Bad To The Bone (7 page)

"No, I'm in the office
because of this." He tossed a copy of that morning's
News & Observer
on
my desk, narrowly missing my latte-in-progress.

"Watch it," I complained.

"Read it," he ordered. "Front page. Didn't
you say that guy who pulled the gun down at the beach was named
Boomer or something?"

"Yeah, but I pray it's just a nickname."

"That him?" Bobby placed a pudgy finger on a
portrait studio photograph of a respectable-looking local
businessman identified by its caption as Bernard "Boomer"
Cockshutt, owner of Cockshutt Motors.

"What's he done?" I asked warily.

"He died," Bobby said. "Thursday night. They
found him in his car out at Lake Johnston, at the back of the
parking lot. He'd been shot through the head."

"Suicide?" I asked hopefully.

"Doubt it. He was in the front seat. The gun
was on the floor of the backseat. Wiped clean. No
fingerprints."

"Shit," I said. "Was it a Colt .45?"

Bobby nodded. "That's what my source
says."

"I think I saw that gun. He was holding it
on Robert Price."

"I figured." Bobby pulled up my visitor's
chair and did his best to fit inside the allotted space. His thighs
popped out from under the arms like loaves of bread bulging from
their pans. "You gotta go to the cops, Case."

"If I go to the cops, the first person
they're going to suspect is Robert Price."

"They already do suspect him. They're
looking for him now."

I groaned. "Please don't tell me I helped
get a man killed?"

Bobby shrugged. "You were just doing what
you get paid for."

"Or don't get paid for," I reminded him.

Bobby nodded sadly. "We'll never get that
dame to settle up now. She'll milk the tabloid shows for every
penny she can get. Then she'll split and leave Price to rot in
jail."

"Maybe she did it?" I asked hopefully.

Bobby shook his head. "My source says she
was attending a church retreat in Winston-Salem at the time. Lots
of good folk can attest to it."

"How convenient," I muttered, pulling the
paper closer. The article was short. Not much information had been
made public by the time the edition went to press. It confirmed
that Boomer Cockshutt was dead. It offered the tidbit that he had
been an Ail-American tackle from Wake Forest University in his
glory days. That figures. Surely the violence I witnessed at the
beach was a steroid-inspired flashback of some sort. The article
went on to say that he had been shot once through the head and was
killed instantly, that police were following several leads and
blah, blah, blah.

The story ended with a few predictable
quotes from Lake Johnston neighborhood residents complaining of
night traffic at the lake and warning teenagers to stay away. Hey,
I thought, that's it: it's that mythical guy with the hook for a
hand that offed Boomer. The bloody stump is probably hanging off
the door handle of the car right now. Forensics must have missed
it.

"I don't like this." I shoved the paper into
the trash can. "If I'd had to predict, I would have said that
Robert Price would end up the corpse, not this guy."

"You got the photos?" Bobby asked.

"What photos?"

"The photos of Tawny Bledsoe with the shit
beat out of her."

"Sure. Why?"

"You've got to give them to the cops, babe.
They need to know Robert Price is violent. Plus, you were there at
the beach. You witnessed his motive for killing this guy. Boomer
was keeping Price from seeing his kid."

"Actually, it was more like Boomer was
caving Price's skull in."

"Whatever. You have to go to the cops. I
can't afford for them to find out later that we held anything back.
We need their goodwill and my contact says this murder has them
really pissed off."

"Of course it's pissing them off," I said.
"It's not like two teenage punks shot each other over a bag of
dope. Hell, this guy was a member of the chamber of commerce. Lower
the flags. Bring on the bagpipes. Let's give him a state funeral,
why don't we?"

"What's eating you? Maybe the guy was an
asshole, but he didn't deserve to be shot through the head."

"You know what's eating me? This whole case
stunk from the start. It should have been simple. Instead, it
turned ugly. Now it's getting uglier. And, somehow, we're in the
middle of it."

"You're pissed at the blond," Bobby guessed.
"You never like natural blonds."

"Don't be so sure her collar matches her
cuff. Besides, it's not her hair color, it's her I don't like. And
I didn't like her boyfriend much, either. Dead or alive."

"What about Robert Price?" Bobby asked
reasonably. "You like him all of a sudden? Look what he did to his
wife." He paused. "If he was the one who did it."

"I don't like anyone but the kid," I said,
chewing on another Krispy Kreme. "And she'll probably get dragged
into this soon enough."

"It can't be easy having dear old Dad
arrested for murder," Bobby agreed. "And I think that's what'll
happen."

"Who's your source?" I asked.

Bobby adopted his Mona Lisa grin. "Sorry.
Her identity is confidential."

"But you call her Deep Throat?" I suggested
wryly. "Or wish you could?"

"Go talk to the cops," Bobby reminded me.
"Do it before they come to you."

I sighed. He was right. An afternoon at the
Raleigh Police Department was not my idea of weekend fun. But it
would be worse if I didn't go right away.

They know me pretty well down at the RPD,
some of them better than others. I saw a couple of ex-boyfriends on
my way upstairs and one guy I'd had my eye on just before I met
Burly. I flirted with him for a few minutes because I like to keep
my options open, then headed for the interview room where a
detective working the Cockshutt murder was waiting to see me.

They'd definitely sent in the B-Team. The
infamous Detective Roland Dick was waiting for me. Everyone I know
calls him Dick-Dick because, well, because he acts like a dick.
He'd become a cop for all the wrong reasons and couldn't be trusted
alone with a suspect since he managed to violate an average of one
constitutional right per minute. At least three cases had been
thrown out of court because of him, and there wasn't a person on
the force who even wanted to be seen with Dick-Dick, much less work
with him. But he couldn't be fired because he claimed to be
one-eighth American Indian and had joined all the minority-officer
clubs he could find. Consequently, he was tolerated but frequently
assigned to backup tasks, well away from the front line.

The fact that he was sitting across from me
stuffing his face with cheese straws and slurping Pepsi was proof
that the Cockshutt murder team didn't think I had much to offer
them.

"Don't I know you?" Dick-Dick asked in a
vaguely snide tone of voice.

"No, you don't," I said flatly, not adding
that I fervently hoped to keep it that way. Orange flour from the
cheese straws coated his liver lips. His mouth seemed to float in
his face like some grotesque species of puff fish. I couldn't take
my eyes off those lips. They were as gruesomely fascinating as a
traffic accident.

"I don't have all day," he barked, annoyed
at my rebuff. "What's so important about the Cockshutt murder that
you had to pull me away from my real work?"

I forced a smile on my face, then proceeded
to give the fat-ass scumbag a summary of what I had seen at the
beach involving Robert Price and Boomer Cockshutt. He perked up
when I gave him a couple of the blurrier photos I'd taken of a
badly beaten Tawny Bledsoe and provided the lurid details on their
purported domestic problems. Unfortunately, this inspired Dick-Dick
to take notes at the speed of a drugged snail, forcing me to repeat
myself endlessly. He made me miserable for over an hour. When I was
done, he didn't even bother to thank me for coming in and I made a
vow that this would be the last time I went out of my way to
perform my civic duty.

"You can go now," he said, slamming his
notebook shut. "We'll be in touch."

In your dreams, I thought as I sulked from
the room. I was pissed that I had wasted my time trying to do the
right thing.

But, as it turned out, the day was not an
entire waste. Guess who I ran into in the lobby? Yup. Good old Bill
Butler. My favorite man in blue. Suddenly we were nose-to-nose for
the first time in months.

"Well, well," I said. "Look who the cat drug
in."

"I work here," he countered. "What's your
excuse?"

I started to tell him, then stopped. He knew
Tawny Bledsoe after all, and who knew if it was in the biblical
sense or worse? "Business," I said. "Minor stuff."

"It's all minor stuff. That's my new motto.
I'm trying to be very Zen about the job." Neither one of us really
heard a word he said.

Being nose-to-nose finally got to him and he
took a step back, letting his gaze drop to my high-top tennis
shoes. His eyes worked their way up my black thermal stockings to
my open coat and, beneath it, my pale pink mohair miniskirt and
matching angora sweater. "Isn't it a little cold for an outfit like
that?" he asked, staring at the front of my sweater. Okay, so my
personal barometers had popped to attention. It wasn't because of
the cold.

"Looks like it's warming up," I said,
flashing him my biggest smile. I nodded toward his enthusiastic
trousers. "Polyester blends give you away every time."

He actually blushed. "You scare me, Casey,"
he admitted unexpectedly.

"I'll consider that a compliment."

"You should." We stared at each other for a
moment in silence.

"You really do have an arrangement worked
out with that boyfriend of yours, don't you?" he finally said.

"I really do." I paused. "But that doesn't
mean I'm going to arrange things with you."

"That's cold." He turned away. "And here I
was going to tell you how much I liked you back as a blond."

"You only like me being taken already," I
called after him. "Which is why, when I stray, it will be with
another cat.”

He shrugged like he really didn't care and
marched away. He sure was cute when he was angry. And those black
pants of his were a very nice fit.

There had been a lot of truth in what I said
to him. Bill Butler was the kind of guy who liked his women
married, involved with someone else or otherwise removed from any
possibility of actually becoming entangled with him. I didn't want
to give him the satisfaction of cooperating with his misogynistic
insecurities—even if I was dying for a shot of hips.

By Monday, the local newspapers had
uncovered enough information on the Cockshutt murder to take up
most of the front page. The first thing that became apparent was
that the RPD had sprung a leak as big as Falls of the Neuse. There
was stuff in the main article that no one had any business knowing.
Dick-Dick and his orange liver lips had struck again.

"Are you reading what I'm reading?" I yelled
to Bobby. The only sounds I'd heard from the front office since I'd
arrived had been the steady munch of ham biscuits being consumed. I
was once again trying to stick to black coffee in recognition of
the fact that my hormones were steering me toward disrobing in
front of a yet-to-be-identified new guy soon and I wanted to be
ready.

"Yeah, I'm reading it. Who do you think the
faucet is?"

"Roland Dick," I yelled back. "Some female
reporter probably stroked his leg and he started spouting off like
Moby Dick."

"You mean Moby Dick-Dick,"
Bobby yelled back, then started to har-har in that bull seal bellow
of his. I was pleased at his quasi-literary joke. His idea of a
great book is
Debbie Does Dallas
Restaurants.
It meant I was rubbing off on
him.

The article had enough case details to
qualify as discovery for the defense team. Protected or not,
Dick-Dick was going to be in hot water once the chief got a gander
at all the beans he had spilled.

According to the N&O, Boomer Cockshutt
was legally drunk when slain and had bragged earlier to a coworker
that he was meeting a girlfriend that night. Contents of his
stomach showed he had enjoyed dinner less than two hours before his
death: steak, salad, French fries and bourbon. A Southern last
meal, if ever there was one. The gun he'd been killed with had
indeed been wiped clean of prints and dropped into the backseat
after the fatal shot. Forensic tests were now being conducted on
trace fibers and hairs found in the Probe, with results expected
later on in the week. After that, the facts petered out in favor of
personal details on Boomer and juicy speculation.

Boomer Cockshutt had a wife and two kids, it
seemed, though the family was too distraught to comment. I wondered
what the wife was most upset about: losing her husband or being
publicly humiliated on the front page of her local paper. According
to unnamed sources, the article went on to say, Boomer had been
seeing an unnamed married woman secretly for months and had bragged
to coworkers that the woman's estranged husband was violent.

"Boomer liked to live on the edge, and he
liked the ladies," one employee went on record as saying. "I
wouldn't be the least bit surprised to hear that he was shot by an
irate husband."

Great. The jury was already in. Robert Price
was toast.

The cops thought so, too. The article ended
by saying that the married woman had cooperated fully and been
cleared of suspicion in Boomer's death. But the police were still
trying to get in contact with her estranged husband to verify his
whereabouts on the night of the killing.

Which meant that so far they had been unable
to locate Robert Price. And now they never would. The article was
an invitation to flee.