P
ete pulled me aside before the five thirty meeting started. We went out into the hall to talk.
“Has anyone mentioned the trouble between Bill Sanchez and Doug that happened a while back when we were all in the air force?”
“No, I don’t think so. What happened?”
“Doug turned him in for drinking heavily the night before he was scheduled to fly.”
“Can’t do that?”
“You have a time window. In this case, Bill had been drinking into the wee hours and had an early morning flight.”
“Is that common?”
“No to both. Not common for a pilot to do that and not common for someone to turn him in if he did. Probably the right thing for Doug to have done, but it messed over Bill. I had forgotten about it.”
“Does Bill still carry a grudge?”
“Not to my knowledge, I think he knew he had no one to blame but himself. Yet, it messed with his career, so it may be festering deep down. Something else may have happened more recently that set him off. I don’t know, but I just wanted to let you know.”
“Okay,” I said.
“They’re not going to catch him, are they?”
“We’ll see. There’s not much time left, but who knows? Do you know if there was anything to this wife swapping story?”
“You mean with Vince and his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Could be something there, but I’ve never heard anything in it that would tell me any bad blood came out of it. They seemed to still be good friends. Still married to the same wives, too.” He looked at his watch, “Guess we should get to the meeting.”
At the meeting I learned my shot on the par three seventh hole had won closest to the hole. I gladly took my winnings of twenty-five dollars, even though the shot hadn’t been a great one. I scalded a six iron, and the ball bounced and rolled all the way to the green.
Everyone throws in fifty dollars at the beginning of the week and, if we’re lucky, we win our money back before going home. There are other prizes, but with my golf game, I don’t get too excited.
After the meeting, I walked with my same dinner gang to a nearby pub for beer and hamburgers. Before we got there, I received a text from Louise. She wanted me to meet her again but said no pie tonight. She had something else planned for us.
“Your lady friend?” Tom asked.
“Yes.” I kept her text to myself. If I said she had something else planned for us, I would never hear the end of it during dinner. I imagined everyone would jump on the chance to give me a hard time.
“You know,” LG said during dinner, “the police told both Bob and Eric that they should tell you if they think of anything and can’t reach them. I think they are setting you up for another attack.”
I had already considered that. “Maybe, but since someone already tried to take me out, I think the consensus is he won’t try again.”
“This guy isn’t being rational,” Mike said. “Who knows what he’ll do.”
“True, but I don’t plan on making it easy for him. You know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I give him guts, though, for staying after he attacked me. He took a big gamble. I could’ve recognized him.”
“Still, for the next three days, we’ll be keeping our eyes on you, and we’ll be sure to let everyone else know what we are doing, so that should also discourage him,” LG said.
“I appreciate it, but, like I said, I doubt if he’ll try anything more. You guys are making me feel like I should be buying your dinner tonight.”
“Better tonight than at the steakhouse on Thursday night,” Pete said.
“Especially since we all got the happy hour special,” Tom said.
Despite a couple of their half-hearted protests, I did pick up the bill that night. After dinner, Tom offered to ride along with me to meet with Louise.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Let me give her a heads-up first.”
“Okay, but you’re not making this bodyguard business easy.”
“Thanks. I do appreciate it.”
The garage was dark when I walked over to get my car, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that every noise had me looking around. Ten minutes later, halfway to the diner, a jacked-up, dark Toyota Tundra raced up behind my Mustang. It followed barely a foot behind my car with its headlights on high, glaring through my back window for about ten seconds. Suddenly, without signaling, it shot around me, passing with a loud roar of its engine.
I never saw the driver and fought the urge to speed up after the idiot. By the time I reached the diner my blood pressure had returned to normal.
“Hey,” I said to Louise as I closed the door to the Mustang.
“Thought we’d do something different tonight. I assume you’ve already eaten.” She wore jeans and a light pink blouse.
“Almost didn’t recognize you out of uniform. You look nice,” I said. “Not that you didn’t before. I didn’t mean that.”
She grinned. “I got off early today. Had to see the dentist, so I thought we could go somewhere else, if that’s okay with you.”
“Fine by me.”
“I’ll drive us. It’s not far, but it’s a little tricky to get there.” She pointed to a small silver Honda parked a few spaces away, and we got in.
“Hope the dentist didn’t pull out too many teeth.”
“Don’t joke. He said he needs to take out my wisdom teeth. I guess they should’ve been removed years ago. How’d your day go?”
“Good, I won closest to the hole but then spent all my winnings buying dinner for some of the guys.”
“Win a lot?”
“No, not enough to pay for dinner.”
“Nichols doesn’t think the business angle between Bishop, Gamble and our victim is much of a motive. Too long ago, and we couldn’t find any reference to it in any of his social media, emails, or messages from his phone or laptop. The thinking is there would’ve been some sort of a threat in there at some point in the last three or four months.”
“I don’t think it is either.”
She pulled onto a narrow side road and then turned behind a bank building onto a well driven dirt road for about fifty yards, before turning into a dirt parking lot surrounded by trees. Next to the lot, stood what looked like an old wooden building not much bigger than a house.
“This is Willard’s, my favorite place to drink Cosmopolitans. For obvious reasons, I don’t like coming alone, so thanks for letting me drag you here.”
The parking lot had one pole light that lit up the seven or eight cars parked in the lot.
“It is a little spooky out here.”
“I’ll protect you,” she laughed.
We walked in through a side door. The place smelled of smoke and fried seafood. All four tables were occupied, and everyone looked up at us when we walked in.
“Spooky in here, too,” I said.
“We’re going out front.” She led me out the front door to a large wooden deck and to the one vacant table out of five that were spread across the deck.
“Now this is nice,” I said. “I like the view, especially with the moon tonight.”
“I like the sound of the waves.”
The Atlantic Ocean was a mere thirty yards away.
“I’m surprised the owner hasn’t expanded the deck or the insides. This is a choice location despite the dirt road.”
“The owner likes it just the way it is. Hasn’t changed a thing since I started coming here about seven years ago. Mostly employs family and a few old acquaintances.”
A server brought her a large cosmopolitan and asked me what I would like to order. He looked like he was my age and wore the thickest glasses I had seen on someone in a long time. I asked for a Yuengling on tap.
“Thanks, Steve,” Louise said as he went to fetch my beer. “Another reason I like this place. They remember you and what you like.”
“You must be a regular.”
She grinned. “Did you see me nod at him when we came in?”
“No.”
“That’s how he knew I wanted my usual. Can you believe the state boys have already backed out of the investigation?”
“They always limit their help to two days?”
“No, but as the saying goes, most murders are solved in the first forty-eight hours, or they’re never solved. In these higher profile cases they like to show up at the beginning. That way if it’s solved, they can take some of the credit. Once they decide it will likely not be solved, they’re happy to back away and go home.”
“Their stats probably look good,” I said.
“Right. Anything new coming out of the group?”
“I’m not sure you can do anything with it, but Doug apparently turned Sanchez in for drinking before a flight many years ago that may have messed up Sanchez’ air force career. I don’t see anything there unless something else happened since.”
She made a note on a small paper pad. “We identified the foursome Doug hit his ball into on the golf course. They were all at their hotel bar during the time the murder took place.”
“I couldn’t see them killing someone for that. Happens all the time, and the ball didn’t hit a person. Did you all talk to LG or Streelman about that story of the AirExpress guys having affairs in Brazil?”
“No one thinks that would be very significant. In fact, Detective Young said that sort of behavior should be expected.”
“Maybe, but it’s sad to think we should expect that behavior.”
The server brought my beer to the table. “Thanks. I get the tab, not her,” I said. She didn’t argue.
“Doug got a phone call from Edward White an hour before he was killed. Do you have any idea what that was about? Has he mentioned anything about talking to him that afternoon?”
“No, not that I heard. Are you all going to ask him?”
“I think Nichols is doing that right now. He’s also going to talk to Doug’s roommate again. The feeling is that he should have known where Doug was. In the first go around though, he denied it.”
“It does make sense he would have mentioned what he was doing when he left the room, but maybe he wasn’t there at the time,” I said.
“Probably be what he’ll claim. He was supposed to be at dinner with you that night. The five of you often dined together?”
“That was only our second night, and we all ate together the first night. It’s their tradition. I was included the night of the incident primarily because I’m sharing a hotel suite with Tom.”
“How did they each react to that initial phone call?”
“I felt like the news of Doug’s death hit all of them pretty hard. I’ve tried to think back if any one of them took the news different, but they all had that shocked and confused look. Additionally, nothing has been mentioned since that has indicated that any of the four have had any past issues with Doug.”
“You think it’s safe to narrow our list down to exclude them?”
“With the time left, I would. I mean who knows, but my money is that it’s one of the other ten.”
“Except the tallest and shortest?”
“That’s right. Makes your list even smaller.”
“It’s still a long list with so little to work with,” she said.
“Yes,” but I wondered which of them had been worried enough about my presence to try to kill me?