The Queen of Cool (31 page)

“
I think I have to
Detective Manny,” Mrs. Williams said. “If I die, what I know dies
with me. You’re not going to write it down now, are
you?”

Manny shook his head.

“
How are you getting away
with all of this…?” Mrs. Williams squinted as if she was trying to
read his mind. “…sneaky stuff?”

“
My supervisor put me on
administrative leave,” Manny said. “Doctors orders. Didn’t you
notice my bad back? I can barely walk. Stairs are almost
impossible. You didn’t notice?”

“
I always liked you,” Mrs.
Williams said.

“
The feeling is mutual,”
Manny said. “Lo, did you ever look through the appreciation
journal?”

“
Can’t bear it,” Lo
said.

“
You’re going to need to go
through it and the rest of what you took from the safe,” Manny
said. “We know Don used his twenty minutes well. He may have left
something or wrote something there.”

Lo nodded.

“
Did you ever talk to that
woman Donny was with when he died?” Mrs. Williams asked.

“
Jean-Jean?” Manny asked.
“I interviewed her for the case. She’s Sy’s aunt.”

“
She is?” Lo stood up. “I
knew this was not the place for me.”

Shaking her head, she moved toward the door
of the office.

“
You want to find out what
happened to your husband?” Mrs. Williams asked. “You better put
that crazy away, Lorraine.”

Feeling scolded, Lo went back in her chair.
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes until Sy showed
up with a tray of pie and a carafe of coffee. Lo glared at him.

“
What?” Sy asked. “What did
I do?”

“
She’s mad about
Jean-Jean,” Manny gave a ‘women are crazy’ shrug. Lo threw a balled
up paper napkin at him.

“
What did Auntie Jeanie do
to her?” Sy set the tray on the desk.

“
Don happened to die in her
presence,” Mrs. Williams said.

“
Don didn’t die in her
presence, Lo,” Sy said. “He died with you.”

Lo flushed with intense emotion. Lisa and
Larry came to the door of the office. Seeing Lo’s face, they stood
in the doorway.

“
And you want to know why
he died with you?” Sy poured more decaffeinated coffee in her cup.
“Auntie Jeanie.”

“
What are you talking
about?” Lo asked.

“
Auntie Jeanie has a
powerful gift,” Sy said. “I told Don about my aunt. She can hold a
soul and body together. He called her when he knew he was dying. If
she could have saved him, she would have. But you can’t stop death
when it’s already on its way. She only delayed it long enough for
you to get there.”

“
But…”

“
You were with a client,”
Sy said. “Did you ever answer your phone when you were with a
client?”

“
But…”

“
Did you ever wonder why he
didn’t call you the moment he knew he was dying?” Sy asked. “You
wouldn’t have answered your phone. That’s what Auntie Jeanie
said.”

“
But…”

“
Doesn’t make it easier,”
Sy said. “I’m furious with Auntie Jeanie for not saving Renee. She
tried but… Nobody can stop death once it’s already on its way.
Auntie Jeanie can only delay it a while, but cannot stop it. I know
that but it doesn’t mean that I’m not pissed as hell. It’s not
rational, but that’s how I feel.”

Her emotions whirling inside, Lo focused on
her coffee. The entire room took on the dark cast of Sy’s and Lo’s
strong emotions.

“
Maybe we should move on,”
Manny said.

“
You all aren’t going to
make it,” Mrs. Williams said. “You, Simon; and you, baby Lo; you
need to get connected to the right here and right now. Or you
aren’t going to be here in a year.”

Mrs. Williams’ words hung in the air. Lo
looked up at the elderly woman. Mrs. Williams reached over to
squeeze her hand.

“
It’s very hard when your
partner dies,” Mrs. Williams said. “But you have to go on. For
them. You have to go on. The problem with you two is that you don’t
want to.”

Unsure of how to respond, Lo focused on her
coffee. Sy didn’t say anything. Lo looked up to see Lisa sitting
down next to her. As if to force Lo to try to go on, Lisa grabbed
Lo’s hand.

“
Maybe we should get back
to Manny’s unresolved list,” Larry said.

“
Good plan.” Manny shifted
in his chair to get his notebook. He flipped a few pages and looked
up. “I was never able to figure out what Marilyn’s role was in all
of this. By every account, Marilyn loved Don like a
son.”

“
He used to say that she
was his surrogate mother,” Lo said. “She was his secretary when I
met him. It seemed like they had always been together.”

“
Right,” Manny said. “Why
would she be involved in all of this?”

Lo shrugged.

“
Anyone?” Manny
said.

“
I think I may know,” Mrs.
Williams said.

While she collected her thoughts, all eyes
turned to the elderly woman. She nodded as if she’d made a
decision.

“
Marilyn’s husband, Pete,
and my Grover were on the civilian maintenance crew at the Air
Force Base,” Mrs. Williams said. Seeing only confused eyes, she
added, “What’s now the Navy Air Station? It was Carswell Air Force
Base. They converted in the 90s.”

“
Right before I enlisted,”
Larry said. “I remember that.”

“
Where the VX was stored?”
Sy asked.

“
Exactly,” Mrs. Williams
said. “My Grover thought there was something funny going on out
there. He used to tell me that someday he was going to figure it
out.”

“
What did he think was
going on?” Manny asked.

“
I don’t think he knew,”
Mrs. Williams said. “Grover and Pete worked the opposite shift from
each other for years. I don’t think they actually met until just
before the accident.”

“
What accident?” Sy
asked.

“
Let’s let her tell her
story in her own way,” Manny said.

“
Thank you, son,” Mrs.
Williams said.

“
You were talking about
Grover’s work?” Manny smiled.

“
Right,” Mrs. Williams
said. “Around about the late 1970s – I remember because my La Shay
was just born – Grover walked in on something he couldn’t explain.
Now, as a maintenance man at a military base, you can imagine he
walked in on a lot of monkey business. But this wasn’t sex or drugs
or whatever. This was weird. Weird enough for Grover to take
pictures.”

“
Of what?” Larry
asked.

“
It didn’t look like
anything to me,” Mrs. Williams said. “But I had a bunch of babies
at home and… Anyway, I thought it was some fool thing. Grover said
that things, military things, would appear at night and disappear
in the morning.”

“
Things?” Manny
asked.

“
They looked like metal
boxes,” Mrs. Williams said. “It seemed to happen in this one
building of the base. Like a warehouse. I’m sorry. I haven’t
thought on this for a long, long time.”

“
You said Grover took
pictures?” Manny asked.

“
He set up a camera in this
building,” Mrs. Williams said. “It took pictures of what was going
on there. Grover was worried that military supplies were being
stolen from the base. He felt very responsible for the base. The
idea that someone was stealing from the base offended him. He’d
been in Korea at the end of the war. He knew what it was to be cold
and alone in the middle of a foreign country. He couldn’t stand the
idea that someone might steal supplies from soldiers who needed
them.”

Sy shifted in his seat. Manny held up his
hand to stop him from speaking. Mrs. Williams fell silent,
collecting her thoughts.

“
I haven’t thought of this
in a long time,” Mrs. Williams said. “And I promise you, I never
thought of it in connection to all of this… garbage.”

“
We know that if there was
anything you could have done, you would have,” Lisa
said.

Lo and Larry nodded.

“
I just hate to think that
I knew something that could have saved your momma or your Donny,”
Mrs. Williams looked Lo in the eyes and sniffed at her tears. “They
were good people.”

“
You were talking about
some photos?” Manny tried to nudge Mrs. Williams back into less
emotional waters.

“
Right,” Mrs. Williams
smiled at Manny for helping her get back on track. “Grover took a
roll of film showing these metal boxes moving in and out of this
one warehouse. In those days, of course, there wasn’t digital.
People used Polaroid, but they were expensive and mostly used by
perverts. Most people took their film to Fort Worth Photo. Grover
took his film there.

“
I guess that brings up
another good point. Fort Worth wasn’t like it is now. Everyone we
knew worked at the base. They were either military or civilian. It
took a lot of people to keep the base running. The whole town was
more like a military town than as fancy as it is now. So it
shouldn’t have been any big surprise that Grover’s photos caught
someone’s attention.”

“
What do you mean?” Manny
asked.

“
Well, they didn’t have
twenty-four-hour photo or any such thing in those days,” Mrs.
Williams said. “He dropped off the film and left the ticket for me
to pick them up when I was running errands. I picked them up maybe
a week and a half after he dropped them off. Grover went through
them that night. When he saw them, he was furious. Pictures missing
and the negatives were all cut up. He accused me or the kids of
tampering with them, which of course we didn’t do.”

“
So you never saw these
pictures?” Manny asked.

“
I saw Pete’s,” Mrs.
Williams said. “Grover met Pete about the same time. Pete had
decided to meet the guy who worked the opposite shift as he had. He
wanted to know what Grover knew. They started talking and found out
that they were both in Korea at the same time. Of course, they
became best friends overnight. You can imagine my surprise. There
we are with five little kids living in the Fairmount and suddenly
we’re best friends with this childless white couple from
Austin.”

Mrs. Williams smiled.

“
Those were good days,”
Mrs. Williams said. “Anyway, Pete borrowed a Polaroid from his
uncle. Between the two of them, they were able to track what
happened in that building twenty-four hours a day.”

“
And what was happening?”
Lo asked.

“
I can only say that these
metal boxes would show up, and vans from Donny’s dad’s air
conditioning company, that HDAC, would take them away,” Mrs.
Williams said. “Grover and Pete had a meeting set up with their
supervisor on the day of the accident.”

Mrs. Williams fell silent. She gave a long
sigh.

“
A bunch of metal piping
fell on my Grover. Killed him instantly,” Mrs. Williams said.
“Crushed Pete’s legs. Grover pushed him out of the way. That’s why
Pete didn’t die, but he never walked again. That’s when Marilyn
went back to work. Me too. We stayed in touch for a few years but…
I was so overwhelmed with the kids and everything that I didn’t
even think of her until Donny said something to me about her. We
had lunch a couple of times a year since Lo’s mother
died.”

“
And the photos?” Manny
asked.

“
I gave the photos to Lo’s
father when he asked me about the packing slip,” Mrs. Williams
said. “You don’t have them.”

Lo, Lisa and Larry shook their heads.

“
How did Marilyn come in
possession of the inhaler?” Manny asked. “Terrell says the FBI
found only Marilyn and Don’s fingerprints are on the
Albuterol.”

“
She used to pick up his
prescriptions,” Lo said. “She did everything for him. She would
have darned his socks if he had let her. She must have picked it up
and given it to him.”

“
So they pass out VX at the
Walgreens?” Sy asked.

“
Too much coincidence for
me,” Larry said.

“
Unless they were trying to
kill her too,” Lo said. “She must have known she gave him the
Albuterol that killed him.”

“
Lorraine is absolutely
right,” Mrs. Williams said. “If she thought she’d killed Donny, she
would have killed herself. No question. She loved him.”

“
That’s why she killed
herself?” Lisa asked. “That makes sense.”

“
But why kill Marilyn?” Lo
asked. “She was the sweetest woman you could imagine. She never had
a cross word to say about anyone. Don doted on her like a dear
aunt.”

“
Unless…” Manny started.
All eyes turned to him.

“
Unless?” Sy
asked.

“
We’ve been looking,
looking, looking for something Don wrote or said, right?” Manny
asked. “What if he gave it to Marilyn? What if Marilyn had all the
answers to all of these puzzles? They’d have to kill
her.”

“
If she had all the
answers,” Larry asked. “Where are they?”

“
I know exactly where,”
Mrs. Williams said. “And I have the keys.”