Blackbird (28 page)

‘Please.’

‘Smart is probably the wrong word. Keets is intelligent all right, but the thing is, IQ scores don’t really have much to do with how smart you are or how well you’re going to do in life. About the only thing they’re good at predicting is what kind of scores you’ll make on your next IQ test.’

‘You’re saying Keets is intelligent but not smart. Why do you think he got himself locked up, exactly?’

‘I think in his case it’s self-punishment. He probably wasn’t raised to hate people, or do the kind of things he’s done, but he got pushed around somehow in his life and ended up grabbing for any kind of strength he could find. Hate looks strong, so he signed on and never looked back. But the boy his mama tried to raise right is still in there somewhere, and the little guy keeps sabotaging the adult’s
agenda. Bright as he is, Keets has probably always been basically a schmuck who shoots himself in the foot every time he goes for his gun.’

‘So you don’t think he knows anything about the killing?’

She looked at the ash on her cigarette. ‘I didn’t say that.’ She watched a white Taurus full of teenage girls passing us in the outside lane. ‘I’m sure he knows exactly who killed Dr Gold.’

I stared at her.

‘Watch the road,’ she said.

‘Do I dare ask why you say that?’

‘I think at first he figured we were there about the credit-card scam M told us about, which he’s probably running. He was ready for that, but when you said we were investigating the murder, it caused an adrenaline dump. No way that happens unless he’s at risk somehow. At risk means involved. Involved means he knows something.’

‘LA, are you ever gonna stop jerking rugs out from under me?’

‘Hah.’

‘So what else does Keets know?’

‘That’s what we’ve gotta find out, Mr Dillon.’

I dropped her off at Kiln-Roi, then drove the half-mile to Three, where I found Mouncey and Ridout in my office, Ridout playing solitaire on the computer, Mouncey flipping through the fattening Gold file. Ridout closed the game and cleared out of my chair.

‘How’d it go?’ he said.

While I was summarising the interview for them Zito stuck his head in the door. ‘Hey, grunts,’ he said. ‘Say, Bis. Seen LA?’

‘Naw,’ said Ridout.

‘’Spect she hiding,’ said Mouncey. ‘Kind of riffraff we get around here.’

‘She’s at Jana’s place,’ I said. ‘Come on in and provide us with a federal presence.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Suffer the little locals is my motto.’

‘You gone enjoy this,’ said Mouncey. ‘We fixin’ to study up on the sex group Gold and Frix in.’

‘Order of the golden whiz,’ said Ridout.

‘Butt-whup of the month,’ added Mouncey.

‘Say what?’

‘Masks, whips, boots,’ I said. ‘The Freakers’ Ball.’

‘Now y’all have gone and made me imagine Frix nekkid in high heels,’ Zito said, shaking his head.

‘Happy to share,’ said Ridout.

‘Any way he could be good for Gold’s killing?’ asked Zito. ‘Then an accomplice turned on him?’

‘That be good,’ said Mouncey. ‘Be like a Bogart movie.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That way it’s a two-fer murder. Makes for more challenging police work.’

‘I sense a nasty streak of laziness developing in you, old buddy,’ said Zito. He looked over at the folder Mouncey held. ‘Hey,’ he said, grabbing a sketch of a framing hammer Wayne had apparently made earlier. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s probably what drove the nails that crucified Gold,’ I said. ‘A California framing hammer. Ever seen one?’

He looked up at me, saying, ‘Seen it? I got it in my evidence locker, hoss. We found it at the Frix fire.’

‘You what?’

‘It was laying in the ashes a couple of yards from the body. Some of the handle’s gone, but it was this puppy all right. Seemed a little out of place to me so I tagged and bagged it.’

‘Well, shee-it,’ said Mouncey.

‘Line three,’ Bertie announced from the doorway. ‘Lady named Earlene Cutchell says she’s got something you need to know about Dr Gold’s killing.’

A quick series of images from
Saturday Night Live
– stained glass, Dana Carvey in drag – flitted through my mind before I clicked on Earlene Cutchell as the name of the church lady who’d been Deborah Gold’s secretary.

THIRTY-FOUR

The sky was November classic, hazed at low altitude and streaked with high cirrus mare’s tails, as I drove out to the Cutchell place. Turning up the driveway, I glanced in the rearview and saw the third of three vehicles that had been behind me, a completely anonymous black Ford sedan, flash by, giving me a strobe shot of the guy behind the wheel. His posture, the set of his shoulders and his general look seemed somehow out of sync with his scruffy flannel shirt. He didn’t even glance my way as he passed, but I saw his Stetson and caught the flash of sun on his shades.

He was the man I’d seen watching me at OZ’s fish fry.

The Cutchells’ house was a square white pier-and-beam on an acre or so of land off Buckner, a World War Two-era structure shaded by mature native pecans, sweetgums and turkey oaks. It was flanked by forsythias, pyracanthas and spireas, and a camellia surrounded by a white fall of curled petals stood by the walk. Parked under one of the big oaks in front of the house were a red five-year-old Corolla and a dusty black Ford stepside that looked closer to fifteen years old. A composed-looking tortoiseshell tabby sat on the hood of the Toyota, watching me with cautious amber eyes.

Mrs Cutchell answered my knock almost instantly, as if
she’d been watching the driveway through her front window the way country people do when they’re expecting company. She was a tall, plain woman in her early fifties, a Pentecostal wearing wire-rimmed glasses, no makeup, a simple print dress hemmed below the calf and sturdy shoes, her hair pinned in a bun at the back of her head. She invited me into a small, organza-curtained front room that smelled like floor wax and mothballs, and introduced me to her invalid husband and Brother Ritchie – ’our pastor’, she said in a slightly hushed tone. With his wavy slicked-back hair, orange polyester pants and wide white belt, he looked like Jerry Lee Lewis in his prime. Holding a well-thumbed bible in his left hand, he stood and offered me his right, which was warm and moist.

Mr Cutchell was a collapsed, angular grey man in clean, pressed denim overalls and railroad shirt, with oxygen tubes in his nostrils. Without getting up from his worn easychair he gave me a cool bony hand and a small nod, and waved me to the couch. A multi-coloured braided rug covered most of the dark pine floor, and what looked like a hundred-year-old grandfather clock stood in the hall, its darkly gleaming brass pendulum sweeping out a slow, back-and-forth arc behind the etched glass. Brother Ritchie returned to the caned rocking chair beside Mr Cutchell.

‘Can I get you something?’ said Mrs Cutchell. ‘Some tea or coffee?’

‘No, thank you,’ I said, bringing out the small notebook I carried in my shirt pocket.

‘Lieutenant Bonham, I want to say something about why I decided to call you.’ She looked at the other men. ‘It was Raymond and Brother Ritchie who convinced me I needed to tell the truth about this.’

A wisp of a smile lifted one corner of the pastor’s mouth, his expression shifting, vulpine.

‘But before I called I asked people I trust about you, people who know who you are, and I prayed about it.’ She sat in the mate to her husband’s easychair, knees and ankles tight together in front of her. ‘Can I ask you one question?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘That man you injured several years ago, the drug dealer – I was told you did that to keep your partner from shooting him. Is that true?’

‘Yes, ma’am, it is.’

‘Something else I was told was that you conduct yourself like a true Christian, that you try to do what’s right even if you have to break rules and even if you get hurt doing it. I felt led to you.’

Not knowing how to respond to this, I didn’t try. I said, ‘Mrs Cutchell, are you aware of how Dr Gold died?’

‘Mercy, can there be anybody above ground who isn’t?’ she said. ‘And now that Frix man. It’s all just so horrible! Have you learned anything about who’s responsible?’

‘Not much. I appreciate your offering to help and being willing to go over all this again.’

She looked down at the backs of her hands. ‘I’m sure the detective who came out was a nice man.’

‘Danny Ridout?’

‘Yes, I think that was his name.’

‘He’s a pretty good investigator,’ I said. The oxygen tanks hissed faintly. Brother Ritchie cleared his throat.

‘It’s me,’ she said, looking at Ritchie, who gave her an encouraging little nod. ‘Mr Ridout was fine, very polite, but there were some things I didn’t tell him.’

I waited again.

‘It’s not an easy thing for me to admit, Lieutenant Bonham, but I’m afraid I strayed from the light a long time ago.’ She lowered her gaze. ‘I was raised in the Lord. There’s no excuse for it.’ She met my eyes again. ‘I gave in to pridefulness and envy and greed. And worse. I denied the Lord and turned away from Him to follow my own desires. I fell short of His grace. But when Raymond got sick it brought me to my senses, and Brother Ritchie led me back to the light. That’s what the church is, you know, a light unto the world – ’

I said, ‘You worked for Dr Gold a little over six years, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, sir. Six years that I’m not proud of. I guess I once thought I was.’ She shook her head.

‘What was it you had trouble with about those six years?’

‘Well, I didn’t have trouble at the time. While I was working for Dr Gold I thought, maybe the Devil led me to think, that her way of doing things was the right way.’

‘What was her way?’

‘Oh my goodness. Her way. Well, her way had a lot to do with it being the only way. With lying and cheating, and with hating anybody who might take a patient away from her or get more attention than her or beat her in court. She never forgave anybody for anything, and when she had it in for somebody, getting revenge was all that mattered to her. She thought everybody had it in for
her
. She was just so needy.’

‘Needy?’

‘I don’t know. Is that the right word? I guess what I mean is she could never be satisfied. Not with anything. If she had three school contracts she wanted five, ten. If she saw twelve patients a day she wanted it to be eighteen.
More. If somebody in town was getting forty-eight per cent from one of the insurance carriers she wanted to get sixty.’

‘Forty-eight? Is that typical?’

‘Actually that’s probably a high figure. The insurance companies are the worst thieves you can imagine. They’re even beginning to extort money from treatment providers just to be on their so-called “panels”, meaning you have to pay to be allowed to treat their patients.’

‘How much money are we talking about?’

‘Oh, say a thousand dollars or so a year for each network. If they aren’t stopped it’ll eventually be a lot more, of course. Then when you file, they “lose” a certain percentage of the claims, say they didn’t receive them, or some trivial piece of information is missing, or you used the wrong forms or codes. Mostly lies of course, and if you call them on it, usually they’ll eventually “discover” the error, and maybe even apologise, but payment is delayed at least until the next billing cycle. Usually longer. And by then they’ll be denying something else for no good reason. It’s just an endless battle.’

‘What went on between Dr Gold and Dr Pendergrass about this?’

‘Oh my, they were constantly at odds, especially there near the end. I believe Dr Pendergrass felt he was being cheated. But he wasn’t, or at least not by us. I know because all the billing went through my hands.’

‘Is this related to what you said you needed to tell me?’

‘In a way. With Dr Gold of course everything was about money. She was as dishonest with the insurance companies as they were with us, and I’m sure if anyone wanted to really look at the records they could make some kind of
case against her. Probably against me too, as far as that goes.’ She touched a tissue to her eyes. ‘I’m not saying I deserve to be delivered from what I’ve done,’ she went on. Another glance at Ritchie, who again nodded reassuringly. ‘I’ll render unto Caesar what I must.’

‘Mrs Cutchell – ’

‘And whether I am punished or not, I’ll never work in an environment like that again, I can promise you,’ she said. ‘But what I thought you should see was this.’ She picked up a printout from the side table and handed it to me. It was a column of letter sequences, in caps, and beside that a column of number/letter combinations:

‘Where did you get this?’ I said.

‘From Dr Gold’s computer. I printed it out the day I was fired. In fact, it’s the reason she let me go. She caught me with it on the screen, but I’d already slipped this into my purse.’

‘I get the idea you knew exactly what this was,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir, I know what it is. Earlier I said all the billing
went through my hands. I should have said all the regular billing did. This list had to do with a special account Dr Gold kept. I found out about it when the bank mixed up the statements one month and I opened the wrong one.’

‘Then the letters on the left would be people’s initials – ’

She nodded.

‘And the numbers on the right are dollar amounts?’

‘Right. Four hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred and so forth. Regular payments.’