Coldwater. He says he and a couple of the city council members want to come by and talk to me.

While I wait for them I try to figure out how I'm going to refuse the job of temporary chief of police.

I needn't have worried. When we are seated around my kitchen table, Coldwater, who looks like somebody puffed him up with a bicycle pump, says, “We've appointed James Harley Krueger as temporary chief.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I say cautiously. If they've appointed James Harley, what do they want with me?

“There was a good bit of opposition to the idea, but we decided it was the best way to go about it.”

“Alton, stop beating around the bush,” Chuck Rathbone says. He's president of the chamber of commerce, a large, red-faced man who lives down the street from me and keeps a dog that barks pretty much nonstop. “We decided making James Harley temporary chief was the best way to keep him busy and out of trouble. But somebody has got to figure out who killed Jack Harbin, and we'd like you to take that on.”

Coldwater is staring off into a corner, which tells me he probably was okay with James Harley being temporary chief, but not so okay with asking for my help.

“It's not official, mind you,” Coldwater says sternly. “We don't have any authority to offer you money, or give you a badge, but we're asking for you to put your mind to it.”

“I don't mind helping out,” I say. Luke Schoppe said budget cuts made it likely that any investigation by the state is going to take some time. The longer it takes, the more likely the case will die. “I think somebody ought get on it before the evidence gets cold. But without official standing, I'm not sure how effective I can be.”

“That's what I said!” Coldwater sets his coffee mug down with a thump. His pudgy fingers straighten his string tie. “And we can't give you any official standing. That's up to the sheriff in Bobtail.”

Conner Middleton, the youngest of the three, is a meek man who wears thick glasses and always looks alarmed. “We're not asking for an arrest or anything. Just that you see what you can find out. I just don't think James Harley Krueger is likely to get anywhere with this.”

We wrestle around for some time, but I find myself unwilling to put up the kind of protest I had planned. I feel a certain stirring in my brain, a desire to investigate what happened to Jack. They're right; James Harley isn't up to the job. And what have I got to lose? I don't have to worry about blame or credit. If I don't find out who killed Jack, it's not like I've lost anything but a little pride. And if I do find out, I have the satisfaction of bringing Jack's killer to justice.

“Look, I'll do what I can. But if push comes to shove, I need to have something official-sounding so people don't tell me to go to hell when I start asking questions.”

Coldwater blinks a few times. “How about if James Harley deputizes you?”

“Or we could get the sheriff in Bobtail to give you a title. Special investigator, or something.” Conner surveys the men around the table.

“That's not going to work,” Coldwater says. “If that damned sheriff gets pulled into it, there'd have to be a meeting and a consultation and a special dispensation.”

I laugh. For once I'm in agreement with Coldwater. Bobtail is the county seat, and anytime you get the powers-that-be in Bobtail involved in anything, it starts to take on bureaucratic steam. It would be a year before they'd agree to my being official, if they ever did.

“Why don't I just say I'm a special investigator to the mayor's office? That gives me something to tell people, without Bobtail having to know about it.”

Coldwater looks pleased, as I knew he would. A mayor who has a “special investigator” is a mayor of some importance.

When my wife, Jeanne, died, I thought I was at a dead end. On top of that, several months later my knee got bunged up, and I thought I was ready to be put out to pasture. But then my old friend Dora Lee Parjeter was murdered and I took it on myself to find out who did it, believing that Rodell Skinner was fixing to arrest the wrong man. The whole time I was investigating I worried that I didn't have what it took any more to get it right. When I managed to figure out who killed Dora Lee, I felt like my life kicked back into gear.

This time it's different. In a lot of ways Jack's investigation is harder, since I didn't know Jack well and don't have access to his personal records the way I did with Dora Lee. But I know now that my mind is still sharp and chances are I'll be as successful as anybody else trying to find out who did it.

The only problem is, I worry that I might not like finding out who murdered Jack. Too many of the possible suspects are people that I've known and cared about in my life. But I'll have to put that worry aside and deal with it when and if it happens.

I'm not sure exactly where to start looking for Jack's killer, so it's time to take stock. While I strategize, I set about rearranging the pictures in my house. Jeanne taught me that if art hangs in one place too long, you stop seeing it. Since she died, I've kept up the habit of moving pictures around every few months. But today I have a hard time keeping my mind on it.

I'm wondering: Jack's death came so soon after Bob's, was there something about Bob that kept Jack safe? Something that Bob knew—sort of a reverse blackmail? Or someone whose respect for Bob kept them from killing Jack? And how am I going to find that out?

As Taylor said, the easy suspect is Curtis. His motive is strong and his alibi weak. I can find out if he bought tickets to the gun show in Dallas, but that doesn't mean he actually went.

But I have to consider Woody and Laurel as suspects, too. I don't want to think of someone like Laurel killing Jack, but women will go to great lengths to protect their families. Given how stubborn Woody was, and how alarmed Laurel was that she'd end up with Jack in her care, I can imagine her going to talk to Jack and angry words being exchanged between them. Maybe even killing him. They say the majority of women who murder do so with a knife. But I can't picture Laurel wrestling with Jack and stabbing him again and again.

Woody said he and Jack made up, but I wonder if anyone was present when the two of them talked. Maybe Woody had reason to lie about it.

And then there are the vets, their wives, and any number of people Jack had run-ins with over the years. I saw how the wives of his vet friends looked at Jack. I doubt they're going to lose much sleep over his dying.

I find myself standing in a trance, holding my Wolf Kahn in my hand. I hang it back where it was, my interest in rearranging things gone.

“I heard Curtis and Walter Dunn got into a fight.” I'm standing in the living room of Jack's house with Marybeth.

She gives a nervous squeak. “You know how people exaggerate. It wasn't a fight. They just shoved each other a little bit.”

Dressed in jeans and a sleeveless blouse, Marybeth looks younger and more bright-eyed than I've seen her in a long time. You'd think with her favorite son dead, she'd be ravaged. But then I realize her eyes are too bright—glassy, in fact. I expect there are drugs involved in keeping her going.

“Did Curtis actually try to throw you out?”

“He grabbed me by the arm. Left a bruise right here.” She encircles her left bicep with her right fingers, and I can see the faint bruise where he grabbed her. “I'm lucky Walter showed up when he did.”

Lucky, yes, but why had Dunn been here? He stuck awfully close to Jack after Bob died, and I assumed he was protecting Jack. But if that was the case, why was he still hanging around? “Marybeth, did Dunn say what he was doing here?”

Marybeth frowns. “I didn't ask. I was just grateful he showed up.”

“Was he already in the house?”

She shakes her head. “He came up to the back door. It was open, so he could see what was happening. He's a big man. I have no doubt Curtis would have made me leave if Walter hadn't intervened.”

“Who did you tell about this?”

“Nobody. I stayed over at the motel last night, and I didn't see anybody I knew.”

“I wonder how people knew about it, then.”

“One of them must have told somebody, because I sure didn't.”

She flits over to the sofa. She has pulled out a couple of picture albums and they lie open on the coffee table. “Look at these pictures.” I sit down beside her on the sofa. Her hand flutters over one of the open pages. “I love looking at these old photographs. Remember what a football hero Jack was?”

She points to a picture of Jack cocking the football. It's a candid shot, not one of those posed for a newspaper article. Jack has a goofy grin on his face. Standing nearby, Woody and Taylor are laughing at him.

“That was a quite a threesome.”

Marybeth sits back abruptly, fingers tracing her lips as if she's not sure what words will come out. “Jack always felt like a fifth wheel with the two of them. I think that's why he wanted to go off to the army, because he knew they were going to get married.”

“Really? The way I heard it, the two boys signed up together. I thought Woody and Taylor only decided to get married after Jack went into the service and Woody was rejected.”

Marybeth frowns. “That's what they told everybody. But Jack thought they'd been planning to get married for a while. I never did trust Taylor Brenner. Everybody thought she was the cutest little thing, sweet and generous. I thought she was sneaky.”

I've been around enough to know that mothers often resent the girls their sons are partial to. “Sneaky how?”

“Let me show you something.”

Marybeth flips back a couple of pages and stabs her forefinger at another picture of the threesome. “See how she's looking at Jack?”

In the picture Jack and Woody are clowning for the camera. Taylor is off to one side and doesn't seem to realize the camera is including her in the shot. She's looking straight at Jack, and I have to admit that her expression is unfriendly. One could even call it calculating, as if she's measuring him and finding him wanting.

“Maybe they'd had an argument and she was mad at him.”

“Hmph. She showed that face all the time when she thought no one was looking. But I saw it. Of course when she was the center of attention, she was little miss darling girl.”

“Do you know who took this picture?”

Marybeth shakes her head. “Could have been any of their friends. You know what high school kids are like, they have to take a picture of every move.” She touches the picture. “But I'm glad they did. It helps me remember Jackie in those good days.”

Curtis comes in the front door with an armload of groceries. “Oh, it's you,” he says. He continues into the kitchen.

Marybeth jumps up from the couch. “I'll be right back,” she says, panic in her voice. She scurries to the bathroom and slams the door after her.

I go into the kitchen. I figure Curtis is going to have something to say to me, and I might as well get it over with.

“I understand you and Taylor took a little trip yesterday.” He's done unloading the groceries and wads up the sack. From the dark look he gives me, you'd think I'd killed his dog.

“Taylor was worried about her sister. Seems natural she'd want to go by and see her. She asked me to meet her there.”

“Quite a coincidence that she picked yesterday, since you both knew I'd be here.”

“I doubt she keeps up with your business,” I say. “And I sure don't. For all I knew you wouldn't be coming right away, knowing it would take some time for the state to release your brother's body.”

He steps in a little close to me. If I were inclined to be a fearful person, I might be intimidated. “My wife would be a lot better off if Taylor would stop badgering her.”

“Wanting to see her sister isn't badgering.”

“It is if Sarah doesn't want to talk to her. Which she doesn't. And if I think anybody is threatening my wife in any way, I'll do what I have to do to protect my family.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“I'm just saying Taylor needs to leave Sarah alone. She's not Taylor's sister anymore, she's my wife.”

Marybeth is hovering in the doorway. “What about Sarah?”

“Nothing.” Curtis says. “I'm going over to the funeral home. Are you coming?”

Marybeth shakes her head without looking at Curtis.

He makes a dismissive noise like a snarl and stalks out, shutting the door behind him harder than need be. Marybeth shudders, staring after him. “What was that about Sarah?” she asks.

We go back in the living room and sit down, and I tell Marybeth about going with Taylor to visit her sister. Marybeth chews her lip while I talk, but doesn't make any comment. I imagine it's hard for her to decide whose side to be on—the son she can't stand, or the girl she never liked.

I don't mention to Marybeth that Taylor's sister signaled that things at the compound were not as good as she claimed out loud that they were. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Marybeth and Curtis reconcile. If she told Curtis about the signal, Sarah might suffer as a consequence.

“How do things stand between you and Curtis now?” I ask.

“We're being nice to each other. Barely. We didn't find a will, so according to your lawyer friend everything Jack left is half mine, half Curtis's. Curtis told me I ought to sign everything over to him because I abandoned Jackie.”

“He didn't exactly stick around himself.”

She gives me a faint smile. “That's what Jenny said, but Curtis said I'm Jack's mother and that makes it different.”

I'm thinking that Curtis seems awfully eager to get his hands on Jack's money, even if it means cutting his mother off. “I hope you'll take Jenny's advice, or at the least don't make a decision right away.”

She rubs her arms, her expression uneasy. “That'll be hard. I want to get it over with. Curtis makes me nervous. He wants to sell this place right away, says he doesn't want it to stand empty.”

“Would you think about coming back here to live?”

“Oh no, oh no.” She shakes her head vigorously. “I couldn't live here.” Her eyes dart around the room as if she's scared something is going to pounce on her. But then she lifts her chin in a show of defiance. “But since it's half mine, Curtis has to be nice to me. He'll need me to go along with selling it.”

Marybeth asks me if I'll stay a little longer while she goes through some of Jack's things. “I'll feel better if somebody is here.”

“You mind if I take a look around?” I don't feel the need to tell her just yet that I'm investigating Jack's death.

“Do whatever you want,” she says.

I go in and make coffee and start looking through the kitchen drawers. Like me, Bob had a drawer where he kept business cards. Unlike me, he has most of them in a neat stack held together with a rubber band. I set aside a card for a doctor at the VA hospital in Temple, in case I need to find out more about Jack's condition. I make note that Bob and Jack's bank is the same one I use in Bobtail, and Hitch Montgomery is their banker. I keep considerable amounts of money in my accounts, having married a woman with more money than I ever thought I'd see. Because I bank with Hitch, he and I have a very cordial relationship. That might come in handy, should I need to know something about Jack's bank account.

Marybeth staggers in carrying a cardboard box. “Wait, let me get that,” I say. I grab it from her and set it on the kitchen table.

“This is stuff Jackie brought back from the army.” She fishes out a fistful of papers clipped together that look like official documents. “His discharge papers. Bob had to use these to get Jack's disability payments. It was a nightmare.” She sets them down on the table, shaking her head. “You'd think the government would fall all over themselves to help out somebody who was injured in the service of his country. But no. They made it really hard. It was like he was trying to cheat somebody.”

She opens a manila envelope, spilling photographs out onto the table. “Photos he couldn't even see.” Her hand lingers over them for a moment, like a benediction. She sits down and begins to shuffle through them slowly. “I remember seeing pictures from when my daddy was in World War II. The pictures looked the same as these.” She hands them to me. She's right. Young men with rifles mugging for the camera, one with them posing on a Humvee, looking like they are ready to go out on the town.

I pause at one of the pictures. It's a picture of three boys, arms around each other, grinning. One of them is Jack, and what has me puzzled is that I recognize one of the other two. Even though in the picture he's twenty years younger, I'm sure it's Walter Dunn, wearing a medical corps T-shirt. He still wears his hair in a buzz cut like in the picture. The thing is, Dunn told me he met Jack at a vet meeting in Bryan. But obviously he knew him in Kuwait.

“You mind if I make a copy of this?”

“Go ahead. It's a good one, isn't it? Jackie looks like he's happy.”

I mumble assent, although that's not why I want it. I tuck the picture into my shirt pocket.

Marybeth puts the photos aside and stands up so she can finish going through the box. She brings out a bunch of brochures, frowning. “I wonder where all this came from . . .”

The brochures are from California—San Francisco, to be exact. There's one with a cable car on the front, another with the Golden Gate Bridge. Some ticket stubs fall out of them onto the table. She picks them up and frowns at them. “This is so strange. As far as I know, Jackie was never in California. Why does he have these?”

I'm suddenly reminded of an incident that happened right after Jack was wounded. I was chief of police at the time, and one day Bob came to see me, saying he needed my help. “I can't find Jack,” he said.

“What do you mean, you can't find him?” Everybody knew by then that Jack had been gravely injured and was in a VA hospital in Washington, DC. Bob had flown up there to see him as soon as Jack arrived at the hospital from overseas and had come back in despair. They had told him it would be a few weeks before Jack would be ready to come home.

“I called to find out when they were going to release him so I could go bring him home, and they said he had already gone.”

“Did they say who picked him up?”

“Some guy I never heard of. And they didn't know where he'd gone. I'm wondering if maybe, you being a lawman, you could find out more for me. They weren't particularly forthcoming, if you know what I mean.”

There was nothing I could do, and I suggested he call the local VFW in Bobtail. I never heard another thing about it. And eventually Jack came home. Now I'm wondering if Jack had somehow made his way to California. But if so, what did he do there, and why had he never talked about it? I wonder if Marybeth knows anything about it and am thinking how to pose the question, when suddenly she cries out.

“Oh, no!” Her face crumples. Until now she has been calm, even weirdly cheerful going through Jack's belongings. But now she pulls Jack's uniform from the bottom of the box and buries her face in it and sobs.

I put my arm around her and sit her down in a chair. In a way it's a relief to see the dam finally break. Marybeth has held herself aloof from this horror for too long. She keens over the uniform, the symbol of the promise her son had as a boy.

Eventually she stands up and throws the uniform back in the box with as much violence as I've ever seen from her. “I've got to get out of here. What's the use of crying? The Jackie I knew was gone a long time ago.”