Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 04 - Vicksburg (21 page)

I dropped the .38 beside me on the seat and grabbed the
wheel with both hands as I bounced the right tires over the
curb-one set of wheels was on the street, and one set was
off. I clenched my teeth, waiting for the impact, but I swept
past the rear of his pickup with one coat of paint to spare.

“Now, let’s get out here,” I muttered.

Give the devil his due. Those two gorillas were persistent.

The next couple of miles, there were stretches where I hit
eighty, but always at the end loomed that ever-present
switchback. Another mile or so, the route straightened once
again and by that time, the pickup was tailgating me. I glanced in the rearview and mumbled between clenched
teeth. “I don’t know who you-are,- pal, but you-can- drive.”

Having no luck with their hardware, they decided to run
me off the road. Just after I slid around the sharp curve at
Stockade Redan, the pickup pulled up and slammed into me.
Metal shrieked. I whipped the wheel back to the right,
bouncing them over the curb.

Seconds later, they bounced me over the curb on my side.
For the next mile or so, we jockeyed for position at eighty
miles an hour, taking turns knocking each other back and
forth. I had just slammed into him when suddenly, a bridge
popped up directly ahead.

I stomped on the brakes as he swerved sharply toward me,
only I wasn’t there to stop him. He hurtled across the road,
jumped the curb, ripped through a chain-link guard fence,
and arched through the air a hundred feet to the road below.
The pickup exploded into flames on impact.

Without hesitation, I sped away. Beyond the bridge, I
pulled off the road into the trees and waited. Sure enough,
moments later, a security unit sped past. When it was out of
sight around a curve, I raced for the exit, hoping I could slip
out of the park before the fire trucks and police arrived. I’d
really have some trouble explaining all that had taken place.

Back at Jack’s, I surveyed the damage to my Silverado. I
cursed when I saw the mangled metal. I cringed when I
found three bullet holes in my tailgate and another in my
windshield. This trip to Vicksburg was becoming expensive.
It was a good thing Jack was going to be a millionaire.

I grimaced when I thought of the fate of Jumbo’s two
thugs. I’d never know their identity. All I knew was they
worked for Jumbo of the Tiger’s Den in Shreveport and that
Jumbo had something to do with Rebel Trucking. Was
Jumbo working for Basco, who was on the board of the
trucking firm? That appeared to be the next logical step in
my little theory.

I lay in bed wide awake, staring into the darkness and trying to make sense of the peculiar twist the case had taken.
Even though I could not reconcile Annebelle’s inclusion in
the bogus will, I had been ninety percent convinced that WR
and Stewart conspired to murder their father and somehow
persuade Goggins to change the will and forge the old man’s
signature.

But now, Jumbo stepped into the picture. If he and Basco
were in the scheme with the two brothers, why would he
deny seeing WR and Stewart at the Tiger’s Den? He could
have provided them with the proverbial ironclad alibi.

Was he double-crossing them? That made no sense. He
had to have them if he hoped for his share of the millions.

I sat up in bed and turned on the light. “Then it had to be
Annebelle, by herself,” I said aloud. She’s the only one left.
“But how?” For several moments, I sat motionless, staring
blankly at the wall. I shook my head. No way. Annebelle
couldn’t be a part of it. How could she have known I was at
the national park? Diane was dating WR, not Annebelle.

Besides, Annebelle had a solid alibi, the softball tournament in Jackson from the twenty-fifth through the twentyseventh.

The old man’s time of death was listed at 2:40 P.M. on the twenty-sixth, and I had a DVD of her sitting on the
bench talking with the coach, Nancy Carleton, at 1:30 P.M.
Still, something was missing. I mumbled under my breath.
“You got yourself a bunch of theories going nowhere,
Tony.”

Al Grogan is the top sleuth in my company, Blevins
Security, in Austin. He mentored me, more or less, if you can
classify shouting and screaming as mentoring. He was a
master craftsman in the art of profanity, honing his proficiency of that questionable talent with all the dedication of
a twenty-first-century Picasso or Michelangelo.

One thing Grogan always told me was that if things got
too confusing, too complicated, just back out and start over.

“That’s exactly what I’ll do,” I muttered, lying back down
and turning off the light. “As soon as I catch a little sleep”

I was exhausted. Jack woke me at nine o’clock. “Hey,
what the dickens happened to your pickup? The whole side’s
caved in.”

“Go away,” I mumbled, pulling the blanket over my head.

He yanked the blanket off me. “Are you going to tell me
what you were up to last night? Your truck’s a wreck. Are
you all right?”

I rolled over and stared sleepily at him. “So? What else is
new?”

Jack shook his head. “Come on down. Coffee’s hot, and
Alice toasted some bagels. I want to know what happened
last night.”

I was hungrier than I thought. While I related the events
of the previous night, I ate two bagels lathered with cream
cheese and washed them down with three cups of coffee.

“How does that tie together? Or does it?”

“I’m not sure, but I plan on going back over all my notes
this morning. Begin at the beginning,” I added, thinking of
Al Grogan’s declaration.

He frowned.

I explained. “The whole case is circumstantial. I need to
find something to tie it together.”

Jack leaned forward. “How are you going to do that?”

Gesturing to the upstairs bedroom, I replied, “I’ve got to
go back over all my notes. I have the feeling I missed something. Cross your fingers that I can find it.”

His frown deepened.

I chuckled. “I know it might sound hopeless, but believe
me, I’ve got a pretty good idea where I’m going with it all.”

“Okay. Anything I can do to help?”

“Nope. Just have Alice keep a pot of coffee perking.
And,” I added with a word caution, “if anyone asks, just tell
them someone just sideswiped my pickup. You hear?”

“I hear.”

Back in my room, I called Tom Garrett at the police station. He was in his usual truculent mood. He growled. “I was
hoping you’d gone back to … where was it? Houston?
Podunk Holler?”

I let the remark slide. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I need
a favor.”

“Like what?”

“I want to find out if the Tiger’s Den-it’s a nightclub in
Shreveport-was shut down on Saturday the twenty-sixth.”

His reply reeked with sarcasm. “I suppose you know that
Shreveport is in Louisiana, and in case you’ve forgotten, this
is Mississippi.”

I started to tell him what he could do with that last
remark, but I held my temper and innocently remarked,
“You mean the Vicksburg department doesn’t have a good
enough relationship with a neighboring city to ask a simple
question?”

One fact I had quickly learned when I first worked with
the law was that cops, the long-timers, have monumental
egos when it comes to their department. They can criticize it, curse it, heap abomination upon it, but they will, without
hesitation, eviscerate any outsider who does the same. He
remained silent a moment, then muttered an expletive. “How
can I get in touch with you?”

I gave him Jack’s number. “I’ll be here the rest of the
morning.” A thought hit me. I hesitated. “And Garrett-”

“Yeah.”

“One more favor. The owner of the joint is called Jumbo.
I would appreciate what information you can find on him.”

“You sure you don’t want me to come over and tuck you
in bed?”

I grinned. “I just got up. Maybe tonight. I’ll call you,
okay?”

He cursed again and hung up.

“Pinhead,” I muttered, replacing the receiver and turning
back to my desk. I spread my note cards, arranging them in
chronological order beginning with the earliest date concerning the case.

The first was July 17, the date Edney called his attorney
and stated he wanted to change his will. A week later, on
July 24, he purportedly signed the new will. Two days later,
he died in the fire. On that date, WR and Stewart claimed
they were at the Tiger’s Den a hundred and eighty miles
away at the time of the fire, except the owner, Jumbo, stated
the nightclub was closed. From July 25 through July 27,
Annebelle attended a softball tournament in Jackson, some
fifty miles or so east of Vicksburg. Her alibi was verified by
the DVD and Nancy Carleton, the coach of the softball
team, although she and the coach were not in each other’s
presence every hour of the day.

I continued placing cards, shifting back and forth, trying
to stumble over another perspective, another angle to the
case.

According to Doc Raines at the Vicksburg Auto Parts, he
and JW Edney attended an antique show in Lafayette,
Louisiana, two days before the fire.

Another disturbing thought hit me. Doc Raines had said
Stewart ordered the naphtha a month before JW’s death, yet
Alice, the housekeeper, claimed Stewart and JW had reconciled only two or three weeks earlier. If her information was
accurate, how could Stewart have known JW was out of
cleaning fluid?

Hastily I scribbled the question on a card and placed it
beside Doc Raines’ card.

The card with the interview of Wilson Jenkins, the
Madison Parish Ornithological Society’s ex-director, I
placed between the card when Edney supposedly called to
inform Goggins of the new will and the card with the date
he signed it.

Then I reread the cards putting Annebelle in the will and
recanting the promise of the land to the Madison Parish
Ornithological Society.

By now, the desktop was filled with cards.

I reread the ones concerning the autopsy. Upon transflecting the scalp, a blunt trauma force to the left temporal area
of the cranium was located.

Thumbing through my files on the case, I retrieved the
pictures of the fire. I studied the one depicting the partially
consumed corpse. The body lay on its right side, the opposite side from the injury to his head.

Muttering, I went back over my theory, verbalizing just
how the death occurred, hoping to discover another viewpoint that would permit more pieces of the puzzle to fall into
place. “If I were at a table that suddenly ignited, I would leap
backward. JW Edney did not. According to the medical
examiner, he turned around, stumbled and fell to his left at
the base of the table, and in the throes of suffocation, turned
over to face it.”

I still couldn’t believe the ME’s conclusion.

The only way I originally saw it, and still did, was that given
the position of the body and the injury, someone struck him on
the left temple, causing him to fall in the position he did.

Yet, who would Chief Herrings believe, me or the medical examiner? Who could blame him?

Suddenly I had an idea. I called Al Grogan, my ex-mentor
back in Austin. I put the question to him. Without hesitation,
he replied, “Don’t let those southern crackers snow you,
Tony. I’ve seen it a dozen times. If someone is unconscious
and suffocating, he ain’t going to turn over. He’ll lay right
where he fell.”

My hopes soared. Right at that moment, Al could have
called me every name in a sailor’s book, and I would have
grinned like the proverbial possum. I thanked him and hung
up, tucking back that little nugget of information for the
proper time to use it.

Chewing on my bottom lip, I repeated my own theory of
the murder. The blow had to come from behind and from the
left, which meant the killer had to be left-handed.

Annebelle? Could she be left-handed? Hastily, I slipped
the DVD of the Vicksburg softball game in the player, fast
forwarding to Annebelle hitting practice balls to the infielders during warmup, right-handed. I shook my head in disappointment, but I noticed something I had dismissed the first
time I viewed the video. A surprising number of the players
on the team were southpaws.

Then my thoughts flashed back to that day in the parlor
when an enraged Stewart raised his hand to slap Annebelle.
I replayed the scene in my mind. He slammed the bottle of
bourbon down on the sideboard and charged Annebelle
with his left arm drawn back. “I’ll slap you silly,” he had
shouted.

Hastily, I put together the scene in the garage as it could
have happened using WR. and Stewart.

WR could have distracted John Wesley Edney while
Stewart approached from the rear and struck the old man in
the head. That scenario fit in neatly with Doc Raine’s assertion that Stewart was the one who ordered the naphtha.

Just about the time I thought the pieces might start falling together, they blew up in my face. And the piece that caused
the blowup once again was named Jumbo.