Watch Me (10 page)

‘Did he ever work weekends?’

‘Hardly ever. He did his best to keep weekends free so we could spend some quality time together as a family. I’m sorry, Mr Winter. Do you have many more questions? I’m finding this rather difficult.’

‘Just one. If you only had one word to describe your husband, what word would you choose?’

Barbara thought about this for a moment. ‘Honest. He was the most honest man I’d ever met.’

16

Taylor found first gear and we pulled away from that brand-new top-of-the-range Mercedes. The air-conditioning was running full blast, but the car still felt like an oven. We passed the front of the house and turned onto the driveway and drove back towards the main gates. Heat shimmered up from the road in front of us and a rolling sea of perfect green stretched out on either side. That big white pretend plantation mansion slowly shrank in the car’s side mirror.

The gates were already wide open when we got there. The maid had probably hit the button when she heard us coming around to the front of the house, timing it just right. She’d probably done the same for Sam Galloway. Sam had been a busy man, a man who often worked late, a man who didn’t have time to waste hanging around waiting for the gates to open.

Taylor hung a right and we retraced our way back to Eagle Creek, steady and slow and sticking to the speed limit. I didn’t get it. Taylor was driving like he had Miss Daisy in the back. One of the few perks of being a cop was that you didn’t have to worry about tickets.

‘What did you make of Barbara Galloway?’ asked Taylor.

‘She’s a gold digger.’

He glanced over, an incredulous expression on his face. ‘And how do you figure that?’

‘You’ve seen the photographs. Sam wasn’t exactly an oil painting. Barbara, on the other hand, is. She looks good now, she would have been stunning when they first met. She could have had her pick of men, and she chose Sam. Why? Because he was loaded.’

‘Maybe they married for love. It does happen, you know.’

‘Not in this case. The love came later. I don’t doubt that for a second. In her own way, Barbara loved Sam. I’ve seen plenty of grieving widows, and her grief was real. But she married Sam for money and status, not for love.’

Taylor was looking at me like he was about to slap down a winning hand. ‘You’re wrong. Barbara Galloway is not a gold digger.’

‘Why? Because she comes from a good family? Because she didn’t follow that worn old route from trailer park to strip club to meal ticket? Barbara Galloway is a gold digger, albeit a very classy one. Just one look and you know she was born into money. This is not someone who fought their way up from the gutter. There’s a hardness missing that you usually find in gold diggers, but she’s tough in her own way. Her toughness is born from generations of privileged breeding. It’s a specific sort of toughness that comes from having everything, and wanting to make damn sure that you keep hold of it.’

Taylor was still smiling that full-house smile. ‘You’re right, she was born into a good family. A family with plenty of money. And that’s where your argument falls down. Barbara Galloway didn’t need Sam’s money.’

‘There’s an old saying: it takes one generation to make a fortune, the second generation to build it up, and the third generation to lose it. Plenty of fortunes have been squandered. My guess is that’s what happened here. Barbara saw the writing on the wall and married Sam to maintain a standard of living that she’d got far too used to.’

The smile disappeared from Taylor’s face. ‘You can’t know that for sure.’

‘You’re right, I can’t.’ It was my turn to flash a winning smile. ‘You’re the new head of the investigation division. Go do some investigating and prove me wrong.’

We drove on in silence for another mile or so, the road rumbling beneath the tyres.

‘I’ve heard lawyers called a lot of things, but I’ve never heard one described as honest.’

‘You think she’s lying?’

I shook my head. ‘That’s the thing, I don’t. She really believed what she was saying. What makes her statement ambiguous is the fact that Sam was having an affair.’ Taylor gave me a questioning look from the driver’s seat, and I added, ‘If you’re so busy that you’re regularly working into the evenings, then you’re going to be working weekends, too.’

‘Barbara Galloway isn’t stupid. If her husband was having an affair then she would have known, and she wouldn’t be describing him as the most honest man she’d ever met.’

‘Honesty is a continuum, not an absolute. She could have found out about the affair, but chose to keep quiet because the status and money were more important to her than fidelity. It happens. Or maybe this was a regular thing and they’d come to some sort of arrangement. She’d turn a blind eye so long as he didn’t embarrass her.’

I glanced out the window at the still trees and thought this over.

‘Door number two fits better. They’d talked this over, put all their cards on the table, and come to an arrangement that worked for them both.’

‘What if she was just trying to save face?’

I shook my head. ‘The way she’s perceived is obviously important to her, but it’s not everything. When she said he was honest, I’m pretty sure she was talking about the pragmatic honesty between them.’

I thought about this a while longer, then nodded and smiled to myself. ‘You’re right, though: Barbara Galloway isn’t stupid. She’s smart enough to know that we’re going to find out about the affair. That’s the second reason she made that comment. She was telling us that she was okay about the affair.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Because she doesn’t want us to go digging too deep into Sam’s past. She wants us to leave well alone.’

‘Same question as before, Winter: why would she do that?’

‘To make sure Sam’s reputation doesn’t get tarnished. With Barbara Galloway it’s always going to come back to status and money.’

‘Her husband’s just died. Do you really think she’s going to be worried about something like that? You said yourself her grief was real. That she loved him.’

I looked over at Taylor. ‘You can grieve and still be pragmatic. Right now the thing that worries Barbara Galloway most is making sure that her son takes over the family firm one day. Sam is her past. Her son is the future. She wants to maintain her current lifestyle indefinitely, and it’s her son who’s going to help her do that.’

‘You don’t have a very high opinion of her. First she’s a gold digger. Now she’s some sort of ice maiden.’

‘On the contrary, I’ve got nothing but respect for her. I’ve seen far too many people in her situation who’ve gone completely to pieces. People who went down so deep they couldn’t find their way out again. Barbara Galloway’s going to get through this, and that’s a good thing because it means one less victim for our unsub.’

We drove on in silence for a while, rolling on through the heat, slow and steady, heading for Main Street. The greens and browns of nature gave way to the dull muted monochrome of urban development when we hit the town limits.

‘Okay, so what now?’ asked Taylor. ‘Do we stop digging?’

I looked over at him again. ‘Of course not, you never stop digging.’

17

Taylor parked in an empty slot outside the police department’s big white building and we stepped into the sun. Early evening and it was still hot. I lit a cigarette with my battered old Zippo and pushed my sunglasses as far back as they would go to block out as much of that white-hot glare as possible.

Our car was one of two sedans parked in front of the station house. Both were as new as you were going to get. The only real difference between our car and the police department’s car were the markings and the colour.

When we’d passed by earlier there had been three police cruisers parked here, all in a neat row. Those other cars would no doubt be taking part in the hunt for Sam Galloway’s killer. From a police perspective, it was the only story in town right now.

There were spaces for five cars, and, from what I’d seen of Eagle Creek, the police department would have enough vehicles to fill all five slots, and probably some spares. Ten cars in the sheriff department’s lot and at least another five here meant an investment of around 400,000 dollars. In light of what I’d learned about Jasper Morgan this made a lot more sense than when I first drove up Main Street. When you had a billion in the bank, four hundred grand was pocket change.

It also went a long way to explaining why Main Street, Eagle Creek, reminded me of Main Street, Disneyland. Jasper Morgan loved his town. Taylor had told me that much. Jasper would want Eagle Creek to look its best. He’d want to win awards for having the finest Main Street in the whole of Louisiana, probably the whole of the South. But that beauty only went skin deep. Strip away the facade and things weren’t quite so pristine. Look at the Imperial Hotel. Perfect on the outside, faded carpets and worn woodwork inside.

Sam’s office was in a prime location overlooking the town square. It was a good spot for a criminal lawyer, since the courthouse and jail were only a stone’s throw away. It wasn’t so good for a lawyer who worked at the other end of the law and spent most of his billable hours shuffling paper. An office further up Main Street made more sense. Property was cheaper, but it would still be close enough for those rare courthouse appearances.

Now we were out of the car a new sense of urgency had infected Taylor. He was already up on the sidewalk, moving fast to escape the heat.

‘Hold on,’ I called out. ‘There’s something I want to check out.’

I drew on my cigarette and walked over to the town square. The place was deserted, all the benches empty. The shade from the trees was non-existent and it was much too hot to be sitting outside.

Randall Morgan Senior stood larger than life on a six-foot plinth. It was at least fifteen feet from the ground to the top of his head. No matter where you stood in the west half of the park he would be staring down at you, disapproval carved into his stone features. It was almost as if he was casting his disapproval across the whole of Eagle Creek, the whole parish, the whole state.
RANDALL JEBEDIAH MORGAN 1863–1934
was written on the plaque. And underneath:
A GIANT AMONGST MEN
.

Randall’s expression was hard and unforgiving. It was easy to imagine him getting furious that a black man would have the audacity to defy him, easy to imagine him outlining exactly what needed to be done to right that wrong.

It was also easy to imagine him sitting on a horse dressed in a white sheet and a white hood. The first man in and the last man out. Last because he would have wanted to watch the flames lick and spit from the burning cross for as long as possible. To watch the fire shadows of a hanged man swinging in the night.

Taylor was standing beside me, arms folded, face grim. He shook his head and muttered, ‘Two lousy acres of nothing.’ Then he turned on his heel and headed back the way we’d come, out of the park and across the street towards Sam Galloway’s office. His stride was much longer than mine and he pulled further away with every step.

I caught up with him in the shade of the entrance porch.
Galloway & Galloway Attorneys-At-Law
was engraved on a bronze plaque that had been screwed into the wall. The plaque was decades old. Despite regular cleaning the letters had a shadow of dirt ground into them, and there were faint streaks of green on the bronze caused by oxidisation.

Who had put the plaque up? My money was on Sam’s grandfather. It looked old enough. When Barbara Galloway had talked about her eldest son taking over the family business, for a beat her grief had been replaced with the sort of pride that had its roots buried deep into history.

We’d been outside for five minutes, long enough to smoke the whole cigarette down to the butt. The humidity was more brutal than ever and my Hendrix T-shirt was sticking to me. Taylor’s shirt was sticking to him too. I wondered if he owned any white T-shirts, and if he did, why the hell wasn’t he wearing one?

Taylor pushed the heavy wooden door open and we went inside. I removed my sunglasses and hooked them onto the neck of my T-shirt. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the change in light. The interior of the building was at least thirty degrees cooler, but it still felt warm. The heat didn’t bother me. Give me sunshine over Siberia any day. I’d spent my first eleven years in northern California and the summers there could get pretty vicious. I’d also spent a summer in Arizona, where it got even hotter. In some ways that had been easier to handle since it was a dry heat.

A wide stairway led to the reception area on the second floor. The receptionist who greeted us had a sad smile that struggled to get past her lips. It was a gesture born out of conditioned politeness rather than one that carried any sort of honest emotion. In that respect she reminded me a lot of Barbara Galloway. In every other way, though, they were polar opposites. Looks, status, the fact that she had worked a day in her life.

The receptionist was well into her fifties. Grey hair, and an appropriate amount of make-up given her age and position. She was dressed conservatively in a plain white blouse and a navy skirt. She had an efficient desk. A computer keyboard and screen directly in front of her, the phone positioned off to her right within easy reach.

Taylor held up his badge. ‘I’m Officer Taylor and this is Jefferson Winter. He’s helping us out with the investigation into Sam Galloway’s murder. Thank you for waiting. We appreciate it.’

The receptionist’s face seemed to collapse in on itself. She looked on the verge of tears. ‘I can’t believe Mr Galloway’s gone.’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

‘Mary. Mary Sanders.’

‘Have you worked here long, Mary?’

‘Since I left high school. Mr Galloway’s father hired me.’ She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t seem real. Every time I hear someone come in, I keep expecting to see Mr Galloway.’

I nodded that I understood, but I was thinking about how we could get information from her. If anybody knew the details of Sam’s extra-curricular activities, Mary would. The problem was that she would be fiercely loyal to her former employer. Particularly right now when the wounds were so raw.