Smoke and Mirrors wm-4 Page 3

  The back door of the house flew open. An attractive rosy-cheeked woman, her blonde hair in a ponytail, slammed the door behind her and strode directly toward them. She was no more than five six and wore jeans, a cotton shirt under a wool cardigan, suede cowboy boots, and a frown.

  “Damn,” Brad muttered. “By the way, Leigh can come on a little strong.”

  “Brad, what the blue blazes happened out here! Who in the hell killed Sherry?”

  “Hello, Leigh. Leigh Gardner, this is Winter Massey. He’s-”

  “What are you doing about it?” she snapped at Brad without looking at Winter.

  “If you’ll calm down, I’ll discuss it with you.”

  Fists on her hips, Leigh Gardner fixed the sheriff with what could only be described as a warrior’s glare. “I’m as calm as I’m going to get.”

  “Who cleared off the crime scene?” he asked her.

  “I guess Estelle did,” Leigh said.

  “It was cordoned off with crime-scene tape. Where is it?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “Tampering with a crime scene is serious.”

  “We’re talking about Estelle. She sees a mess and she cleans it up. Did you tell her not to?”

  “Well, no. I didn’t think…”

  “Did you leave someone here to protect it?”

  “I left crime-scene tape around it.”

  “Are you planning to arrest Estelle for cleaning up?”

  “Arresting her is hardly the point. It’s blatant obstruction of justice and willful destruction of evidence. It was a clearly roped-off crime scene.”

  “How many crime scenes do you suppose Estelle’s been around? If you weren’t done out here, you should have stayed until you were. Roy Bishop told me you took off without telling him where you were going.”

  “If it’s any of your business, I went to talk to Winter Massey here who agreed to come out and offer his expertise. He’s a highly respected ex-law enforcement officer with a great deal of experience with the type of individuals who would do this sort of thing.”

  “Well, maybe Mr. Massey ought to be our sheriff. A potted plant could see you’re no good at it.” She turned her glare on Winter. “So, Mr. Murder Expert, who killed Sherry?”

  “That’s totally uncalled for,” Brad said. “I understand you’re upset, but this attitude is counterproductive. He just got here, and we’re just starting to gather information to figure this out. If you’ll calm down, we can get started.”

  “Brad Barnett, you’re about as useful as a milk bucket under a bull,” she said. “Well, quit standing around wasting time. Y’all come on in out of the cold.”

  8

  Winter and Brad followed Leigh Gardner inside through a mudroom, where he could see down a wide hallway all the way to the front doors at the far end of the house. They turned right adjacent to a utility room, entering into an expansive kitchen with high ceilings. The floor was well-worn wide oak boards. An island was topped with a thick, ancient butcher’s block. There were two gas ranges standing side by side and a built-in refrigerator that looked like it had come from a florist shop-its contents on steel wire shelves visible through the glass doors.

  At the dining table a young boy with large blue eyes and thick auburn hair sat behind a plate of bacon, grits, and eggs. He wore a black cape with a red lining over his pajamas and he looked up and blinked owlishly when the men walked in. A matronly ebony-skinned woman in a bright white uniform stood at the sink washing dishes. A ceiling fan turned lazily to redistribute the warm air issuing loudly from vents.

  A girl with long light-brown hair nodded at the men, tugged back the sleeves of her sweatshirt, and placed the blood-sugar monitor she had just used on the green Formica-topped counter. Her sweatshirt advertised a place called Junior’s House of Blues. Her tattered jeans stopped above her bare feet, the toes of which were painted a shade of tangerine.

  “Winter Massey, meet Hampton and Cynthia, Leigh’s children, and Estelle Johnson, their maid.”

  “Estelle is our housekeeper,” Leigh corrected.

  The children merely stared at Winter, but Estelle turned and smiled at him. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Massey,” she said.

  “Without her the house does not function. Estelle, the sheriff is not pleased that you washed off the walk,” Leigh said, crossing her arms.

  “Good Lord, Sheriff Brad,” Estelle said. “I couldn’t leave that for Miss Leigh and Cyn to see. After your people left it was a terrible mess out there. They got most everything up, but…” Her lip trembled. “Anyhow, I rolled that plastic line up on a stick and left it in the garage for you.” She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. “I can’t believe that baby’s dead. Sherry was a bright, churchgoing child. I’ve known her since she was born.”

  “And I know you were upset when I first asked, but since then have you thought of anybody who would want to hurt her?” Brad asked.

  “No, sir. Everybody loved her,” Estelle said. “She was an angel. Pure angel. She was going to be a nurse. Got herself a scholarship to Fisk. Only reason she didn’t start college was because her mama was down again with the breast cancer.”

  Estelle turned back to the dishes in the sink.

  “Sherry worked for us since she was Hamp’s age,” Leigh interjected. “She was a serious, sweet girl and the idea that anyone would purposefully kill her is absurd. Some hunter must have shot at a deer and the bullet went astray. A high-powered rifle bullet can travel a couple of miles.”

  “No,” Brad said. “Whoever did it shot from the tree line straight behind the house.”

  “From way out there?” Leigh asked, pointing out the kitchen window at the trees that were amazingly small in the distance. “Preposterous.” She continued, “I’ve shot rifles myself and those woods are too far away for it to have been done on purpose. There must have been a deer in the field. He missed it and hit Sherry.”

  “I found the place he fired from,” Brad told her. “And he sat there and waited for her to come out of the house.”

  “A sniper?” Leigh asked, frowning.

  Brad nodded.

  “There’s only one sniper around here that I know of,” Leigh said, putting her hand to her mouth in a gesture of surprise, then turning her eyes away. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I’m not myself.”

  “Mama!” Cyn said.

  “There’s this one man,” Hampton said in a low voice. “Sherry said he wanted to talk to her. He got mad and grabbed her when she told him to leave her alone.”

  “Talk about what?” Brad asked.

  “Talk doesn’t mean talk,” Cyn said, smiling coyly. “That talk means he wanted to-you know.”

  Hamp continued, “He bugged her. He’d sit in his hoopty and watch her house sometimes. She said he followed her around a lot.”

  “He ever sit and watch this house?” Brad asked.

  Hamp’s brow creased in contemplation. “I don’t think so. If he did, I never saw him.”

  “Did you see him last night, Hamp?” Brad asked.

  “I saw him last night at the Shell station when we were going to the video store. He waved at Sherry and she told me not to look at him.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  Hamp nodded. “Alfoons.”

  “Alphonse,” Cyn said. “Sherry told me all about him. He totally grossed her out.”

  “He got thrown out of the Army,” Hamp said.

  “Why?” Brad asked.

  “He told Sherry he punched a white general for disrespecting him. Sherry said he gambles away all of his money and he owes people he doesn’t pay back. Sherry said even if he was kind of handsome and dressed up fancy, he was no good.”

  “Handsome?” Cynthia blurted. “He looks like a bowlegged monkey in a pimp suit. He has creepy eyes and freckles.”

  “Cyn!” Leigh snapped. “You know better than to say such a thing. If that is what they teach you at LSU, young lady, maybe you’d be better off at the juni
or college in Senatobia.”

  “I didn’t say it because he’s black,” Cyn said. “Girls like bad boys, but not stupid, ugly ones.”

  “Jefferson,” Estelle said, without turning around. “That’s his name. Alphonse Jefferson. It isn’t Christian to talk bad about people, but that is one lazy, liquor-boned, good-for-nothing boy that comes from shiftless people.”

  “What’s liquor-boned?” Hamp asked.

  “On account he’s mean-tempered when he drinks, which is most of the time. He stays at his grandmother’s and hangs out at Bugger’s juke joint with other no-accounts. He does look like a organ grinder’s monkey in those flashy getups, like Miss Cyn said.”

  “Don’t encourage her, Estelle.”

  Estelle threw up her wet hands.

  Brad opened his murder book and made a note. “I know who he is. We’ve had him in the jail for drunk and disorderly a couple of times. I’ll check his Army records to see about his marksmanship ability.”

  “Well, there you have it. Pick him up,” Leigh said. “Obviously he did it. Put him where he belongs, doing hard labor on Parchman Farm for the rest of his life. Sherry Adams had a productive life ahead of her. She mattered, and if you don’t remember anything else, remember that.”

  “Parchman Farm be the only work he ever did,” Estelle threw in. She put the last plate in the rack, dried her hands, and let the water out of the sink.

  “I’ll check him out, Leigh.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Hamp,” Brad asked. “Have you remembered anything else about last night since we talked this morning?”

  “Nope,” the boy said, absently spoon-stirring the grits on his plate. “I showed Sherry some new tricks I got yesterday.”

  “Tricks?” Brad asked.

  “Magic stuff,” Hamp said.

  “Hamp is a magician,” Estelle said proudly. “He about the best there is around here. He can make about anything disappear.”

  “And I always get them back,” Hamp added.

  “The Great Memphister,” Estelle said, nodding. “That why he wears that cape he bought at the magic store in Memphis. You wouldn’t believe what those little thingamajigs cost.”

  “It’s the Great Mephisto,” Hamp corrected.

  “He can sure make his mama’s money disappear with them tricks he buys,” Estelle said, laughing.

  “I use my own allowance,” he said defensively.

  “That’s what allowances are for,” Leigh said, smiling.

  Brad looked through his notebook. “Sherry came yesterday morning just before your mother left for Baton Rouge. At around seven last night, Sherry drove you to town to the video store and y’all got two movies. You both watched them until around midnight. There were no phone calls or visitors during that time. And you didn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Except for Alphonse Jefferson at the Shell station,” Hamp said.

  Brad made a notation about the encounter. “The Shell station.”

  Hamp nodded. “Yay-ah, Mr. Barnett.”

  “Yes, Sheriff Barnett,” Leigh chided.

  “Yes, Sheriff Barnett,” Hamp said.

  “Stop playing with your food,” Leigh said.

  Hamp frowned and put the spoon down on his plate.

  “And you were asleep until the gunshot woke you up?” Brad asked.

  “Yeah. It was real loud. I heard Estelle screaming and then I came down and she made me get in the utility room while she called nine-one-one. I didn’t see Sherry.”

  “Thanks, Hamp,” Brad said, patting the boy’s shoulder.

  “Leigh, why did you drive to Baton Rouge?” he asked, turning to her.

  “To bring Cyn home for Christmas break.”

  “I mean, why did you drive all the way to Baton Rouge instead of letting her fly home?”

  “Good question,” Cyn said, frowning.

  Leigh looked at Brad like he was an idiot. “Do you have any idea what it costs to fly from Baton Rouge to Memphis? The cotton is already ginned. Brad, have you ever known me to waste money?”

  “There’s meals and a motel room and time away from the place,” he said.

  “Motel?” Cyn said, laughing. “Mom spent the night in my room at the dorm and she made ham sandwiches for the trip.”

  Cyn’s cell phone buzzed and she took it out of her pocket and looked at the display. With well-practiced thumbs she typed a message and closed it.

  “Not wasting money is why I still own Six Oaks and not some damned conglomeration of suit-wearing, citified windbags who don’t know a cotton boll from a golf ball,” Leigh said flatly.

  9

  Pierce Mulvane leaned back in his chair and gazed affectionately at the framed Walter Anderson watercolors of Gulf Coast wildlife that decorated his office. Anderson’s work-sloppy and unfinished looking, in Mulvane’s opinion-had appreciated enormously over the past few years. Pierce wouldn’t have purchased them himself, and he technically didn’t own them, since they had been part of the purchase of the Castle casino. The fixtures, including all existing equipment, had remained with the structure as part of the sale agreement. He didn’t know anything about art, but the increased value endeared the paintings to him. He had made a wise choice by talking Klein into buying this marginally profitable, garishly designed casino in north Mississippi, instead of building one on the Gulf Coast.

  Mulvane had been employed by Royale Resorts International for twelve years. The Castle had been his idea. He had convinced the owner, Kurt Klein, to purchase the run-down casino to see if the area was viable for a major investment in a future RRI self-contained billion-dollar casino resort-the likes of which had never been seen in Tunica County. After the new resort was built, RRI would sell the existing casino to another group and recoup their investment, plus pocket the profits it had made. Or they might even retain the casino as an operation that catered to low rollers. The Roundtable had only two hundred hotel rooms, four restaurants, five bars, and two acres of gambling floor. The new place, to be built over three thousand acres, would be the grandest operation RRI owned, and Mulvane would manage it.

  Pierce’s brothers had all followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the Boston-based Irish mob. Pierce, more ambitious than the other Mulvanes, had started his career in crime as a bookie, but after three years he had been put in charge of a floating high-stakes poker game. From there Pierce had gone to Atlantic City and worked his way into casino management. After two years rising through the ranks at the Atlantic Ocean Club, he had been hired by Resorts Royale International. He had been running RRI’s Atlantic City casino when he suggested to Kurt Klein the concept for the new resort in Tunica County, an area he believed had more growth potential than Las Vegas. Pierce had targeted the Castle, a casino that would have been a gold mine except for the fact that it was being crippled by the skim taken off the top by greedy, silent-partner mobsters. Providentially, and with the help of a phone call to the right people, the mobsters had been caught and RRI had purchased the Castle at fire-sale rates. Due to Pierce’s management, an honest count upstairs, effective promotions, and a cosmetic remodeling, the place, renamed the Roundtable, had indeed become a gold mine.

  The present Roundtable, originally built with a facade that resembled a medieval castle complete with battlements from which a series of long and colorful banners flew, had become so profitable that Pierce had finally convinced Kurt that the spot was ripe for a major resort operation. Pierce had promised to have the new operation ready to start construction within a year, but he had run into an unforeseen problem. He had explained the dilemma to Kurt Klein, but it was clear that any revision in the schedule would not be tolerated. His boss, a German billionaire businessman unaccustomed to financial disappointment, demanded strict adherence to his instructions.

  Pierce left his office and strolled to the elevator where his personal assistant, Patrick “Tug” Murphy, waited. He looked, despite an expensive suit tailored to hide his handgun, like a prof
essional boxer who’d been knocked out and collapsed, the side of his face landing on a pile of sharp rocks. He had not been a prizefighter, but he had been disfigured in a car accident years earlier when an explosion had sent super-heated safety glass into his face. The scars resembled acute acne, mercilessly pitting the skin on his right cheek, the side of his chin, and forehead. As a result, his facial expression gave less information than the backside of a speed limit sign.

  “Time for a tour,” Pierce said.

  “Yes, sir,” Tug said, looking down at his watch. Tug was intelligent, had astounding reflexes, no conscience, and executed orders perfectly. Klein’s people in New York had recommended Tug. He had only been with Pierce a few months, but Pierce trusted him as much as he did Albert White, his chief of security.

  Pierce checked himself out in the wall of mirrors. His crimson hair was perfectly combed, his naturally bushy eyebrows neatly trimmed. He centered the knot of his silk tie perfectly between the stiff collars of his Swiss-made shirt and pulled down the hem of his double-breasted charcoal Armani jacket.

  “How do I look?” he asked, knowing it was a rhetorical question.

  “Like you stepped out from a page in GQ, boss,” Tug said.

  “Anything else on that incident out at Six Oaks?”

  “Nothing yet. Albert’s still trying to find out more. It was a young black girl, is all I know.”

  “If it were Pablo, that wouldn’t be the case, would it? He’s the best there is, right? Mistaking his target would be impossible,” he said sarcastically.

  Tug nodded. “Big fuckup for a big professional.”

  “Then,” Pierce said, “it must have been a hunting accident. Still this is definitely not a good thing.”

  Pierce wasn’t yet fifty, and he was at the top of his game. Stepping into the mirrored cab, he was confident that he was going to make the resort happen on schedule. The alternative was unthinkable.

  10