CHAPTER EIGHT

My father died of a heart attack in the middle of my senior year in college, leaving me with an invalid mother suffering from multiple sclerosis to support. I came back home and took over the family timber business and then got married soon afterward. Although commerce wasn’t my first choice as an occupation, I had a knack for it, and at one time I owned two sawmills and a lumberyard. A little more than a decade later, Caddo County’s longtime sheriff, John Nightwalker, a giant man of one quarter Cherokee blood, came down with the cancer that killed him a couple of years later. He resigned a few weeks after he got the diagnosis, and for reasons known only to him he talked the commissioners court into appointing me to fill out the two remaining years of his unexpired term. I liked the job and ran for the office in the next election. I’ve been running ever since, the last two times without an opponent.

Besides patience, my years as sheriff have taught me just how comforting the old rituals and patterns of small-town life really are, and I know that one reason I’ve thrived in law enforcement was that it lets me feel more involved with my people than I did peddling two-by-fours and plywood slabs across a sales counter. I also liked walking that fine line between force and diplomacy that a country sheriff has to walk, and I’ve often found myself in the amusing position of having to arrest some of my strongest supporters and do it in such a way that I could still expect to get their votes when the next election rolled around.

I live in the house where I was raised, a Queen Anne Victorian on South Main Street five blocks down from the courthouse that was built by my great-grandfather in the closing years of the Gilded Age. It’s two stories, with four bedrooms upstairs and five rooms plus a huge kitchen downstairs, along with a three-bay carriage house in the rear that I use as a garage.

Sheila’s Datsun was parked out front. I wheeled into the carriage house, walked up the flagstone pathway I’d laid down years before, crossed the screened-in porch and unlocked the kitchen door. As soon as I stepped inside I heard piano music coming hesitantly from the front room. I tossed my hat on a peg and took the time to wash my hands and face in the kitchen sink.

She’d left a bottle of V.O. on the cabinet. I threw a few ice cubes into a glass and poured myself about three ounces of whiskey. Then I pulled off my boots and socks, relishing the cool feel of the kitchen tiles beneath my tired, hot feet. I quickly drank about half my drink, refilled the glass, and then made my way up the hall toward the living room to find her sitting at my Baldwin baby grand pecking out “Chopsticks.” She turned and smiled at me and said, “I’m not much good, am I?”

“I’m not either anymore.”

“You sound a whole lot better than I do.” She looked around. “This is such a beautiful room. I remember Grandma always called it the parlor.”

I laughed, but it was a laugh that sounded sad and without conviction in my own ears. “Now it’s Beauregard Handel’s Museum of Faded Dreams. I think you know something about faded dreams too, don’t you?”

She gave me a wry smile and nodded. “I grew up knowing you were majoring in music before you had to quit and come home to take care of Grandma,” she said. “I’ve always wondered if you’ve regretted it.”

“Sometimes I do. But like Dad always said, what might have been won’t pay the rent or put a dime’s worth of groceries on the table. I did what I had to do.”

She smiled at me again. “Play something for me, Bo.”

“You know I only like to play when I’ve had enough to drink that I don’t care how bad I sound.”

“Come on … do it for me.”

“Move over then,” I said and sat down beside her on the piano bench. I put my drink on a coaster and flexed my hands a few seconds to limber them up, then began to play.

“I know that one,” Sheila said after a couple of minutes. “It’s ‘Clair de Lune.’ ”

“Right you are,” I said. “The Ferrante and Teicher arrangement. Try this.”

“I haven’t got a clue,” she said after a few bars. “But it’s pretty.”

“ ‘The Waltz You Saved for Me.’ That was your grandmother’s mother’s favorite song.” I played on for a while, then closed the lid on the keyboard and took her hand. “Let’s go back to the kitchen. I’ve got to have something to eat, and I want to fill you in on the pieces you’re missing from this odyssey. Are you hungry?”

“No, I went home after I got my story off to the paper and had supper with Mom and Mindy.”

“How is Mindy?” I asked.

“Fine. She’s been wanting to know if you’re going to take us riding again once the weather cools off.”

“Of course I am. I’ve got my eye on a real gentle little Welsh gelding I’m going to buy for her and board out at my place. I’m going to get her a nice saddle to go with it too.”

“Bo, no…”

“Yes.”

“I can’t let you do that,” she said.

“I don’t see any way you can stop me. Now will you quit all this senseless commotion and let me get something to eat?”

*   *   *

A little later we were sitting at the big round oak table in my kitchen. As I made my way through a corned beef sandwich and sipped on my second drink, I brought her up to date on the case, including what I’d learned from Muldoon and Hotchkiss that morning.

“Did you talk to Zorn?” she asked.

“Yeah. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”

“That’s not what I meant. Did you learn anything that might tie him to the killing?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe her demands had become intolerably irritating,” she said.

I gave her a sage nod. “Yes, I’ll admit that many a woman has been killed for getting on some old boy’s last nerve. But when that happens, it’s almost always a passion murder, and I’m convinced there was no passion involved in this killing.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one thing, she was shot in the back. Passion murders usually happen in the heat of an argument, and the victim oftentimes gets it right in the face. And secondly, if it had been a passion killing, I think the perpetrator would have tried to hide the body instead of dumping it in her front yard. Somebody was trying to send a message with that move.”

“Well, you don’t really have to have a motive to prove guilt. Even I know that much about the law.”

“That’s true,” I admitted.

“So kudos to Uncle Bo. You solved this one in record time.”

“I ain’t solved nothing yet, girl. I’m just getting started.”

“But you’ve got Doyle Raynes locked up and charged with the crime.”

“Oh, I’m sure he knows who did it because there’s no doubt the body was hauled in his car. He may have even been present, but as far as pulling the trigger goes?” I shook my head. “That clown no more killed that poor woman than you did.”