Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 04 - Vicksburg (24 page)

He stiffened, then relaxed. Clearing his throat, he replied,
“Who might that be, Mr. Boudreaux?”

“I’d rather not say. If it was just a mistake, I wouldn’t
want to embarrass the individual. You understand”

He nodded. “Of course. I’ll check our records also.
Mistakes can happen. My secretary might have entered the
wrong date”

She shot him a brief, but withering look.

He continued. “I can check our appointment books if you
wish.” He dragged the tip of his tongue over his lips.

I handed him the will. “No. I’m sure the other witness was
mistaken.” I nodded to the Edney file. “Do you mind if I take
a look at his file?”

His fingers tightened about the file. “May I ask why?”

With a disarming smile, I replied, “Certainly. I’m looking
for something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know if I
would recognize it even if -1 -saw it.”

He glanced uncomfortably at his secretary, then offered
me the file. “By all means”

I turned to the beginning of the file. Within seconds, I
found that for which I had hoped, several follow-up letters
for various purchases over the last four decades, but not one
for the new will. That was all I needed to confirm that
Goggins was part of the scheme.

Closing the file, I slid it across his desk. “Thanks.” I rose
and offered my hand. “I do appreciate your time.”

A frown wrinkled his forehead. “Did you find what you
were looking for?”

“Nope. Thanks again.”

His secretary opened the office door for me. I glanced
back as she closed it, just in time to see lawyer William
Goggins punching in a number on the phone. I crossed my
fingers, hoping he was calling the killer. If he was, then the
first step in my plan had been successful.

Next stop, Annebelle Edney.

My telephone call did not surprise Annebelle, nor did I
expect it would.

I came right to the point. “We need to talk. As soon as
possible this afternoon”

With an indifferent tone, she said, “I have a route to
complete.”

“It would be in your interest to make the time, Annebelle.
If I turn what I’ve found over to Chief Herrings, the only
route you’ll be running is around a dirty six-by-nine cell at
Parchmann Prison for Women before you ride the needle.”

She said nothing for several moments. I held my breath.
She had to know of my visit to Goggins, and he had to have
told her about my questioning the date on the will. Finally,
she said, “When?”

“Four o’clock. At the military park. Thayer’s Approach.
I’ll be at the bottom of the stairs.”

“Why out there?”

“No one around to hear us”

Several more seconds of silence elapsed. Finally, “All
right. Four-o’clock.”

I looked at my watch. It was two. I called Garrett. “Be
there early. I’ll wait at the gate for her, then we’ll come down
together.”

Garrett growled. “I hope you know what you’re doing.
This better not be a waste of my time.”

“Just be there”

Annebelle was on time. I climbed out of my pickup in the
parking area at site six, Thayer’s Approach. She parked her
Riverside Bread truck next to the curb across the paved road.

Thayer’s Approach is a deep ravine fifty yards wide and
almost four hundred in length with a shallow gully at the
bottom cut by runoff rain, narrow enough one can step over
it. The west side of the ravine was a two-hundred-yard open
stretch sloping upward at a forty-five-degree angle to the rim
of a redoubt once manned by Confederate troops. During
the battle, General Thayer’s Union boys made a bloody, but
unsuccessful attempt to scale the slope under the withering
gunfire from the Twenty-sixth Louisiana Redoubt.

A flight of concrete stairs led to the bottom of the ravine.
To the side of the stairs was a concrete cave with an arched
entrance, constructed by Thayer’s forces as protection
against the weapons of the Confederates on the slope towering over them.

When Annebelle climbed from her truck, I started down
the stairs, casting a hasty glance in the direction of the cave.
I grinned to myself when I spotted movement back in the
shadows. Garrett was waiting.

At the base of the stairs, I looked around, and my heart
started hammering in my chest like the proverbial jackhammer. Annebelle was halfway down the stairs, and behind her
came all six-foot-four and three hundred pounds of Jumbo.

Instinctively, I took a few steps backward.

She stopped a few feet in front of me. She was a couple
inches shorter than I, but probably had me by ten or twenty
pounds. She jammed her fists in her hips and stared at me
narrowly. “Well, what’s so important?”

I hadn’t planned on her bringing Jumbo along. At that
moment, I wished I had never met Jack Edney, but now it was
too late. I glanced at Jumbo. “How much does he know?”

“Everything.”

Taking a deep breath and slowly releasing it, I said, “You
know why I came to Vicksburg. Well, I found what I was
looking for. Good news for me, bad for you”

“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow.

I had no hard proof, but I was convinced that Annebelle
was the only one who could have put a tap on her brothers’
lines. I tried a bluff, hoping she’d fall for it. “I wasn’t sure
about you until I discovered you had put a phone tap on your
brothers’ phones. Once I learned that, everything fell into
place. That, and now seeing Jumbo answers several questions that had puzzled me. Joe Basco ordered Jumbo to send
the cement man and the eighteen-wheelers after me, and you
had Jumbo send the bombers and those two thugs out at the
park after me. Probably even the Cadillac and the shooter.”

She laughed, a drawn-out sneer. “So?”

I grinned to myself. She had fallen for my bluff. Her calm
acceptance of the accusation told me exactly what I wanted
to know, that she had planted the bugs and was behind the
last few attempts on my life. “So, Jumbo there was the gobetween for the land deal with you and Basco as well as
doing your dirty work.”

“Prove it.”

“Don’t think I can’t. I’ve come up with more than enough
to put you in Parchmann, but when I considered all the ins
and outs of turning the evidence over to the police, I began
to wonder whether you might be smart enough to take on a
partner-a silent partner, of course. Once WR and Stewart
end up riding the needle, you’ll have all the money you can
spend. And I’m not greedy.”

She said nothing. She continued eyeing me with no trace
of emotion. “Why should I?”

I glanced over her shoulder at Jumbo. “I can think of two
good reasons. Life in prison is one. A needle up your arm is
another.”

She sneered. “You really think I killed John, don’t you?”

“I know you did. Your first mistake was that day in the parlor when you told Stewart `at least, I have an alibi.’ I
couldn’t help wondering later just how you knew their alibis
wouldn’t hold up unless you had set it up yourself. You hired
someone to play the lawyer with the porn. And Jumbo there
helped you by claiming the Tiger’s Den was closed on the
twenty-sixth, which destroyed your brothers’ alibis.”

“You can’t prove a thing.”

“No? I can prove you and Jumbo have a history back to
high school. I can prove there was no new will, the one you
claimed you learned of when your father called on the
twenty-fourth and said he was going to his attorney’s to sign
the new will.”

“He did call.”

“He couldn’t. He was in Lafayette, Louisiana”

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t make me laugh. When I talked
to him the day before he told me he was going to work on
his cars before he went to Goggins’ office”

“No. You made all that up. He didn’t call you. His phone
records don’t show any call to your number on the twentythird, but they do show one from you to him.”

She glanced around nervously. “It’s your word against
mine. You can’t prove I said he called me”

Clucking my tongue, I replied, “Wrong again, Annebelle.
WR and Jack were there. That’s the night WR asked you
how you knew you had been put back in the will.
Remember? They heard you say JW called you.”

She glared at me, hate boiling in her eyes. “So I got my
words mixed up. Sue me!”

I continued. “JW couldn’t have signed that will because
he was in Lafayette with Doc Raines the day you and your
friend Goggins claimed the new will was signed.”

She nibbled at her bottom lip. “They’re mistaken.”

I kept glancing at Jumbo, expecting him to erupt at any
second. I continued. “That isn’t all. You’re the one who
ordered the naphtha for your father, not Stewart”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about”

Shaking my head, I couldn’t suppress an amused grin.
“You can deny it all you want, but I have the phone records
showing you called the Vicksburg Auto Parts at the very
moment the order was placed. Your voice is similar to
Stewart’s. Doc Raines thought it was Stewart who called.”

“It was Stewart.”

“No. Neither his home phone nor salon phone called the
parts house. Besides, he had no way of knowing JW needed
cleaning fluid. The two hadn’t spoken in months” I paused,
then added, “What do you think Goggins is going to do
when the Mississippi Board of Attorneys starts action to
strip him of his license? I’ll tell you what. He’ll sing like one
of those Kentucky Warblers your father wanted to save”

Annebelle licked her lips, but kept her cold eyes fixed on
mine. “I couldn’t have killed John. I was in Jackson, at the
softball tournament. Nancy Carleton will swear to it,” she
said smugly. “I might have called about the naphtha, but I
was fifty miles away when John died.”

“I know you were in Jackson, but Nancy Carleton can’t
swear she was with you from one-thirty to five-fifteen or so
on Saturday the twenty-sixth.”

“I was scouting a ball game-the Monroe Marauders and
the Beaumont Raiders.”

I arched an eyebrow. Her face grew red. “Who won?”

She hesitated. “The Marauders”

“What was the score?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, shaking her head.

“Come on, Annebelle. It was only last Saturday.”

For several seconds she concentrated. “Oh, yeah. Now I
remember. Six, four, Marauders.”

I clucked my tongue. “If I were still a school teacher, I’d
have to give you an A on that answer. You were there at the
beginning and end. You’re in the video.”

A smug grin played over her face. “I told you”

Then I hit her between the eyes with the one piece of evidence that tied the case up. “Yes, but what you didn’t tell me was that at four-fifty that day, you were parked between mile
markers thirty-four and thirty-five on I-twenty getting a
warning ticket from the Mississippi Highway Patrol. You
just had enough time to get back before the five-thirty
game”

She glanced at Jumbo, who was staring at me with the
cold black eyes of a shark. From the blank expression in his
eyes, I couldn’t tell if any of this was registering with him
or not.

I just hoped Garrett was getting an earful. “Jumbo there is
Joe Basco’s cousin. Like I said, you and Jumbo go back to
middle school and high school in Jackson. It was through
Jumbo you were going to arrange to sell the thousand acres
to Basco and help you discredit your brothers’ alibis.”

She remained silent, her eyes seething with hate, her face
flushed. She appeared ready to explode.

I pushed her further. “You made a poor choice with your
lawyer. Your father had a habit of following up any major
decision with a letter confirming the decision. There are
dozens of such letters in his file at the attorney’s, but there’s
not one letter confirming the last will. And if JW Edney
actually requested a new will, a letter would be in the file.”

“Goggins probably misplaced it.”

I grinned. “Nice try, but the fact of the matter is, he had
no idea about the letters. Still doesn’t, nor do you.” Keeping
one eye on Jumbo, I continued. “But, you know what really
made me realize you were the one?”

She sneered. “Keep guessing.”

“Batting practice in Jackson. I had eliminated you as a
suspect because the killer had to be left-handed. On the first
DVD, you were batting right-handed. Then I saw the corrected version of the DVD” Her face tightened, her eyes
narrowed. She knew exactly what I was going to say. “I saw
you hitting practice balls to the players, but this time, it was
left-handed. That was the only way your father could have
received the injury to his head. I don’t exactly know what took place in the garage that day, but I’m guessing you found
your father working on one of his cars and maybe you told
him you’d come to straighten out the problems between you
two or something like that. Whatever the reason, you were
standing behind him when you struck him. Then you set the
fire and raced back to Jackson. Unfortunately for you, the
highway patrol stopped you”

Suddenly, she jumped back and pulled a silver-plated
revolver from inside her shirt. “Get back!”