CHAPTER THIRTY

I was at the courthouse early the next morning before the day shift punched in. I was still puttering around in the outer office when Maylene cruised in with Hotchkiss only a few steps behind her.

“You are a timely young man,” she told him.

“How so?” he asked.

“Well, I see that Bo has the coffee made and…” She smiled, set a large canister down on her desk, and removed its top.

“More cookies!” he said, the delight clear in his voice. “May I?”

“Have at ’em.”

“You’re a wonderful cook,” he said around a mouthful of oatmeal raisin.

“And how is our Mr. Quinn doing this fine morning?” I asked, motioning him into my inner office.

“He’s at the federal building in Houston giving statements and signing papers even as we speak. He’ll be in protective custody until after the trial, then he’ll vanish. I hope you don’t mind losing the state gambling bust.”

“I don’t mind a bit. Getting a bookie shut down was my main objective. As long as he’s out of my county I don’t care who gets the credit.”

“I’m glad you feel that way. It’s for the greater good.”

I had my doubts about that, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I asked, “So what else is on your mind?”

“Yesterday evening I made some phone calls. One of the Bureau’s agents in Houston has been doing a background workup on Zorn, and I thought you might be interested.”

“Sure. Let’s have it.”

He reached in his inner pocket and pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. “The man was born August twentieth, 1962, in Kerrville, Texas, which makes him forty-eight years old. His parents were of German descent, and owned a successful hardware store there in Kerrville. He graduated from high school and did one year at Southwest Texas State at San Marcus before dropping out.”

“That’s a big party school,” I said.

“I didn’t know that, but it fits his personality. After that he odd-jobbed around for a while, then enlisted in the air force. Came out in three years with an honorable discharge. Pretty good military record, though he was called on the carpet once for making sexually suggestive remarks to an officer.”

“Female, I assume.”

“Right. Then a couple of years later he somehow emerged as the agent-manager for a pretty well known bronc rider from Midland, and from that gig he went into rodeo promotions, whatever in the hell that means. That’s where he met Lester Sipes. When Lester started to hit it big, he took Zorn on as his agent.”

“He should have made some decent money with that one.”

“He did, but he flitted it all away on high living. You know the story. Big cars, fancy apartments—”

“And high-maintenance women.”

“No doubt. Then about the time Sipes quit the rodeo circuit, Zorn’s mother had a major stroke, and he wound up taking care of her for several years down in New Orleans.”

“Why New Orleans if they were from Texas?” I asked.

“His only sister lived there and she helped out.”

“Anybody talk to the sister?”

“No one could since she died of cancer a couple of years ago. They did contact her husband, and he says Zorn managed a bar part-time and did a good job with the old lady. When his mother died, Zorn and his sister split what little was left of the family fortune, and he drifted up here to Sequoya.”

“Any criminal record?”

He shook his head. “Nothing substantial. Just a couple of minor liquor violations here in town and one down in New Orleans. And the gambling charge I mentioned the other day. Everybody my contact interviewed thought he was a pretty decent guy, friendly, a lot of fun at parties.”

“Hmm…”

“What’s your analysis of the man, Bo?” he asked.

“If I had to speculate, I’d say that his decency probably comes more from habit than conviction. And like you said that morning at the Caravan, he’s a guy who’s spent his whole life nibbling at the crust while others were getting the pie. Had to be some envy there. Then something happens. A midlife crisis, maybe. Who knows? But he wakes up one morning and sees himself facing the remainder of his days wrangling with salesmen over a quarter discount on a case of beer. Tedious. So when opportunity presented itself in the form of Lester Sipes’s cocaine deal, he jettisoned what little ethics he had and signed on. Before he knew it, he was in over his head, and things start to snowball.”

He nodded in agreement. “For what it’s worth, his brother-in-law liked him, but he claimed the man just cannot leave the women alone. When one caught his eye, he had to have her or bust a gasket.”

“That’s true.” I said. “He was after my niece until I told him I’d put a knot on his head if he didn’t leave her alone.”

“The brother-in-law also said that, one way or another, some woman would be his downfall.’ ”

“Amanda Twiller.”

“Could be.”

*   *   *

After Hotchkiss left, I spent some time thinking about the case and reviewing what I had, which was little of substance beyond Zorn’s involvement in the cocaine trade. How Nobel Dennard factored into the equation, which already had too many unknowns, I had no idea. He was still sitting complacently in the jail, saying nothing and making no attempt to make bond. An enigma.

Sherlock Holmes used to say that once you had eliminated all the suspects who couldn’t have committed the crime, what you had left was the guilty party no matter how improbable it seemed. I had eliminated Paul Arno, which left one of the other six billion people on the planet as the killer. That meant I needed a name, not a smug slogan from a nineteenth-century pulp detective.

So for lack of anything better to do, I headed for the Sawmill Club. The joint held a dozen or so tired-looking blue-collar guys, three curvy college girls, and a pair of honky-tonk heroes who were trying hard to put the make on them and apparently getting nowhere. Parker Raynes was once again behind the bar, and this time she was decked out in a pair of cherry-colored Wranglers and another of her wiggly-squiggly blouses.

“Well, if it ain’t Marshall Dillon,” she said. “Have you come to court Miss Kitty?”

“No, ma’am, I can’t say that I have,” I replied with a laugh. “But if I do decide to ever go courting again, Miss Kitty will be high on my list.”

“That’s good enough for me. You want another one of them Coca-Colas?”

“Yes, ma’am, and with plenty of ice.”

She set the glass in front of me on the bar and said, “Well, if you ain’t here to make an assault on the high walls of my virtue, you must want information.”

“I don’t know what I want. I’m at loose ends.”

“Hon, I been there myself more times than I can count.”

“I meant to come to Doyle’s funeral,” I said. “Mainly because I wanted to see if there was anybody there who looked suspicious.”

“There wasn’t much of a funeral to speak of. Me and my preacher and the fellow from the funeral home was all the folks that showed up. I had him cremated and put in the columbarium at the city cemetery beside his momma and daddy.”

“You mean none of his friends came?”

She shook her head. “Pitiful, ain’t it? But you and I both know his running buddies weren’t the kind to have a strong sense of obligation toward a fallen comrade.”

“Probably not. Do you know anything about them?”

“His friends? Not really. I wasn’t that close to the kid. Mostly I didn’t see him unless he needed a little money or some help of some kind.”

“And you always came through, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Of course. I’m a pushover, which is one reason you need to keep my name at the top of that list.”

“I’ll do it. Do any of his buddies stand out in your mind? Anybody special?”

“Oh, from time to time I’d see him talking to a few of the younger bozos that hang out in here, but none of them seemed to stick with him. I think the truth is that Doyle was a pretty lonely kid.”

“Did anybody contact you or send condolence cards or anything like that when he was killed?”

“One whiny little nitwit named Tia something-or-other came in here and said she didn’t come to the funeral because she wanted to remember him the way he was rather than seeing him lyin’ in a casket. Damn fool. You hear more and more of that kind of crap these days, and it’s nothing but an excuse people use to get out of doing what they know they ought to do. Anyhow, I told her there wasn’t nothing to see but a box of ashes, and we didn’t look at them.”

“Could she have been his girlfriend?” I asked.

“Girlfriend? You got to be kidding.”

“Why would I be?”

“Doyle was gay, hon.”

“You don’t mean it.…”

“Oh, but I do. He was queer as a two-headed penny. I thought everybody knew that. He came out of the closet right after he dropped out of high school.”

I laughed and picked up Parker Raynes’s hand and gave it a gentle kiss. “Miss Kitty, you sweet thing, I think you may have solved this murder case for ole Marshall Dillon.”

“Huh?”

I drained my Coke and threw a couple of dollars on the bar. “You can read about it in the funny papers, darlin’,” I said as I turned to leave.

“Where you going this time?” she asked.

“I got to catch me a killer.”

She shook her head sadly. “I do believe you’re the most sudden man I ever met.”

*   *   *

An hour later I had Toby and Linda in my office with the door closed. “What I’m about to tell you two stays in this room,” I said. “Just the three of us. Understand?”

They nodded.

“As of now I have reason to make Scott Kimball for the Twiller murder. And before you object that nobody we’ve talked to has seen him around town in months, just remember that we haven’t asked that many people about him.”

“Whoa,” Linda said. “How did you get on this track?”

“A little confidential information, and I was able to put two and two together. I’ll tell you all about it later. Now we need to get moving.”

“So what do you want us to do?” Toby asked.

“To start with, keep this strictly to yourselves. Go to every informant you’ve got and try to find out if they’ve seen Scott around the county. But do it as casually as you can. Ask them about other things too, and just throw this in. Talk to his friends and try to find out if any of them have seen him. We aren’t going to fool people long. If we haven’t gotten a good lead in a couple of days, he’ll get word that we’re looking for him. Then he’ll flush on us for sure. If nothing has turned up by then I’ll try to get a warrant on him and put it out statewide. What we have is thin, but Judge MacGregor hasn’t gotten annoyed with me yet. If you don’t mind working late, I’d like for you each to put in a few hours tonight. I’m going to be out there doing the same thing, so…”

“How about that Dennard guy?” Toby asked. “Does this bust him loose?”

I now had a pretty good idea where Nobel Dennard fit in the story, but it wasn’t something I was about to tell them, now or ever. That was one piece of the puzzle I’d deal with myself when and if the time came. I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “Let him stew awhile longer.”