Dead Aim

  Leonard went past me, and holding the revolver in front of him, he looked in the bathroom.

  “No one,” he said. He went along to the bedroom. The door was cracked. He looked in there. “And the hits just keep on coming.”

  I went over and looked. There was a nude woman on the bed. There was enough light through the curtains I could tell she wasn’t napping either. It was hard to tell what she might have looked like. She was swollen up and her head was bloated. All I could tell was it was a female.

  I used my elbow to turn on the light. She didn’t look any more identifiable. She looked worse. She was lying on her back with a hole in her forehead. It reminded me of the hole in the back of Henry’s head. The sheet under her head was dark and caked with blood. The sheet pulled over her went up to her waist. I was tempted to pull it over her head, but I resisted.

  Back in the hall I used the axe handle to turn on the light so we could get a look at the man. He was face down and was stuck to the floor by dried blood.

  “Did you touch anything?” Leonard asked.

  “The door with the toe of my boot and I used the axe handle on the light. Wait a minute, I put the note paper against the door… I didn’t touch anything but the paper though.”

  “Okay, let’s keep it that way.”

  We went outside and breathed in clean air.

  “They been dead awhile,” Leonard said.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “And me without my deerstalker.”

  We got in the car. Leonard put my revolver back in the glove box. I put the axe handle on the back seat.

  I said, “I hope no one saw us drive in.”

  “Probably not,” Leonard said. “No houses much. We didn’t pass any cars.”

  It was a good guess. There was only a little dirt road leading to the trailer, and the property was a pasture with high grass and some trees at the back. Still, someone could have watched us turn in. Nothing for it but to hope no one had seen us arrive.

  I pulled onto the road and eased along. Driving fast would just draw attention to us.

  “This whole business is starting to stink worse than that trailer,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m beginning to feel like you and me have been puppets all along, and that Sharon Devon is our puppeteer.”

  “Time we cut the strings,” Leonard said.

  ***

  We went to my place and Brett was home. She was cute in some old overalls worn over a paint-

  splattered shirt; it had got that way when we repaired a door and painted it. She had the cuffs of the overalls rolled up and she was barefoot. Her toenails were painted bright red. It went with her hair, which was tied back with a yellow tie. I made some coffee and we told Brett everything we knew. I always told Brett everything I knew. The only people I would tell that sort of thing were her and Leonard, maybe Marvin. Under certain circumstances, Jim Bob. In fact, when I got through telling Brett all we knew, she said, “Seems like you got to start with who put you in her camp.”

  “Jim Bob,” she said.

  “Makes sense,” I said, “and maybe we can do that, but I got to say, if we were fooled, Jim Bob was fooled. And on top of that, I have tried him, without luck. He’s not answering his phone. I figure he’s turned it off on purpose. He may be in the middle of a job, and the kind of work he does often means the cell is off.”

  “I wasn’t saying he had anything to do with it,” she said. “Just that he might give you some insight.”

  “Yeah, he and Devon used to date,” Leonard said.

  “Way back,” I said. “What I figure is she may have always been selfish, and over time, she became more of that. A whole lot of that. Enough so that it might lead to something that had to do with murder. Jim Bob, if he hadn’t seen her in awhile, he wouldn’t know that. Wouldn’t suspect it. He’d remember her as the woman he dated.”

  “Problem with that,” Leonard said, “is I was with her when Henry was killed. And somehow I can’t see her breaking into that trailer and popping Unslerod and his girlfriend.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figure whoever picked Henry’s lock picked the trailer lock, caught Unslerod heading for the bathroom, shot him, and was in the bedroom before the woman knew what happened. They were probably both dead in less than fifteen seconds. If it took that long. Wouldn’t have to be a professional killer, but someone who knew locks and was sneaky as an alley cat.”

  “Or professional,” Leonard said. “I’m voting professional, but I’ll settle it could be either way.”

  “Maybe you guys ought to forget all this,” Brett said. “You’re off the job. Not your problem, really. Maybe you stay out of it she won’t try to pin it on you.”

  “I don’t want to feel like I let her set me up and she got away with it,” I said. “Or that I somehow helped any plan she had all along to kill Henry. I don’t know how I helped, but I have this horrible feeling I did. We only got how bad Henry was from her. Unslerod, what did he do? What did his woman do? I don’t like it.”

  “You know what?” Leonard said. “Actually, we didn’t just hear how bad Henry was from her. We heard it from the lawyer.”

  “And he’s still in love with her,” I said.

  “Bingo,” Leonard said. “You got any more cookies?”

  Brett got up.

  I said, “Don’t show him the stash.”

  She laughed and opened a drawer next to the sink. It had two bags of vanilla cookies in it.

  “And you know what, hon,” she said to Leonard, “I got you some Dr Peppers.”

  “Oh, hell,” Leonard said. “I swear, darling, I am going to quit being queer and go straight so I can take you away from Hap and you can keep me supplied in cookies and Dr Peppers.”

  ***

  Leonard was taking a nap on the couch, and Brett was upstairs in bed reading. I turned on the computer in Leonard’s bedroom we had built onto the house for him, and did some checking on Frank the lawyer. What I got was Frank’s firm had been around a while. He owned it and employed other lawyers; in other words, he ran a large aquarium for sharks. I looked to find out about his cases, discovered his firm was pretty good. They had nice odds on their winnings. Not too many losses. They did everything from divorce to murder trials, but they didn’t seem to be ambulance chasers. As far as I could tell, they didn’t advertise on TV. They had been around long enough they didn’t have to. I called Marvin, told him what I found, asked if he might be able to find out more from some of his contacts. “After all,” I said, “as you have pointed out, you are the detective.”

  “An attempt at flattery?”

  “How’s it working?”

  “I see it coming as clearly as an elephant trying to walk a high wire, so not so well.”

  “But, then again, aren’t you the true detective?”

  “Damn you, Hap Collins,” he said. “It is working. You have found my weak spot.”

  I went upstairs and locked the door and took off my clothes and slid under the sheets with Brett. She was sitting up in bed with pillows at her back. She had the sheet pulled up over her. She had her reading glasses on, pushed down on her nose. She put the book in her lap.

  “I hope you don’t think you’re going to get any?” she said.

  “Any what?” I said.

  “Don’t act coy with me,” she said.

  “I just got naked,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you. I’m comfortable naked. Some of us are quite comfortable with our bodies, our nudity.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m reading, you know.”

  “How’s the book?”

  “Sucks.”

  “So, want to do the nasty?”

  “That is far from romantic,” she said. “But lucky for you I think a lot of that stuff is nonsense. The romantic stuff. I’m not as girly as I look. And then again, the book sucks, so that makes your suggestion a little more interesting.”

  “Dear, believe me,
” I said. “You are as girly as you need to be.”

  She laid the book on the bed beside her. She dropped the sheet. She was naked too.

  “Surprise,” she said.

  ***

  The phone call woke me up. Brett stirred in my arms.

  “You get that,” she said.

  I slipped loose of her and put my feet on the floor and picked up the phone. It was Marvin.

  “You busy,” he asked.

  “Not right now,” I said.

  “This Henry guy,” he said. “He seems to have been a pretty straight dude. Made a lot of money in oil. He was a land speculator for the companies. His job was to get people to give up beautiful land so it could have trees cleared, the soil torn up by a bulldozer, concrete and oil drills put down. He made a lot of money. And then he didn’t.”

  “It comes and goes,” I said.

  “People were drilling everywhere because of the oil shortage talk, and then when they drilled in some places and didn’t find as much as they hoped, they quit drilling so much.”

  “And he quit making money,” I said.

  “But here’s some things,” Marvin said. “He has a daughter. Her name is Nora. My cop friends say she has been arrested. A lot. Mostly stupid stuff. Small amounts of drugs. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. Not exactly a Bonnie Parker, more just troublesome. Lindsay Lohan without the fame and without that much money. Daddy had enough money to help her out of deep doo-doo, though, until he didn’t.”

  “So what has she got to do with this?” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” Marvin said. “Maybe nothing. But she didn’t get mentioned by Sharon Devon, did she?”

  “Nope. The girl didn’t come up in conversation,” I said.

  “My friend at the cop shop said Sharon and Henry always came down together to bail her out and such, and that it was pretty clear to them that the girl was close to Sharon. Like a mother. Her actual mother was dead. Car accident. Got an engine block through the chest.”

  “So, you’re saying why didn’t the dog bark in the nighttime?” I said.

  “That’s right. If they had a daughter and were divorcing, and the daughter was close to them both, why didn’t she come up in your conversation with Mrs. Devon? And where is she? She was supposed to be living with Henry. The cops have been looking for her too, and nothing. No one knows what happened to her.”

  “Connected?”

  “Maybe,” Marvin said. “Cops have tried to find her every which way, but it’s like she fell off the face of the earth. I’m not sure what that means or what we should do, but something about it bothers me.”

  “The lawyer,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I figure he knows something more than we know and we ought to know it.”

  “Lawyers have client privilege,” Marvin said.

  “Sometimes that wavers if they think you’re going to beat the hell out of them,” I said. “Not saying we would, but maybe he could think we mean to, even if we don’t say we plan to. Just sort of insinuate.”

  “Maybe we ought to just drop it,” Marvin said. “A reason we ought to, and I have been holding this back for dramatic effect, is Sharon Devon went down to the station and said she didn’t think you had anything to do with Henry’s death, and that she sent you there, and you were only doing what she asked.”

  “That’s kind of different than before,” I said.

  “I guess she thought about it,” Marvin said.

  “Or decided she didn’t need that dodge anymore.”

  “Well, there’s a little bit more,” Marvin said. “She’s got a big insurance policy. Henry left everything to her and he’s got this policy that’s worth about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They weren’t divorced, and he hadn’t changed his will or his policy, so it all goes to her.”

  “So she didn’t have any reason to make too much of a stink about us being involved,” I said.

  “It clears the palate some,” Marvin said. “It gets attention away from her, and it’s just another unsolved murder. And there’s all that money. Maybe not as much as he would have had a few years back, but it’s more than starter change.”

  “You think she had him hit?” I said.

  “It happens,” he said, “but if so, why hire us in the first place?”

  “It made Henry look like a bad man and it made us look like someone who might have put him down, and it confused the situation. It doesn’t seem to take much confusion to mess a jury up these days. If she could plant in people’s mind that he was dangerous, any sympathy there might be for him could be negated.”

  “You sound like you’re holding something back, Hap,” Marvin said. “It’s not what you’re saying, but I know your tone well enough to know there’s something missing here.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I was going to get around to telling you. Maybe, like you, I was holding it back for dramatic effect. I meant to tell you earlier, but I wanted to think about things first. Unslerod, you remember him?”

  “The guy that got beat up by Henry,” Marvin said.

  “He’s dead, and a woman who was with him is dead too.”

  “Shit.”

  “I haven’t called about it. I figured they weren’t going to get any deader. Maybe stinkier, but not deader.”

  I gave Marvin the location of the trailer. That way he could contact his friend at the department, maybe keep me and Leonard out of it. Marvin too.

  “This is getting more complicated,” Marvin said.

  “Still think we should let it go?” I asked.

  “I think we ought to,” Marvin said. “And I want to.”

  “But we won’t, will we?”

  “Of course not,” Marvin said.

  I had no sooner got off the phone than there was a knock on the bedroom door.

  Leonard called out, “I woke up and I was all alone and I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  “Get up and let him in,” Brett said.

  I got up and pulled on my pajama pants and tee-shirt, unlocked the door and let Leonard in.

  “The cookies are missing,” Leonard said.

  “I put them up,” I said. “You eat all of them if I don’t hide them. You’ll have a tummy ache.”

  “You hid Leonard’s cookies?” Brett said. She was sitting up in bed with the sheet pulled around her. Her red hair fell against the white sheets and her fine skin and made her look like a goddess.

  “They’re not his cookies,” I said.

  “Are too,” Leonard said.

  “Yeah,” Brett said. “They are. You go down there and give the baby his cookies.”

  I said, “You’re spoiling him, you know.”

  ***

  When the lawyer, Givens, came out of the restaurant, we were waiting in the parking lot. We had followed him from his work and parked as near to his car as possible. We had been waiting all morning for him to leave his office, not even sure he would, but hoping eventually he’d come out. If he went to lunch we could maybe pull off talking to him easier than trying to set a time at his work and him not wanting to talk to us; we tried it that way, he could avoid us for ages. So, when he left we were watching from across the street and we followed him, and now, here we were, waiting.

  While he was in the restaurant enjoying a good meal, Leonard and I were eating hotdogs from Sonic, which frankly, wasn’t half bad.

  We ate and waited, and after about hour he came out. As he got close to my car we got out and started walking like we were going into the restaurant. He looked up from fumbling with his car keys and saw us.

  “Hello,” he said, and gave us one of those smiles you would expect from someone who had just discovered

  his zipper was down.

  “Hey,” I said, like it was a big surprise to see him. “How are you?”

  “Okay. Just grabbing a little lunch.”

  “Yeah, well, good,”
I said. “We thought we’d have a little lunch ourselves.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. He couldn’t have been more awkward than if he were standing on a mile-long razor blade over a gorge.

  “You know, things really didn’t work out for us on that gig with Ms. Devon,” Leonard said.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I know. Sorry about that.”

  He tried to dart for his car.

  I said, “Thing is, we think a lot of what happened stinks. We think maybe we got played for fools.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken,” he said.

  “Then you wouldn’t mind talking to us?” I said.

  “Did you follow me here?” he asked.

  “Happy coincidence,” Leonard said.

  “Well, I don’t know I have anything to say,” he said. “Ms. Devon is my client, and—”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s just us guys talking here. She’s more than a client.”

  “She’s also a friend,” he said.

  “Ah,” Leonard said, “I bet you feel more than that for her. I mean, hell, you were married to her for awhile, and to think that big jock Henry was riding her around the bedroom like she was a pony had to get your goat.”

  “That is inappropriate,” Givens said.

  “So is framing our ass,” Leonard said.

  “Ms. Devon has made it clear you had nothing to do with what happened,” Givens said. “It was just an unfortunate coincidence.”

  “Coincidence, huh?” Leonard said. “You know what I’m thinking, and I’m just thinking here—”

  “And for him to do that, he has to really be serious,” I said, “because it hurts his head.”

  “There you have it,” Leonard said. “But I’m thinking since you knew Hap was watching Henry’s house, you sneaked over there and picked the lock and shot Henry. Hap hears the shot, like maybe you thought he would, and he comes in and looks bad for it.”

  “I already told you Ms. Devon says it was a coincidence, and the police believe her.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Really, but we still got to wonder if that was part of the original plan, to have our dicks mashed between two bricks.”