Nailed Page 15

  Regardless of how his personal demons made him feel, he’d have to keep his ear close to the ground. If there were anything worse than having assholes in his jurisdiction, it would be letting them get organized. He wouldn’t stand for that.

  Then there was the matter of Mr. Didi DuPree, the seriously bad ex con, according to Leroi Grand. Ron didn’t doubt the canny houseman’s appraisal was accurate. It wouldn’t do to have someone like DuPree on hand, sliding in and out of the shadows. Not at any time. But especially not now when Isaac Cardwell’s killer was still looking to have his nametag filled in. A prompt sit down with DuPree would be imperative.

  Ron let out a deep sigh.

  A voice said, “The burdens of high office getting to be too much for you? Let me know if I should make my pitch to the mayor.”

  The chief turned to see that Oliver had entered his office.

  “You keep telling me you’re not going to spend another winter here,” Ron said.

  “My wife and son keep telling me they won’t live anywhere else.”

  “We’ve all got our —” Ron stopped himself. “I was going to say crosses to bear. But in light of recent events I don’t think that’s a very happy metaphor.”

  “Not hardly,” Oliver said, taking a seat.

  Ron sat down behind his desk.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your day, and I’ll tell you about mine?”

  The two cops spent the next ten minutes sharing information, and they examined how some of the pieces of what they’d learned might fit together.

  “The reverend has himself two girlfriends?” Oliver asked. “And they both live under his roof? That’s not exactly living the fine, upstanding lifestyle he preaches, is it?”

  Jimmy Thunder’s ministry was predicated on the simple idea that if you followed the Ten Commandments, you were beyond reproof. If anyone hurled an epithet, racial or otherwise, at you while you lived a righteous life, they were only revealing their own flawed and sinful natures.

  A moral, upright life was an invincible shield, the reverend preached. In time, even the wicked would tire of trying to attack it. Or they would be driven off by the multitudes of the godly. Whose numbers would surely increase if Jimmy Thunder’s show remained on TV.

  “Yeah,” Ron responded. “And then there’s his friend and houseguest, Didi DuPree, and whatever sins he makes his life’s work. In the middle of all this, Isaac Cardwell arrives unexpectedly on Daddy’s doorstep, with a Brit sleaze merchant in tow.”

  “You think the old lady’s got it right? Jimmy Thunder did his son?”

  “He says he was playing cards with Texas Jack.”

  “Gambling being another thing that surely wouldn’t help his image.”

  “Besides which,” Ron added, “Thunder could have hired it done, and never had to leave the card table.”

  A reflective look crossed the deputy chief’s face.

  “Killing your own son. Man, you can’t get any colder than that.”

  Ron knew Oliver was thinking about his own beloved child.

  “It’s not like they really knew each other,” the chief said. “From what you told me, Mahalia Cardwell drove Thunder off before Isaac Cardwell was even born.”

  “Yeah. And the good reverend never made an attempt to see his boy after that. So maybe he didn’t care that Isaac was his own flesh and blood. Maybe all he cared about was saving his own sweet scam, and hired the killing done like you said.”

  Ron decided to play the devil’s advocate for a moment.

  “I thought you liked a white guy with a red neck for the murder.”

  “Maybe that’s who Thunder hired,” Oliver said.

  “Or maybe he just had his boy nailed to that tree like that to throw us off.”

  “Yeah, shit. It could be like that,” the deputy chief admitted.

  “You think Isaac Cardwell was actually spying on his father for this Colin Ring scumbag?”

  “Mrs. Cardwell paints a halo ‘round Isaac’s head. On the other hand, even Jesus had his moment of weakness. Maybe Reverend Cardwell was hitting back at Reverend Thunder for being such a miserable fucking excuse for a father.”

  Oliver shook his head several times.

  Then he asked, “We get any word on physical evidence from the crime scene?”

  “Such as it is,” Ron answered. “Dr. Ryman estimates Isaac Cardwell’s time of death as approximately three A.M. Friday morning. He says the rain that was falling off and on that night undoubtedly affected the body’s temperature, but to what degree he can’t say. So three in the morning is his best guess. Benny Marx tells me those footprints come from a size nine-and-a-half E work boot, manufactured in South Korea and sold under various labels at department and discount stores around the country. The impressions indicate a man five nine to six feet, weighing between one fifty and two hundred pounds. Again, precision was made more difficult by the rain, by the fact that the killer was burdened by Isaac Cardwell’s weight on the way to the tree, and the fact that slippery footing likely caused him to alter the length of his normal stride on the way out.”

  “No chance of getting anything of the killer’s to do a DNA test on?”

  Ron shook his head. “No tissue was found under Isaac Cardwell’s fingernails. No strands of hair were found. No blood was found.”

  Oliver Gosden’s jaw was tight with frustration. Then he sighed as loudly as Ron had moments earlier. “You know, I wouldn’t mind letting my family see their daddy part of this Sunday. That all right with you?”

  “Sure, go ahead. Give my love to Lauren, and tell Danny his Uncle Ron says hello.”

  Oliver snorted. “Uncle Ron, huh? You think that’s funny, don’t you?”

  “A sense of humor is sanity’s life preserver,” Ron said with a grin.

  “Yeah, I’ll give you that. You going home, too?”

  The smile fell off the chief’s face.

  “No. Not yet. I’ve got a lot of hate mail to read.”

  Chapter 20

  Late afternoon had arrived by the time Ron had slogged through the last of the letters telling Jimmy Thunder he was a subhuman monster who fucked his mother when he wasn’t out raping white women, conning the liberal dupe media and generally polluting a country that would otherwise be the Garden of Eden. The hate mail came from both near, and far, thirty-eight states including Alaska and Hawaii, and three foreign countries.

  Ron hadn’t known Thunder’s show was broadcast internationally. And maybe it wasn’t. These days, people overseas could be relying on their satellite dishes to pick up TV signals of someone they could hate.

  The hard thing for the chief was not to hate them right back. It wasn’t different skin colors that made the world a charnel house so often. It was the tribal mindset — fear the outsider — that the human race just could not seem to evolve past.

  But if you hated the haters, you fell into the same trap.

  The idea of hating the sin, but loving the sinner, well, maybe just giving him a kick in the ass, seemed to be about the only answer Ron could agree with. But look where that philosophy got its originator.

  Crucified. Just like Isaac Cardwell.

  The chief locked the file containing the hate mail in his office safe, all except the one mentioning the church burnings and the threat against Jimmy Thunder. The FBI had a legitimate interest in that one. Ron had Sergeant Stanley fax it to Special Agent Horgan in San Francisco.

  Then he went to the Muni’s rec center to shoot some hoops. It was closed at that hour on Sunday, but he had a key. It was one of the perks of his job, and the only one he’d had to request specifically of Clay Steadman.

  Some cops, when they got wrung out by the job, went home and regained their sanity in the comfort of their families. Others went to bars and tried to forget the madness by drinking themselves into stupors. Ron went to the gym and lost himself in the familiar rhythms of basketball.

  He went to the men’s locker room and changed into his shorts and sneakers. He carri
ed his T-shirt into the gym with him but didn’t bother putting it on since he had the place to himself. He tossed the shirt onto a rack filled with basketballs.

  He jogged five easy laps of the gym to get his muscles warmed up and then he stretched and did ten reps of abdominal crunches. He maintained an athlete’s discipline not because he feared growing old — age didn’t scare him — but because he relished the childlike joy of unrestrained physical movement, and he wanted to hang on to it as long as he could.

  When he felt ready, he took a ball off a rack and dribbled it rapidly several times with each hand, then switched it deftly from hand to hand, behind his back, and back and forth between his legs. Not Pistol Pete Maravich, but not bad.

  Then, holding the ball to his chest, he twisted his torso gently from side to side, and did a couple of light squats and toe raises. Still had some spring left in the old wheels, he felt. But how much? Only one way to tell

  He stepped to the top of the key and fixed his eyes on the basket. In a sudden burst, he charged toward the hoop. The ball left his hand just once, hit the floor and bounced back to him as he jumped from the dotted arc below the free throw line. Ron held the ball high in his right hand, his arm extended as far as it could go. He measured the distance to the rim as he reached the top of his jump. It was going to be close and … BANG!

  Slam dunk — but just barely.

  Not that any dunk by a 48 year old guy was anything to be ashamed of. Heck, he’d never been able to do it when he was a kid in high school with fresh knees. But after he’d joined the army and finally hit a late growth spurt, and his hands got big enough to palm the ball, he’d discovered to his profound delight that he could jam the ball through the hole. This impressed the hell out of just about every black soldier he’d ever played ball with. It was his goal to still be able to dunk when he hit fifty.

  That was going to take a lot of increased strength work for his legs, he knew. But what the hell else did he have in his life besides his job?

  After the dunk, Ron started casually hitting jumpers from all over the court. He still had his shooter’s eye. There was no problem with vision, thank God. He then stepped to the free throw line to finish up. One hundred free throws in a row before he could go home. Sometimes he wimped out and gave himself a pass if he knocked down eighty or more. Other times he stayed until he hit all one hundred consecutively.

  He’d rung up seventy-eight in a row when the door to the gym opened and Corrie Knox stepped in, breaking his concentration and making him miss. The ball clanked off the front of the rim and Ron had to retrieve it on the second bounce

  “Sorry if I’m interrupting,” she said. “Sergeant Stanley said I might find you here.”

  Ron felt mildly embarrassed, as if she’d caught him shaving in his underwear. He stepped over to the ball rack and picked up his T-shirt.

  “Don’t bother on my account,” Corrie said. “When I heard where I might find you, I was hoping I might shoot a few hoops myself.”

  “You like basketball?” Ron asked.

  “Sure. Muggsy Bogues is my favorite player.”

  “He is?”

  “Yeah. Everybody always talks about LeBron, D-Wade and Kobe. They’re all great. But for my money, a guy who was five-three and played in the NBA, that’s someone to really admire.”

  Corrie Knox sat down on the hardwood floor and took off her shoes and socks. Ron saw that she wore hiking shorts, and that her legs were very long and very tan. She stood up and pulled her shirt tails out of her shorts.

  She bent from her waist, casually pressed her forehead to her knees and held it there. Turning her head but holding her position, she saw Ron looking at her. “Gotta stretch out those hammies, huh?”

  Then she straightened, popped the ball out of Ron’s hands, dribbled a few steps and drilled a twenty foot jumper.

  She turned and looked at him. “So what’ll it be? HORSE, 21, or some one on one?”

  “One on one with what rules?”

  She said, “You never stop the game to call a carrying violation, and you have to take more than three steps before it’s traveling. You make it, you take it.”

  Ron laughed. Then he said, “Let’s play HORSE or 21. I don’t know you well enough to knock you down and sweat all over you.”

  Warden Knox replied. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not exactly fragile. And I’ve been known to work up a pretty good lather myself.”

  Still, they started with HORSE. Ron had greater range and quickly had his opponent down by four letters, but when he missed his next long-range bomb, Corrie started canning fifteen to twenty foot jumpers, with her off hand. She completed the comeback for the win.

  When they switched to 21, Ron’s long years of Zen-like concentration on free throws gave him the edge. He went first and made fifty in a row before pleading the need for a drink of water and turning the ball over to Corrie. He’d almost quit too soon. She made forty-four consecutively before missing.

  “So,” she said with fine beads of perspiration on her brow, “it’s one win apiece. A quick game of one-on-one to ten, gotta win by a deuce, to settle things?”

  Ron regarded her, with her cockeyed smile, challenging him. Then he looked at her bare feet, wincing inwardly at how his own feet, not to mention his knees, would feel if he didn’t wear shoes with shock absorbing soles.

  “No, I don’t think so. We need you around here. I’d feel terrible if I came down on one of those bare feet and broke several of your toes.”

  “Sounds like an excuse to me,” Corrie said bluntly.

  “Yeah, sure. You’ve got me scared.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Or maybe you could get yourself a pair of shoes. Then we’ll see.”

  “I’ll do that. I think playing you could be a lot of fun.”

  Now the grin on her face had enough mischief in it to make him uncomfortable. This time, he popped the ball out of her hands and put it back on the rack. He slipped his T-shirt on.

  “If you’re in town long enough, maybe we’ll get around to it.”

  “Oh, I’m going to be here. For a while, anyway. That was the main reason I came to see you.”

  Ron understood immediately. “The mountain lion? You got a match?”

  “I got a match. If he sticks around, so do I.”

  “Well, hell,” the chief said. Then he sighed and suggested, “Why don’t you clean up at my place, and I’ll shower here. Then we can go somewhere and talk about it.”

  “That’s the other thing I have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I found a hotel room.”

  “Oh.”

  “A little motel that was redecorating opened up a room since the market’s so tight.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s not as nice as your place, but this way people won’t get the wrong idea.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “I mean I wouldn’t want anyone thinking something’s going on when you won’t even play basketball with me,” she said with a straight face.

  “Get a pair of shoes.”

  “Count on it,” Corrie Knox replied.

  Oliver Gosden and his wife Lauren sat on the front porch glider at their home on Highwood Street. The six room house was well constructed, but all of the rooms were fairly small. Snug and cozy, Lauren liked to call them. The living room, dining room and kitchen occupied the right half of the floor plan. Three bedrooms filled the left half. There was access to the bedroom wing from the living room and the kitchen. The single bathroom was opposite the middle bedroom, and had a door that opened on the bedroom wing and another on an alcove between the dining room and kitchen. The house was situated one block from a pine forest that marked the eastern boundary of the town. Close to nature and hiking, the real estate lady had put it.

  “Close to black bears and coyotes,” was Oliver’s point of view.

  He definitely would have preferred a larger house in the middle of town, as close to the lake as
possible. But prices for those places were way out of reach.

  Not that the Gosdens were poor. Far from it. Their combined incomes nudged them north of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that year, a new personal high for them. But after taxes, day care and putting money aside for when a second child filled their third bedroom, the Gosdens would not be moving lakeside anytime soon.

  Lauren Gosden rubbed the tight muscles in her husband’s neck to make him feel better about his lot in life. He was still complaining about the move to Goldstrike two years after they’d left L.A., when they both knew it was the best decision they could have made.

  “I’ve been thinking about Arizona,” the deputy chief told his wife.

  “For what, a winter vacation? Fine with me.”

  “The chief of police in Sedona is coming up on retirement in another year.”

  “I don’t want to live in a sandbox, Oliver. Not one that gets that hot. Might as well live in San Bernadino.”

  “Hey, now. Sedona’s a nice town. Got a reputation for being artistic.”

  “That’s going to do a lot for us. You’re a cop, and I’m a nurse.”

  “I was thinking about Danny.”

  Both parents turned to look at their six year old son. He sat on the grass in their small front yard and was working his way through Dr. Seuss’s Foot Book with a smile on his face. Every so often, he’d ask for help sounding out a word. Not too often, though. They’d been reading to him since he was born, and he’d started reading for himself at age four. In a few weeks, he’d be starting first grade.

  “You find out if there are going to be any other black kids in Danny’s class?” Oliver asked his wife.

  “Two,” she responded. “And one Asian child and three Hispanics.”

  “All God’s children, huh? For up here, that’s real diversity.”

  “Lots of middle class black folks in Sedona, I suppose”

  “At least it’s warm in the winter.”

  “And hot enough to broil your brain in the summer.”

  Lauren Gosden took her husband’s hand and squeezed it affectionately.