Murder in the Hearse Degree (39 page)

“Sugar.”

His head was slightly cocked and he had a great big smile on his face when he said it. Sugar hefted the rifle up to her hip and fired. No hesitation. Another explosion. Crawford took a trip similar to his deputy’s, only in his case he ended up sprawled half on and half off the couch. The smile was gone. Half the face was gone. I looked over at Sugar Jenks. Like a conjurer’s trick, Crawford Larue’s smile was now on his daughter’s face. Not as seasoned. Not as large. Not as smarmy. But it was still the same smile. Her daddy’s smile.

At my feet, Libby let out a huge sob.

The sirens grew louder.

 

 

I had two long
talks the day before we buried Mike Gellman. The first was with Eva Potts.

She phoned me at home. She spent most of the conversation talking about her daughter, telling me random stories of Sophie’s twenty-three years. I listened. The undertaker’s ear is accustomed to this exercise; I’ve always considered it one of the more important parts of my job. Eva Potts thanked me for my part in helping flush out what had really happened to her daughter. It was painful to see Sophie’s name in all of the newspaper articles, but she was gratified that the truth—ugly as it was—had been uncovered.

The other talk was with Lee Cromwell. Lee drove over to Fell’s Point and I took her out for a snazzy breakfast at Jimmy’s. Pete was going back to Susan. He had decided the night before; he was giving his marriage another shot. Pete was still in the shower when I popped out to meet with Lee. Lee wanted to talk with Pete, but she wanted to talk with me first. Her eyes were dark, with a mood to match. She looked tired. Lee had performed two shows at the Wine Cellar the night before. By my calculations she was working on five hours’ sleep at best. Probably less. I had to be at the funeral home soon to get things rolling for Mike’s service. Lee was in jeans, cowboy boots and a loose-fitting pale green sweater. She took exactly two bites of her scrambled eggs and left the rest, pushing the plate to the side.

“Will they let me smoke in this damn place?” she asked me, her eyes casting about for an ashtray. The cigarette was already in her mouth. She sounded so much like Pete just then it broke my heart.

Our talk ended out on the pier, across the harbor from the ubiquitous Domino Sugar sign. Lee had her fingers jammed into her rear pockets and was gazing across the water.

“I was so miserable when I left Ben. I was drinking too much. Ben was two-timing me with a younger woman. I hated the corner I had gotten myself into. I hated Ben, too. Our love was gone. It was an autopilot marriage and even the autopilot was breaking down.”

She looked out over the water. “Peter doesn’t hate his wife,” she went on. “He’s very angry and a lot of it is aimed at her. Susan has been a convenient place for him to dump all the blame for his unhappiness. And he knows it. And he doesn’t like himself for it.”

“He’s not happy with Susan,” I said. “You make him happy.”

“I’m easy, Hitch. I’m a girl singing in a nightclub. I love my independence. I don’t make demands on Peter. He’s not responsible for me. A marriage is a lot harder.”

“I think he’s making a mistake. He adores you.”

“He told me that he loves me,” Lee said.

“He loves you but he is going back to his wife. That is so Munger. He just wants to make
everyone
miserable.”

Lee tilted her chin as if she were sniffing a new scent in the air. An inquisitive look came onto her face.

“No. I think Peter wants to make everyone happy but he can’t do it. I think he’s overlooking the fact that unless
he
is happy it’s not going to work at all.”

“I guess,” I said. “And you make him happy.”

“So does being loyal to his marriage.”

“You don’t believe that,” I said.

The toe of one of Lee’s boots had found a large splinter chip on the pier and she looked down at it as she worked it loose. She kicked it into the water.

“I guess I don’t.” She looked over at me and gave a thin smile. “It’s all your fault, Hitch. You introduced us.”

“Pete said the same thing.”

She looked past me. I turned. Munger was standing at the bottom of the pier, next to the Oyster. He seemed uncommonly interested in his shoes. I looked back at Lee. I was struck with the urge to tell her what Pete had done the day before at Crawford Larue’s house. But I didn’t. Pete had sworn me to secrecy. He had acted incredibly swiftly. It couldn’t have been less than ten seconds before the police came bursting into the house and Pete had stepped over to where Crawford Larue lay sprawled half on and half off the couch. Pete was still holding his own pistol, and taking hold of Larue’s right hand he pressed the dead man’s hand around the grip. Then he let the pistol drop to the floor. He stepped back over to where he had been standing and addressed Sugar Jenks. “Your father relieved me of my gun. When you burst in here just now, he was holding my gun on Hitchcock and me. That’s why you shot him. That is the only story you know. That is what happened.” Sugar had looked perplexed and then Munger had given her one of his great big crooked smiles. “Thank you for saving our lives, ma’am. Hitchcock and I appreciate it.”

Lee pulled her hands from her pockets and crossed her arms. She was still looking past me at Pete.

“I’ve got to go bury someone,” I said to her.

Lee took a beat. Then she smiled. “Oh, right.
That
old excuse.”

The media was having a veritable field day. Kids in the candy shop.
The Daily Cannon
in particular was so rife with purple prose that its readers practically had to wear gloves in order to keep their fingers from getting stained. Fallon swore to me that even he had protested—to no avail—over
The Cannon
’s banner headline that ran the day after the shootings.

 

 

“We have to sell papers, Hitch,” he said to me over the phone. “It’s a screaming match out there.”

Most of the news accounts had little to go on beyond the bare-bones facts of Sugar Larue Jenks having gunned down the executive director and the CEO of the ARK, one of whom happened to have been her father, the other her husband. Speculative pistols were being shot off in all directions. It wasn’t until two days after the killings that Nick Fallon bylined
The Daily Cannon
’s scoop, setting out the reasons and rhymes for Sugar Jenks’s bloody actions. Nick was greatly assisted in his efforts by a detailing from none other than Sugar herself. Owen Cutler had moved swiftly to secure Sugar’s release on bail, exerting his considerable influence as well as digging deep into his own pockets to come up with the sum set by the judge. The prosecutor protested, but Owen Cutler’s personal promise that he would keep a short leash on Sugar had carried the day. Nick Fallon had been tipped off that Cutler was planning to intervene on Sugar’s behalf, and when Cutler and Sugar arrived back at Cutler’s house after the hearing, Nick was camped out on the doorstep. So was I. Nick had urged me to be on hand. He wanted someone there who Sugar Jenks would recognize—and possibly trust—as he made his pitch for an exclusive interview. Cutler balked of course and attempted to get Sugar swiftly into the house, but with a tall undertaker blocking the door he failed. It was something of a long shot on Fallon’s part, though in truth he had little to lose. It paid off. I put the matter to Sugar, who took no time shaking free of Cutler’s grip and inviting us inside.

“I do not agree to this,” Cutler protested.

Sugar told him that was fine. We could go off to a coffee shop and talk.

“You can’t keep me from talking,” she said. “Maybe you think you can, but not anymore you can’t.”

“It’s the devil you know,” Fallon said to Cutler. “You might as well listen in. It’s tomorrow’s news.”

Cutler conceded. He held open the door and we filed in.

It was not a happy chronicle.

Sugar Larue Jenks sat at the Cutlers’ kitchen table and in her soft, nearly whispering voice detailed a lonely childhood in Kentucky. Her father, she said, had little time for her, consumed as he was with raising and training his champion racehorses. He was cold to her, she said, and he also had little time for his wife, who shared none of her husband’s passion for the caballos. Honey Larue—that’s right, you can’t make this stuff up—Honey Larue had a pair of outlets for her own loneliness. One of them was Kentucky mash. The other was her daughter. Sugar Larue grew up on a steady diet of bitter invective directed against her father.

“I never knew someone could hate another person so much,” Sugar whispered into Fallon’s tape recorder. “I felt sorry for Daddy.”

When she was thirteen, Sugar got involved with one of the horse trainers under her father’s employment. Ten years her senior, the trainer seduced the boss’s daughter in a horse trailer next to one of the ranch’s several riding rings. The affair was brief, ending the day Sugar Larue looked beyond the jolting shoulders of the trainer to see her father standing at the door of the trailer, arms crossed on his oval chest, a look of casual disdain on his elfin face. Crawford Larue never mentioned the incident, either to Sugar or to his wife. Nor did he fire the trainer. On the contrary, he promoted him, putting him in charge of one of Larue’s personal favorites of the stable. Larue had recently made his decision to run for the statehouse. Sugar fell into a heavy depression and remained in it throughout the campaign and after she and her parents had moved into the governor’s mansion. A year later, Crawford Larue was in federal prison and—the ranch sold—Sugar and her mother were living in a modest house in a Louisville suburb. The day that her husband was released from prison, Honey Larue drove her car into a lake. When divers reached it there was no indication that Honey had made any attempts to escape. Her seat and shoulder belts were still affixed and her hands were gripped tightly on the steering wheel.

Sugar had paused at this point in her story to get herself a glass of water. Cutler, who was standing off by the refrigerator the entire time, had not budged. When Sugar sat back down, she had again whispered, “I felt so sorry for Daddy.”

Crawford and Sugar moved to Washington, where Jack Barton had arranged for his old friend to take the reins of the Alliance for Reason and Kindness. By that point Sugar’s depression was chronic and she sought refuge in a variety of medications, few of which did little else but dull her already insensate senses. It was in such a state that she let out her very small whimper of protest the first evening that Jack Barton excused himself from cordials in Crawford’s den and made his way upstairs to Sugar’s bedroom.

Sugar would not—or could not—detail the number of encounters she had with Jack Barton over the next several years. Fallon had pressed gently, but Sugar frowned him off. “A lot,” she whispered. That her father was fully aware of what was going on was evident not only in Barton’s boldness, but in the abortions—three in all, she said—that Crawford Larue quietly arranged for his daughter.

Here, Sugar corrected herself. She had told most of her story to the kitchen table, her eyes fixed on Nick Fallon’s tape recorder. But now she looked up. She looked across the room at Owen Cutler. The poor girl was incapable of getting off a withering stare. There was too much pain in her eyes to pull it off. But she tried.

“They tried one more time,” she said hoarsely. “I ran away. I . . . I couldn’t do it again. I was killing too many babies. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Sugar had been scheduled for another appointment with her doctor. Instead she went to the bus station and took the first bus out. The bus took her to Florida, where she stayed a while before moving on to California. She had withdrawn some money from her savings account and as that ran out she took a series of jobs waiting tables.

Tears appeared in Sugar’s large black eyes and they flowed unimpeded down her cheeks.

“But I . . . I was no good. I was scared. And I was sick all the time. I’ve never taken care of myself before. I didn’t have anyone to protect me. It was . . . I was lonely.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and she closed her eyes.

“I couldn’t live out there.”

Crawford Larue had the resources—and he used them—to locate his daughter and to bring her back home. Sugar was too far along at that point to safely abort the child, so she carried the baby to term, never once leaving the house until it was time for the baby to be born. Sugar told us that she has almost no memory of that stretch of time. The child was delivered by cesarean. A baby girl. Sugar never saw her.

“You stole my baby,” Sugar said, pointing a trembling finger at Owen Cutler. “You told me she was dead.” She turned to Fallon and sniffed back her tears.

“They made it so I would never have a baby again. They never asked me, they just did it.” She took a deep breath and held it. The tears welled up again in her eyes.

“And that’s when I died.”

Crawford and Virginia Larue had never intended to adopt a baby. Leastwise, not for themselves. Fallon had been right about that. Neither of them was interested in raising a child. The baby was intended for Sugar. For Mr. and Mrs. Jenks. A little bambino all their own. Ginny Larue swore she knew nothing of her stepdaughter’s wretched past. I was inclined to believe her. She told the authorities that she was in fact aware that Crawford was on the lookout for a child to “present” to his daughter and her husband. Ginny knew that Sugar was unable to conceive a child on her own, although she insisted she was in the dark as to the reasons. Owen Cutler admitted that Larue had initially told him that he wanted the lawyer to “fetch Sugar’s baby back.” This was what Cutler had told Mike during their conversation on Gellman’s deck. Cindy Lehigh had not heard this part, or if she had, had not understood what Cutler was saying. Of course Cutler steered Larue away from such a ludicrous notion. There were, he assured him, plenty of babies out there.