Nailed Page 28

  Clay Steadman nodded. “All of us have hunting experience.”

  Knowing the mayor was in his ride to the rescue mode at least made the reason behind the idea clear to Ron. It also told him that there was no way he was going to change Clay Steadman’s mind. The thing that bothered him most, though, was that as much as he disliked the idea — and he hated it — he couldn’t think of a better one.

  So presented with lemons, he attempted to make lemonade.

  “We’ll have to get Warden Knox’s input,” Ron said, “but what I’d see would be three two-man patrols. You guys could watch the outskirts of town, be a defense against the animal jumping into somebody’s backyard again. I think that was the incident that scared people most.”

  Clay nodded, accepting the suggestion.

  “You’ll need police radios to advise my department of your location and any situation that may arise,” the chief said. “And unless it’s a matter of life or death —”

  “Or letting the lion get away,” Clay added.

  “Or that,” Ron conceded. “You and your men will not fire a shot in this town unless I give you permission.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Sergeant Stanley will coordinate your patrol schedules.”

  “We’ll work things out with him,” Clay agreed.

  “And this will be the one and only civilian supplement to the police force. Or you can find yourself a new chief.”

  Ron and Clay stared at each other and it might have gone on a long time, had the phone not rung. The mayor looked away and picked it up. He listened to the caller and said, “Right away.”

  Then he told Ron about the attack on Terry Castlewood, and they were on their way out the door. But Clay Steadman stopped Ron and told him not go to the hospital. Warden Knox and Deputy Chief Gosden were already on their way. Having Clay there, too, would be enough official representation.

  The mayor told the chief to go find Isaac Cardwell’s killer.

  Chapter 38

  “You’re not being straight with me, Jimmy,” Marcus Martin said. “You’ve got to tell me the truth. I’m your lawyer. Nobody can make me repeat a word that passes between us.”

  The attorney sat with Jimmy Thunder in the sunroom of his mansion. A spread of breakfast rolls and fresh fruit lay on the table between them. The lawyer was looking at his client, but the televangelist stared unheeding into the distance. Martin wasn’t sure if the man had heard a word he’d said the past fifteen minutes.

  Deacon Meeker stood at the entrance to the room with his arms folded across his chest, making sure there were no disturbances. Making sure he heard every word, as well.

  “Jimmy, look at me,” Martin said. When his words produced no result, he leaned across the table and grabbed Jimmy Thunder’s wrist — and got a far nastier reaction than he’d ever expected. Jimmy pulled his arm free, and jumped to his feet. His eyes were wild and his mouth curled in a snarl. He looked like he was going to jump right over the breakfast table at Martin and rip his throat out. He might have done just that, except Deacon Meeker got to him in a hurry and wrapped both arms around the TV preacher.

  “Be cool,” Meeker urged softly. “Be cool now, Jimmy.”

  Then the deacon whispered something in his ear that Marcus Martin couldn’t hear. Whatever he said, it calmed Thunder down. The moment of almost tender intimacy between the two men reminded the lawyer that they’d been in prison together. Being very careful to keep his face blank, Martin wondered just what experiences they’d shared in that den of Darwinian terrors. He honestly didn’t think there had been a sexual relationship between the men, but they had to share some kind of bond, and he didn’t want to know what is was.

  Deacon Meeker got Jimmy Thunder back in his chair, whispered something more to him, and returned to his post at the door.

  “All you’ve got to know is I didn’t kill my boy,” Jimmy told his attorney.

  Marcus Martin nodded. “I do know that … but me knowing it is not enough. We’ve got to make sure everybody knows it. Make sure everybody believes it.”

  That fucking redneck Ron Ketchum had turned the tables on Martin again. Making that crack about having them surrounded, and then posting a cop car outside Jimmy’s gates. Sure enough, he’d created a bunker mentality inside the Thunder estate. Nobody went out, not even for groceries. Anything they needed, they had it delivered. Anything that was delivered, Martin checked through it to make sure the cops hadn’t planted a bug.

  Jimmy’s busloads of believers wouldn’t be coming in anytime soon, either. The reverend’s TV show, The Sound of Thunder, was in reruns for the foreseeable future. That could be plausibly explained as a consequence of a father mourning the loss of his son. But there was so much media in town — all of them demanding interviews, with only Ben Dexter being accommodated — that they were sure to notice that Jimmy had gone into a shell.

  Denied the ability to fill their air time and news holes, the press would pick up on the cops parked outside and start speculating. Was an arrest imminent? Did the police have evidence against Reverend Thunder? Were they about to uncover something damning? Could he really have killed his son? Media masturbation like that could ruin Jimmy Thunder.

  Marcus Martin tried to think of a legal means to force Ketchum to remove his cops from the street in front of Jimmy Thunder’s estate. Parking that damn patrol car there twenty-four hours a day was like pinning a scarlet letter on Jimmy. Except in this case the letter was K for killer. But even if Martin found an effective legal argument to make the cops leave, he was leery that Ketchum might turn that victory around on him and transform it into a public relations debacle.

  He could almost hear the questions that would be raised, among the public, if not in court. If Reverend Thunder’s done nothing wrong, why should it bother him to have a police car around? What was he afraid of? What was he hiding?

  That was just what Marcus Martin had been trying to find out when Jimmy blew up at him. Well, he wasn’t going to make that mistake again. But he was going to try to get the man to stand up for himself.

  “Jimmy … Reverend Thunder, you can’t let this man, this Ron Ketchum, make you cower. He is your enemy, not me. You have to go out and confront him publicly. I know you did that once, but with a man like this trying to beat you down, you have to stand up to him again and again and again, if necessary. He’s not going to give up, and neither can you. You have to fight ’til you win. I can help you. Ben Dexter can help you. But in the end you have to stand up to him.”

  Jimmy Thunder looked at his attorney and confessed, “I’m afraid.”

  “Of Ron Ketchum?” Marcus Martin asked in disbelief.

  The reverend shook his head.

  “Then what? Tell me, and I’ll help you.”

  “I don’t know if there is any help for me.”

  “Let me be the —” Martin began, but Jimmy Thunder stood up and started walking away. “Where are you going?”

  Considering the reverend’s station in life, his answer shouldn’t have surprised Marcus Martin, but it did. Even Deacon Meeker looked mildly astonished .

  Jimmy Thunder said, “I’m going to pray for my son’s soul.”

  When Ron arrived at police headquarters, he checked with Sergeant Stanley to get the lay of the land. The deputy chief, he was told, had left with Warden Knox, but Ron already knew that from Clay Steadman. He asked the Sarge what kind of mood Oliver had been in when he left.

  “Hurried, concerned … and pissed at you, Chief.”

  “Great,” Ron muttered. “How’d your meeting with Marjorie Fitzroy go?”

  Sergeant Stanley had a fine time with the concierge from the Renaissance Hotel. He had, in fact, made a date with her for Saturday night, providing there was no emergency to keep him on the job. But the chief didn’t have to know all that, the sergeant felt.

  “Quite productive,” he said. “Ms. Fitzroy is something of a sketch artist herself. I offered to have the department pay for her services, but she declined
. There’s a likeness of the man she saw on your desk.”

  The sergeant had more to say, but he paused to look for the right words.

  “What is it, Caz?” Ron asked.

  “We got a response to our queries on Texas Jack. The computer turned up a hit.”

  Meaning Texas Jack had a criminal record, which made the Sarge unhappy. Jack Telford was well liked locally.

  “That’s on your desk, too, Chief. I’m still working on compiling a list of all the places in town that sell the kind of nail you asked about.”

  Ron commended the sergeant for his good work, and went to his office.

  The drawing Marjorie Fitzroy had made was placed on Ron’s desk side by side with the photo that the Texas prison authorities had provided of Didi DuPree. Even a quick glance revealed that the man Marjorie Fitzroy had seen, and then sketched, was almost certainly DuPree. Ron would have the drawing duplicated and have officers take copies and re-canvass the hotels he’d checked yesterday. He’d bring the original along with him to the places he’d visit today.

  Maybe they were getting closer to the elusive Mr. DuPree.

  But after the chief checked out Texas Jack he wondered if he was getting any closer to Isaac Cardwell’s killer. Or simply enlarging the suspect pool.

  At the age of eighteen, John Ralston Telford had been convicted of petty theft in Houston, having made off with twenty-seven dollars from a bake sale at a Baptist church. He’d been sentenced to ninety days in the Harris County Jail.

  But on the third day of his incarceration, Texas Jack had been remanded to the prison wing of the county hospital and his sentence was suspended upon his hospital discharge ten days later.

  The ever efficient Sergeant Stanley apparently had investigated this curious turn of events, because there was a name and a Texas phone number for Ron to call for the details of what had transpired. He picked up his phone and punched in the number.

  After six rings, the call was answered by a gruff but not unfriendly voice with a deep Texas twang. “Gusek residence.”

  “Good morning. This is Chief of Police Ron Ketchum of Goldstrike, California calling. Am I speaking to Deputy Gus Gusek?”

  “Retired Deputy Gusek. You got your man, Chief. Your sergeant told me I could expect your call.”

  “Did he mention the reason?”

  “Yes, sir. He told me you wanted to hear about when Texas Jack Telford was a guest of Harris County, while I was working at the jail. That was some years ago, but given who that particular inmate turned out to be, I doubt anybody who heard that story forgot it.”

  Gusek told the tale to Ron.

  Texas Jack was just getting started on his card playing career, and he’d found a game with a bunch of boys who worked at an oil refinery. Jack was sure he could make a pile in this game, but he lacked a stake. He asked his girlfriend, JoEllen Joslin, if he could borrow the proceeds of the bake sale that had just been held at her daddy’s church. When Jack told JoEllen the reason he needed the money, she adamantly refused. He took it, anyway, when she wasn’t looking. Jack won a hundred and seventy-nine dollars playing poker with the Baptist bake sale money. He was sneaking into the Jenkins’ house through JoEllen’s bedroom window after the game when he was caught by Pastor Henry Joslin. The pastor immediately suspected Jack of attempting an unspeakable sexual assault on his fair young daughter.

  Denying that idea vehemently, Jack was forced to admit the real reason for his presence in JoEllen’s bedroom. He naively thought neither Pastor Joslin nor JoEllen would mind his little transgression since he told them it was his intent to return not just the twenty-seven dollars he’d taken, but fifty-four dollars as a sign of his gratitude.

  The moral outrage of hard rock Baptists, however, was not to be alleviated by a petty bribe. The Joslins squealed on Jack, pressed charges, and off to the hoosegow he went.

  “What happened to him there?” Ron wanted to know.

  “I’m getting’ to that,” Deputy Gusek responded.

  The sad truth was, Jack got himself corn-holed. The big old boy who got put in Jack’s cell on the second night of the young man’s sentence did it. That kind of thing was just a fact of life behind bars. It could happen in almost any lockup. Most of the people who committed crimes knew it was one of the risks they took. The ones who didn’t know, should have.

  Texas Jack hadn’t known, and when he learned the hard way, he refused to play along. He ignored the code of inmate etiquette that said you didn’t rat on your fellow con no matter what he did to you. While Jack was getting raped, he started screaming at the top of his voice. He kept right on screaming until the guards knew they’d have to go in there and fetch him out before the prisoner who was trying to make Jack his punk killed him.

  “You were the one who saved Jack, weren’t you?” Ron asked Gusek.

  “Yeah, I guess I was. I had a kid brother back then. Just a couple years younger than Jack. He was always gettin’ in trouble, being arrested. I heard Jack screamin’, and I just had to go help him out. Once I did, I took sort of an interest in him. Enough to find out what his story was anyway.”

  Even when they got Jack to the hospital, he still refused to keep quiet about what had happened. All his bellowing started to upset the doctors and nurses, and pretty soon respectable people took to whispering the dread word of reform. The authorities decided they didn’t need all that hooraw, a bunch of do-gooders coming in and telling them how to do their jobs, so they cut Jack a deal. Close his trap and his sentence would be suspended as soon as he got better. Keep bellyaching and he’d go right back to the pokey to serve out his time — if he lived that long.

  Jack took the deal.

  Ron asked, “Just so I understand the situation, was the man who raped Jack Telford black?”

  “As midnight in a coal mine,” retired Deputy Gusek confirmed.

  Chapter 39

  Ron headed out in his patrol unit to continue his pursuit of Didi DuPree. But his search wasn’t as single-minded as it had been the day before. What he’d just learned about Texas Jack Telford was preying on his mind, distracting him.

  How deeply had it scarred Jack’s soul to be raped as an eighteen year old by a black convict? Enough to kill an innocent man a lifetime later simply because he shared the same skin color? That seemed beyond belief — unless you’d worked as a homicide dick. Then you knew the motives, means and opportunities for the taking of a human life were endless.

  Ron remembered being a rookie on the LAPD and hearing from an old-timer about a murder that had been committed in Encino in 1968. A man in his seventies had been gunned down as he was raking leaves off his front lawn. The killer turned out to be from the Irish Republican Army. The reason for the killing: the victim had betrayed the Easter Uprising in 1917.

  Don’t get angry, get even. No matter how long it takes.

  No matter if the reason for evening the score doesn’t exist outside of the killer’s own sorry imagination. Maybe Isaac Cardwell had been killed not because he was black but because he’d borne an unfortunate resemblance to the man who’d raped Texas Jack. Or maybe it was that plus the fact that Isaac’s father, Jimmy Thunder, was stiffing Jack for a lot of cash. Exactly what affront might have been committed against the poker champ was impossible to say.

  In fact, Ron was far from sure that Texas Jack had killed Isaac Cardwell — but he knew that Jack had possessed reasons to commit murder equal to many of those that lay behind the one hundred and ninety-three other homicide cases he had worked.

  The chief had just pulled into the motor court of the Crestline Motel when he received a call. He was requested to call headquarters immediately by landline. With all the reporters in town, and all the uproar going on, it was a given that police frequencies were being monitored by the media.

  Ron called from a phone outside the motel’s registration office.

  Sergeant Stanley told him, “Chief we just got a call from Charmaine Cardwell, Isaac’s widow. She’d like you to call her at home.�
��

  The sergeant gave the chief an Oakland number. Ron’s call was answered on the first ring.

  “Hello.” The woman’s voice was soft and tentative.

  “Mrs. Charmaine Cardwell?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Chief Ronald Ketchum, calling from Goldstrike. I was given a message that you wanted to talk with me.”

  “Yes. Thank you for calling. I would have gotten in touch with you sooner but … we buried Isaac yesterday. I’ve been very busy.”

  “I’m truly sorry for your loss, Mrs. Cardwell. My condolences to you and everyone in your family.” There was a pause, and in the silence Ron could hear the question she wanted to ask. “We’re doing our best to find your husband’s killer, Mrs. Cardwell. It would be wrong of me to make any promises, but I am hopeful that we’ll succeed.”

  “Thank you, Chief Ketchum. I’m not vengeful. I wouldn’t dishonor my husband’s memory that way … but I do hope there will be justice. I’m very fearful of not having any means to comfort my son as he gets older. I don’t want to see Japhet grow up bitter or angry.”

  “We will do our best, Mrs. Cardwell. All of us up here. I can promise you that.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Chief Ketchum: I received a letter from my husband. A letter sent from your town. This morning was the first chance I had to read it.”

  A jolt of adrenaline made the hair on the chief’s neck stand on end. He tried to keep his hopes from getting too high, and the excitement from his voice. “What does it say?”

  “Most of it is personal. But near the end of the letter, Isaac says that he’s worried for his father’s safety.”

  Cardwell, the man who’d been killed, had been worried about Thunder, the man who was hiding behind his wrought iron gates and his lawyer?

  “Do you think your husband might have meant that in, say, a metaphysical sense? The well-being of Reverend Thunder’s soul?”

  “No. Isaac wrote very clearly and precisely. Here, I’ll read to you what his letter says: ‘I think my father could be in real jeopardy. There’s someone close to him, someone unlikely to arouse his suspicions, who may mean to do him harm or even kill him. I cannot imagine that it is only coincidence that has brought this man so close to my father. I need to confirm my suspicions before I act. To make a false accusation would be unforgivable. Perhaps the local library will have the resources I need. If it doesn’t, I will call you from a public phone and ask you to see what you can find in a library in Oakland or Berkeley.’”