Authors: Mary Willis Walker
“Lieutenant,” he corrected.
“Oh, yes. Lieutenant!” she said. “Well, Lieutenant. I refuse to get out of my car. I’ve heard about all this po-lice brutality and I’m just a poor widow-woman trying to make a living as best I can—”
He snorted. “Widow-woman!”
“Well, yes. My third husband
did
die.”
“Yeah, four years after you divorced him.”
“So,” she said with a smile of satisfaction, “you’ve been keeping track.”
He sighed and switched off the flashlight. “I suppose I have. How about following me over to the Cadillac Bar?” He leaned in the open window, so close she could smell that he still used English Leather after-shave. “Maybe we could have us a drink there and talk this situation over real peacefullike.”
Molly broke the mood; she couldn’t help herself. “What would what’s-her-name, Jane, say about that?”
“Janine. It’s not a problem.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll tell you all about it, if you come.”
Molly hesitated, but the outcome was never in doubt. Just like the
outcome was never in doubt when she was a seventeen-year-old orphan, a high school dropout being seduced by a twenty-four-year-old rookie patrolman. Now, as then, her curiosity was fueled as much by hormones as by interest in the way things turn out in the end.
M
olly had never been to the Cadillac Bar. It was a fairly new place on Red River, only a few blocks north of police headquarters. As they entered, several men at the bar, whom she recognized as off-duty policemen, turned their heads and watched as she and Grady walked to a booth in the back. Grady stood aside for Molly to slide into the semicircular booth, then he slid in next to her and took his jacket off, quickly transferring his pistol from his belt to the jacket pocket.
“Molly,” he said in his official voice, “I want to warn you about something: if you have in mind writing anything about this murder—even so much as a word—forget about it.”
Molly crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t try to bully me, Grady; you know I hate that. You promised some personal revelations, a nice chat. If you’ve brought me here under false pretenses, I’m leaving.”
“Let’s get this out of the way first,” he said. “I’m not sure yet how we’re going to handle this with the media, but you know we’ll withhold some details, details you were in a position to observe. So I want you to assure me you will not write anything about what you’ve seen or heard at the scene today, or any other inside stuff you’ve gotten, including that crazy stuff you got in the mail. This case is off-limits for you until I tell you different.”
“Grady, do you know you’re the third man in the last thirty hours to tell me what I shouldn’t write? You may remember how I feel about men trying to boss me around.”
He rolled his eyes upward. “How could I forget!” Then he looked at her with interest. “Who else tried to boss you around?”
“Yesterday Charlie McFarland tried to bribe me not to write anything more about his first wife’s murder and not to interview his kids for the article I’m planning on Louie Bronk’s execution.”
“Bribe you with what?”
“One hundred thousand bucks, in the guise of a writing award.”
He let out a low wolf whistle. “Well, I find that highly interesting. Who else?”
“My boss at
Lone Star Monthly
, Richard Dutton, vetoed the article this morning. Said he’d fire me if I went ahead and did it the way I want to.”
“Well, good luck to them—trying to persuade you of anything. But this is different, Molly. I’m not trying to persuade you, or bribe you. I’m
ordering
you. If you write about this without checking it out with me, I’ll make sure no one in the Department ever tells you the time of day again. You may remember how I regard press interference in police business.”
“Oh, I surely do,” she said.
He nodded to indicate an end to the subject, leaned back against the booth, and said, “McFarland says he asked you to come to his house today to tell you he’d changed his mind and he would cooperate with you after all.”
“That’s what he told me, too.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“Just now, before I left the house.”
“I wonder why he didn’t tell you that when he called earlier.” He raised his eyebrows. “From his private plane.”
“He’s a man who likes to wield power and one way he does that is to get people to come to him.”
“And you were willing to let him do that?” He narrowed his eyes.
“Sure. I was curious.”
He grinned. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “I remember that about you.”
She looked down at the table to avoid his eyes. “I wanted the interview; it’s how I make my living. And as I told you, we had an ongoing discussion about the article I’m planning on Louie Bronk.”
“Oh, yes. Louie Bronk. I suppose I’m going to have to ferret out the old case files on him. I was in IA back then, but I sure remember Louie Bronk. And of course I know he’s one of your obsessions.”
Molly decided not to take the bait. She had a good excuse since the waitress was approaching their table. She wore a Mexican peasant blouse dipping off one shoulder and an expression of utter world-weariness. Molly ordered a Coors Light and Grady ordered a frozen strawberry daiquiri.
When the waitress left, Molly laughed. “You’ve got to be the only homicide detective in Texas who drinks strawberry daiquiris.”
He didn’t smile. “Molly, I can’t let this go until I get a commitment from you. I have a feeling about this case. I’m going to give you some good advice; write about the Bronk burning if you feel you must, but leave Charlie McFarland out of it for now. Don’t see him. Don’t talk to him. Don’t write about him.”
“Thank you for the advice, Grady. That must mean you actually think he did it.”
He planted his elbows on the table and glared at her. “You know the percentages. Odds are ten-to-one when a wife is dead, her old man did it. Here we have an older husband, beautiful younger wife. She probably had a lover—you know how it goes with women, don’t you, Molly?” His glance was sharp. “He finds out, he’s jealous, he shoots her. The old story.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard it. Is it your theory he did it himself or had someone else do it?”
He paused, then said, “I see two itsy-bitsy problems with his having done it himself, but nothing I can’t deal with. I can talk about this to you because you already know most of it and also because you know if you breathe a syllable of it, I’ll slam you in jail for obstructing justice, right?”
Molly nodded to keep him going.
“Purcell says when he got there this morning at exactly ten minutes to seven to take his boss to the airport, he went into the bedroom to carry his briefcase for him—seems McFarland has a back problem—and he heard McFarland shouting to Georgia who was in the shower, or so McFarland says, and Purcell could hear that the shower was on. But he didn’t actually hear Georgia’s voice or see her. That’s number one. Number two is that Purcell saw a stainless-steel Thermos leaning against the back door. He identified it as identical to the one found next to the body.”
“What was in the Thermos?”
He laughed. “What I love about you, Molly, is that there’s no predicting your questions. Coffee. And it was still hot, since that’s probably your next question. She was cold and the coffee was hot. A great Thermos.”
Molly said nothing.
“McFarland and Purcell left the house together at a few minutes before seven and Purcell saw the Thermos at the door as they left.”
“What about the shower? Was it still running?”
“Purcell couldn’t hear because by then they were in the kitchen, too far away to hear.”
“And you’ve checked that Charlie was with people all day after that, right?”
“On the plane, meetings in Dallas all day, then on the plane again, and Purcell drove him home. No way he could have come back before you found the body.”
“Purcell’s a good witness?”
“According to our preliminary check, Molly. He was with the Rangers seventeen years, excellent record, quit to make more money in corporate security. And, anyway, if he was lying, he would of said he’d actually
seen
the lady as they left. No. This sounds like truth.”
“So if Charlie killed her,” Molly said flatly, “he would have had to kill her before he left with Purcell at seven. A lot is going to depend on the ME’s time of death.”
Grady let out a long sigh. “You know those things are about as reliable as the fucking rhythm method.”
“Yeah. So if he did it himself, how would you explain those two things?”
“Easy for a smart guy like that. The shower thing—he just turned it on and talked to it so Purcell would hear, turned it off before he left. And the Thermos—well, he just had a duplicate he’d left with the body down the hill before Purcell got there.”
“And how did he get rid of the Thermos he’d left in the house?” she asked.
“While Purcell was down the hill with you and the corpse, he hid it.”
“But you didn’t find it when you searched the house.”
“Nope. But that doesn’t mean much.”
Molly digested this in silence for a minute. “You know,” she said, “his back is so bad he can barely walk.”
“So he says. But it doesn’t matter. Rich guy like that—he could hire the whole thing done.”
“Why would he, Grady?”
“Damned if I know—yet.” He grinned at her. “They’d been married almost two years. According to McFarland she had no money of
her own. No enemies. Even his kids liked her, he swears. Imagine that—being liked by your stepchildren.”
“Where were they?”
“The kids? Well, young Alison was asleep in bed in South Austin with her live-in boyfriend, who happens to be her first cousin, until six-thirty when the cousin got up to run and then went on to work without coming back. She studied at home without seeing or talking to anyone all morning.”
“What about Stuart?”
“Stuart McFarland started his shift at the hospital at five this morning, but nothing much was going on so he slept in one of the rooms until nine when business got going. He doesn’t think anyone can vouch for that.”
“What about business enemies of Charlie?”
Grady toyed with his drooping mustache and watched the waitress approaching with their drinks. “He says he’s got some. We’ll check them out, of course, but that will come up dry. The wife didn’t have anything to do with his business.”
The waitress set their drinks in front of them and left.
“Molly,” Grady said, still toying with his mustache, “save me some time here. You’re more familiar than anybody with the murder of Charlie McFarland’s first wife. I’ll read the case files tonight, but tell me something about it.”
“It’s all in my book. Read it.”
He grinned. “Nah. I’m waiting till they make it into a movie, and then I’ll probably wait until it comes out in video. Just give it to me now in a nutshell.”
“How many words are there in a nutshell, Grady?”
“About five hundred.”
“Okay. It was eleven years ago, in July. Tiny and Charlie lived out west of the city on fifteen acres off City Park Road. Charlie was an up-and-coming builder-developer, self-made. She was a little bit of a thing, ninety pounds, blond, sort of a society matron, an heiress; her daddy owned a chain of department stores. The children were young—Stuart was fourteen and Alison was eleven. Tiny was gone a lot, most of the time, actually—tennis, charity work, parties, travel—that sort of thing—so they had a live-in baby-sitter, David Serrano, age twenty-one, a part-time student at ACC. He lived in an apartment over the garage.”
Molly took a sip of her beer. Grady still hadn’t touched his daiquiri.
“About eleven o’clock on the morning of July ninth,” Molly continued, “Serrano hears a shot, goes down to check, and finds Mrs. McFarland in the garage, dead, naked except for a pair of white panties, her head shaved. He sees a car driving out of the driveway—an old white car with a brown door on the driver’s side. Just then the daughter, Alison, emerges from the house, in time to see the car drive off. He hustles her back inside and calls the police. Meanwhile, young Stuart arrives home on his bicycle to find his mother lying dead. The cops arrive in fifteen minutes. She’d been shot once in the back with a .22 caliber bullet. She hadn’t been raped. David Serrano was their chief suspect at first—young, Hispanic, helpless—you know what cops are like. They tried to pin all the Scalper murders on him.”
“Where was McFarland?” Grady had been listening intently and still hadn’t touched his drink. Molly remembered that she had always loved the way he listened—with total concentration.
“At work. But he left the office at around ten-thirty to go to his health club for a swim; he got there, but no one knows exactly when. So he had an alibi but it wasn’t perfect.”
He ran an index finger along one side of his mustache. “This was right before Bronk was arrested, right? And dead women with their heads shaved had been turning up all over Texas?”
“Yes. Tiny McFarland was murdered eight days before Louie Bronk was arrested in Fort Worth. They had been trying to link David Serrano with the other crimes when Louie confessed. What made the Tiny McFarland case particularly interesting, beside the fact that she was rich and beautiful, was that it was the only chance to nail Louie on a capital charge.”
“Why was that?” Grady asked.
“Because he was in the process of robbing the house when he killed her,” Molly answered. “He also took her jewelry. That made it murder in the course of committing another felony, hence, a capital crime.”
“Oh, yes. I remember. He raped some of his other victims but the sequence was wrong for a capital charge. And this was before they added serial killing as a capital crime.”
“Yeah.” Molly could hear how hard her voice sounded. “He killed
them first, then screwed them. So the most they could get him for was murder and the desecration of a corpse. Louie enjoyed submissiveness in his women.”
Grady let out a long, deep sigh. “So there’s no doubt Bronk did her, huh?”
“None. He was able to tell the detectives details that weren’t in the news—that she was wearing only panties under her dress, that red flowers she’d cut from her garden were strewn around her, that the garage door was open, that she was lying on an oil spot, that the driveway was gravel. And he listed all the stuff that was stolen. Two eyewitnesses saw the car drive away—a very distinctive car that he did own. And he confessed to it.”