Death on the Pedernales Read online

  Well, maybe, I thought. And maybe not.

  *****

  I would get Denise’s part in the story much later on, after it was all settled out. At age seventeen her parents were killed in an underground gas explosion from one of the few hundred or so cavernous salt domes where the petrochemical companies keep their more dangerous inventories in East Texas. Denise’s then youthful features, nicked here and there from the flying debris—not yet lined with oncoming middle age as when we first met—were indelicately splashed across newspapers state-wide the way only newspapers can-–in grisly detail and complete with the tears of her tragic loss. The picture had gotten the attention of a wealthy Texan who interceded with enough money to secure a future for her, a future which came quicky into focus when, at the aforementioned Texan’s bidding, a high-powered Dallas law firm with an eye toward class-action lawsuits came calling. The firm easily took in the families of all twenty-eight who died in the blast, but they came knocking on Denise’s door first.

  From a formative age Denise Lipscomb’s lifelong dreams had been dreams of flight. Before the explosion that claimed the lives of her parents and most of her neighbors, the walls of her trailer-home bedroom had been covered with every type of airplane to emerge from an assembly line. Over time the pasted up magazine cutouts grew from a series of separate pictures to become one continuous collage that encompassed the four walls and three doors of her postage stamp-sized room and threatened the narrow hallway leading to the rest of the house. P-58 Mustangs, Corsairs, World War I biplanes, Messherschmidts, C47s, B52s, C141 Starlifters, Harrier AV8s, Piper Cubs, Cessnas, Beechs, Lears—all of them. The airplanes, seemingly, grew like ivy.

  A little girl’s dreams. Dreams of flight.

  For weeks and months after the disaster, follow-up stories about Denise and a scant number of other survivors made their way onto page two of most newspapers throughout the southwestern United States. Those stories which included Denise invariably mentioned her love affair with flight, a dream that had never been accomplished. One of those stories had even been entitled “The Girl Who Never Flew.”

  On a clear Christmas morning not long after, a Beech aircraft touched down at the Conroe, Texas airport, five miles from where Denise lived with her drunken uncle, Ralph Lipscomb. At ten o’clock that morning a rented limousine pulled up outside the front door of her uncle’s ramshackle apartment, and at ten-thirty Denise Lipscomb took her first flight.

  That dream, like many others yet to come, had been handed to her by her new benefactor. She went from having no driver’s license to the possession of a twin-engine rating in six months. By the time we met she was thirty-eight and had her own small flight school. There’s success for you.

  Success had a name: Edgar Bristow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I stood there outside the coroner’s office trying to breathe. There are some smells that work their way into the sinus membranes and no amount of wind can get rid of them. The mixed odor of coppery blood, entrails, offal and decomposition is one of them. The breeze was good and stiff, if hot, and I drew it in deeply.

  A Sheriff stepped around the corner of the graystone architecture and regarded me. You can always tell a Sheriff at first glance, especially in rural Texas.

  “Who the hell are you?” the fellow asked.

  “Bill Travis,” I said. “No relation.”

  “Fine,” he said, then his bushy gray eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

  “Bill Travis,” I repeated. “You know, Commander at the Alamo. Some people think we’re related. I actually don’t know.”

  “Oh. I’m Buster LeRoy, County Sheriff.” He held out one rough and meaty paw and I shook it.

  “Good to meet you,” I said.

  “Are you here regarding Edgar Bristow?” he asked.

  The English language is funny. At first I thought he was using the “looking” definition of “regarding.” I almost answered: “Hell no, you can go regard him all you want, please leave me out of it.” But then I got what he’d meant.

  “Uh, you might say that,” I said. “I’m with a young lady, Denise Lipscomb. She and Mr. Bristow were close. We flew into the airport were he was found.”

  “Got it,” the Sheriff said. “Well, then, if you’ll excuse me.”

  I nodded and he stepped around me and through the glass door. I clamped down on my nose until the door closed again. You can never be too careful.

  “All business,” I mumbled to myself. “That’s a plus.”

  *****

  I waited for five minutes and was about to go back inside when Sheriff LeRoy held the door open for Denise and the two of them stepped out into the wind.

  I noticed how they both breathed—in gulps. Maybe I wasn’t so oddball after all.

  Denise’s eyes were puffy and red, but her tears were dry. She held a shredded and wadded-up kleenex in one hand, grasping it for dear life.

  “Where to?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I have an idea,” Sheriff LeRoy said. “I’ll take Miss Lipscomb over to visit with my wife for a spell. Then you and I can go for a little ride, Mr. Travis.”

  “Alright,” I agreed.

  *****

  Sheriff LeRoy lived in an ancient many-gabled home a mile outside of town. The structure was tilted out of true and bore a girdle of cracked and chipped asbestos shingles that revealed old tar-paper beneath. There were stacks of the dingy broken-off squares with parched and desiccated weeds growing up around them scattered hither and yon about the yard.

  “I always feel like I should apologize when anyone sees my place,” Sheriff LeRoy said. “We’re in the process of re-siding the house, but the truth is Samantha and I are doing the labor ourselves. I can’t see paying someone to do something that I know I can do much better myself.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Your home is fine by me.”

  A screen door banged shut and a young woman stepped down from the front porch. Sheriff LeRoy’s wife was twenty or so years his junior, and she was a looker.

  “Denise!” she cried, and I looked to see first surprise and then joy spread across my instructor’s face as she opened the cruiser door and stepped into the arms of Sheriff LeRoy’s wife for a tight embrace.

  “We were suite-mates at Mary-Hardin Baylor,” Mrs. LeRoy said over Denise’s shoulder.

  “Small world,” Sheriff LeRoy said, and grinned.

  *****

  The first thing I noted inside Buster and Samantha LeRoy’s home, apart from the odor of aging pine-tar wafting in from the front yard, was the smell of latex paint. Second, just underneath this sharp smell was the clean scent of oil soap, the kind used to make hardwood floors glow as if with an inner light, which the floors of the LeRoy home certainly did. They also creaked the way old hardwood floors in old houses should—for me a satisfying sound. The walls were freshly painted an antique-white in an orange-peel texture and the entryways and windows were faced out in bright white high-glass oil-base. Samantha LeRoy had a penchant for colorful impressionist paintings as evidenced by one of the lesser-known but still magnificent Matisse reprints donning the foyer wall. The painting set the tone for the whole house: light and airy. The small table beneath the painting I recognized as having been done in the Shaker style, whether original or a copy. Nice.

  “Sammie, take them back to the kitchen,” Buster told his wife. The girls walked ahead of us, arm in arm, and we followed. “We’re re-painting the dining room,” he added by way of explanation.

  We turned left into a long central hallway and passed an open doorway. A passing glance revealed the Sheriff’s study, a comfortable-looking room filled with leather furniture, old maps framed on the walls, and a drafting table that was being used to hold trophies. One of the trophies was a cowboy on a bucking bronc. At some time in Buster LeRoy’s past he’d been a rodeo rider.

  The kitchen was as I expected it, new solid wood cabinets as yet unpainted and missing their knobs against light
yellow, freshly painted walls. The LeRoy home, every square foot of it, was a work in progress, right down to the light switch plates which in the kitchen were ceramic with an American Indian motif.

  The kitchen table was small but there were only the four of us.

  “Pull up a chair Bill, Denise,” Buster said as he placed his large hands on a hardwood chair and waited for us to sit. He turned to Samantha LeRoy. “How about some of those little finger sandwiches and some tea, darlin’?”

  She smiled to us, her guests, but it was a bit of a painted-on smile—social entertainment only. I knew there were to be no serious discussions in this kitchen. Her rule, not his. And I was sure that between the four exterior walls of this house, it was her rules that carried weight.

  “A great idea,” Samantha said, and turned to begin fiddling with the tea kettle while Buster removed the bread from an old wooden box beside the refrigerator, which looked to be forty year or so old. My folks had a fridge like that when I was knee-high to a jackrabbit.

  “Nice house,” Denise said, and her words hung in the air.

  “Why, thank you,” Buster said. “Sammie does all the work. Inside, that is. I’m her foreman.”

  Samantha LeRoy rolled her eyes.

  “What’s next regarding Bristow?” I asked, and Denise gave me a hard look.

  “I don’t rightly know,” Buster said. He took his gun belt off and laid it on the counter. “Besides that, you and I can cover all that after we have a bite. I’ll want you to take a ride with me, Bill.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  *****

  An hour passed in the LeRoy kitchen, and it was mostly the girls doing the talking. Every time the conversation edged over toward Buster and his Sheriff work, Samantha LeRoy guided it every so deftly back into more pleasant area. The whole while I sat there and watched I felt the unseen presence of something large, unpretty and carefully hidden from sight. For all the nest-feathering that appeared to be going on, Buster and Samantha LeRoy appeared to me to be about as well-matched as animal rights activist and a butcher.

  And fortunately, that hour ended an eternity after we sat down. Finger sandwiches and tea indeed.

  *****

  As Sheriff LeRoy turned back onto the highway leading back to town, he let me have it with both barrels.

  “First,” he said, “I had a talk with Burt while Denise and I were in the coroner’s office. He knows who you are, and so now I know.”

  “Um,” I said, “who am I?”

  “Don’t get smart. You’re the fellow who saved the Governor’s life. I’ve still got the issue of the Austin American-Statesman where you hung from that blimp during the UT-Tech game.”

  “Good God,” I said. He was referring to an event a few years back where I found myself caught in the cross-fire between a certain Texas Ranger and a insurgent rebel group who wanted to overthrow the Texas government from within and secede from the United States of America. And they’d very nearly done it. I still had scars from that debacle.

  “Also, you were the guy who pulled Texas Ranger Walt Cannon’s fat off the fire in that killing of that museum curator.”

  “You know Walt?” I asked.

  “Who doesn’t? So shut up and listen.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “So I know you’re some hot-shot investigator—”

  “Actually I’m a financial consultant. Buy stocks securities cheap and sell them dear, build a portfolio—”

  “Who’s doing the talking here?” he cut me off. “Alright. Now I know you had a Special Rangers commission from the Governor—”

  “‘Had’ is the operative word,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I already put in a phone call to Ranger Cannon. He told me to not only cooperate with you, but that as far as he was concerned you were working as his deputy in the field as of right now.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” I said. There had been an ongoing plot among the powers that be to keep me in the Ranger Service. The real reason I hadn’t stuck it out had everything to do with the several women in my life, each of whom bore either my last name, my genes, or both. Having them in my life was terribly expensive and a Ranger’s pay, particularly that of a Special Ranger, could in no way cover the lifestyle to which they—or for that matter, yours truly—was accustomed.

  “So,” Buster LeRoy said, “You’re here and you’re a hotshot and I’m in need of help. But, you see, I haven’t even asked for it.”

  Oh yes you have, I thought.

  “But you’re about to,” I said.

  “I’m about to.”

  I discovered that for all of a minute I hadn’t been breathing. My lungs gulped in air.

  “No,” I said. “Where I come from you just did.”

  Buster LeRoy started to raise his hand but I held up a finger.

  “No you don’t,” I said. “It’s my turn to talk. You ramble around a lot, Sheriff LeRoy. If you were interrogating me as a suspect I would have already given up and confessed out of sheer desperation just so I could keep two thoughts tied together. First, let’s go back to who I am. I’m just a family man, Sheriff. I live for my wife and my kids and not much else. So I’ve helped out a friend who happened to be a Texas Ranger—so what? I didn’t know he was a Ranger when I first met him and circumstances put me in a position where I had to help him. Circumstances also put me in that balloon where I nearly got myself killed and definitely my actions, or probably my inactions, got the sniper killed. There’s a great deal about that which never leaked to the press and never will. So, as you say, you have got a real problem here and for some reason you can’t solve it yourself. I’ll want to know why, but we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s just say that I’ll see what I can do for you and your county, Sheriff.”

  It was time to breathe again, and so I did.

  “Well,” Sheriff LeRoy said as the town blurred by us in the hottest of all Texas days. He poked the brim of his gray Stetson and it settled back on his head, revealing a broad, gristled brow. Some county sheriffs I’d met were soft-spoken and seemingly benign while others bowled over everyone around them. Buster LeRoy was somewhere in between. While he calculatedly projected a rough exterior, I was certain there was coolness and quietness beneath, and if there were both time and opportunity I found myself hoping I’d get to know him better. Besides, doing the kinds of things I do it’s never a bad idea to have good friends in law enforcement, both far away and close to home.

  “So,” he continued, but I cut him off.

  “You say ‘so’ a lot.”

  I noticed we were going seventy miles per hour in a forty zone. He saw me glance at his speedometer and eased off the gas.

  “Yeah,” I guess I do. So—”

  “So,” I said, “You want me to help you find and bring in Edgar Bristow’s murderer, you want me to do it your way, you want to make sure you get all the credit for it if I can make everything go right and none of the blame if I can’t, and then you want me to disappear back into the blue sky from which I came. How am I doing so far?”

  He nodded. “Not bad. Not bad at all. A little critical, maybe. A little unkind, but you got to the heart of it.”

  “Understood,” I said. “Like I said, I’ll do it.”

  He visibly relaxed.

  “Bill,” he said, “I suppose maybe you’re alright.”

  “My momma and my wife sometimes tell me that.”

  “Well, there’s only the one thing you need to know.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “About Edgar Bristow.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He paused. We slowed for a traffic light in the heart of the town.

  “Bristow. I couldn’t stand that sonuvabitch.”

  I digested that. It took a moment.

  “Does that make you any less able in your capacity as a law man?” I asked.

  “It shouldn’t,” he said.

  “Then what gives?” I asked.


  “What gives is that I will be less able in my capacity, as you say, when the Feds come knocking, and they will come knocking.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Sheriff LeRoy said and swallowed, as if he were trying to wrestle a not very small frog down his throat, “I’ll be the prime suspect.”

  “Did you kill Edgar Bristow?” I asked him. Thus far I was not missing a beat. That would likely change, however. I don’t know how I knew this, but how does anyone know anything?

  “No,” he said, and looked hard at me as the engine idled at the stop light. “But a certain tire iron very likely bearing certain fingerprints did.”

  *****

  A murder in a small Texas town is not normally the jurisdiction of Federal law enforcement, and I knew that Sheriff LeRoy knew that. Which meant that there was something far worse going on than a simple murder, regardless of it having been the cold-blooded killing of a wealthy war hero and philanthropist.

  It was a hot day but I suddenly felt cold inside.

  We pulled over at a county filling station on the east end of town. Next door was a greasy spoon, the kind where they change the grease traps every two or three weeks whether it was needed or not and where there would doubtless be found an old juke box and even older gum-chewing waitresses—exactly the kind of place Julie made sure I steered clear of. My mouth watered and my stomach rumbled. Samantha LeRoy’s dainty yet tasty little cheese sandwiches and licorice tea hadn’t made a dint in that great vacuum of space just south of my floating ribs. I was surprised Buster wasn’t thirty or forty pounds lighter on such a diet, but lawmen rarely are.

  “I’ll top the tank,” Buster said. He followed my gaze when I stepped out of his cruiser and regarded the restaurant over the roof of the car.

  “You hungry, Bill?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Besides, I left my cell phone in the plane and I need to make a call. Maybe they’ve got a pay phone.”

  “They do,” he said. “But you can use my cell phone any time.”