CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

After a light lunch I decided to take a rare afternoon off and get some much-needed sleep. I considered leaving a set of elaborate instructions for my staff, but eventually came to the conclusion that I had good people who could use their own heads. I did tell Maylene to see to it that Hotchkiss got a copy of the Raynes autopsy report and the bullets recovered from the body. Then I went home.

I was sound asleep about two minutes after I fell in bed, and I don’t remember a time when I’d needed it more. I woke up a little before six and fired up the charcoal grill. After I threw two big grade-A Idaho potatoes in the oven to bake, I began whipping up a tossed green salad with avocados. At a little before seven Carla knocked on the kitchen door. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and got the bottle of V.O. out of the cabinet and started building us both a drink.

“How goes it all?” I asked.

“Okay, I guess. Billy Don and two deputies from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office arrested Nobel Dennard at his office this afternoon.”

“No trouble, I suppose.”

“Not a bit,” she said. “The man is now securely locked in our jail. And Otis said Zorn is alibied out for all day yesterday. He was at the store until about six and then he went to the Roundup Club here in town. The clerk at the store and the waitresses at the club back him up.”

I nodded. “Do me a favor while I finish cooking our supper. Call the jail and tell them that I said to keep Nobel in one of the one-man cells on the third floor. I don’t want him in the felony tank, where he might have to fight to keep from being abused. Give him some magazines, let him have coffee now and then, and so forth.”

“Okay, but why the red carpet treatment?”

“In my judgment this guy will react better to the carrot than to the stick. Besides, he’s a substantial citizen and there’s no reason not to give him a little consideration.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, call Agent Don Hotchkiss and ask him to see if the Bureau has anything on Dennard. The number is on a card stuck to the refrigerator.”

“Will he cooperate?” she asked. “I’ve never had much luck with getting those guys to give up info.”

“Use your feminine wiles,” I said. “Say ‘pretty please.’ ”

“In your dreams, Bo.”

“Just call him. Hotch is a different breed.”

*   *   *

An hour later we found ourselves in the den, both as full as feed-lot hogs.

Carla stretched out on the sofa with a long moan and said, “My libido is buried under all that food. I seem to have reached the age when I can’t feast and canoodle on the same night. No doubt senility looms just over the horizon.”

“To tell the truth, I’m more interested in getting your opinion about this murder case.” I laid out the whole story, the letter, Nobel Dennard, the arrest, Willard Peet and the cocaine. Everything I knew and could think of.

“And?” she asked when I’d finished.

“Tell me if I’m focusing too intently on Dennard.”

“Well, he was obviously one of the last people to see the Raynes boy alive. Do you have any other suspects?”

I shrugged. “Maybe Zorn.”

She blinked. “That’s a new wrinkle.”

“It’s weak, I know. Can you think of any possible motive Zorn could have had for wanting Amanda Twiller dead?”

“You said he was in the process of dumping her, right?”

“So he claimed.”

“So maybe she had something on him and was threatening to expose him. After all, that’s what she did with Dennard. Or she might have actually loved Zorn. Did you ever think about that?”

“Not really. I figured it was more a union of convenience since her husband said her various doctors were cutting her off.”

“There’s nothing in this world more vindictive than a woman who’s just been dumped by a man she really cares about.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“How about Arno?” she asked.

“He has an alibi. Or at least he seems to, and there is absolutely nothing to connect him to the crime. That woman who owns the Sawmill Club said Doyle Raynes had gotten pretty tight with Scott Kimball before Scott left town. I’m going to need to follow up on that, but I don’t really expect it to go anywhere since Scott hasn’t been seen around town in months. He’s just about burned his bridges here in Sequoya.”

“You know his mother pretty well, don’t you?”

“Willa? Sure. She goes to my church, and I’ve been around her all my adult life.”

“What’s her story?”

“Not much to it. Her mother died when she was about three, and her daddy wound up raising her by himself. He had some help from an old colored woman named Eula Kemp who kept house for him. The Kemps had lived out there on the Hathaway place forever. They were descended from family slaves.”

“Isn’t one of the Kemps still alive?” she said.

“Jesse Kemp. He’s a Vietnam vet who lives in a shack on top of that big hill about a quarter mile behind Willa’s house. He owns that land up there. Willa’s great-grandfather left the Kemps a hundred acres in his will.”

“Why? That’s a pretty big chunk of real estate.”

“He did it because Jesse’s father was his son.”

“Really? Who was his mother?”

“A young black widow who lived out there on the place. Hathaway’s wife was dead, and nature took its course.”

“So that means that Jesse is Willa’s uncle, right?”

“Her great-uncle. Everybody knows about it, but it’s just one of those things that people don’t talk about. Her daddy wanted her to go to college, but she and Bob Kimball got married not long after high school. They had those two boys in three years. A few years later Bob got killed, and then her older son was murdered. So here she is—waiting tables at the Caravan and having the life worried out of her by a psychopathic brat who’s her only living relative. Except for Jesse, of course.”

“What’s Jesse like?”

“A chronic alcoholic. He gets a veteran’s disability from the government because he was shot up pretty bad in Vietnam. The first of every month Willa gets his check and cashes it and makes him buy about half of it up in canned goods and salt pork and dried beans and other nonperishables because he doesn’t have electricity. Then she takes him to the liquor store, where he spends the rest on cheap gin and vodka. The booze lasts him about ten days or two weeks. After it’s gone he has the DTs for a few days, then he just settles down to wait for the next check. That’s his life, and that’s the way he wants it.”

“You don’t sound too sympathetic.”

“I have more respect for him than sympathy,” I said. “He’s the toughest man I’ve ever met. The way he lives would kill a mule, but it’s by his choice, and he won’t take any help from anybody, not even Willa.”

“Willa always uses her maiden name as a middle name,” she said. “I’ve wondered why.”

“I think it’s because her people were original settlers here in Caddo County, just like mine. At one time the Hathaways owned about a thousand acres of land and a big mercantile store. It’s all gone now, but the name still means something, and that’s important to Willa. She’s a proud woman despite the mess her life has been.”

“I know that,” she said. “That’s why I hated seeing her with a man like Emmet Zorn.”

“What?”

“They were an item before he took up with Amanda Twiller. Didn’t you know that?”

“No. Are you sure?”

“As sure as death and taxes,” she said. “But it didn’t last.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “I would have expected Willa to set her sights a little higher than that.”

She gave me one of those looks—half exasperation, half pity—that men get from women when we’ve said something truly stupid. “She set her sights on what was available to a woman who’s in her forties and terribly lonely.”

I nodded, but wisely I didn’t respond since the same thing could be said of another attractive woman near the same age who was hooked up with an old geezer of a sheriff.

“Bo, Sheila came by the office this afternoon to see you. She’s worried about that complaint she signed against Paul Arno.”

“I’ll go ahead and tell her to drop it if she wants to. We don’t need it since we’ve got him on the cocaine.”

“Thanks,” she said with visible relief. “That’s what she was hoping you’d say. So was I.”

“I doubt that she has to be concerned about him. I expect he’s gone on back down to New Orleans by now.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

I wasn’t. Paul Arno was still in Sequoya and would be for a long, long time because nobody would ever come forward to claim his body.