Faithful Unto Death (18 page)

Wanderley had started to cut me off, but now he watched HD, the guitar pick peeking out between his teeth.

“I’m not sorry.” He dipped his head emphatically. “Graham Garcia took and took and took from Honey and didn’t give her a thing back.”

“So why confess?”

He scootched his chair closer to the table.

“Because Alex has got to get out of that place, that’s why. I know what goes on in these places to young men. I don’t believe for a second you’re keeping that boy safe. And he’s missing school.”

He took in our surprise.

“What?”

“Mr. Parker.” Wanderley was almost kind. “We aren’t keeping Alex Garcia. We didn’t even keep him overnight. He’s in school right now, unless he cut classes again. Didn’t your daughter tell you?”

HD turned to me and I nodded.

“I saw him night before last, HD. I know Honey would have called you. What made you think Alex was still in custody?”

He puzzled on this.

“Where’s Fredrick?” HD looked to the door, patted his pockets for his phone.

“Is that why you confessed? Because you were afraid for Alex?”

“Are you telling me Alex isn’t a suspect anymore?” HD addressed this to Wanderley and Dortch.

“We think he can help us with more information than he’s been willing to supply so far, but—”

HD cut him off.

“Uh-huh. Doesn’t matter. I did it and it was the right thing to do.” He crossed his arms. “Let’s get on with it.”

It was an hour later before I left that room and I hadn’t learned anything more.

Twenty-two

R
ebecca gave me two messages that sent me halfway across the city for something that could and should have been handled over the phone, but I went. Afterward, I stopped at one of the rolling trailer taquerias that cater to the construction crowd and got three pork tacos on soft corn tortillas and an icy bottle of Mexican Coke. Cost me a total of six dollars. And I got all the fresh pico de gallo and homemade hot sauce I asked for, too.

Loooooove taquerias. It was Annie Laurie who first introduced me to the pleasures of what my high school friends had dismissed as “roach mobiles.” Annie and I were taking Highway 6 to Galveston, and when we passed one on the road, she demanded I U-turn and get her some tacos. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t, and when I saw the
abuelita
cooking in there and, oh mercy,
smelled
what the little grandmother was cooking, I was a convert. Annie Laurie doesn’t have a snobby bone in her. Good is good and she doesn’t care where she finds it. I love that about the girl.

Along with some men in hard hats, I sat in the shade at the nearby picnic table, bowed my head for a brief prayer, and enjoyed my lunch. The hard hats noticed my Blue Bonnet Bowl ring and started up a conversation I could only half participate in—my Spanish is too slow. I was sorry when they piled into a pickup and headed back to work. They had been keeping my mind off Jenasy’s story.

Nat had thought it would be a good idea for me to tell Jenasy’s story to Detective Wanderley. He’d gotten Jenasy’s permission. I wanted to know why it wasn’t a good idea for Nat to tell Wanderley. Nat hemmed and hawed. He said that while, technically, it wouldn’t be a problem—there was a longish pause—he’d be much more comfortable if I did the telling.

We stood there looking at each other until it hit me that Graham might have told Nat this story; Graham might have told him in the confessional. So though Nat had the story from Jenasy, too, and her story didn’t bind him, Nat didn’t want to disclose the story himself and violate Graham’s confession. That’s paring the apple pretty finely, but I won’t criticize a man for trying too hard to do the right thing.

After this morning, I was unsure about telling Wanderley about the work angle—it seemed like HD’s confession made the work connection moot.

Finally I decided that it was bad enough not telling Wanderley what Alex had seen between his father and the girl who wasn’t Jo. I could at least give him Jenasy’s story, and Wanderley could do what he would with it. I would keep my appointment.

They were pretty heavy feet, the ones that took me back into that police station.

Wanderley didn’t have an office. I should have known that from all the cop shows I’ve watched. He had a desk in a room full of desks; his was neither messier nor neater than the ones around him. He had four or five framed pictures on his desk, all of them of Molly. The earliest was an ultrasound. I hate those ultrasound pictures. The babies always look like aliens. Wanderley had his fine, old cowboy boots on his desk, and he didn’t bother to take them down when he saw me. Sometime in the hours I’d been gone, Wanderley had found time to clean the mud off those boots and buff them up.

He grinned when I walked over.

“Long time, preacher. I’m wondering if you have a crush on me. Or was it Detective Dortch you were hoping to see?”

“I made an appointment.”

“I know you did. I’m giving you a tough time. Sorry you had to make the extra trip—I had to shoot out as soon as we were done in there this morning.”

I sat down in the chair he indicated next to his desk and asked a personal question of my own.

“Where did you get those boots? They don’t make them like that anymore.”

Wanderley’s eyebrows went up and he swung his feet down. He pulled a pant leg up so I could admire the stitching.

“You know boots? These are Lucchese’s. Custom. Nineteen fifty-four.”

“’Fifty-four?” I whistled. “How do you keep the leather from cracking?”

“Lanolin. Pure lanolin. Every week I rub lanolin over every inch of leather, that’s whether I wear them or not; I’ve got four more pairs made between ’54 and ’99. All custom and all original, except the heels and soles, those have been replaced. It’s the shafts that matter. The boots were my granddad’s. I wear exactly the same size. He was going to have a pair made for me when he was sure my feet had stopped growing.”

“Are you sure they have?” I asked. The guy had remarkably small feet, especially for such a tall lanky fellow.

He didn’t take offense. He grinned.

“Nine-and-a-halfs. And uh . . . that whole thing about the size of your feet correlating with the size of your . . .” He waggled his eyebrows at me suggestively. “That’s a no-go. Check it out on Snopes.com. You can bet my brothers did.”

I assured Wanderley I was not trying to cast any aspersions on his male member and chanced another question.

“How many brothers?”

“Two. One plays baseball for TCU and the other is raking in cash with some kind of computer operation. They’re both younger.”

“How about that,” I said. “I’m the oldest of three brothers, too. You your dad’s favorite, oldest son and all?”

Wanderley smiled again; it was a thin smile.

“Oh, no sir, I am not my father’s favorite.” He swung his boots back onto the desk and looked away from me. “Not that I give a crap what my dad thinks. I was my grandfather’s favorite, and he was the better man.”

Alrighty then. I’d put my foot into it, and I wear a size twelve.

“What do you have to tell me, preacher? We need a private room or are you okay here?”

I said I’d rather tell my story to him privately, and he led the way to a small conference room or interrogation room, I don’t know which. It was smaller than the room we’d been in this morning, and not as bleak. It had a vending machine in it, too, and Wanderley offered me a Coke. I said no thank you, and he got one for himself and sat across from me at the wood laminate table. He snapped off the aluminum tab on the Coke and immediately put it in his mouth, which gave me visions of doing the Heimlich maneuver on a cop. It was worse than the guitar pick.

I asked him about HD, and he told me that HD had thrown a fit when he’d been asked to change into the orange jumpsuit and had complained ceaselessly about how cold it was.

I asked if it was cold in the holding cell or was that HD’s thin blood.

“We keep it cold. We don’t want you getting comfortable. We don’t want repeat guests, so I’m afraid we do our best to make sure nobody wants to come back.”

He told me it wasn’t easy checking up on a story that couldn’t be verified, no matter which direction they moved in.

“We did get to meet Beanie,” he said.

“Oh? What did you think of her?”

“She looks a lot like Honey Garcia will in twenty-five years. The whole confession was news to her and she says it can’t be true, that HD has been leaving his marbles here and there for the last two years and he’s lost most all of them now.”

He smiled. “She’s got a colorful way of talking. I’d say she is teetering at the edge of the very end of her patience with HD. I noticed the empty gun cabinet and she told me that, this time, she took all the guns over to HD’s oldest son’s house and made him promise not to tell.”

“What do you think? Is she right? Is HD gaga?”

“He could be coasting downhill and still be a murderer, Bear. He is clear as a bell most of the time.”

That was true.

“So what did you come here to tell me?” Wanderley asked.

As accurately as I could, I told him Jenasy’s story, leaving her name out of it. Wanderley listened intently without expression until I’d finished. He opened his mouth over his hand and the tab dropped out. Since he had been drinking his Coke all the time I was talking, I was real glad to see the tab again.

He said, “Is that all?”

I said it was.

He said, “I know all that.”

I said, “Why in heck didn’t you say so instead of having me go through the whole dang story?”

Wanderley shook his head slowly, that sneaky grin back on his face.

“Bear,” he said in this compassionate sort of voice, “it’s ‘hell.’ Nobody says ‘why in heck?’—they say ‘why in hell?’ And it’s ‘damn,’ not ‘dang,’ even for preachers. I promise. I’m an officer of the law and I officially give you permission to say ‘hell’ and ‘damn.’ But not the F word, okay? Don’t get crazy with your permission.” He chuckled and I held my temper.

“The reason I didn’t tell you I knew your whole story already was because I didn’t know I knew everything you were going to say until you’d said it all. I might have stopped you, said ‘Old news; heard it already,’ and missed some vital piece of information that you were about to say, right? I might have missed out on that one crucial piece of the puzzle that would make everything fall into place. Not that that happens anywhere except in novels. After you told me your story,
then
I knew I’d heard it all. How did you know all this anyway?”

“How did you know?” I asked.

That’s when I discovered that my chair had four sturdy legs on the ground, but Wanderley was in a pivoting office chair. He started that back-and-forth thing again.

“No, Bear, you know it doesn’t work that way. You tell me, and maybe I’ll tell you if I don’t see a reason not to. You understand this isn’t ‘quid pro quo’; you tell me no matter what.”

Since Nat
had
gotten Jenasy’s permission, I went ahead and gave Wanderley her name and told him how she knew the story.

I said, “Are you going to have to talk to her?”

Wanderley shook his head “no.” “Probably not. Our Mr. Garcia was a very, very careful man. You know what lawyers say? First rule of law is CYA. That means ‘cover your ass.’”

Yeah, I’d heard that one.

“Garcia has reams of notes.” Wanderley put the tab back in his mouth. I could hear it “scritch, scritching” over his perfect white teeth. I wanted to ask him to trade the metal tab for the plastic guitar pick and stop wreaking such havoc on all that expensive orthodontia his parents had paid for.

“The notes on that little story were hard-copied. When we delve into his computer, I expect to find lots more interesting information.”

I nodded my head, determining to go home and delete everything on my computer I wouldn’t be comfortable with the whole world reading in their Sunday papers.

“It’s not as if that would be much of a motive for murder anyway . . .” I said. I was reluctant to give up a possible motive for someone else; I felt ready to seize on anything that might clear HD and, more especially, Alex. Who said he was in love with my daughter.

Wanderley guffawed. Really.

“Bear! I’ve known men murdered because they wouldn’t give up their place in a taxi line! We had a guy in here a year ago who shot his wife because she wouldn’t iron their bedroom sheets—he was still indignant when we snapped the cuffs on him. Shoot, two high school kids from Clements took a girl from their school, a friend of theirs as far as we can tell, took her out to one of the new home construction sites in Commonwealth and shot her, and even they don’t know why! People get murdered all the time, Bear, and for some pretty whacked reasons.”

“Do you think this guy did it then?”

Wanderley shook his head and looked wistful.

“God knows I’d like to pin it on a lawyer. Someone has sure been eager to get hold of Garcia’s work-related shit, briefcase, laptop, papers. Did you hear we found his car?”

I said I hadn’t and wondered why I hadn’t thought about Graham’s car before this. Maybe because I’m a preacher and not a detective.

“Yeah. Parked on a residential street a block from where he was killed. His driver’s side window was bashed in.”

“That’s great!” I blurted out.

One of Wanderley’s eyebrows dove toward the bridge of his nose.

“It’s great that his car window was bashed in?”

“It’s kind of suspicious, don’t you think? Seems to me like somebody was looking for something.”

“Well, yeah, probably cash, or ganja, or something to pawn. The stereo. That’s why most cars get broken into.”

“I wouldn’t think cars get broken into out here in the suburbs.”

“You’d think wrong, then. Park an expensive car on any street overnight and it can happen.”

“Does it happen a lot?”

“Bear, it happens, okay? It happens more often than the lawyer stuff that goes on in Grisham’s novels, okay? So that’s the first thing we’re going to think. But we’re considering everything. The stereo wasn’t stolen. So maybe the thief got interrupted, or maybe he wasn’t after the stereo system. And, well, it looks like the car was wiped. Not seriously wiped, but the door handle, the console . . . things the guy touched. That’s a little sophisticated for most smash-and-grabs.”

“Could the partners
have hired a hit guy?” I asked, not with any real hope. “Killed Graham and then searched his car? They could have been following him and—”

Another chuckle from Wanderley, and he finally plucked the metal tab out of his mouth and pitched it into a wastebasket that stood against the wall. It made a “ting” against the side of the basket.

“Could have but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a professional hit man using a Big Bertha; that would be . . . unconventional. If HD hadn’t walked right in and forced us to arrest him, he’d be sitting in his La-Z-Boy, keeping busy making Beanie nervous. We were not thinking pro. From my own experience, and truly vast reading of thrillers”—he worked his eyebrows up and down—“hit men use guns and use them well. Maybe a knife. They get fancy in books and movies, but not in the world we walk in. Oh, wait. Russians get fancy. Polonium.” Wanderley laced his fingers and rested his chin on the tops of them. That stopped him rocking the chair.

“But no, Bear, we don’t think we’re looking for a professional hit man. We think this was a very personal crime.”

My heart clenched up at that.

“I mean, picture it, Bear—Garcia is on the country club golf course in the middle of the night. There are no major streets near this corner of the golf course; there’s Elkins and Alcorn Oaks, quiet, residential streets. No businesses. Lots of expensive homes that back up to the golf course and every one of them has expanses of plate glass windows that look out onto the golf course. Well, sure, they paid extra for acreage on the fairway. If you like green grass, it’s a great view.