If only he could talk to her…
But that wasn’t going to happen, so he might just as well stop wishing for it.
He opened the telephone directory again and looked for listings under Ruiz. There wasn’t one for a Manuelo. He hadn’t expected that kind of luck. But maybe the Salvadoran had relatives. Using the motel phone, Griff dialed the first number.
“Hola?”
“Manuelo, por favor.”
His grasp of Spanish was limited to what he’d learned in two years of high school, but he gathered by what the woman said that he had the wrong number.
He went down the list, calling every Ruiz. No Manuelos. And even if he had run down the one he sought, Manuelo wouldn’t have stuck around waiting for Griff to show up. He would’ve run like hell.
The man was no fool.
Without a car, there was nothing more Griff could do until dark. He had no choice but to wait out the long hours of the afternoon.
I
T’S NICE OUT HERE.”
At the sound of his voice, Laura jumped and turned around suddenly. “Oh, Detective. Hello.”
Rodarte had crept up on her deliberately, wanting to get an honest reaction out of her, not one she had time to rehearse. He climbed the steps and joined her in the gazebo. “You don’t see many of these anymore.” He pretended to admire the lacy woodwork trim on the circular roof.
“Foster’s grandmother had it built even before the house was completed. Foster told me she wanted someplace where she could sit and watch the swans. They always had swans in the pond.”
The gazebo sat on a rise overlooking a pond where a pair of honest-to-God swans were gliding across the mirrored surface of the water.
Rich folk,
he thought scornfully. If he had their money, he’d spend it on something better than gazebos and swans.
“You mind?” He nodded at one of the vacant wicker chairs. She shook her head, and he sat down. She was wearing sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes to tell if she’d been crying. He guessed she had because she was twisting a damp Kleenex between her fingers.
Tears of grief or guilt?
he wondered. He really didn’t care. Not unless she’d plotted with Griff Burkett to kill her husband.
Now,
that
would be a story, wouldn’t it? It would be written up in
People
magazine;
20/20
would do a segment on it. They’d make a movie of the week out of it. Maybe they’d cast him in a bit part, or he could serve as technical adviser to the producers, get movie credit.
But first he had to prove it.
“More peaceful out here than inside,” he remarked as he settled against the floral-print chair cushion.
Mrs. Speakman’s assistant had been joined by Mr. Speakman’s, a woman named Myrna something, who vacillated between crying like a baby and issuing orders like a drill sergeant. Together with Mrs. Dobbins, the housekeeper, they were manning the telephone, finding places for the floral arrangements and fruit baskets that were delivered by the truckload, cleaning up after all the cops who had been in the house last night, and making lists. They made endless lists.
A homicide generated a lot of busywork for everybody but the corpse.
“I had to get some fresh air,” Laura Speakman said. “And away from the telephone.”
“Who’s called?”
Behind the opaque lenses he figured she was giving him one of her haughty, condescending looks. “People conveying their condolences.”
“Anybody I should know about?”
“Griff Burkett. That’s who you mean.”
He grinned as though to say,
You know me too well.
“It’s my duty to check. Has he tried to contact you?”
“No. He wouldn’t.”
“You sure about that?”
“He wouldn’t.” She went back to looking at the swans. One had buried its face beneath its wing.
“I got the autopsy report from the ME.” Her only response to that was to roll her lips inward and compress them into a hard line. “Your car accident two years ago? Besides the obvious damage to his spinal column and legs, your husband suffered a lot of internal injury.”
“I mentioned that this morning when we talked about his medication.”
“It was pretty bad.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Some of his organs were friable. That’s the word the ME used. Weak. Eventually he would have died from one of those organs giving out. Probably sooner than later. That also according to the ME.” He paused on purpose. “But what killed him was a severed artery.”
She swallowed. “How long would it have taken?”
“Hmm, not long. But there was blood on his hands, tissue under his fingernails.”
She snapped her head around to look at him.
“That’s right, Mrs. Speakman. Your husband fought for his life.”
Rodarte actually enjoyed telling her that. Finally he got a reaction out of her. Her chest rose and fell on a quick little breath. She pressed the Kleenex against her mouth.
“He lived long enough to struggle with his attacker,” he continued. “Have to admire him for that. Him, paralyzed from the waist down, battling a guy with Burkett’s size and strength. He never had a chance, but he put up a brave fight.” Leaning forward, he placed his hand over hers. “Are you all right?”
She yanked her hand from beneath his. “I’ll be fine.”
“I know this is hard for you.”
“Is there anything else, Detective?”
“You can make arrangements for burial now.”
“Thank you.”
“Just contact the funeral home. They’ll know what to do.”
She nodded.
He stood up and moved to the railing that enclosed the gazebo. Staring out across the well-manicured landscape, he said thoughtfully, “Do you think Burkett attacked your husband suddenly, in a jealous rage? Or do you think they quarreled over the money?”
“Money?”
When he came around, she had removed her sunglasses and was staring up at him inquisitively.
“Didn’t I mention the money to you?”
“What are you talking about, Detective? What money?”
“The cash. In the navy blue box. It was on your husband’s desk in plain sight when the crime scene unit got here. They nearly shit when they—I’m sorry. Pardon the expletive.” He gave her a feeble smile. “See? Just thinking about it rattled me. It’s not every day you see that kind of money all heaped together. Half a million in one-hundred-dollar bills.”
Her lips parted soundlessly. She stared into near space for several moments, then shifted her gaze to a shrub loaded with big blue flowers that looked like pom-poms. He didn’t know what you called the flowers, but he knew how to define Mrs. Speakman’s reaction. She was stunned to hear about the half mil. More specifically, she was stunned to learn he knew about it.
“Half a million dollars in cash,” he said. “Sitting right there. It’s under lock and key in the evidence room now. You’ll get it back. Unless it turns out to be ill-gotten funds of some kind.”
“Ill-gotten?”
“Drug money, something like that.”
She turned back to him and stood up suddenly. “Listen to me, Detective Rodarte. My husband wasn’t involved in anything illegal, and if you were to check his financial portfolio, you’d realize just how ludicrous that allegation is.”
“You said he had a meeting with Griff Burkett here in your home. That’s how you two met.”
“What bearing does that have on this?”
“You said you didn’t know what they talked about.”
“I still don’t see the relevance of—”
“Burkett was found guilty of racketeering, Mrs. Speakman. So I was thinking that—”
“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.”
“Then how do you explain the cash?”
She folded her arms across her middle and tilted her head to one side. “Why are you just now mentioning this box of money to me?”
“With everything else, it slipped my mind,” he lied.
Their mutual stare held for several seconds, then she shrugged. “Foster kept large amounts of cash in the safe here at home, and in another at his office.”
“You don’t say. Why?”
“He liked to pass it around.”
“Pass it around?”
“It was a trait of his. An idiosyncrasy. He was a lavish tipper. He enjoyed leaving huge gratuities to waiters, hotel maids, the toll-booth attendant, anyone who did a service for him. Sometimes he would go out to the airport and hand out cash gifts to SunSouth ticket agents, baggage handlers, people who worked for him and were rarely thanked for the jobs they did. He did things like that often. Ask anybody.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “I believe you. It’s just a strange hobby. Never heard of such.”
“Foster didn’t advertise it. He did it for the pleasure he derived from doing it, not for self-aggrandizement.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Rodarte said, faking sincerity. “That could be one explanation for the box of cash. Except…”
“What?”
“Burkett’s prints were on the lid of the box. How do you explain that?”
“I can’t. But it proves that Griff Burkett isn’t a thief.”
He chuckled. “Well, the Department of Justice, gamblers nationwide, and the Cowboys organization would disagree. He took them for plenty every time he shaved points. I guess he didn’t need your husband’s half million.”
She pounced on his remark as though about to contradict it, then closed her mouth quickly and put her sunglasses back on. Whatever she had been about to say, she’d thought better of it. “If that’s all, I’d like to go in now and place that call to the funeral director.”
“Sure,” he said, waving her toward the steps. He walked along beside her as they crossed the expansive lawn. Whenever he got too close, she moved away, which amused him. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. We found two different blood types in Burkett’s Honda. One, of course, was your husband’s. Burkett must’ve had his blood all over him.”
The sunglasses weren’t large enough to conceal her grimace, but she didn’t address the issue of her husband’s blood being on her lover. “The other is probably his,” she said. “If there was tissue beneath Foster’s fingernails, he probably scratched him.”
Rodarte said, “I would think that, too, except we’ve already tested it. Doesn’t match Burkett’s blood type. So what I think is, it’s Manuelo Ruiz’s blood. Because it’s the same blood type as what we got off your library rug.”
“Implying what?”
“That Manuelo Ruiz was bleeding, too.” Rodarte tugged on his earlobe as though thinking it through. “The man’s vanished. I got in touch with Immigration to try to track him down. Guess what? Ruiz didn’t have papers. Your husband hired him illegally.”
“That’s academic now, isn’t it?”
This rich bitch was one cool broad, staring up at him through her dark sunglasses, her body language a dead giveaway to her contempt for him. He’d like to have done something to shake her up, something to crack that smooth mask she wore whenever she was talking to him. Twist her nipple, maybe. Push his hand between her legs. Something that would shock and frighten her.
“I guess it’s beside the point now.” He smiled amiably, even as he was thinking how much pleasure he would derive from humiliating her.
“Then what is the point, Detective?”
“Griff Burkett knocked off the wetback, too.”
Well, at least that elicited an honest reaction. He wasn’t sure if she flinched away from the racial slur or from his allegation that Burkett had committed double murder. It was hard not to look smug, but he kept his stoniest cop expression in place. “I don’t know if he got rid of Manuelo before or after he killed your husband, but it’s almost a certainty that he’s responsible for Ruiz’s unexplained disappearance.”
She wet her lips, pulled the lower one through her teeth, and he understood why Burkett liked fucking her enough to kill for it.
“Maybe Manuelo was frightened away by what he saw,” she said. “He ran.”
“Without taking any clothes or personal belongings? Without a car? Without the half million cash? Unlikely, Mrs. Speakman. But, on the outside chance that he ran from something that scared him out of his wits, I’ve had cops calling on every Ruiz in the Dallas phone book. Fort Worth, too.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Want to know something funny? We weren’t the first to call those folks today, asking did they know Manuelo.”
“No?”
“No. Come to find out, somebody beat us to the punch. A man has been calling the same people, looking for Manuelo Ruiz.”
“Griff Burkett?”
He spread his hands at his sides and smiled.
She removed her sunglasses, carefully folded down the stems, and studied them for several moments before lifting her head and looking up at him. “Well, which is it, Detective Rodarte?”
“Which is what?”
“If Griff Burkett killed Manuelo, as you allege, then why has he been calling people named Ruiz, looking for him?”
She held his gaze for several moments, then turned her back to him and started walking toward the house.
Rodarte stared after her, trying to control the anger pulsing through him. All right, she’d got him on that one, and he had no one to blame but himself for the blunder.
Truth be told, he hadn’t dwelled a lot on the fate of Manuelo Ruiz because he didn’t give a flying fuck what had happened to him. Whether Burkett had killed him or was trying to chase him down because he had witnessed a murder and needed to be silenced, it mattered not in the least to Rodarte.
He would either find the wetback’s body or run him down and get him to testify against Burkett. Whichever, he had Burkett for Foster Speakman’s murder. Burkett’s ass belonged to Stanley Rodarte.
And so does the widow’s.
Chuckling to himself, he thought of the payback he’d extract for her snooty condescension. After the funeral. After the folderol had died down. After Burkett was locked behind bars. Using the prison grapevine, he’d make sure Number Ten heard about his attentions to the lady. Every salacious detail.
Jesus, was that gonna be fun, or what?
F
OR THE REMAINDER OF THE AFTERNOON, GRIFF PACED THE
dismal room, wondering how in hell he’d sunk so low. When had this unstoppable decline started? When he accepted Vista’s first bribe? Or before that, when he began placing bets while at UT? Or had he been irreversibly ill-fated when his mother had abandoned him to run off with her boyfriend Ray?
Sometimes he thought he’d been doomed even before he was born.
During the weeks between his conviction and the day he reported to Big Spring to begin his sentence, he’d conducted a search for his parents. Wasn’t it natural for a child to turn to his parents when he was in trouble?
Thanks to the Internet and websites dedicated to linking lost relatives, it hadn’t taken him long to track down his father. After serving his jail sentence in Texas, he’d left the state, alighting several places but never staying anywhere for long, until he eventually wound up in Laramie, Wyoming. He died there in a local hospital at the age of forty-nine. Hospital records said he suffered from several maladies related to alcoholism.
It took more time to locate his mother. She had either committed bigamy and married men without first securing divorces or simply assumed the names of the various men she lived with.
As the day of Griff’s incarceration approached, he frequently asked himself why he was bothering to try to find her, why he was even curious about her life now, when she’d left him without a shred of remorse. To his knowledge she had never tried to learn what happened to him, so why was reconnecting with her so important?
He didn’t know what drove him. It was a compulsion he couldn’t explain, even to himself, so he gave up and just went with it.
His doggedness paid off. On the day before he was to begin serving his sentence, he found her in Omaha. He obtained an address and a telephone number. Before he could talk himself out of it, he called the number.
It was a decision he came to regret.
Quite a send-off to prison,
he thought now, caustically.
Why today, when he was in worse trouble than ever, was he conjuring up all this crap about his parents? Maybe because thinking about them reinforced what he strongly suspected: He had been on this path to self-destruction before he even left the womb.
Which didn’t bode well for the eventual outcome.
Depressed, he lay down on the ratty bed and actually slept for a while. Perhaps that was his body’s way of letting him temporarily escape from his reality. Even kinder was his subconscious, which let him dream about Laura. His hands were on her. He was moving inside her. She was clutching his ass, arching up to receive him, moaning his name. Heartbeats away from coming, he woke up, her name on his lips, soaked in sweat, sporting a painful erection.
He got up, showered, and turned on the TV in time for the local evening newscasts. As he’d feared, a smug-looking anchorman with bad hair announced that the police were seeking Griff Burkett for “questioning in the brutal slaying of Foster Speakman.”
This came as no surprise, of course, but Griff sat dazed, immobilized by the sudden appearance of Stanley Rodarte on the screen. He was standing in the glare of video lights, which intensified his ugliness. “At this point, Mr. Burkett is only a person of interest. All we know at present is that he was inside the Speakmans’ mansion last evening.”
This statement of fact caused a feeding frenzy among the reporters, who began firing questions at him. Full of self-importance, Rodarte denied them answers, saying only “Burkett’s involvement warrants further investigation. That’s all I have for you right now.” He turned his back on them and walked through the iron gates onto the Speakman estate.
Rodarte was there. Inside the ivy-covered walls. With Laura. She would revile Griff Burkett now. Rodarte would stoke that, use it to win her to his side. The thought of her and Rodarte breathing the same air made his empty stomach clench as tight as a fist.
Darkness finally fell. Even with the temperature hovering in the low nineties, it felt good to be outdoors, away from the lingering odors in his motel room. But it took Griff nearly two hours to walk to Hunnicutt Motors, and by that time the heat was taking its toll. He hadn’t dared stop to buy a bottle of water, so he arrived at the car lot gritty with dried sweat and dehydrated.
But the hike had been worth it. The car had been left as promised.
It was a nondescript sedan somewhere between brown and gray. The model name on the trunk lid was unfamiliar to him, and he couldn’t even identify the car’s maker. Pontiac? Ford maybe? The cloth upholstery gave off the musty smell of stale tobacco smoke when he warily opened the unlocked door. No alarm went off.
The keys were beneath the floor mat, the gas tank was full, and the engine fired as soon as he turned the ignition. Conveniently, the chain that was usually stretched across the driveway as a security measure was lying on the pavement. Hunnicutt had thought of everything.
Wyatt Turner, attorney-at-law, lived in one of the nouveau riche neighborhoods of North Dallas. Every house had a swimming pool in the backyard, golf clubs in the garage, and inside, an upwardly mobile couple trying to keep up with the Joneses. Pets were optional. Most had children.
The Turners had only one. Griff had never seen Wyatt Junior in person, but he’d seen his picture on Wyatt’s desk. He was a fifty-fifty blend of his parents, which was unfortunate for the kid. Griff had met Susan Turner only once, at a social function long before he was in need of Wyatt’s services. She was a pallid woman, virtually colorless, with a personality to match. She practiced law also, but not criminal law like her husband. Taxes, corporate, probate, something dull like that. And Griff bet she was good at it. She was uptight, unfriendly, and unattractive. Compared with her, Wyatt was the life of the party.
Griff cruised past their house and saw that there was only one light on inside. He hoped it was Wyatt burning the midnight oil and not Susan. He parked two streets over and conscientiously locked the car door when he got out. He had dressed in shorts and T-shirt, running shoes, ball cap. In a neighborhood of yuppies like this one, people ran at all hours, whenever they could wedge the workout into their busy schedules. He hoped that if he was seen, he’d be mistaken for a guy who had time to exercise only late at night.
He jogged the two blocks. One dog barked at him from behind a wood fence, but otherwise he went unnoticed. At least he hoped so. Someone inside one of these upscale homes could have spotted him and called a neighborhood security watch or the police. That was a risk he had to take.
He had noticed that the house next door to the Turners’ had a For Sale sign out front. The property was dark, inside and out, which was to his advantage. When he reached it now, he detoured off the sidewalk into the shadows of the yard. He went around to the side yard that abutted the Turners’ driveway. There he crouched in the shrubbery to catch his breath and plan his next move.
Through open blinds, he could see into the lighted room of the Turners’ house. It was a home office, reminiscent of Bolly’s except much neater. A stuffed deer head mounted on the wall. Framed diplomas. Law books on the shelves. A computer monitor was on, casting a bluish light onto the desk and several open files.
The lawyer appeared, coming into the room carrying a glass of milk and what looked like a sandwich on a plate. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms. The tail of the T-shirt was tucked into the elastic waistband of the pajamas.
Tucked in.
In spite of his situation, Griff had to smile at his lawyer’s sleeping attire. But he shared a bed with Mrs. Turner, so that explained it. Griff would have sooner made love to a corn husk.
Turner sat down at the desk, took a bite of the sandwich, and as he chewed, he gazed into his computer monitor. Griff took a deep breath and stepped out of the shrubbery. He crossed the driveway and walked up to the pair of French doors that opened directly into the office. He tapped lightly on a pane of glass.
Startled, Turner looked in his direction. When he saw Griff, his face registered a series of expressions—astonishment, apprehension, finally anger.
Griff tried the door handle. It was locked. He jiggled it several times, making metal rattle against metal. He read the curse on Turner’s lips as he got out of his chair. He glanced cautiously into what Griff presumed was a hallway, then quickly came to the door and opened it.
Angrily he whispered, “Do you know that every cop within five hundred miles is after you?”
“Then you’d better let me in before one of them spots me on your doorstep.”
Turner motioned him in, then stepped outside and looked down his driveway into the street. Satisfied that there were no wolves at the gate, he shut the door, after which he went around the room hastily drawing the blinds closed.
Griff picked up the sandwich and began wolfing it down. Between the car lot and here, he’d used the drive-through window to pick up a Whataburger and demolished it as he drove. It had taken the edge off his hunger but hadn’t appeased it. Peanut butter and jelly had never been his favorite, but right now it tasted delicious. He drank the milk, too. Turner was watching him, seething.
“I need this more than you do,” Griff said through a mouthful. Then, motioning toward his lawyer’s paunch, he added, “A lot more.”
“I want you out of here.”
“I need information.”
“I’m not CNN.”
“You’re my lawyer.”
“Not anymore.”
Griff stopped chewing. “Since when?”
“Since you—” Turner’s loud voice startled even him. He froze, listening, then went to the door and looked into the hallway again. “Don’t move,” he whispered to Griff over his shoulder. “Don’t make a sound.”
The lawyer disappeared into the dark hallway. Griff could hear doors—he assumed to bedrooms—being softly closed. Despite Turner’s warning, he went to the French doors and separated the slats of the blinds to peer out, wondering if Hunnicutt’s car parked two streets over had aroused a watchful homeowner’s suspicion. Had anybody noticed a jogger at midnight suddenly disappearing into the dark shadows surrounding a vacant house?
Turner returned, walking on tiptoe. Quietly he pulled the door closed behind himself. “Susan’s a light sleeper.”
“Since when aren’t you my lawyer?”
“Since you murdered Foster Speakman,” the lawyer returned, matching Griff’s angry stage whisper. “Christ, Griff. Foster Speakman! You could just as well have killed the president. Is it true you were screwing his wife?”
Griff held his accusatory stare for several seconds, then crammed the last of the sandwich into his mouth, muttering, “You should be so lucky.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He finished the milk, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I didn’t know a lawyer could fire a client.”
“I don’t want anything to do with you. You’re too dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Griff spread his arms wide. All he had on him was the car key and his cell phone clipped to the elastic waistband of his running shorts.
“I’d call you dangerous,” Turner said. “He said you stabbed Speakman in the neck with his letter opener. A paraplegic, Griff. He said Speakman tried to fight back, tried to protect himself from you, but—”
“He who? Who said? Rodarte?”
“Of course Rodarte. He and that silent partner of his came to my office this morning. Rodarte did all the talking. He asked if I knew where you were, and fortunately I could honestly say no.” Turner frowned, unhappy over knowing Griff’s whereabouts now. “Rodarte is having a field day. This time, make no mistake, he’s got you.”
“I don’t get my day in court?”
Turner gnawed the inside of his cheek and cast a worried glance toward the closed door. “Make it quick.” He sat down in his desk chair and tried to look lawyerly—a role hard to pull off in the pajama outfit. “How’d you meet the Speakmans?”
“I was invited to their home. Speakman proposed a business deal.”
Turner looked dubious. “What kind of business?”
“We talked about me doing some ads for his airline.” That wasn’t exactly a lie. It wasn’t exactly the truth, but he couldn’t tell Turner the truth. Not yet. Foster Speakman’s reputation be damned. As far as keeping his secret was concerned, all bets were off. But Laura shared that secret. Griff would keep it for her sake.
“That’s nuts,” Turner remarked.
“That’s what I told him. But, come to find out, he had a lot of idiosyncrasies and weird ideas. Anyway, he told me to think it over, he would, too, so forth.”
“The wife? Laura?”
“I met her that same night.”
“Instant lust, Rodarte said.”
“Rodarte said that?”
“Words to that effect. He said the two of you had a hot and heavy affair.”
Griff wondered where Rodarte was getting his information. Probably he was merely speculating and making it sound like fact. “She and I got together. Four times to be exact. Over a period of months. The last time we saw each other, she called it off.”
“Why?”
Disinclined to tell Turner more than that, he shrugged. “Typical reasons. Guilt mostly. I thought I’d never see her again.”
“But you wanted to.”
He didn’t answer, but his expression must have given him away.
Turner groaned. “You just handed Rodarte motivation on a silver platter. To get the girl, you bumped off her husband. You don’t even need a criminal law degree to see that, Griff.”
“Besides motivation—”
“And opportunity.”
“I didn’t barge in on Speakman last night. I went to the mansion at his invitation.”
“He
invited
you?”
“He invited me.”
“What for? Did he confront you about the affair? Had the wife felt so guilty she confessed all?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how much Laura told him about us.” In all honesty, he didn’t.
“Have you been in touch with her?”
He shook his head.
“I advise you not to try.”
“As my former lawyer?”
Ignoring the sarcastic dig, Foster asked, “Can you prove Speakman invited you to the mansion last night?”