Voodoo Daddy (A Virgil Jones Mystery) (32 page)

Sandy had grabbed the back of my shirt collar and pulled me toward her and onto the ground. Later, she would tell me she yelled something, but could not remember what it was. I never heard the words she spoke, but I did hear the gunfire right next to my ear. Sandy fired twice, but Amanda Pate managed to get one shot off.

And one was enough.

* * *

I couldn’t hear anything, the sound of the gunshots booming in my ears. The cordite from the spent shells assaulted my nostrils like someone had stuffed fire ants in my nose. I turned on the ground and the pain in my leg made the room swim out of focus for a moment, but I saw Sandy kick a gun from Amanda’s dead hand, then saw her move back toward me. She was yelling something, I don’t know what, but when our eyes locked and she saw I was okay, she ran right past me to the other side of the bar. I tried to get up, but my leg was caught in the railing, the cast wedged in tight. I finally managed to pull it free and when I did, I felt something pull loose and a wave of pain swam through me and everything seemed to turn gray, as if I were watching an old black and white film.

I could hear Sandy on the other side of the bar. She kept repeating, ‘no, no, no,’ over and over. I called out to her.

“Virgil……Virgil, I need you back here.”

“Sandy?” I yelled back.

“Virgil, hurry. You better hurry.”

I hopped and slid along the bar, my bad leg trailing behind me. When I turned the corner I saw Sandy was covered in my father’s blood, his head in her lap. The bullet had caught him squarely in the chest at the bottom of his rib cage. The color had drained from his face, and blood ran from both corners of his mouth. Sandy had one arm wrapped around his body, holding him in place, her other hand pressed tight over the gaping wound in his chest. I could see his blood as it burst between her fingers with every beat of his heart, and from the time it took me to move from the end of the bar to where they lay, he had lost more blood than I thought the human body capable of containing.

I already had my cell phone out. I punched in 9-1-1, shouted our location into the phone and let it slip from my hand. I got down at my father’s side and put my hand on top of his wound as well. “Hang in there, Dad. You’re going to be alright. You’re going to make it. Help’s on the way, you hear me?” His eyes glanced off mine and I felt his hand reach out and grab my wrist. He tried to say something, but when he did, he choked on the blood that ran from his mouth and no words ever came. He took my hand and held it to his heart, then placed Sandy’s hand on top of mine, his gaze held firmly to hers. I watched him stare at Sandy and as I did, I saw his eyes go out of focus and felt the silence in his chest.

I looked at Sandy who held my father in her lap and knew she grieved in ways I would never be able to know. For her, it was summer again from long ago, and this was yet another goodbye of a father figure she would never have the chance to know or love.

After a while, I slid sideways and sat down next to her and ran my fingers through my father’s hair. The three of us sat there like that for a long time, but for how long, I was never really sure.

EPILOGUE

The sun was out, suspended high in the miracle of another day and it felt like everything was fresh and destined to live forever. I walked with a cane, a handmade hickory stick Sandy bought for me when the doctor removed my cast and said I could go without the crutches. When we walked across the still wet grass of an overnight rain, the tip of my cane sank into the ground in various spots and Sandy had to hold my arm to help steady me along.

It had been eight weeks since my father died.

In the end, I decided that my father’s death could only be attributed to a certain sense of bad luck and a failure of imagination on my part. Amanda Pate had pulled the strings on her husband for years as she lived with and hid from his desires, all while she served an agenda of her own. We were able to piece together certain facts, Amanda Pate and Sidney Wells, Jr. being lovers, chief among them. When that fell into place, eventually the rest did too.

The fire that killed Amy Frechette, Murton’s girlfriend, was traced back to Collins and Hicks by forensics and the hard work of the Arson squad. It was ultimately decided that it was nothing more than a way to draw Murton out into the open and it worked better than either Collins or Hicks would have liked, I’m sure. It took a number of weeks, but I was finally able to put the final piece of the puzzle in place, and when I did, I almost wished I’d left it alone.

I thought I knew the rest of the story. No, that’s not quite right. I did know the rest of the story, but I needed someone to confirm it for me. So I called the Governor on a Sunday morning at home and asked him to meet me at his office.

He resisted the idea of the meeting.

I insisted.

I let him get there ahead of me, and when I walked into his office he was seated at his desk, a glass of scotch in his hand. It was only ten-thirty in the morning. I limped in and sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk. I didn’t say a word.

He watched me for a few minutes. Then he unlocked the center drawer of his desk and pulled out a brown expandable file folder. He set it flat on the desk, removed the elastic string from the flap and pulled out a number of different photographs and laid them on his desk. I couldn’t see the person in the photos, but I didn’t need to. “I should have known you would figure it out,” the Governor said. “Who else knows?”

“Sandy, and probably Murton Wheeler, though he hasn’t come right out and said so. But no one else that I’m aware of. My gut tells me you’ve probably confided in Bradley though.”

“Your gut tells you true. That makes five people in the entire world who know, Jonesy. You, Sandy, Murton, me, and my aid, Bradley Pearson.”

“Your wife doesn’t even know?”

The Governor took a sip of scotch then shook his head. “No, she does not. We were never able to conceive and I thought the cruelty of it all, the fact that I had a child by another woman, would break us apart. So no, I never told her. How did you put it together?”

“Murton had a lot to do with it,” I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a copy of the birth certificate that had been in the safe deposit box and handed it to the Governor. “He gave me this. Amanda Pate had the original before Murton got hold of it. How she got it, I don’t know. I guess we’ll never know.”

The Governor passed a stack of pictures over to me and I leafed through them. They were all pictures of Sidney Wells, Jr. at various ages in her life. And then he told me his story.

“Her name was Sara Wells. One night I stayed at the hotel where she worked. It was as simple as that. She was stuck in a bad marriage, I was stuck in a bad hotel, and when we met in the bar, I’m telling you, Jonesy, it was magic. She stayed with me that night and we met every chance we got for the next year and a half.”

“And when you found out she was pregnant?”

“I’m not sure I understand your question. Is it my honor you’re asking about?”

“I’m asking you what happened next.”

The Governor looked at nothing and spoke to me. “She told me she knew the baby was mine. She said she knew it to be true because Sid had been to the doctor. He had a low count or something. I asked her to divorce Sid so she could marry me, and she told me she would. My God, Jonesy, we were happy. That’s where we were when everything changed.

“My call sign that day was Voodoo. You know what’s funny? I remember almost every single detail of that day except the one that matters. The one where I picked up the phone and filed my flight plan. I had the option of going to Indy or Ft. Wayne first. For some reason I picked Indy. If I’d have picked Ft. Wayne…” He let it hang there.

“She might still be alive today,” I said.

The Governor pointed his finger at me. “Wrong. She
would
still be alive. I’d probably be flying for the airlines and we’d have a ton of kids. Instead, the woman I loved and my only child are dead because of me.”

“Governor…”

He held up his hand to stop me. What he said next didn’t surprise me, but it made my stomach turn just the same. “I’m sorry about your father, Jonesy. I really am. But what’s done is done. I see no criminal involvement on my part in this matter. The Pate’s and the Wells’ are gone. I’ll consider the matter closed as soon as I have my daughter Sidney’s original birth certificate. You do have that, don’t you?”

I did indeed have it. It was in my pocket.

I had two choices.

One, give the birth certificate to the Governor and be complicit in hiding his secret, one that would all but destroy his political career if it ever came out, or two, include the birth certificate in the official file, and let the Governor fend for himself.

I stared at him for a long time.

He stared right back.

“You put me on Pate right out of the gate,” I said. “Why?”

“That was Bradley’s doing, though I agreed to it,” the Governor said. “We knew he was being looked at by the FBI, but they were dragging their feet.”

“I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, Sir. In fact, with all due respect, it’s flat out wrong.”

“It’s neither right or wrong, Jonesy. It’s politics. How long do you think I would have lasted in my next campaign against Sermon Sam once he started digging up old news stories about me punching out of my plane and taking out that hotel? Or better yet, how long would I have lasted once everyone found out that the woman I was sleeping with, the woman who just happened to be married to that idiot Wells was at work and in the hotel that morning? Not very long, I can tell you that,” the Governor said.

“And what about the shootings?”

The Governor took another drink of his scotch. “What about them? Sidney Wells was a psychopath. He was trying to destroy me by murdering family members of anyone and everyone he thought was even remotely responsible for the crash that day. He knew all along I was Sidney, Junior’s  father. If Pate’s wife and my daughter were having some sort of illicit affair, as you allege, then the plan must have been put together by them. Who knows?”

I tried to hide the contempt in my voice, but I don’t think I succeeded. “And who cares, right?”

I picked up a few more of the pictures and looked through them. I thought the Governor’s priorities were about as far out of line as they could be, but in truth, who was I to judge? After a few minutes I did what I thought was the right thing—which may eventually be my downfall—and reached into my pocket and gave him the document. When he used my formal title I immediately knew I’d made the wrong choice.

“Thank you, Detective Jones. That will be all.”

I gave him a chance to correct himself, but he didn’t take it. “Are you sure about that, Sir?”

When he looked away and didn’t answer me, I pulled myself out of the chair and walked out of his office.

* * *

Sandy touched my arm and pulled me out of my thoughts. “Hey, you with me, big guy?” she said. We stood next to the edge of the pond behind my house and when I looked out across the water I saw it wrinkle in spots, the blue gill hungry, nicking at the surface.

“Why did you want to come out here?” I said.

Just then, a landscape truck pulling a back-hoe on a lowboy trailer turned off the road and came up the drive. I lost sight of it for a moment, then it came around the side of the house and stopped next to the out building I use as a storage space for my lawn equipment.

“You’re about to find out,” Sandy said. “We wanted to do something. For you. Me, Murton, and Delroy. ”

I watched as Murton backed the tractor from the trailer and drove over to where we stood, about ten yards from the edge of the pond. He lowered the bucket on the backhoe and scooped out a pile of soil then placed it carefully in a mound a few feet away from the hole. He repeated the process two more times, then turned the tractor around, winked at me like he may have just noticed my presence and drove back to the truck. When he returned the next time Delroy rode along with him. There was a Weeping Willow tree in the bucket of the tractor, its root ball enclosed with burlap and twine. Murton lowered the bucket next to the hole opposite the pile of dirt, shut down the engine and climbed from the operator’s seat, a small package in his hands.

“Hey Jonesy. Sandy,” he said, as he handed me the package. It was wrapped in plain white paper, the kind a butcher would use at a meat market, and tied across both ends with brown string that knotted in the middle. The paper wrapping was stiff, but the contents of the package soft and pliable. I let a question form on my face and I saw Sandy nod at Murton. “It’s the shirt your father was wearing at the bar when he was shot,” Murton said. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, Virg. I spent a year undercover with the Pate’s and never once looked at Amanda. I could have prevented the whole god damned thing.”

Sandy walked over and wrapped her arms around Murton and when she did, his eyes locked on mine. “It’s alright,” I said. “It’s time to let go of the past, Murt.”

I held the package against my chest, my father’s blood wasted and dry under a wrap of string and paper. I looked at Sandy. “He was telling me he loved me,” I said. “In the bar, when you came out of the bathroom. He didn’t say the words, but that’s what he was telling me.”