A Song to Die For (31 page)

“Hey, Hooley, where'd you buy the colored boy?” Barlow drawled.

Hooley saw Mel immediately hump up like a bronc about to buck. At the same time, a black state trooper stuck his head out of a nearby office door and looked at Mel, all but asking what he planned to do about the racist statement.

“First of all,” Hooley said, stepping between Mel and Barlow to cut the fuse to the powder keg, “he's a grown man. Second, what do you mean by calling him colored? He's black.”

“That's exactly what I mean by colored. And that's puttin' it nice.”

“This is Special Agent Mel Doolittle of the F.B.I. He was born black and he'll die black. You, on the other hand … You call yourself a white man, right, J.D.?”

“Mighty white of you to notice.”

“I've seen you turn red when you're mad and blue when you're cold. You turned yella that time you had the jaundice. You turned green with envy when I made captain ahead of you. And you call
him
colored?” He jutted his thumb at Mel.

The black trooper in the doorway started laughing, letting Mel off the hook. Barlow was befuddled, and effectively silenced. He waved his hand at Hooley as he turned back into his office and muttered something—probably a slur.

Hooley and Mel resumed their walk down the hallway.

“Green with envy,” Mel said, his voice still tense. “That was a nice touch.”

“He really did get the jaundice one time, too. Turned yella as a squash.”

“We were talking about the portable phone.”

“Oh, yeah…” Hooley led the way to Lucille's desk. Looking through the glass doors in the front of the building, he could see the news vans camped outside, a cluster of reporters waiting to pounce on him as he emerged from the building. “Lucille, darlin', this is Special Agent Mel Doolittle of the F.B.I.”

“Do tell?” Lucille said, daintily offering her hand to Mel, her eyelashes blinking seductively.

“Can you keep a phone line clear for him to use? He's gonna have to make a call here, directly.”

“Line four is all yours, honey.”

“All right, Mel, I'm gonna go out there and talk to them newshounds. Sooner or later, they're gonna ask me something I don't want to answer. When that happens, I'm gonna take my hat off, and run my hand back over my head, like this…” He demonstrated, theatrically. “When I do that, you call me on the spy phone immediately.”

“Okay. What do you want me to say to you?”

“You don't have to say a damn thing. Just make the phone ring.”

Mel nodded. “Got it.”

Hooley turned to Lucille. “How do I look?”

She glanced up and down his frame. “Button your jacket and stand up straight. There, that's better. Now you look like the voice of authority.”

Hooley turned to Mel. “What do you think, sumo-come-lately?”

Mel nodded. “You look like a know-it-all to me, too.”

Hooley smirked, impressed with himself. “Good. Remember what I told you. Look for the signal.” Hooley grabbed the experimental F.B.I. phone and marched for the entrance, pushing his way through the glass doors to greet the reporters.

“Mornin', ladies,” he said to the mostly male gathering. “And gentlemen.” He coughed. “And members of the press.” He placed the spy phone at his feet on the sidewalk. “I have a brief statement to make, then I'll take a few questions.” He paused, remembered to stand up straight.

“In case you don't know, I'm Texas Ranger Captain Hooley Johnson. Yesterday, the body of a deceased white male was found in a house near Lake L.B.J. An apparent suicide. There was a suicide note. The body was found by an employee of a cleaning company who went there to clean the house. It was a rental house on the lake. The cleaning company notified the Burnet Country Sheriff's Department, who notified the Texas D.P.S.”

Hooley took his tally book out of his pocket and flipped it open to make it look as if he would refer to some notes or something.

“The identity of the deceased is being withheld until family members can be contacted, but I can tell you that the victim was a white male from Nevada. As I mentioned, there was a suicide note. It was typed on a typewriter. A connection between the note and a typewriter owned by the deceased has already been established, but not confirmed. Now, in this suicide note, the victim appears to confess to killing two young women who died tragically last week in our area. Both women were formerly members of the same college sorority. I'm sure you're familiar with those cases.”

He put his tally book away and picked up the spy phone case. “Now, as you know, the D.P.S. and the Texas Rangers are cooperating with the F.B.I. in this investigation, so we have access to the latest technology, and we're gonna get to the bottom of this thing. Any questions?”

A local newspaper reporter was quick to raise his hand. “So, is the official ruling suicide, or something else?”

“No official ruling on that, yet, Joe. We're waiting on the autopsy report.”

“Who's doing the autopsy?” some out-of-town reporter asked.

“That would be the Travis County Medical Examiner, Dr. Brewster.”

“What's Dr. Brewster's first name?”

“His first name is, uh … Doc.” Hooley smiled to the chuckles among the reporters.

A young television reporter from Houston raised a hand. “What condition was the corpse in?”

“Last I checked, he was still dead.”

The reporters laughed.

The blushing TV reporter rephrased: “What was the cause of death?”

“It appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the head, but the official autopsy report hasn't been released.”

A crime reporter from the
Dallas Morning News
waved a ballpoint. “What's the connection between the deceased and the two sorority girls?”

“Good question, Bud. The deceased apparently had a personal relationship with one of the young women.”

“Which one?”

“He was a white male from
Nevada.
That's all I can tell you right now.”

“Hooley, is there some kind of organized crime connection with this death?”

Hooley shook his head. “Not at this time. The investigation is still going on.” He was fingering the latches to the spy phone case.

A young reporter from the local TV news tossed her blonde hair at Hooley. “Captain Johnson, does this mean that the cases of Rosabella Martini and Celinda Valenzuela have been closed?”

Hooley put the phone down, removed his hat, ran his fingers back through his short-cropped hair, returned the hat, and picked the phone back up. “Those investigations are ongoing, Susanne.”

The attractive blonde persisted, flashing a wry smile. “What's your gut feeling, Captain? Do you believe this deceased man from Nevada is, indeed, responsible for the deaths of those two young women?”

“Susanne, there are a lot of unanswered questions in this complicated case. Right now, the only gut feeling I have is that I should have skipped the jalapeños with my huevos rancheros this mornin'.” He thumped a fist against his chest and feigned a silent belch to the amusement of the reporters. Had Mel missed the signal? Why wasn't the spy phone ringing? The damn thing probably didn't even work.

Susanne the bombshell anchorwoman refused to relent. “Captain, with all the hysteria over a possible sorority serial killer on the loose, or a rogue mob hit man gone berserk, can you give us any information that will help calm the public?”

Hooley sighed. The reporters waited in silence, their pens poised, microphones aimed at his face. Finally, the phone rang. Hooley opened the case and yanked the phone receiver out.

“Captain Johnson.”

He heard Mel's voice: “
Smile, you're on
Candid Camera
.”

Hooley didn't have to fake his surprise. He frowned. “No shit?” he said into the phone. “I'll be right there.” He jammed the phone set back into the case and turned away from the clambering reporters, each of whom begged for another tidbit. “Gotta go,” he said, over his shoulder, as he pushed through the glass doors, shutting the reporters out.

“Good work, Mel. Come on, let's slip out the back door. I hid my truck behind the Dumpsters.”

“Good-bye, Agent Doolittle…” Lucille purred.

*   *   *

Arriving at the county morgue, they walked briskly through the building to the autopsy facilities. Brewster greeted them with handshakes—cold, like a dead man's hand.

“Agent Doolittle's got a flight to catch, Doc,” said Hooley. “What do you got for us?”

“I want to show you a couple of things.” He led them back into the operating room to look over the dissected human body on the aluminum table. He made a pistol of his right hand, the index finger being the gun barrel. “Make like you're gonna shoot yourself in the head,” he suggested.

Hooley held his own finger to his head, and slapped Mel on the shoulder. Mel played along.

“Check the angle of the bullet path. Pretty much horizontal, right? Maybe even angling upward a little?”

“Right,” Hooley said.

“With the victim, the bullet angled downward. It's difficult to even hold a gun to your own head in that position. The wound was to the right temple. Now, look at his right hand. Virtually no blood spatter. Blood spatter all over the weapon, but only a droplet or two on the victim's hand, which was, supposedly, holding the gun.”

Hooley lowered his fake gun from his head. “You're lookin' at the choir, preacher.”

“My opinion is that the victim was seated at the kitchen table. Someone standing above him put the gun to his temple and shot him. The bullet angled down through the cerebral hemisphere. The victim probably never knew what hit him.”

“Of course, none of this is official until you finish your written report, right, Doc?”

Brewster narrowed his eyes at the ranger, removed his glasses, and polished them on his lab coat. “I suppose.”

“A report like that is not something you want to rush, right?”

Brewster shrugged. “I'm in no particular hurry.”

Hooley turned to Mel. “I mean, it might take a couple days to get the wording just right, I would think.”

Mel nodded. “All that medical terminology. Yeah, two days, at least.”

Brewster smiled with one side of his mouth as he replaced his spectacles. “I was just about to say I'll have the report ready in forty-eight hours.”

“Thanks, Doc. Come on, Mel, I'll get you to the airport. Then, I've got to hightail it out to Lake L.B.J. The county is pulling that old wooden boat out of the water this afternoon.”

 

31

CHAPTER

Franco stepped out of his rented lake house and felt an unexpected chill. Freakin' Texas weather. Earlier, just before dawn, he had stepped out to steal the newspaper from the neighbor's driveway. The temperature had to have been almost seventy. Now the skies had cleared, bringing out the sun. It looked warmer, but it was actually colder. He went back inside for the hooded warm-up jacket he had bought at Sports Nation in Austin.

Zipping the jacket up, he began jogging down the quiet lake community street. It was a weird place. Like a ghost town. He had learned that most of these houses belonged to absentee owners who lived in Houston, Austin, or San Antonio. The few residents who actually lived here full-time were old, retired farts who spent most of their time locked up in their houses, staring at the boob tube. This had to be the dullest place on earth. He missed Vegas, and couldn't wait to get this business over with so he could go home.

It was all but done, he thought. He had given the ranger and the fed a murderer, complete with a confession on a suicide note typed on the murderer's own typewriter in his office at the Las Vegas Police Department. The cops would go to the press, claiming they had solved the mystery. Case closed. The boat driver who knew too much would come out of hiding—probably for a beer at The Crew's Inn. Franco had someone in place there watching for the guy to reappear—a nephew from Vegas who had won a bartending job at The Crew's Inn. The nephew knew what kind of guy to look for. Tall, with long hair—or maybe a fresh haircut. A guy that played too much country music on the jukebox. As far as Franco was concerned, half a verse was too much country music. Anyway, the nephew was on the job, and once Franco could finger the stupid puke who had wrecked his vintage boat trying to help Rosa escape, he'd plan the hit and whack him.

Then it was back to Vegas, and the life he loved. He could hardly wait. He hadn't had a decent meal in almost two weeks. He had a jones for a good bottle of Italian red. As he jogged down the street, he thought about the choices in his personal wine cellar. When he got home, he was going to light a Cuban in the hot tub and open a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo he had been saving for years. Then he was going to call a couple of party girls from the strip club and open his stash of smack. He only used the stuff for recreational purposes. He liked to remain clearheaded while he was working.

Continuing his morning run, he pulled some dark sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on. The cold wind was chilling his ears, so he yanked the knit cap down lower over his shaved head. He turned a corner and headed for a part of the neighborhood that ran along the channel leading from the lake. You never knew what you might see. Maybe an open garage door with a damaged wooden boat on a trailer or something. Didn't hurt to look around while he was keeping in shape.

Rounding a curve in the street, he noticed three squad cars in front of a house up ahead, red and blue lights blinking. A crane had been hauled in on a large flatbed trailer. It was now off the trailer and positioned beside the house, braced with four tubular legs spread wide on steel-pad feet. Its boom reached behind the house, lifting something, the cable taut with weight. A few neighbors had emerged from houses to stand in the yards, rooted like shrubs, staring as they stood motionless in the slouched pose of the elderly, bellies forward, mouths hanging open.