Split Second

  After Parks left, Joan took the piece of paper out of her purse. She’d persuaded one of the county deputies to let her make a copy of the note found on Susan Whitehead’s body while King and Chief Williams were occupied elsewhere. After reading through it she took from her wallet another piece of paper she’d kept all these years. She carefully unfolded it and stared at the few words written on it.

  The note she was holding was one that she believed Sean had left for her in her room at the Fairmount Hotel on the morning Ritter was killed. After their vigorous night of lovemaking she slept in, and King went on duty. When she woke up, she saw the note and did precisely what it asked, even though the request carried some professional risk. After all, she was nothing if not a risk taker. At first she simply thought it bad timing, atrocious timing. Then she wondered what Sean had really been up to that morning. She said nothing back then for a simple reason: It would have ruined her career. Now this new development had thrown an entirely new angle on all of this.

  The question was what to do about it.

  CHAPTER

  32

  AS KING AND Michelle climbed into Michelle’s Land Cruiser, he looked around in surprise.

  “You cleaned out your truck.”

  She said nonchalantly, “Oh, I just picked up a few things here and there.”

  “Michelle, it’s spotless and it smells good too.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “There were some old bananas. I don’t know how they got in here.”

  “Did you do it because of the hard time I gave you?”

  “Are you kidding? I just, you know, I had some time to kill.”

  “I appreciate it anyway.” Something struck him. “What’d you do with all the stuff? You haven’t been home.”

  She looked embarrassed. “You probably don’t want to see my room at the inn.”

  “No, I probably don’t.”

  They got to Bowlington and met Tony Baldwin. With his and the local sheriff’s permission, they looked around Loretta Baldwin’s home.

  “What was your mother living on? Social Security?” King asked as he surveyed the nice interior.

  “No, she was only sixty-one,” said Tony.

  “Did she work?” Tony shook his head as King looked around at the furniture and rugs, the neat little touches here and there. The kitchen had appliances far newer than the house, and a late-model Ford sedan was parked in the garage.

  King stared at Tony. “So I give up. Were you supporting her, or did she have a rich relative who died?”

  “I’ve got four kids. I barely make ends meet.”

  “Let me guess: did she send money to you?” Tony looked uncomfortable.

  “Come on, Tony,” said Michelle, “we’re just trying to find out who did this to your mother.”

  “Okay, okay, yeah, she had some money. From where, I don’t really know and didn’t really want to ask. When you got a bunch of mouths to feed, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right?”

  “She ever mention where it might be coming from?” Tony shook his head. King then said, “When was the first time you noticed this flow of money?”

  “Not sure. I mean she sent me some cash for the first time years ago.”

  “How many years? Think carefully, it’s important.”

  “Maybe six or seven or so.”

  “When did she stop working at the Fairmount?”

  “It closed down pretty soon after Ritter got shot.”

  “Had she worked since?”

  “Nothing steady and the last few years not at all. She’d done crap work all her life. It was time to take it easy,” he said defensively.

  “So your mother never said anything about where the money came from? Any friends or other family she might have spoken to about it?”

  “I’m the closest family she has. Friends, I don’t know. She had a real good friend, Oliver Jones, but he’s dead now. She might have told him.”

  “Any way we can talk to his family?”

  “Didn’t have any. He outlived them all. Died about a year ago.”

  “Nothing else you can think of?”

  Tony considered this and his expression changed. “Well, last Christmas Mama said something a little strange.”

  “What was it?”

  “The last five or six years she’d always sent nice presents for the kids. Only last Christmas she didn’t. My little girl, Jewell, she asked her grammy how come she didn’t send any presents, didn’t she love them anymore? You know how kids are. Well, anyway, Mama said something like, ‘Honey, all good things must come to an end,’ something like that.”

  Michelle and King shared a significant glance. King said, “I suppose the police have searched the house pretty thoroughly.”

  “Top to bottom, didn’t find nothing.”

  “No check stubs, deposit slips, old envelopes to show maybe where the money came from?”

  “No, nothing like that. Mama didn’t like banks. She dealt in cash only.”

  King had strolled to the window and was looking out at the backyard. “Looks like your mother was really into her garden.”

  Tony smiled. “She loved flowers. Put a lot of work into it when she could. I’d come up every week and help out. She’d sit out there for hours and just look at her flowers.” Tony started to say something, then paused before asking, “You want to go look at ’em?” King started to shake his head, but Tony quickly added, “See, today’s the day I usually came up to weed. I mean I know she’s not around to see it anymore, but it was important to her.”

  Michelle smiled and said in a sympathetic tone, “I love gardens, Tony.” She nudged King.

  “Right. I’m into gardens too,” said King without much enthusiasm.

  While Tony Baldwin pulled at some weeds in one of the beds, Michelle and King walked around the yard and admired the flowers.

  King said, “Loretta’s secret cash flow started shortly after Ritter died.”

  “Right. So you’re thinking blackmail?”

  He nodded. “Although I’m wondering how Loretta was blackmailing someone simply because she might have seen him or her in the closet.”

  “Meaning they might have just come in there for the same reason she did, because they were scared?”

  “Only there has to be more to it. Remember when we were looking in the closet, and I said that she had probably squeezed in the back. I thought so because for all she knew some guy might come in with a gun—” He broke off and suddenly looked at her wide-eyed.

  “What are you saying? That maybe she did see someone come in with a gun?”

  “Or with something. Why else would she have gotten suspicious? I mean there were probably lots of people running around trying to hide.”

  “But why a gun?”

  “Why not? Some guy trying to stash a gun in a supply closet right after there’s been an assassination makes more sense than trying to hide a pair of glasses or a bundle of cash. A gun is instantly incriminating. It would peg him as part of the assassination plot. Okay, let’s say the guy has a gun on him. He’s afraid to try to go outside with it, because he might get stopped and searched. So when all hell is breaking loose, he runs in and hides it in the closet, not knowing Loretta is in there. He might have planned to stash the gun in the closet all along. He might have intended to retrieve it later, or just let the police find it if it was clean of any incriminating evidence. So he stuffs the gun in between some towels or something and leaves. Loretta comes out from her hiding place and takes it. Maybe she thinks she’ll bring it to the police but then changes her mind and goes down the blackmail highway. Since she works at the hotel, she could probably sneak out an exit no one is covering or else hide the gun and come back to get it later.”

  Michelle considered this line of reasoning. “Okay, so she has the gun and she’s seen the guy, and if she doesn’t know who he is, it’s easy enough to find out. She contacts him anonymously, possibly with a picture of the gun and where she was when she saw him, and starts
extracting payment. It works, Sean, as well as anything else.”

  “And that’s why her house was ransacked. They were looking for the gun.”

  “You really think Loretta kept it here somewhere?”

  “You heard Tony: the woman didn’t believe in banks. She was probably the sort who kept anything of importance right where she could lay her hands on it.”

  “So the big question is, where’s the gun now? Maybe the killer found it.”

  “Maybe we take the house apart board by board.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Unless there’s a secret compartment somewhere, hiding the gun in a wall doesn’t make it real convenient to get to.”

  “That’s true.” King’s gaze was absently roaming over the little garden. He stopped at one spot, passed it and then came back. He walked over to the row of hydrangea bushes. Six pink ones, and one in the middle of the group that was blue.

  “Nice hydrangeas,” he said to Tony.

  He came over wiping off his hands on a rag. “Yeah, Mama loved those the most, probably even over the roses.”

  King looked curious. “Interesting. She ever say why?”

  Tony looked puzzled. “Why what?”

  “Why she liked hydrangeas over roses?”

  “Sean, do you really think that’s important?” asked Michelle.

  Tony rubbed his chin. “Well, now that you mention it, she told me more than once that to her those hydrangeas were priceless.”

  King glanced sharply at Michelle and then stared at the blue hydrangea and exclaimed, “Damn!”

  “What is it?” asked Michelle.

  “The longest long shot in the world. But it might just be. Quick, Tony, do you have a shovel?”

  “A shovel? Why?”

  “I’ve always been curious about pink and blue hydrangeas.”

  “Nothing special about that. Some people think they’re different bushes, but they’re not really. I mean you can get yourself pink and blue ones, but you can also change pink to blue by lowering the pH in the soil, make it more acidic, or blue to pink by making the soil more alkaline and raising the pH. They got stuff to make it more acidic, aluminum sulfate, I think they call it. Or you can put some iron filings in the soil, tin cans, even rusty nails and such. That’ll change the color from pink to blue too.”

  “I know, Tony. That’s why I want the shovel.”

  Tony fetched the tool from the garage, and King started to dig around the blue hydrangea. It didn’t take long before his shovel clinked against something hard. And a short time later he pulled out the object.

  “Nice source of iron,” said King as he held up the rusty pistol.

  CHAPTER

  33

  KING AND MICHELLE had stopped at a small diner for a quick bite after leaving poor Tony dumbstruck in his mother’s garden.

  Michelle said, “Okay, I’m officially impressed with both your detective and gardening skills.”

  “Lucky for us that iron is a component of steel, or else we never would have found the gun.”

  “I get the gun and blackmail part and why Loretta was murdered. But I still don’t understand the point of stuffing the money in her mouth.”

  King fingered his coffee cup. “I once worked a joint task force with the FBI in L.A. Russian mobsters were extorting money from every business in a one-square-mile area and also running a financial scam, which was why we were involved. We had some snitches on the inside; some cash got to them from us—you fight fire with fire, right? Well, we found our snitches full of bullet holes in the trunk of a car with their mouths stapled shut. When we took the staples out, we found cash wadded up in there, probably the same cash we paid them. The message was clear: you talk, you die and you eat the betrayal money that caused your death.”

  “So the money in Loretta’s mouth was symbolic? The ultimate hush money treatment?”

  “That’s how I read it.”

  “Wait a minute. Her son said that the money stopped coming about a year or so ago. But if the person was still around to kill Loretta, why did he stop paying? And why would she have accepted that? I mean why didn’t she go to the police at that point?”

  “Well, it’d been seven years or so. What was she going to tell the cops? That she had amnesia and had just remembered everything, and oh, by the way, here’s the gun?”

  “Well, maybe the person being blackmailed figured that out too, and that’s why he stopped paying. Maybe he figured her leverage was gone.”

  “Whatever the case, apparently very recently someone found out that Loretta was the blackmailer, and she paid with her life.”

  Michelle suddenly paled and she clutched his arm. “When I spoke with Loretta, she mentioned that she was in that supply closet, although she never said she saw anyone. You don’t think?”

  King picked up on her concern. “Someone might have overheard her tell you, or she might have told someone else later.”

  “No, she was killed so soon after I spoke with her. It must have come from my conversation with her. But we were alone on that porch. Yet somebody must have heard. God, I’m probably the reason she’s dead.”

  King gripped her hand. “No, you’re not. The person who held her under the water in the bathtub is the reason she’s dead.”

  Michelle closed her eyes and shook her head.

  King said firmly, “Listen to me, I’m sorry about what happened to Loretta, but if she was blackmailing the person who killed her, that’s a dangerous game she chose to play. She could have gone to the police and given them the gun years ago.”

  “That’s what we should do.”

  “We will, although the serial numbers have been drilled out, and it’s in pretty poor condition. Maybe the forensics boys at the FBI can pull something out of it. There’s a satellite office in Charlottesville. We’ll drop it off when we get back home.”

  “So what now?”

  “If someone hid a gun in the supply closet of the Fairmount Hotel on the day Clyde Ritter was assassinated, what does that tell you?”

  It suddenly hit her. “That maybe Arnold Ramsey wasn’t working alone.”

  “That’s right. And that’s why we’re going there right now.”

  “Where?”

  “Atticus College. Where Arnold Ramsey was a professor.”

  CHAPTER

  34

  THE BEAUTIFUL TREELINED, brick-paved streets and elegant ivy-covered buildings of tiny Atticus College did not seem like a place that could spawn a political assassin.

  “I’d never heard of this school until Ritter was killed,” said Michelle as she drove her Land Cruiser slowly down the main campus thoroughfare.

  King nodded. “I hadn’t realized how close it was to Bowlington.” He looked at his watch. “It only took us thirty minutes to get here.”

  “What did Ramsey teach here?”

  “Political science with a special emphasis on federal election laws, although his personal interest was radical political theory.” Michelle looked at him in surprise.

  He explained. “After Ritter was killed, I made it my business to get a Ph.D. in Arnold Ramsey.” He glanced at Michelle. “You drop a guy, the least you can do is take the time to learn about him.”

  “That sounds a little callous, Sean.”