Ted didn’t think this would be a problem. A lot of women would give their left tit for a shot at being the first lady and couldn’t care less how many women their husband fucked on the road to the White House, as long as he got them there.
He’d have to come to a financial understanding with his ex-wife, too. She knew too much about him and would have to be paid off handsomely, but his guys told him that was no problem. Money solved all problems in the end.
President Ted Rawlings,
Ted thought as he padded into his dark living room,
I really like the sound of that.
He didn’t realize until he turned the light on that he wasn’t alone. Someone sat there, in Ted’s favorite recliner in the dark, waiting for him. Ted recognized the man immediately and glowered.
“You!” Ted said. “What the fuck are you doing in here? This is my home.”
“Sit down, Ted.”
“Why? What do YOU want?”
S
lick and Camilla
met Doris Carlson early the next morning at the diner, the very same diner that Slick had been arrested in, though he didn’t think she was aware of that fact. She looked more haggard than she did before, but greeted both Camilla and Slick warmly nonetheless. They joined her in a back corner booth and Slick noted that the rest of the customers kept a polite and respectful distance from the mourning widow.
“Thank you so much for meeting with us,” Camilla said. “I know this is a difficult time for you and I’m so very sorry to bother you.”
“It’s fine, honey. I’m sorry I took so long to call you back,” Doris said. “I just had to get out of the house, off of that ranch. If I stayed there one minute longer I was going to pull my hair out. I have a friend who I know from antiquing, she lives in the mountains and she invited me stay with her for as long as I needed. I went up there for a couple days.”
Doris paused as the waitress came by with menus, listened patiently as the woman offered her condolences and told her that her money was no good here. Doris thanked her and asked for tea, nothing else. Camilla and Slick ordered the same and the waitress bustled off. Doris sighed.
“They tell you, the grief experts, that it gets better. That it never goes away, not completely, but the pain lessens over time as one gains perspective and distance. That’s what they say. Maybe that’s how it works for some folks, but that’s sure as hell not my experience. Each day it just gets worse and worse. I miss him so much.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I know it’s not gonna get better with time, either. Roger and I never got over the loss of Jim. I kept hoping it would get better but it never, ever did. It just got worse. In fact, it put Roger over the edge, that’s why he got involved in crazy politics and conspiracy ideas, all that stuff. He’d spend hours on the phone or online arguing about stuff like that. I couldn’t bear to listen to it, I couldn’t. If I never heard the words nine-eleven ever again, that would far too soon.
“I hope you don’t think too poorly of my husband, I’m not criticizing him and his little political squabbles.” Doris ran her hands back through her hair, took another deep breath. “He was a good man, everyone liked him. Even in an argument, you couldn’t stay angry at him. He just needed someone to tussle with once Jim was gone, he needed somebody to blame for what happened. So he got caught up in all that crackpot conspiracy theory garbage.”
“Conspiracy theories?” Camilla asked. “Like what?”
“You know, the usual. How the towers were an inside job, bombs set inside to detonate the towers, by the government, in order to scare folks and get them to do what you want. He had a name for it, I forget what it was called again…”
“A false flag,” Slick said.
“Yes, that’s it. A false flag operation. He went on and on about it. Mr. Elder, you saw his office, you saw what a mess that was. Notes and scribbles everywhere. I thought it’d go away, after time, but it only got worse and worse. He wrote letters to his Congressmen, he attended rallies. It’s how he grieved for our son.”
She sighed again. “I’d be irritated, listening to him holler on the phone, but now that he’s gone, damn it … it’s just too quiet. So quiet that I think I might just bust sometime. Both my men dead and gone and me left with nothing but dust bunnies. So I got out. I only came back to get some personal things and, well, get started on the paperwork.”
“Paperwork?” Camilla asked.
“Yeah, I decided to sell the old place after all. I can’t stay there without losing my mind and I’m fooling myself to think I’d be any kind of farmer anyhow. That was all Roger’s deal, he handled that end of things.”
“That’s something we wanted to ask you, Mrs. Carlson. Had there been offers on the farm, and if so, from whom?
“Please, call me Doris. There’ve been offers for it, off and on, over the past year or so. Maybe a little longer than that. Seems like we got a new one every month. That was Roger’s thing, he always dealt with the business, not me.”
“Was it the same company each time?”
“Uh, no. Of that I’m pretty sure. Because Roger always wanted to know who the company was, what they did and what they were gonna do to the land. I don’t know why, I think he didn’t want any munitions factories or fracking or anything like that. Roger was dead set against war and very pro-environment. So it was different companies, making different offers. You’d have to ask Del Martin, he handled most them, not all, but at least half of the offers. He’d know more and probably the names of any other realtors sniffing around. I know there were other realtors besides Del. I’m meeting Del this afternoon, he’ll sell the place for me.”
“Do you remember Roger’s reactions to the offers?”
“Other than, ‘Oh, hell no’? I don’t really, but I have to be honest—” She caught herself here. “I tuned him out over the past few months. Just stopped listening.”
“Why the last few months? Was he worse than usual?” Slick asked.
“Well, now that you mention it, there was a bit more shouting than usual.”
“Did he say anything lately that you remember? Do you remember any particular arguments with any of these guys about their offers, anything unusual?”
Doris thought hard as the waitress brought tea for everyone.
“Roger … he never discussed any of his political ideas with me. He never said anything, because he knew it just made me angry. I snapped at him because of it once … and he never brought it up around me again. He kept his distance. So I don’t know.”
“Anything you may have overheard or seen on his desk that was … out of the ordinary for him, anything at all?”
“You think it might have something to do with Roger’s murder?”
“We don’t know, we’re looking at all angles.”
“It wasn’t Pedro, was it?”
“No, definitely not Pedro.”
“I knew Pedro would never do anything like that. But…” Doris closed her eyes. “But you think somebody may have killed my Roger just to get the place from us?”
“It’s a possibility. We don’t know for sure. Can you think of anything?”
Doris clenched her fists, emotion bubbling close to the surface.
“I’m so sorry to bother you with this,” Slick said, “but—”
“No, it’s okay. I understand,” Doris said. “A day or so before he was … he was shouting at someone over the phone, I was in the kitchen and he was in the yard, I could hear him through the window. I thought it was another offer on the farm, he had that tone he always had when he … talked to realtors, even Del, who he liked. He said, ‘Bullshit, I researched it!’ and something I couldn’t hear and then he said, ‘Fifty thousand per year. Per year! It’s a factory for profit, not for…’ and I missed what he said after that. And then he said, ‘I’m going tell them,’ and he shouted a bit more about letting the public know and hung up.
“He was smiling when he came in, and went right to his office to write something, but he didn’t tell me what it was about and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. I figured it was another one of his lost liberal causes. He did that, like, once a month, he’d find some terrible injustice on the Internet or something and threatened to tell the world. I never thought there was anything to any of it, never. Oh my God. Oh my God, Roger.”
Doris lowered her head as tears finally came through. Camilla’s phone rang. She checked the caller ID and excused herself to answer it.
“Did Ted know?” Doris asked. “He had to have known, that’s why he was dead certain on Pedro, despite what I told him.”
“We don’t know what Ted knew,” Slick said.
“He had to have known. Damn him,” Doris said.
“Yes, I know exactly where he is,” Camilla said into the phone. “He’s here having breakfast with me right now and … at City Diner. Why? Javier? Javier!”
Camilla looked at her phone then at Slick, concerned. But Slick wasn’t looking at her. He stared over her shoulder. Deputies Brower and Collins pushed into the diner, followed by four other deputies. They didn’t come in sloppy this time, either. They all had their weapons drawn and aimed right at Slick.
“Hands where I can see them, right now!” Brower shouted.
“Doris,” Slick said. “I’d like to read those letters Roger wrote. Can you get his computer and give it to Camilla? I think I’m going to be busy for a little while.”
“H
ands where I
can see them!” Brower shouted again.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Camilla demanded, keeping her body between the deputies and Slick.
“Out of the way, counselor, we have a warrant to arrest that man. Move!”
Collins and two other deputies fanned out. Diners scattered out of the way. Slick kept his hands on the table and did not move.
“On what charge?” Camilla demanded again.
“Out of the way, counselor! I’m not going to tell you again!”
“Not until you give me an explanation! What charge?”
“Counselor, I’m not going to tell you again—”
“You think I’m going to let you arrest this man on a bullshit charge so you can beat him again in custody? So he can end up like Pedro Garcia? You don’t give me orders, deputy! You tell me right now what charge or—”
“You’ll either move or I’ll have YOU arrested and charged with obstruction!”
Doris stood up. “Then you’ll have to charge me, too.”
Brower shook that off. “Collins, move them both out of the way.”
Collins holstered his weapon, charged forward and grabbed each woman by the arm. A diner stood up, a big man, a local farmer.
“You got no cause to arrest Doris,” the man said quietly. “It ain’t right.”
A couple more local men stood up. Slick noticed that these men were armed, as was sometimes the custom in these parts. The deputies got still.
“You arrest Doris, you’re gonna have to arrest all of us,” another man said. More diners stood up and stepped closer, aligning themselves with the others. “And we ain’t gonna like being arrested, I’ll tell you that much. It ain’t American, being arrested without cause.”
“Look, everyone, back away. That’s an official police order. You’re obstructing justice, so move aside. Now!” Brower said. The men didn’t move. “Mrs. Carlson, counselor, I’m not going to tell you again. Out of the way. All of you.”
The diners just stood there, silent but united against the deputies. Brower swallowed, this wasn’t how this was supposed to go.
“That’s an order!”
“You gonna beat this man here to death, like you did the other? Doris too?” one of the men said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be giving orders, if that’s how you run things.”
The other diners nodded at that, hands on their weapons.
“This is your last warning,” Brower said.
“And yours,” said another diner. Their intent was clear. “No one hurts Doris.”
“Calm down, everyone, please,” Camilla said as she tried to pull herself out of Collins’s grip but he was too strong. “Let go of me!”
“What the FUCK are you doing!” A bellow from the diner doorway startled the deputies and they instinctively turned their heads.
Bad training,
Slick thought.
Javier stood at the door, his eyes burning. He barreled forward toward Collins, knocking tables and chairs out of the way. He grabbed the big deputy by the front of his shirt and shoved him aside. Collins stumbled backward.
“Don’t you ever, ever touch her, ever again. You understand me?” Javier said. “You even THINK to put your hands on her again and I will personally take your nuts off and put them in a cup on my desk, you understand me, asshole?”
“Agent Rivera—” Brower said.
“Shut up!” Javier barked at him. “You’ve fucked enough things up. I’ve got this. Back off.”
“Javier, what’s going on?” Camilla said.
“Camilla, we have to arrest this man. Stand back and let the process—”
“Arrested for what?”
“Murder.”
“Murder? Who—”
“Ted didn’t show up today. They went to his house and found his body. Somebody broke in and shot him. This man here did it. Now stand aside.”
“T
hat’s impossible!” Camilla
sputtered.
“It’s not, he did it,” Javier said. “Just step aside and let these men—”
“Javier, you know what will happen if he goes into custody, you KNOW what they’ll do to him once they get him—”
“They won’t. I’ll be there every step of the way. I’ll walk him through it and make sure that he gets to his expensive lawyer in one piece. Any of these deputies here try for any type of payback and I’ll eat their lunch, you have my word on that. Now just step back, please. Everyone. Please.”
Javier took her elbow, gently, and led her aside. “Mrs. Carlson, you, too.”
Slick held his hands up, slowly. Brower and Collins moved forward.
“On your feet, sport,” Javier said. “You should have left town when I told you to and left justice to the professionals.”
Slick did as he was told. The deputies cuffed him, none too gently.
“Jon Elder, you’re under arrest for the murder of Ted Rawlings,” Brower said. “You have the right to remain silent, the right—”
“I understand my rights,” Slick said.
“Javier, it can’t be, he didn’t do it,” Camilla said. “I know he didn’t do it!”