Husband and Wives (8 page)

Milt Kovak – Wednesday

The next morning I told Anthony to go to Bishop with Nita and talk to the troop leaders about setting up the Boy Scouts. We’d still have almost three hours of sunlight once they got out of school. We got a lot of Boy Scouts in Prophesy County: two troops in Longbranch, another two in Bishop, and one in Harrellville, which always surprises me ’cause it’s a small place, but the boys are all brothers or cousins, or related in some way, so we had plenty of kids to comb the whole cul-de-sac for the suspected murder weapon.

Jean called me around ten and gave me the addresses of five other plural families in Prophesy County. I was flabbergasted.

‘There are at least ten families in the church, according to Rene,’ Jean said. Then added, ‘But of course, you’ll have to take that with a grain of salt.’

‘Why are you so hard on poor little Rene?’ I asked.

‘Maybe because you call her “poor little Rene,”’ she answered. Then laughed. ‘No, dear, I’m not jealous.’ There was a silence, then she said, ‘There’s just something about her. She’s so different from the other two—’

‘You never met Mary,’ I reminded her.

‘Not in person, but have you been around her children? Have you heard the way they talk about her? The kids, Jerry, Carol Anne, hell, even Rene? She was a saint. Carol Anne is––’

‘Your secret crush,’ I said.

‘Stop it. She’s a stand-up woman. She’s trustworthy. Rene . . . isn’t.’

‘You know, honey, I’ve never seen you go this much on instinct with patients—’

‘These people aren’t patients.’

‘Well, yeah they are. You had Rene in your office.’

‘Interviewing her for the case. Not as a patient,’ my wife said.

‘Still. You seem to be going more by the seat of your pants than usual. That’s my territory, honey.’

Jean sighed. ‘I don’t know, babe,’ she said. ‘These people are getting under my skin. Part of it is I have strong opinions on this lifestyle, and these people . . .’

Her voice drifted off. I said into the silence, ‘These people are changing your opinions?’

Again, she sighed. ‘I don’t know. But they are certainly putting a strain on my certainty.’

With that she said goodbye and hung up, and I looked at the list set before me. The church house, according to what I’d found out, was in Tejas County, which was the next county over, where my amigo Bill Williams was sheriff. Checking out the six names given to me, all except Andrew Schmidt were in Prophesy County. Schmidt was in Tejas County. I wasn’t sure how this church worked, if it was like a lot of Protestant sects, where there was a preacher and a board of elders or whatever that oversaw paying him and the bills of the church, or what. But if I had to guess, I’d guess that the other person who lived in Tejas County, where the church house was, would be the person in charge.

I called Bill Williams, found him at his desk like he should be, and told him what had been going on over here with our plural family.

‘Ah, hell, I’ve been keeping quiet about old Earl Mayhew and his wives and kids,’ Bill said. ‘He’s a nice enough old bird and his wives seem happy enough. Kids keep out of trouble. But yeah, he’s the preacher or whatever it is at that church. It’s way back in the piney woods and I try not to disturb ’em or let anybody else do so. I think to each his own, ya know?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t arrested the husband over here either. Figure he’s got enough trouble. How many wives the preacher got?’ I asked.

‘Only two that I know of. Ha!’ Bill said, letting out a laugh. ‘Who’da thought I’d ever say that about wives, huh?’

I laughed back. ‘Know what you mean. This kinda thing gets your thoughts all twisted up.’

‘Yeah, I know. When I first met Earl, I came home, looked at my wife, and thought, ‘‘now what would she think about us bringing in a cute little twenty-two-year-old?’’’

‘Whoo, don’t I know it. Had the same kinda thought myself. But seriously, Bill, I need to talk to this Earl fella. Find out what I can about Hudson and his three wives.’

‘Woodoggies,’ Bill said, ‘three of ’em. Don’t that beat all?’

‘I’m tellin’ ya,’ I said.

‘Well, you come on over here and I’ll take you out yonder where the church is. He’s got a trailer set up right next to it. Church is one of them metal buildings you see, but it’s got a big ol’ cross on top of it.’

‘I’ll be there in about twenty,’ I told him, and hung up.

It takes about thirty minutes to get to the county seat of Tejas County where Bill Williams’ office is, but I drive fast. Me and Bill chewed the fat for a while then he headed out to a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

‘Seriously?’ I said.

‘Hey, wouldn’t you go where no one could see you, if you were breaking the law?’ Bill asked.

‘Never thought about it much, but I guess you’re right. Of course, I rarely, if ever, contemplate things criminal,’ I said.

Bill hooted with laughter. ‘Yeah, just things immoral, anti-social, and bad for the complexion.’

‘Drive,’ I suggested.

Now we don’t have a lot of piny woods in Oklahoma, but there’s a little hidden dab of ’em on the east side of Tejas County – Tejas County is just to the west of us, so this was close. The trees reached the sky, all skinny and tall, not the Christmas tree kind at all. And they had big ol’ pine cones falling off of ’em. Just getting out of the car I spied half a dozen pristine cones, the middle of ’em bigger than my two hands cupped together. I picked up a bunch and threw them in the back of Bill’s car.

‘What?’ he whined on seeing me do it.

‘My wife’ll do something creative with these come Christmas. Just wait and see.’

‘I’d rather not,’ he said.

I could spy the church through the trees, and it was exactly what Bill had said it was: a manufactured metal building with a cross on top. There was another building to the right of it, I think for Sunday school, or whatever it is these Mormon offshoots liked to call their indoctrination of children. We Baptists call it Sunday school. To the left of the church building was a double-wide trailer, what we Baptists would call a parsonage. Getting closer, I could see a single-wide one scrunched up to the back of it.

Pointing, I asked Bill, ‘What’s that?’

He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

He walked up the aluminum steps of the double-wide and rapped sharply on the door. In less than a minute a woman opened it. Even from where I was standing at the bottom of the steps, I could tell she was short, maybe five feet even, with graying brown hair pulled back and clipped at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a long skirt that touched the tops of her sensible-looking shoes and a blouse that started at her throat with sleeves that went to her wrists. This whole ensemble was covered with a handmade apron displaying Noah and his animals.

The woman’s smile barely lifted her lips and never reached her eyes. ‘Hello, Sheriff,’ she said to Bill. ‘How may we help you?’

‘Earl around?’ Bill asked.

‘He’s in the church house.’

‘Be OK if I go over there?’ he asked.

She stared at him for a long moment, then said, ‘If you don’t mind interrupting a man at prayer.’ With that said, she shut the door. She didn’t slam it. Just shut it firmly.

Bill looked down at me. ‘OK, so one wife’s not exactly happy,’ he said as he came down the steps.

‘I’d say she’s pretty surly, but that’s just me.’

It was about a hundred feet from the door of the double-wide to the door of the metal church building. Bill rapped on the church double doors then opened one. ‘Hey, Brother Earl, mind if we come in?’ he called into the room.

We both stepped in and I saw a vast room, devoid of anything – pews, chairs, whatever. There was a podium at the back and a man was standing there. He was a short, thin man with wiry gray hair shooting out every which way, a beak of a nose, and small, squinty eyes, color hard to tell.

‘Hey there, Sheriff!’ the man called back, coming down from the raised dais to meet us. He shook hands with Bill and then got introduced to me.

‘I take it you’re here about Sister Mary Hudson?’ he asked.

I nodded and he shook his head.

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ he said. ‘I’m still praying on this one, though. I don’t think this was God’s will. Somebody murdered that poor woman and took a good mother away from her children. I am at your beck and call, Sheriff Kovak. Anything you want or need, I will help you receive.’

‘Thank you, Brother Earl,’ I said. ‘If we could sit for a spell so I could ask you a few questions?’

‘Absolutely! We got about a couple hundred folding chairs back in that closet,’ he said, pointing to the right of the podium. ‘Sheriff Bill, why don’t you round us up a few?’

Before Bill could even think about protesting, the two of us were knee-deep in the closet pulling out beige folding chairs. ‘How come we ended up doing this?’ he said in a half whisper.

‘Beats the hell out of me,’ I whispered back, before I remembered I was in a house of God and therefore shouldn’t be cussing out loud, or even to myself, really.

We took the chairs back to where Brother Earl waited for us. Once the three of us were seated, I said, ‘Brother Earl, I thank you for taking the time. I just wanted to know if you had any idea who might have done such a thing? If Mary or her husband Jerry Hudson had any enemies that you knew of?’

‘Well, now,’ he said, looking off, ‘I don’t know the Hudsons really well; they’ve only been with us two years, and though I did get to know Jerry some through our men’s group, I didn’t know Mary that well. My ladies tell me she was a wonderful mother and a gifted homemaker.’

‘Any troubles that might have reached your ears? Rumors about trouble in the family, some other lady mad at Mary about something? Any gossip at all?’

Brother Earl frowned. ‘I don’t hold with gossip, Sheriff,’ he said in a stiff tone. ‘As a group, we do not condone gossip and I’m sure no one would tell tales to either myself or my wives.’ At this point he sighed heavily. ‘But, and this is a big but, gentlemen, I have been known to hear things through . . . um . . . the grapevine, shall we say?’ He leaned forward to impart his wisdom. ‘Sister Carol Anne Hudson’s brother seemed to be a bother to Sister Mary.’ Straightening up, he added, ‘Now I can’t say what it was about, just that there appeared to be a . . . um . . . dispute amongst the two.’

‘That’d be Dennis Rigsby?’ I said.

‘Um-hum. He and his mama come to our church with the Hudson family. I just noticed the two of ’em having words after Sunday service a couple of weeks ago. And one of our congregation mentioned the two of them having at it after a Thursday social supper, last week I think it was.’

‘You remember which member of your congregation mentioned this to you, Brother Earl?’ I asked.

‘That would be confidential, Sheriff,’ he said. ‘I would not be at liberty to divulge that information.’

I looked at Bill Williams and he shrugged. I took a minute to think about it. I knew Catholic confession was confidential, but I knew that anything told to a priest outside of the confessional, in conversation, wasn’t. So, in a Protestant sect, counseling would be like a confession, and a conversation would just be a conversation, right? I hoped so.

‘Brother Earl,’ I said, ‘were you having a formal counseling session with this person?’

‘What person?’ he countered.

‘The one who said they saw Mary Hudson and Carol Anne Hudson’s brother Dennis having at it?’

‘Now, what do you mean by a formal counseling session?’ he asked.

I sighed deep. ‘Mr Mayhew, I do believe you know what I’m talking about. If this wasn’t a formal counseling session, then it was not confidential and you are required to tell me who it was.’

He sighed right back at me. ‘Rachael McKinsey,’ he said. ‘Brother Michael McKinsey’s wife.’

‘And where would I find them?’ I asked, looking quickly at my list of congregants. I didn’t see the McKinseys on there.

‘Michael and his family live in Longbranch,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you the address.’

‘Before we do that, Brother Earl, is there anything else you can tell me about the Hudsons?’

‘Like I said, Jerry’s a nice enough fella, his wives seem fine, and their kids – other than being a handful – are good kids. I don’t know anybody who’d want to kill Sister Mary. And I want this duly noted: neither I nor Sister Rachael McKinsey have accused Brother Dennis Rigsby of a darned thing, OK?’

I stood up. ‘Understood, Brother Earl. Now, about Mrs McKinsey’s address?’

On the way back to Longbranch, I called my wife on my cell phone and asked her if she was busy.

‘No. I finished with patients this morning. Just busy-work for the hospital this afternoon. What’s up?’

‘You wanna help me interview another plural family?’ I asked.

‘Why, yes, Sheriff, I believe I would like that very much,’ my wife said. I think she was being flippant.

I picked her up in my Jeep and we headed to the house in town belonging to Michael McKinsey and his family.

The house that matched the address was in an area of houses with acreage. The McKinseys had about five acres, I’d say, and the house that sprawled out on those acres might have taken up at least one all by itself. It was a one-story house that, from the front anyway, appeared to be shaped like an off-center ‘U,’ with the wings going toward the back.

I’d called ahead to make sure Rachael McKinsey would be there and she’d answered the phone herself. She’d refused to talk to me without her husband present, and I’d asked her to get him to come home because I needed to speak to her within the hour. There was a large Dodge Ram pick-up truck in the circle drive, and I pulled in behind it.

A man answered my knock. He was about six foot two, maybe six foot three inches tall, had to weigh well over 200 pounds, had a blond military haircut and his hands, hanging off meaty, muscled forearms, were fisted. I pulled my wife behind me.

‘Mr McKinsey?’ I said.

‘Sheriff,’ he said back. If this had been happening a hundred years earlier, somebody would be pulling a gun right about now.

‘I need to speak to your wife Rachael about a police matter, sir,’ I said.

‘I speak for my wife,’ he said.