I entered Cox’s bedroom again, this time with Torres beside me, and all three of us began searching for evidence. The first thing Torres did was bag the bloodstained bedspread. When I saw Faith about to walk in, I stopped her.
“Have you been in here since Billie’s death?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I locked it from the outside and left. Except for the police and paramedics, the only one who has been in the room since Billie’s death is Lena, the housekeeper. She found the body, but hasn’t been in the room since she called police.”
“Is she here now?” I asked.
“In her quarters over the garage,” Faith said, offering, “I can go with you, introduce you.”
“No,” I said. “I’d really prefer that you waited outside, on the front porch. I don’t want you to leave, in case we have questions. But it’s better to keep a distance, and please don’t touch anything.”
“Of course,” she said. “Anything you say.”
Lena Suarez was a tall woman, heavy-boned with a long nose and graying hair pulled into a bun. Her apartment over the four-car garage had its own kitchen and a small sitting area, and she invited me in, although rather reluctantly.
“I only went looking for Miss Billie because she asked me to wake her,” Suarez said. “When she get home, she said, ‘Lena, wake
me at six-thirty. I have dinner at home tonight.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Miss Billie.’ I was disappointed. Friday nights are my time off, so after work, I came here to my room, but then I remember that I need a gift for my nephew’s birthday. So I leave my room and drive to the store. I buy a game for his computer, so expensive those games are, and go right home to fix Miss Billie’s dinner. When I get back, I hurry and put a plate in the microwave for Miss Billie, tamales I made on Wednesday. They are her favorites. Then I go to wake her for dinner.”
“Had she said what her plans were for that night?” I asked.
“She tell me that she will have dinner at home and stay in,” the woman said. “Miss Billie young and very pretty, and she went out a lot the last few months. Before that not so much, but lately, all the time. Until the last few weeks, then she stay home again.”
“When she went out, do you know where she went?” I asked.
“No,” the woman said, shaking her head. “She never tell me where she go or who she go with.”
“So what happened after you put the plate in the oven?”
“Six-thirty, like she say, I go upstairs to wake Miss Billie,” Suarez said. “I knock on the door. No one answer. I knock again, two more, maybe three more times. No one answer. I think she’s sleeping, but I am afraid to go in. Maybe she not want me to. So I wait in the hall and try to think what to do. Then I say to myself, ‘Lena, Miss Billie say to wake her, so you should do as she tell you.’ I open the door.”
“Did you notice anything odd in the hallway, anywhere in the house, before you went into the bedroom?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Did you see anyone? Anyone at all?”
“No, no one,” she said.
“Go on,” I said. “What happened next?”
With this, the woman lowered her face and rubbed her eyes. Her voice grew weary. “Like I say, I open the door,” she recounted.
“The shutters are closed. It is dark in the room. No lights on. So, I turn on the light switch. I say, ‘Miss Billie, it is the time you say . . .’ But I don’t finish, because I see Miss Billie. I see the blood, so much blood, and her face, her beautiful face. What that bullet did to her.
Dios mio.
I look hard to make sure it’s her. It is Miss Billie.”
Lena Suarez stopped talking and wrapped her arms around herself, appearing troubled. I felt sorry for her, but I needed the woman to talk. “What did you do next?” I asked. “Did you call the police?”
“No,” she said. “I stand there for a while, and I just look, wondering if maybe my eyes not tell me the truth. Then, I think, I must get help. So I call for ambulance on nine-one-one, on the telephone down the hall, on Miss Billie’s desk. They ask me to help her, to do CPR. I tell them, it is too late.”
“Did you wait for them in the office?”
“No,” she said. “I go downstairs to the front porch. I sit on the steps and try not to think about what I see. And soon they come in the ambulance with the siren. I point to the room, and the ambulance people go inside. But they come back in a hurry and say there is nothing they can do. Miss Billie is dead, and the medical men, they called police.”
From that point on, Lena Suarez told me of waiting for the police to arrive, without going back in the house. She’d never entered the front door, not since that afternoon. Instead, she stood on the porch and watched as the officers and a coroner’s assistant made their way upstairs. They lingered, undoubtedly sizing up the scene, and then filed slowly down. Late that night when the police were finished, a detective, probably Brad Walker, told her that the medical examiner was removing the body.
“That detective say Miss Billie kill herself, but I couldn’t understand why she do that,” Lena said. “She seem happy, not upset. And she’s so proud of the way she looks. Why would she do that to her face?”
“I don’t think she did,” I said.
The housekeeper looked just momentarily surprised, then nodded, as if she’d suspected.
“Have you seen any men here, anyone at all that Miss Billie appeared to have a relationship with? Anyone she was dating?”
“No,” Suarez said. “The only ones who visit Miss Billie are Miss Faith and Mr. Grant. Miss Billie very busy at work. She work all the time.”
“But you said she’d been out more lately,” I pointed out. “You said she’d been going out over the past few months.”
That made her pause, and she thought. Then she said, “Yes, I don’t know where she go, but she go out more. Maybe with a man.”
“Miss Suarez, what was Miss Cox’s relationship like with her brother-in-law, with Mr. Grant?” I asked.
Her eyes grew round and she stared at me, and then cautiously said, “They seem to like each other very much.”
“How much?” I asked.
The housekeeper lowered her eyes.
“I need to know,” I said. “It’s important.”
“I don’t think they do anything wrong,” she whispered. “But sometimes, I think maybe they like each other too much.”
“Did you ever see them together?” I asked. “Without Miss Faith?”
“Only once,” she said. “That time, he bring Miss Billie home. She said her car broke, and she called him for a ride.”
“What did you see?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Only I think, maybe Mr. Grant like Miss Billie more than he should. He kissed her on lips, a little kiss, and she look happy. I worry that Miss Faith will get hurt.”
By the time I made my way back to the main house, Torres and Adkins were carrying evidence out to the crime-scene-unit’s van. Adkins had collected the bedding, everything she could out of the bedroom, while Torres gathered up Cox’s home computer, a laptop.
“I found these in her home office,” she said, handing me a pile of credit-card statements and receipts. “Maybe they’ll help.”
“Maybe they will,” I said.
As we got ready to leave, Faith stood on the porch.
“I need your sister’s keys,” I said. “This is a crime scene now, and we need to make sure it’s secure.”
“Of course,” she said.
She watched as we strung yellow tape over the front and back doors, and then drove out the driveway and onto the street right before us in her Subaru SUV. I thought again about Grant Roberts and wondered if Faith had any idea of the pain that might wait ahead.
A
fter I left Billie Cox’s place, I called Janet from the car and asked her to subpoena Grant Roberts’s credit card and cell phone records. I also asked her to track down an address for Carlton Wagner, Billie’s boss and one of the two identifiable men in the Stanhope photo. It turned out that Wagner lived nearby, so I tabled Roberts for the time being and made a U-turn, drove less than a mile east, and parked in front of the biggest mansion I’d ever seen. The darn thing took up half a block, all gray granite with ornate black-iron balconies. I parked the car, walked up to the massive oak doors, and knocked. I expected a butler or a maid, but a rickety white-haired man with a back humped by age and a full white beard answered. Carlton Wagner.
“I’m glad you finally decided to introduce yourself,” Wagner mumbled, glaring at me, when we sat in his parlor. He had a thick East Texas drawl and a frown as crooked as his posture. “I heard about your tomfoolery at the Century Oil offices this morning. I was surprised. Since it’s my company, I thought you’d have the courtesy to contact me first. Getting my employees all upset hurts
productivity. They end up spending all their time at the water cooler, gossiping. Is this your usual overbearing way of looking into a suicide?”
A feisty old guy, Wagner’s faded denim-blue eyes bristled with contempt. He may have invited me into his home, but he put on no masquerade. The old man was blatantly angry about the intrusion. His entire manner suggested annoyance at my very presence.
“No. It’s the way we investigate a murder. The medical examiner has changed his ruling, Mr. Wagner,” I said. “Elizabeth Cox’s death is now a homicide.”
“That’s about as likely as a hurricane in Detroit,” he snarled. “Damn Yankee-town’s too far away from the ocean for that to ever happen.”
“How can you be so sure Billie wasn’t murdered?” I asked.
“Who’d kill Billie?” he scoffed. His beard flapped when he talked, and he toyed with the edge of the lace cloth on the small table between us, rolling it between his thumb and index finger. I’d never met Wagner before, but my bet was that the old geezer had a stomach full of nerves as he rattled on. “Everybody, including me, loved that woman. Why she was beautiful and smart, and had the best business sense of any oil company exec I’ve ever had on my payroll. Plus, she wasn’t old enough to make an enemy, not one that hated her enough to commit murder.”
With that the old guy exhaled a short laugh. “Now take me, for instance,” he bragged. “I’ve been around long enough to step on toes, some mighty big toes at that. Stirring folks up to get my way, for me, that’s a big part of the fun. But not Billie. She was a good sort of person. And even if she had teed somebody off, that woman could’ve charmed him into figuring that he was the one who was wrong. She had it all, beauty, money, brains, a darn good personality, everything but happiness.”
The old guy shook his head, as if in disbelief. Something about
his act, however, I wasn’t buying, principally that I would have used that exact word to describe it, an
act.
If Wagner hadn’t cashed in working the oil fields, he could have made a living playing Gabby Hayes parts in Westerns. The old wildcatter was a natural performer.
“Why would she be unhappy? Why would any woman with so much chuck it all?” I asked.
Wagner sucked in his thin upper lip in disdain. “I don’t like to spread gossip,” he said. “Ain’t in my character.”
“This isn’t gossip,” I assured him. “This is cooperating in a police investigation into a murder.”
He paused, studied my face, and appeared to consider that for a moment, before going on. “Well, I still disagree about the murder part. But I guess either way it’s an investigation,” he said. “Billie was smart every way but in matters of the heart. When it came to love, that woman was an utter fool. She threw herself at men. It wasn’t a pretty sight. And when they were done with her, she fell to pieces. I feared one day she’d take a dead-end romance too hard. I figure that’s what happened here.”
“You do, do you?” I asked. “That’s interesting.”
“Thought you should know the truth, if you’re doing a real investigation,” he said, looking up at me from under eyelids that hung as loose as wrinkled curtains. “I figure I knew Billie as well as anybody. I don’t care what that third-rate doc down in the morgue says. I’ve got no question that she killed herself.”
“Who was this man, the one who broke her heart so badly that you believe she shot a bullet through her skull?” I asked.
Wagner sucked in again and let out a long breath. “Well, don’t really know,” he said. “I hear he was married. Some man she hooked up with she shouldn’t have.”
“How about a name?” I asked. “How about anything that would narrow the field down from every married man in Texas?”
The old man scowled, and then said, “Listen, I knew Billie
well, that’s for sure. But I’m not in the habit of asking about my employees’ personal lives. You’re the detective. The way I see it, you need to figure that out.”
Some might have found Carlton Wagner’s performance amusing, but I had a case to solve. “What I have figured out is that Elizabeth Cox didn’t kill herself. This case is, as I said, a murder investigation.”
Looking increasingly uncomfortable, Wagner fidgeted in his chair. The old man was a bundle of unspent energy. “You’re sure of that?” he asked, still sizing me up with a skeptical stare.
“As sure as I am that I’m sitting here in this fine mansion with you,” I said. “No doubt about it.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Well, I’m sure you’ll understand if I continue to disagree, but what do you want from me? You should be busy finding out who that man Billie dated was. My guess is that he’s the only one with a motive.”
“I appreciate the advice,” I said, thinking that Billie Cox picked one squirrelly old geezer to work for. “The reason I’m here is that I’d like you to tell me about the Stanhope Field acquisition.”
Looking unconcerned, he said with a shrug, “I can’t tell you a thing about it. That was Billie’s deal. I wasn’t involved.”
“Not at all?” I asked.
“Lieutenant Armstrong, I’ve closed multimillion-dollar deals on a handshake. When I tell you something I mean it. I wasn’t involved in any of Century Oil’s business for the past two years. When I turned the company over to Billie, I told her to charge ahead and not worry about waiting for this old man to limp along behind her,” he said. “I know I’m over the hill, and it was time for me to get out of the business.”
“So you had nothing to do with the planned acquisition? You weren’t involved in any way?”