Bad To The Bone (9 page)

"In other words, he didn't trust her to stay
home with the kid?"

"He did not."

"It sounds like the mother was going to get
full custody."

"She was. At first. But then something
happened to change that."

"What?" I asked as I worked on a small
mountain of fried okra. Some people won't touch okra. They claim
it's hairy on the outside and slimy on the inside. Naturally, most
of these people are men.

The court reporter nibbled on a carrot as
she thought about my question. "I guess everything changed when
Price's lawyer called a man named Joe Scurlock to the stand. There
was a big old bunch of excitement at Miss Bledsoe's table, and then
her lawyer jumped up and demanded a sidebar conference. Judge Poe
listened for a moment, I couldn't hear a word myself, and then she
called a recess and everyone trooped back to her office. Except for
me, I'm sorry to say. The whole thing was off the record."

I was disappointed and my face showed
it.

"When they came back," she said, anxious to
help, "Robert Price's lawyer made a motion to grant his client full
custody of the girl—and Miss Bledsoe's lawyer didn't make a
peep."

"So the father got custody?" I asked,
confused.

The court reporter shook her head. "Judge
Poe decided to bring in a court-appointed child psychiatrist to
interview the little girl. The doctor spent all afternoon with
Tiffany. The next morning he testified that it would be detrimental
for Tiffany to be deprived of her mother's presence during the next
six years."

"What happened then?"

"Robert Price started whispering to his
lawyer, and then his lawyer jumped up and asked if he could
question the psychiatrist again. But all he asked was one thing:
would joint custody provide the little girl with enough contact
with her mother? The shrink said yes. And that was when Price's
lawyer said they wanted to amend their motion to request joint
custody instead of sole custody."

"Robert Price suggested joint custody
because the shrink thought it was best for Tiffany?"

She nodded. "That was another reason why I
thought he really cared about his daughter. No matter what
happened, no matter how much money his wife asked for, no matter
how horrible her lawyer acted, Mr. Price never lost his temper. He
just sat there calmly while his lawyer worked out the
arrangements."

"So Price was allowed to see Tiffany after
the custody hearing was over?"

"Oh, sure. He was supposed to see her every
other week. And every other major holiday."

"Poor kid," I murmured. "She must have felt
like a Ping- Pong ball."

"He had stuff on her," my companion
whispered suddenly, her thin lips barely moving. "I know he
did."

"Robert Price had something on Tawny
Bledsoe?"

She nodded emphatically. “Toward the end,
whenever her lawyer would make some outrageous demand, his lawyer
would call a sidebar conference, they'd whisper, and then her
lawyer would either drop his motion or soften his demands. She
didn't like it at all, let me tell you. She was used to getting her
own way, that woman was. You could tell just by looking at
her."

"Who was in the courtroom?" I asked,
wondering why Price had not made his information public. Who had he
been protecting? "Was Tiffany there?"

"Sometimes," the court reporter said. "Not
always. Only if the judge wanted to question her. But the
grandmother was there both days."

"The grandmother on which side?" I
asked.

"I think maybe she was his mother. Since she
was colored."

And here I was the professional
detective.

"Anyone else?" I asked, wondering where
Tawny's family had been.

"Mr. Price's sister took the little girl in
and out of the courtroom."

"No one from Tawny's side of the
family?"

The woman shifted uncomfortably. "I don't
think her family was very happy she had married him."

In that case, they sure as hell weren't
thrilled about it now.

"So, who is Joe Scurlock?" I asked,
remembering the man who had started to testify, then been stopped
by Tawny's lawyer.

The court reporter shook her head. "I don't
know. He never came back into the courtroom."

I changed the subject. "How easy is it to
fake a court order?" I was thinking about the fat stack of
documents Tawny had given me that first day in my office.

The woman pushed her untouched lettuce to
the edges of her plate. "It's real easy these days, what with word
processing. Except for the seal. That would be hard to fake without
going through a lot of trouble."

"But the seal only appears on the final
page?" I asked.

She nodded.

"So someone could use the back page from a
prior court order and attach it to forged front pages?" I
asked.

She looked perplexed. "I guess. But why
would anyone do that?"

Oh, to fake out some cracker girl PI who
doesn't know her ass from a hole in the ground, I thought.

"Just speculating," I said out loud. "How
about some dessert? Maybe pie?"

"Oh, no. I'm getting fat," she protested.
"My husband left me after I gained too much weight when the kids
were born. So I lost forty pounds after the divorce and I want to
keep it off. In case I start dating again."

As she stood and reached for her check, I
watched her bony body unfold like some sort of gawky paper
marionette. Jesus, I thought, what women will do just to have some
poor dumb-ass man at their side.

Then I remembered Tawny, and thought of how
it was true going the other way, too. Stupidity was an equal
opportunity inflicter.

"She lied about the court order," Burly
acknowledged. "That doesn't mean she's guilty of murder." We were
having drinks at MacLaine's later that same night. The evening had
started out well, but quickly deteriorated— mostly because I
couldn't think of anything but kicking Tawny Bledsoe's ass.

"If it looks like a duck and walks like a
duck," I began, but was interrupted by laughter from a group of
well-lubricated men I'd never seen at the bar before. I'd have

guessed a salesmen convention, except that
they weren't polished in that cheesy way. Almost all of them wore
eyeglasses and sported haircuts not popular in ten years.

I sat at the bar beside Burly, watching my
bartender friend Jack handle the heavy crowd. It was rarely this
busy on a weekday night. I caught Jack's eye and exchanged a smile.
Jack was more than a friend to me. He was also my sometimes bed
partner, though it wasn't a role that we paraded in front of Burly
for obvious reasons. I had hesitated at bringing the two men
together at all, but my fantasies proved unfounded. They were so
busy male bonding, they never got around to fighting over me. I'd
had visions of Jack threatening Burly with a corkscrew and Burly
retaliating by running over Jack with his wheelchair, but between
all the palm slapping and talk about the Broncos, I may as well
have been a stuffed moose head on the wall. Men can be so
annoying.

"What is up with these guys?" I yelled
across the bar at Jack.

"Pathologists' convention!" a fat man with a
red face screamed back at me over the din. "Couldn't you just
die?”

He was not more than six inches from my
elbow and almost perforated my right eardrum as he laughed
hysterically at his joke. He turned back to his friends, bumping my
arm and nearly knocking over my glass of Johnnie Walker Black. I
exchanged a glance with Burly.

"It was your idea to come here," was all
Burly said.

Christ, but he was being uncommunicative.
Any hopes I'd had that his latest ebony wave would be a fleeting
one had evaporated.

"Be right back," Burly said abruptly as he
wheeled toward the cigarette machine. Another bad sign. He knew I
hated kissing him when he smoked.

"What's up, Casey?" Jack said
sympathetically as he stopped by on his way to the sink. "Your boy
slipping into darkness again?"

"Looks that way." I sighed.

"We all have our demons," Jack pointed out
as he set up a row of glasses and poured triple shots of whiskey
into each. "What's yours these days?"

I fished out the photographs of Tawny
Bledsoe that I had kept and arranged them in a row on the bar.
"This is my demon."

Jack peered at the Polaroids and winced.
"Ouch. She ran into a big door."

"Yeah, she did." I fingered one of the
photos, touching a purple bruise thoughtfully. "She claims her
husband did this to her. But he denies it."

"Like he's going to admit it?" Jack said. As
he slid the drinks down the bar toward a waiting cluster of
revelers, the same fat man with the red face who had bumped my
elbow earlier leaned forward and stared at Tawny's photos.

"Not bad," he offered loudly. "Pretty
authentic. But that one's obviously fake." He touched a bruise that
stretched across the top of Tawny's right cheek.

"Fake?" I asked.

"Sure. You a makeup artist or something?" He
peered at me closely and a waft of boozy breath brushed my face.
"You gals ought to ask the professionals before you jump in with
your brushes. Hey, Oscar!" he screamed, attracting the attention of
a thin man with wire-rimmed glasses. “Take a look at these and tell
the little lady where she went wrong."

Oscar and a couple of his friends crowded
around the photos, liquor glasses in hand. They murmured and
argued, swapping opinions until Oscar finally held up a hand for
silence. "Okay," he said. "These aren't bad." He nodded toward the
photos. "You do this to her?"

"No," I said emphatically. "Though something
tells me I'm going to want to."

"Well, this side of the face looks pretty
authentic." He placed a finger over Tawny's left eye. "But the
other side is phony. You shaded this bruise in with too much
purple. It's right over a major bone plate, see? The layer of
tissue is exceptionally thin at that point. Not enough blood to
have bloomed that deeply or so large. And this bruise would have
followed an arc this way." He swept his fingers downward over the
Polaroid. "But I got to hand it to you—the rest of the injuries
look absolutely genuine. You in theater or something?"

"Sometimes I act happy," I said, sliding the
photos off the bar and tucking them into my jeans. "Hey, Jack—buy
these guys a round on me, would you?"

"All right," one of them said, pumping a
fist in the air. "Southerners sure are a friendly lot." Hah. Wait
until he met the Southern patrolman trolling for drunks outside the
bar.

Jack gave me a look that let me know I was
bringing coals to Newcastle by buying drinks for the pathologists,
but I ignored it and worked on my own whiskey instead, pondering
why Tawny Bledsoe had found it necessary to enhance her injuries.
And wondering who was responsible for the real bruises. Robert
Price? Boomer? Someone else? No way they were self-inflicted.

"Ready to get out of here?" Burly asked when
he returned with his smokes. His dark stare met mine, and a stab of
bittersweet lust tinged with pain shot through me at the haunted
look in his eyes. I never loved Burly so much as when he was
slipping away from me.

"Sure," I said. "Let's stay at my apartment.
It's closer and I can make you breakfast in the morning."

"I wouldn't be very good company right now,"
he muttered, sliding his bar change into his pocket and unwrapping
the pack of cigarettes. "I think I'll head home alone. I'll call
you."

I watched him maneuver out the door of
MacLaine's, aware that Jack's sympathetic eyes were watching
me.

"It's never easy, Casey," he offered,
leaning over the bar. "But when you love someone, what choice do
you have but to stand by your man?"

"Oh, yeah?" I said. "Look where it got Tammy
Wynette."

By the time I got home, I was more depressed
than Burly. The evening news did nothing to lift my spirits. The
leadoff story was a breathless announcement that Robert Price had
been arrested for the murder of Boomer Cockshutt and was expected
to be charged with capital murder. That meant the death
penalty.

It wasn't news to me, of course, but what
followed was: a three-minute film clip—eternity on television—that
began with a shot of a well-dressed man standing on the steps of
the downtown courthouse, staring at a row of microphones. It was
cold as hell for an outdoor news conference. What was going on?

I turned up the sound just as a caption
flashed on the screen, identifying the man as the lawyer for Tawny
Bledsoe, estranged wife of murder suspect Robert Price. The man
rattled a piece of paper he was holding in his hands, cleared his
throat, and began to read from it in a courtroom-trained voice.
"The following is a prepared statement put forth by my client, Mrs.
Tawny Ann Bledsoe Price."

"'Although I know the courts are depending
on me as a material witness,'" the lawyer read, "'I fear for my
life and that of my young daughter. Because of this, I have gone
into hiding with my child until I can be absolutely sure that
justice has been served and that my violent and unpredictable
husband has been put behind bars forever. Not even my lawyer knows
where I am.'"

Here, the lawyer looked soulfully at the
cameras, his expression as sincere as that of a man about to ask
for your vote. "It's true," he said. "I do not know where she has
gone."

Hah—wait until he tried to cash her retainer
check. He'd find her soon enough then.

The lawyer began to read again: "'I beg the
court to consider not only my wounds, but those of women everywhere
who have ever been threatened or beaten or who have feared for
their lives. Hear our cries. Deny my husband bail. To let him go,
even for a few months prior to trial, is to put my life and my
daughter's life in jeopardy. Please. Protect us. Do not let Robert
Price go free.'"