Murder Me Sweetly
by Gary Clifton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
part 4
Harper caught up and they compared notes. Maggs walked up in the blazing heat, looking as fresh as Central Casting. Across the street, several children were in and around Granny LeBeck’s gas station/convenience store.
Granny was plump, fiftyish, with kind, blue eyes. Her gray hair was wound tightly in a bun; she wore one of those faces that never completely lost its smile.
“My God, officers, what monster could...” Her soft eyes brimmed. “These are my children. Merciful God, whatever... Anything I can do to help?”
Granny motioned for a clerk to take over and ushered them into a small office. Maggs gestured that she would stay in the store and talk to a few students.
“Officers, this is doubly tragic for me. What higher authority says lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place?”
McCoy and Harper, journeymen in a patient trade, waited.
“My very own little family was murdered by a monster twenty years ago. Home invasion... Butchered... House burned to God’s own ground.”
“In Dallas, ma’am?” Harper asked.
“Albuquerque,” she melted into sobs. “Albuquerque.”
McCoy found a shady spot down the block, called his clerk again, and asked her to send an inquiry to the Albuquerque PD and see if they would try to find background on the murder of Granny LeBeck’s family.
To cover more ground, they separated again. At just past six-thirty, they regrouped and agreed unanimously that the workday had ended. The heat had not.
As they waited to cross Fitzhugh, a visitor from another world stopped at the light. McCoy seized the driver with an iron stare. Trapped by the car in front of him, the driver did his best to shrink in the battered old Ford seat.
McCoy stepped into the street and motioned the Ford to the curb, partially out of the bumper-to-bumper parade. The frightened driver’s eyes suggested a run for it, but cowardice stifled his brief experiment with valor.
The old green Crown Vic had no A/C, as evidenced by the open windows. McCoy pulled the door open, put a gentler than usual hand on the driver’s shoulder, and helped him out. The rancid smell of overheated radiator filled the sticky air. Sweat glistened on the driver’s totally shaved head like the outer glass of a cold beer.
“Long time no see, Cue Ball,” McCoy said.
“McCoy, I ain’t did crap,” he wailed as he stumbled out of the Ford.
“When did you get out?” McCoy asked, then turned to Harper.
“Harper, you remember Charlie Frank Harris, also known as Cue Ball?”
“Do now.” Harper edged closer, sweating in the late afternoon heat. “Big in the Klan.”
“Cue Ball went to the joint behind a gay bar bombing over on Cedar Springs.”
“I remember.” Harper nodded.
“Cue Ball, do tell me you didn’t break out?” McCoy asked.
“No, no, McCoy, early release man. Paroled out three months ago.”
“You’ve always stayed out in the Grove.” McCoy studied the loser’s face. He was making reference to the Pleasant Grove District of far southeast Dallas. “Little off your grease here in east Dallas?”
“Working... uh, right up Gaston... At the body shop.”
“For Guidry? Well bless my soul,” McCoy crossed his arms. “Got a driver’s License, slick?”
Cue Ball started to reach back onto the seat of the Ford, then shot a glance over his shoulder at McCoy looming over him and thought better of it. Stepping back, he pointed instead. “Jes’ tuck the test again, after I got out. Receipt’s on the seat there. Ain’t did nothin’, McCoy.” Apprehension trembled his voice. McCoy leaned into the car and retrieved the application for a Texas driver’s License.
McCoy scribbled in his notebook and handed the application back to Cue Ball. “I find out you’re not one hundred percent righteous, dude, you aren’t gonna like what happens.”
Nodding furiously, a very nervous Cue Ball squeezed the old Ford back into traffic. McCoy watched the clunker work its way down Gaston and jotted the car license number in his notebook.
Maggs shaded her eyes from the blazing sun. “You just about scared Cue Ball into a fatal convulsion. Don’t think he likes you.” She peered after the smoking Ford.
“Maybe we oughta go back and kick Guidry’s skinny ass around a little,” McCoy said. “Little weasel didn’t tell me he had Cue Ball and the Klan in his body shop. This kid in the dumpster business wears on my normally tender nature.”
“Think a mope like Cue Ball coulda been involved with a dead kid in a dumpster?” Harper relit his stogie.
“Man learns hard ways in the joint, where women are non-existent.” McCoy squinted after the Ford. “He just said he’d been out three months. That’s enough to cover the time frame of the first burned kid. And Guidry volunteered he’d been in the Oklahoma Prison System for child molestation. That’s a poor pair of citizens, even if they were both buried in the same cardboard box in the county cemetery.”
Maggs, drifting into motherhood/nurse mode, gave McCoy a once-over as they checked their city cars into the motor pool.
“I have time for a drink or a bite to eat on the way home,” she said. “JoAnne is on evenings this month.” She was referring to her partner.
“Kid, those shrinks get word I’m declining an offer from a lady who looks as good as you, they’ll have me on the rubber gun squad. But, I’m okay.”
Maggs nodded and walked way, fully aware McCoy was not okay.
* * *
McCoy was still not okay when his phone rang at 4:17 a.m. His mindset slid further into the ditch when he heard another kid had been found in a burning dumpster three blocks from the one the night before. A lunatic’s appetite is unpredictable.
This time, McCoy beat Harper and Maggs to the scene. Cops and firefighters were present in numbers. Maggs and Harper arrived. She looked as shiny as a new silver dollar. Harper looked as if close inspection might reveal tire tread marks up his back. News media types were gathering like blowflies over roadkill.
Harper strolled up and said, “Two this close together plus the one last spring is bad news. The location of abductions is too similar. And don’t talk to that press bunch, guys.” He pointed his chin at the glut of newsies.
McCoy and Maggs shook their heads in unison as the field agent for the M.E.’s office walked over.
“The drill was not quite a repeat of the night before,” Maggs said. “The kid was wrapped in a blanket, but a corner-remnant of the wrapper disclosed a legible tag: “Heart of Texas Rodeo — Second Place — Bull Riding.”
“A DNA hit off that blanket might be somebody’s ass,” the M.E. said dropping the remnant into a plastic baggie and handing it to McCoy.
“That rodeo is right over east in Skinnerville,” Harper pointed. “Lemme see what I can do with this cell phone.”
By more luck than usual, Harper found somebody to talk rodeo at a bad hour. The manager of the rodeo officed out of his bedroom. The blanket had been awarded to Roger Jayson, with an address just around the corner.
Jayson’s wife answered the second-floor apartment door and advised her husband worked in a liquor store further east on Gaston.
The liquor store had not opened for the day, but a cluster of badges induced the clerk to unlock the door. Jayson was a tall, rangy, rawboned man who looked like a cowboy — with a severe limp. He leaned back against the store counter, arms folded.
“Yeah, I won that blanket.” He pointed to his gimpy left leg. “Before I got stomped by a bull who didn’t quite understand the rules.”
Twenty minutes of interrogation went nowhere. Jayson appeared sincerely to be unable to recall what had become of his blanket. Maggs, McCoy, and Harper were filing out when Jayson’s face came alive.
“Wait! Took my pickup to Guidry, the body man, couple weeks ago.” He pointed his chin. “Blanket was on the passenger seat. Now I think about it, it wasn’t there when I picked up the truck. I hadn’t missed it.”
Outside, Harper tasked a patrol officer to carry the blanket remnant to the lab at the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences with instructions to hang around and see if a mitochondrial DNA hit might miraculously be raised.
They were having a coffee at a joint on Gaston when Harper got a call from the M.E.’s office. Harper listened, smiled, hung up. “Good news. They raised a DNA sample from the blanket remnant the cop brought out. Bad news: no hit in any available data bases.”
McCoy called his office and, in ten minutes, they called back with confirmation of his hunch. The Oklahoma Prison System retained DNA samples, but lack of funds kept most from being submitted to databases. They did have a retained sample form Guidry’s time in the Springtown Unit which had not been submitted.
* * *
By 6:00 a.m. the following morning, McCoy and Maggs were breaking every speed limit in Oklahoma, headed north on U.S. Highway 69. After a reasonably short argument with a weary prison warden at the Stringtown Prison Unit, they were headed back south with a DNA sample. The warden had handed over a copy of Guidry’s entire file. Maggs thumbed it as McCoy sped along.
“Guidry is from Oklahoma.” She turned a page. “Born down at Hugo, nearly in Texas. All his family tree’s in here.”
“Does it say how many have tails?” McCoy smiled across the seat.
“Or how many knocked up their sister?” she chuckled.
They stopped back by the Institute of Forensic Science, tucked behind the sprawling Parkland Hospital/University of Texas Medical School complex on Harry Hines Boulevard.
In an hour, a smiling lab tech had stabbed Guidry squarely in the heart: “The guy who was in the joint in Oklahoma handled this blanket scrap,” she cheerily pronounced the sentence. “It’s only a preliminary mitochondrial hit, but it narrows the profile enough. I’ll guarantee it’s a match.”
“We need a hard sample from Guidry.” McCoy grinned and tapped the tech lightly on the back. “We can arrest Guidry for blanket theft, then get an in-custody DNA sample.”
In twenty minutes, they were spoiling Guidry’s day. McCoy smiled his best as Harper slipped the cuffs on Guidry. Guidry violently protested his innocence, with a ready story about DNA on the blanket.”
“Hey, I took that old raggedy blanket. Looked like junk to me. Used it as a chair cover. Dunno where it went. I’m thinkin’ I tossed it in the trash. Sure, I handled that damned thing, but I ain’t killed nobody.” His eyes flicked about like warring atoms.
“Where’s Cue Ball, your hired man?” Maggs asked.
“Uh... sucker didn’t show today. I ain’t did crap. Ain’t touched no kid.”
“Would you believe three kids?” McCoy said soberly.
Guidry was still shouting his innocence to everyone in Central Book-in when McCoy, Harper, and Maggs cleared the Sterrett Center just past 5:00 pm. Comfortable with the arrest, they all went separate ways.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Gary Clifton
