Bad To The Bone (8 page)

"What do you say, Bobby?" I called out.
"Think he's holed up with his sister in Rocky Mount?"

I heard a weird strangling sound in reply,
like Bobby had choked on a ham biscuit. I jumped up, prepared to
perform a trampoline-style version of the Heimlich maneuver, and
rushed into the outer office. I stopped short in surprise.

Robert Price stood uncertainly in our
doorway. He glanced back and forth between the newspaper spread
open on Bobby's desk and our stunned faces.

"You have to help me." His deep voice broke
as his eyes locked on mine. "I know you were at the beach. You saw
what she's like. You're the only one who will believe what I have
to say."

"Have a seat," I said calmly, though my
insides felt like I'd swallowed a fistful of Mexican jumping beans.
I'd given Bobby a signal and had no way of knowing whether he'd
interpreted it correctly. "How did you find out about me?"

"When they were talking to my lawyer and
trying to get me to cut a deal and come in, one of the detectives
claimed that you were willing to testify that I had a motive to
kill that Cockshutt guy."

I was going to strangle Dick-Dick when I saw
him, but odds were good I'd have to wait in line for the
privilege.

I didn't know what to say, so I bought some
time by looking Price over. He was grimy and his hair was matted.
His polo shirt was stained with sweat, his pants wrinkled, his
fingernails dirty. He hadn't slept in a bed the night before.

Price noticed me looking him over and
dropped his head in shame, then touched the ragged bandage wound
around his head. We both winced.

"The detective claims that you saw that
Cockshutt guy hit me at the beach in a dispute over Tiffany," he
said.

"I was there," I admitted reluctantly. "It
was a pretty ugly scene."

"Then you saw what she was like. You'll help
me."

"Saw what who was like?" I asked.

"My wife." He paused. “Tawny. She set me up.
I know she did."

"Look, Mr. Price," I said, as
sympathetically as I could. He was, after all, a hunted man and the
smell of fear was starting to fill my office. His eyes were glazed
with a watery film rimmed in yellow, and his breath was shallow.
Like I said, desperation makes me nervous. "Your wife came in here
badly beaten by you, with a legal court order granting her full
custody of her child." I forced myself to remember the damage he
had done. "She asked me to find out where you had taken the girl. I
found you. She came and got her daughter. End of story."

I took a couple snapshots of Tawny from a
drawer and tossed them across the desk. "You started it, so don't
blame me."

He hardly looked at the photos. "It's a
lie," he said, his voice cracking again.

"What's a lie?' I asked, trying not to stare
behind him into the hall. Damn it, Bobby—use your head. I'm trapped
in my office with a murderer.

"Everything." He picked up a photo and waved
it at me. "I didn't do this to her. I hadn't seen her in months
until that day at the beach. And I don't ever want to see her
again."

"Oh, yeah? Then how did you manage to get
your daughter away from your wife to take her to the beach?"

"Their neighbor brought her to me after
Tawny dumped Tiffany on her and disappeared for three days."

"What about the court order?" I asked.
"Granting her full custody?"

"No way," he said. Anger flashed in his
voice. "I'd never give up custody of my daughter. Whatever she
showed you was a lie. It's always a lie with her. You don't know
her. We have shared custody. It was my week. I didn't kidnap my
daughter. Tawny did when she showed up with that maniac to take her
back."

"Okay, Mr. Price," I said soothingly,
stalling for lime. "Make sure you tell that to your lawyer. I'm
sure they'll be able to straighten it out."

"You don't understand," he shouted, jumping
to his feet. He towered over me, his six and a half feet of anger
and frustration intimidating in the extreme. I inched my hand
toward the drawer where I stored my gun. God, but I was sorry I'd
ever set eyes on Tawny Bledsoe.

"Let me try to understand," I said calmly.
"Please, have a seat. I'll listen."

He remained standing. "My wife is..." He
groped for words. "My wife is empty inside. She lies and she steals
as easily as the rest of us breathe. She doesn't care about anyone
but herself. She only pretends to care when she thinks she can get
something out of you. She doesn't even care about her
daughter."

"Then why would she go through the trouble
of hiring me to find Tiffany?" I asked. No sounds yet from the
outer office. Come on, Bobby, come on.

"Because she was using you to frame me, to
make it look like I had a motive to kill. I dumped her and she'll
never forgive me for that. She has to win and that means taking me
down. Forever." His words were a hiss. "She is empty inside. Empty
and evil." He slapped a palm on my desk. The sound echoed like a
gunshot. My fingers touched the drawer pull and I rested them
there, waiting.

"What the fuck is the matter with you
people?" Price yelled when I did not respond. "Why can't any of you
believe me? Just because she's small and blond and acts so
helpless, why the hell can't anyone see her for what she really is?
She's been doing this for years, do you understand? For years.
Getting away with hurting people, and taking from people, and lying
and stealing, and now she's going to get away with murder." His
voice dropped to a whisper, making him sound even crazier. "I've
been calling people about her. I've been asking them. You go. You
ask them. They'll tell you."

"Ask who?" I said, checking the clock. He'd
been in my office for eight minutes and it felt like eight
months.

"Ask her ex-husband. Ask her kids. Ask the
people she's worked with."

"She doesn't have any kids except for
Tiffany," I said, knowing then that he was unstable.

"Yes, she does," he shouted back. 'That's
what I'm saying. She lies and her lies are getting worse. They
don't make sense anymore. They can be found out. And do you know
why?" Unwillingly, I looked up. He was frightened yet excited, his
pupils dilated, the whites of his eyes frozen wide. "She's
slipping," he confided in a hoarse whisper. "She's obsessed with
getting older. She's getting these wrinkles, you see, little ones
around her eyes and mouth." He clawed at his eyes and leaned even
closer to me. "She knows she won't be able to get away with her act
much longer. The evil is showing on her face. Men aren't going to
fall for it anymore. So she's desperate. And if she's desperate,
she's dangerous."

I looked away, embarrassed. I was filled
with sadness for the broken man standing before me.

His voice came back full force. "Listen to
me, please." He grabbed my arm, forcing me to look at him. "She
lied to you, so that she could set me up for murder. No one is
going to believe me. Don't you see? I'm the perfect fall guy. I'm a
black man and she's what she is. And now she has you to tell the
world I had a motive. No one will stand up for me. My own people
abandoned me when I married her. I have no one to believe me.
Except for you. You have to help me. You have to. I don't have
anyone else." His voice broke and he began to sob, his shoulders
heaving with every ragged breath. "My daughter can't be left with
her. She'll destroy Tiffany. You can't let her do this."

"Mr. Price," I began, but, at long last,
without so much as a warning cough, four cops burst into my office.
Two of them jumped on Price and knocked him to the ground. He hit
his head on the chair on the way down, triggering a fresh flow of
blood from his scalp wound. He started to struggle and two more
cops piled on him. They grabbed his arms and jerked him upright.
They threw him against a wall, kicked his legs apart and cuffed his
hands behind his back.

"You're making a mistake," he started to
say, but one of the cops kneed him in the soft spot of his left
calf and he almost crumpled to the floor.

"That's enough," I said more loudly than I'd
intended. The cops stared at me. "You have him. Now get him out of
here. He's sick. He needs help."

They took turns dragging him through our
outer office. Price dwarfed the officers and their vague fear made
the four men even more aggressive. They prodded and jerked him
along. Price alternated between trying to struggle and allowing
himself to be dragged. It was pitiful and it was pathetic. It left
a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn't anything I ever wanted to see
again.

"Don't you get it?" Price shouted as the
cops threw him out the front door. "It was too easy. The way you
found me. She knew where I was. She set you up, too. She's using
you. Just check the court papers. You'll see it's a lie." His voice
faded as the cops hustled him into a waiting squad car.

"God almighty," Bobby said. "What the hell
was he saying to you? I was ten seconds away from busting in with
my shotgun when the frigging cops arrived."

"I don't know," I said, my stomach filling
with an acrid dread. "But I got a real bad feeling that what he was
trying to tell me was the truth."

"You
can't."

"I can."

"You can't."

"I can," I told Bobby. "And I am."

"There's no percentage in it. All you're
going to do is lose us more money."

"Bobby," I explained. "This isn't about
money. This is about some skinny, chicken-necked little twat
thinking she can make a fool out of me by batting her eyelashes. If
even a little bit of what Robert Price says is true, than that
woman sat there in my chair and dredged up some perverted version
of sisterhood to get me to help her send an innocent man to jail.
She is going to pay for that. No one takes me for a fool. No
one."

"Sheesh," Bobby grumbled. "That's if what
Price said was true. Remind me to stay on your good side."

"Want to stay on my good side? Help me get
to the truth."

"Me? No way." He rummaged around in a
shopping bag on the floor and came up with a box of Little Debbie
Raisin Cakes, which he placed on his desk as reverently as if it
were the golden ark. He selected four of the cakes for a snack.
"All that excitement is bad for my heart," he confided.

"I'm gonna be bad for your heart if you
don't help me."

"What can I do?" he asked indignantly.

"You can find out who the court reporter was
on the Price versus Bledsoe custody case. I want to talk to
them."

"What was wrong with the court papers? You
saw them."

"I saw them, but they may be fake. And I'll
bet you dollars to doughnuts that the actual court papers are
sealed. Otherwise, she'd never risk passing off phony ones as
genuine. It would be too easy to check."

"This is why I never had children," Bobby
said. "It brings out the worst in people." But he reached for the
phone anyway, leaving me to ponder the horrifying thought of little
no-necked, roly-poly Bobby D.'s populating the earth.

By the next night, I was sitting in a
country diner twelve miles east of Raleigh staring at the
scrawniest woman I had ever seen. Her dark hair was wound into a
protruding bulb on top of her head and she wore a black dress with
white cuffs. I felt like I was having dinner with Olive Oyl. I
resisted the urge to eat spinach, and ordered a plate of
chicken-and-dumplings instead.

My companion was picking at a salad that
looked as if it had been hanging around for a week hoping to be
noticed. We discussed Bobby for a few minutes, but when it became
apparent that the court reporter didn't know he now had a steady
girlfriend, I steered the subject to Price versus Bledsoe.

"It was an awful case," she told me. "Judge
Poe even ordered a sealed courtroom. Price's lawyer argued that his
client's public position would attract the media, to the detriment
of the child. Judge Poe agreed."

"So you could technically get in trouble for
talking to me?" I asked.

The woman nodded. "More than
technically."

"Then why are you doing it?"

She pushed a mushy tomato around. "You said
that this was about Robert Price's arrest for murder? Right?"

"Right."

She looked around to see if anyone could
overhear her. "I just don't believe he could do something like
that," she whispered. "Even if he is a you-know-what. I mean, he
may be colored, but he is well-educated. He sounds just like you
and me."

Well, not quite. He had at least four years
of higher education on both of us—and it showed. But who was I to
quibble?

“To be perfectly honest," the court reporter
added, "he is quite a nice-looking man. Considering. I can even see
how the wife might have crossed that line, you know?" She raised an
eyebrow at me and I nodded. "I mean, marrying someone not of her
own color and all."

She looked around the diner again. Matched
sets of sturdy country folk sat quietly, downing their quotas of
starch and fatty meats. No one wore a white hood over his head, so
I guess she felt safe enough to continue.

"My ex-husband would kill me for saying so,"
she whispered. "But for a colored man, Robert Price was deeply
concerned about his daughter. More than the mother, if you ask
me."

I could tell she was at war with her own
bigotry. She had been raised to distrust and fear anyone different
from her, especially black men, but being tell and awkward— not to
mention homely—she probably didn't dig petite blonds much either.
Especially ones who twitched their butts like lightning bugs in
heat.

"What made you feel Price was a good
father?" I asked.

"A couple of things," she said. "He agreed
to the child support amount immediately, though it was quite high.
And when the wife said she wanted alimony as well, so she could
stay home and take care of the little girl, the husband agreed to
that. But," she paused for dramatic effect, "he wanted it
stipulated that she could not engage nonfamily baby-sitters for
more than ten hours a week."