Designed to Kill (6 page)
“True,” I said. “But it takes only one fruitcake to blunder out with a terribly painful gaffe.”
“Hopefully, that won’t happen. Were you a bit surprised that
Tara
wanted to have the service so early? I’m sure most of their friends work, so
would cause the least inconvenience. She’s a very considerate young woman.”
“It’s good for us, too,” Jill said. “We’re leaving for
Pensacola
right after the service. The early start will give us a chance to get there before dark.”
———
The pain we had experienced that morning was mental or emotional. In the afternoon, it got physical. Vickie, Jill’s white-haired physical therapist, had instructed her to do her exercises three times a day. They included lying on her back, holding her left arm out and raising it as high as possible, then moving it from side to side. The goal was once again to extend her arm straight up, an angle of 180 degrees. At Jill’s therapy session on Friday, Vickie had measured the achievement of just over sixty degrees.
“Problems?” I asked.
I stood in the doorway of our oversize bedroom, watching her exercise on the king-size bed. The room was an example of dimensions throughout the large log house we had bought on moving to
Tennessee
. The place had to have been built by a man with visions of structural grandeur. Jill let her arm flop to her side, a frown on her face.
“I can’t even get fifty-five degrees,” she said.
I tried to boost her spirits. “Just keep at it, babe. It’ll get better.”
She got up and moved to the walk-in closet, where she sat on a chair in front of the door. I had rigged a pulley with a rope suspended by a web belt attached to the top of the door, the rope ends tied to short sections of garden hose for handholds. One of her exercises was to pull down on the rope with her right hand, stretching the left arm upward. Then she would pull with the left hand, elevating the right arm. She began to grimace as she pulled and stretched.
“Is that pain or discomfort?” I asked.
“It’s about as discomfortable as you can get.” Her lips flattened into a straight red line.
We had a running joke about her therapy. Vickie, the PT, had instructed her to keep working despite the discomfort but to stop if she suffered pain. Though we chuckled about the terms occasionally, I knew Jill experienced no fun at all when she rubbed up against that gray area where the misery became too difficult to categorize.
I had turned to head back downstairs when a sudden crash froze me.
“Oww!” Jill cried out.
I looked around to see the web belt had slipped loose, letting the metal pulley fall. I hurried toward her. “What the hell happened...hurt your shoulder?”
“No. It hit my leg. It only hurt my feelings. That does it. I’m done for the day. If I’d known I was going to have to go through all this, I don’t know if I’d have agreed to that surgery.”
The rotator cuff tear had resulted from an incident in
Israel
a year ago. The situation developed after we found ourselves caught in the middle of a struggle between Palestinian and Jewish groups out to recover an ancient parchment scroll. During my effort to rescue Jill, one of the assailants had shoved her to the ground. She was sore after the ordeal but did not realize until later that her left shoulder had been injured. The pain plagued her off and on during the months that followed, finally reaching the point that something had to be done.
Dr. Vail, the orthopedic surgeon, had assured her she should be nearly as good as new if she followed her exercise routine faithfully. I was a little envious. I had no idea what it would take to get me back on track after the derailment I had suffered from my encounter with Metro’s finest.
7
The funeral home had started out as a large plantation-style house with stately white columns in front. The sort of place Rhett Butler might have galloped up to on his wild black stallion. Inside, the high-ceilinged parlors had been turned into “viewing rooms” and chapels, conservatively decorated with cool colors and jungles of fake greenery. Jill and I were among the first to sign the guest register in the hallway beside a sign that read
TIMOTHY GANNON
. Tim’s closed casket sat on display inside the room, covered by an American flag and surrounded by photos of him as a stalwart high school tailback, helmet tucked beneath his arm, a Navy lieutenant in dress whites, gold wings on his chest, and as a blue-suited businessman a year ago when he had received an award from the architects’ association.
His popularity was obvious in the mass of fragrant flower arrangements, sprays and potted plants that crowded one side of the room. The younger Gannons’ Sunday School class was a large one, and the area filled quickly with couples in their thirties and forties.
Sam introduced us to
Tara
’s parents, Barney and Gladys Johnson from
Columbia
, forty miles south of
Nashville
. They had been on a trip to
North Carolina
when their daughter received the call from Sergeant Payne and were unable to reach her house before Jill and I had left. When the Johnsons drifted off to where
Tara
stood near the casket, Sam turned with a wan smile.
“Barney recently retired from a bank in
Columbia
,” he said. “They’re good people.”
“How did Tim and Tara meet?” Jill asked.
“It was at UT. They dated for a couple of years as students. She was in broadcast journalism and after graduation landed a job with Channel Five in
Nashville
. Tim wanted to get married, but he was dead set on flexing his wings as a naval aviator.
Tara
couldn’t pass up the TV job, so they parted company on a rather unhappy note.”
I smiled. “I bet she’d still look good on TV. Was she a reporter?”
“A pretty good one, from what I hear.”
“So how did they manage to get things back together?”
“Tim called her a few times when he would come to
Nashville
to visit Wilma’s mother. After he got out of the Navy, he went to work for an engineering firm here and started courting
Tara
again. Hot and heavy. A couple of months later, they were married. When Tom was born the following year, she quit her TV job.”
After Sam and Jill drifted away, I staked out a spot at one side of the room to study the dynamics of funeral home visitation. It was an intriguing exercise. Those I would call true friends lingered at length with the Gannons, offering condolences and recalling incidents from Tim’s past that would bring fond memories and smiles from everyone around. The opportunists, those who came to see or be seen, would shake hands briefly with the family, then turn away to spend their time chattering with acquaintances they thought important to know they were there. A third category I labeled duty-bound friends. These were people who appeared to feel the visit compulsory, despite the discomfort they experienced. They would walk in with barely a look to right or left, say a few words to the Gannons, do an about face and depart.
As I was completing my clinical analysis of the shifting crowd, Sam strolled up with a small woman who appeared to be in her mid-fifties. Dressed in a simple brown suit, she had short, chestnut hair and gazed out through large round glasses with troubled gray eyes.
“Greg McKenzie,” Sam said, “meet Robbie Renegar, Tim’s secretary. She did her best to keep him in line.”
She held out her hand, which I shook gently. “Nice to meet you, Robbie,” I said.
“It was your condo he stayed in down in
Florida
, wasn’t it?” A catch in her voice told me she still hadn’t come to terms with Tim’s death.
“Right. We’re going down tomorrow to look into things.”
“Greg’s a former Air Force investigator,” Sam said. “I’ve asked him to see what he can find out. I just can’t accept that Tim committed suicide.”
“Neither can I,” she said. “He wasn’t the sort of fellow who would do something like that. This is the most awful thing that’s happened since my husband died.”
“How’s your daughter?” Sam asked.
Her face brightened. “She finally got pregnant. I’m going to be a grandma next April.”
Sam hugged her. “Congratulations. I’m so happy for you, Robbie. Have you told Wilma?”
“No, not yet.” Her face darkened. “How’s she holding up?”
“It’s been rough, but she’ll be okay. She’s a tough lady.”
Recalling what Tim had said when he came after the condo key, I asked a question that had been bugging me. “Mrs. Renegar, was Tim having problems with The Sand Castle project?”
“We’ve had problems getting our invoices paid,” she said. “They claimed sales had been slower than anticipated, causing some delays. But Mr. Gannon believed they had the money to pay us. I think there were some other things that bothered him. He never told me just what. On a few occasions, he closed his office door while talking to those folks down there. Afterward, he would be really agitated.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“The developer, Mr. Baucus, or the contractor, a Mr. Detrich. He wasn’t real happy with either of them.”
“Was he concerned about the quality of the construction?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. You’d best ask Mr. Sturdivant about stuff like that.”
Sam looked around. “I wonder where Walt is? I would have thought he’d be here by now.”
Mrs. Renegar had just headed off to speak to
Tara
when Walt Sturdivant made his appearance. He looked more like a college professor than an engineer now, the pipe bowl protruding from the breast pocket of his gray-checked wool jacket. I watched as he paused in the doorway, his head snapping back and forth. When he spotted Sam and me, he strode toward us.
“Something weird is going on,” he said in a low, angry voice.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
“I just came from the office. I went by to pick up some things to take with me tomorrow. We may have been broken into.”
I frowned. “May have?”
“Well, the place was still locked up like I left it Friday. But when I looked for The Sand Castle plans, they were missing. I checked the computer and guess what—the whole damned file has been deleted.”
8
Monday morning turned sullen. Somber clouds huddled over the cemetery as
Tara
and the boys dropped red roses into the open grave. We stood beneath a green canvas tent, the chill of a gusty breeze striking our faces. The air had the musty smell of dead grass, adding to the dismal mood. Dr. Trent offered a few final words of comfort to the family, after which Jill and I joined others in expressing our heavy-hearted farewells.