1 A Small Case of Murder Read online

  Marjorie Greene read through the list of offenses with which Victoria Rawlings was charged. Mannings declared that she pleaded not guilty and requested bail. The prosecution objected to bail being allowed, saying the defendant was a menace to society. Mannings then pleaded that the defendant was a misunderstood child in need of psychological help. Claiming she suffered from a chemical imbalance, he said his client was in need of medical examination and treatment.

  Tess Bauer glared at Vicki. Leo Walker laughed out loud.

  While slapping his palm with his driving gloves, Reverend Orville Rawlings watched the proceedings like the captain of a ship supervising his underlings in a clean-up operation after an accident.

  In her role of matriarch, Bridgette patted her father’s arm while looking annoyed.

  The judge set bail at fifty thousand dollars and scheduled the trial date for September 9.

  This was the point when things changed from business as usual.

  Vicki exploded. “What do you mean the trial date is set for September 9?”

  When Mannings tried to hush her, Vicki wouldn’t be silenced. She jumped out of her seat and turned to the gallery behind her.

  “So you think you can lock me up and all your troubles will disappear! Nah! That’s not the way it works,” she appeared to say to her father.

  Shaking off the guard trying to lead her out, she directed her curses to each family member in turn. “I’m taking you all going down with me.”

  The bailiff joined the guard in wrestling Vicki towards the door to go downstairs to the jail on the second floor. After breaking away, she lunged at Reverend Rawlings. “You can lock me up, but you can’t shut me up.”

  Her struggle with the guards got her to the other side of the gallery. “The word is mightier than the sword. My words are downright deadly!”

  Joshua followed her eyes and saw that it seemed her last remark had been aimed at Tad. Or was it Beth?

  Clasping her arms around Tad’s neck, Beth screamed into his chest. Her blood drained from her face.

  The guards picked Vicki Rawlings up and carried her through the side door, which closed shut with a loud clang.

  With a shake of his head, the judge adjourned the court.

  With Vicki gone Orville Rawlings covered up his face and his shoulders shook. Joshua leaned forward to take a look at Wallace for his reaction. His face had turned as white as a sheet.

  “Judging from that performance,” Jan told Joshua when everyone stood to leave, “it isn’t going to be much of a stretch for Mannings to convince a jury that Vicki Rawlings is crazy.”

  Joshua saw Marjorie Greene conferring with Clarence Manning. He imagined she was warning the defense lawyer not to make Vicki’s emotional state the issue during the trial.

  A cry rose from across the courtroom. They craned their necks to see through the crowd gathered in the aisle.

  Beth Davis had collapsed at Tad’s feet.

  While the doctor ordered the spectators to stand back to give her air, Joshua fought to get to his side. After Tad ordered her to call an ambulance, Jan disappeared into the crowd.

  “Would you mind doing this someplace else?” an impatient voice demanded.

  Joshua looked up at Wallace and Orville Rawlings. “Can’t you see that she’s unconscious?”

  “She can’t be moved until the ambulance gets here.” Tad continued tending to the woman. “There’s another door right behind the jury box.”

  “We have to go out the main exit.” Reverend Rawlings clasped Hal Poole’s wrist to stop him when he started to follow the suggestion. “The media will think we’re ducking out the back way if we go out the other door.”

  Tess Bauer and Leo Walker lingered nearby while they tried to force their way over Beth’s unconscious body.

  Joshua blocked the reverend’s path. “I’m afraid you have no choice, Mr. Rawlings.”

  “It’s the Reverend Rawlings!” he barked. “I am the Reverend Rawlings and don’t you ever forget it.” He waved his arms at the crowd around him. “Get away from me!”

  Joshua noticed the gloves he had previously seen the reverend slapping in his hands were now gone.

  “I’m sorry if I said anything to offend you.” Joshua’s children were disappointed to hear him apologize. “But I won’t let you endanger this woman in the name of taking advantage of a good photo op.” He put his face into Wallace’s chubby face.

  Wallace regarded Joshua and his equally tall sons flanking him. “Father, let’s go out the side door. We can go around and meet the press out front.” He gestured for the family to turn around.

  Before following his son’s suggestion, Reverend Rawlings hesitated to give Joshua a glare that warned his son’s childhood rival that he had crossed swords with the wrong man.

  Chapter Five

  Joshua wasn’t as gullible as his children thought. He knew when they talked him into taking them to Vicki’s arraignment that they would want to continue along to visit Rick Pendleton. Joshua intended to refuse to take them. However, by the time the ambulance had left the courthouse to take Beth to the hospital, he had lost his resolve.

  Rick Pendleton was a retired autoworker who, after leaving Chester in his youth, had made his home in an upper-middle-class housing development in one of Cleveland’s suburbs.

  From an enclosed patio furnished in blue-striped furniture, Rick, his wife Ruth, and their guests watched the Pendleton’s two grandsons play on a wooden playground set in a lush back yard. Joshua’s children sipped iced tea while the two men drank beer from frosted mugs.

  “I have two other friends who are raising their grand-children,” Ruth, a robust woman with short salt-and-pepper hair, was telling Joshua, who sat between Sarah and Donny on the swing bench.

  “We were looking forward to my retirement to go off and see the world. Instead, we’re going off to play dates.” Her husband’s good-natured laugh held a note of disappointment. Remembering his guest, he leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry, I forgot. Knowing Johnny’s momma—”

  Joshua shrugged off his apology. “Don’t be sorry. My grandmother always made sure I felt wanted.”

  “Yeah, well, she had a good excuse for having to bring you up. Our Chelsea is alive.”

  “Rick, don’t air our dirty laundry.” Ruth squeezed her husband’s forearm as if it had a shut off switch.

  After sitting back in his chaise with a grunt, Rick looked Joshua up and down and shook his head. “Damn! I can’t get over how much you look like your daddy. Your grandmother wanted Johnny to go to the academy, but he was head over heels in love with Claire and just had to marry her.” He sipped his beer. “They were destined to be together. Nowadays, they use the term ‘soul mates’. That was Johnny and Claire all right.” He sighed. “They’d sure be proud of you.”

  Impatient, Murphy asked, “Can you tell us about when they found the dead body?”

  “Can he?” Ruth said.

  Rick laughed. “I can’t believe you came all this way to ask me about that. I gave up on that years ago.”

  “Gave up?” Tracy repeated his words.

  “Trying to convince people there was a body. You see, no one ever did believe that we’d found a body that night.”

  “We heard that you found it in Bosley’s barn,” Joshua told him. “Am I correct to assume that was on Jim Bosley’s farm out on Locust Hill?”

  Rick said that he was right. “It was an old abandoned barn by the stream. He didn’t use it anymore because he had built a new barn across the lane. It had lofts and was a lot more comfortable and private than trying to do it in the back seat of a car on a double date.”

  Joshua concealed his understanding of the prelude with a poker face. He didn’t want his children to know how much he empathized.

  Rick
began his story. “It was the night of Oak Glen’s senior prom, back in 1963. Johnny and Claire had been going together all through school, so they were naturally going to go together. Me, I felt like I was king of the world when I got a date with Lulu Jefferson. Johnny set it up through Claire. Lulu was a hot number back in those days. We used to call her Lulu Sinatra because she was every bit as sexy as Nancy Sinatra.”

  Joshua and his children waited for him to continue.

  Deep in thought, Rick took another swig of his beer. “It was my idea that we go to Bosley’s barn. They were in Fox’s nursing home because one of them had a stroke and the other had Alzheimer, so that whole farm had been abandoned. I remember that Johnny and Claire went up into the loft, and Lulu and I ran back to the stall in the far corner.”

  “Were there any lights?” Joshua interjected. “Did the barn have electricity?”

  “Nah! The place was ancient. Johnny and I had flashlights. I had taken off my tuxedo jacket and put it down on the hay for Lulu. When she laid down on it, she said there was some-thing lumpy under her. When she felt the hay under the jacket, she shrieked.” He chuckled at the memory. “She thought it was a dead animal. At the time, I thought it was funny. It was such a high-pitched shriek. Johnny was getting a little annoyed with all the noise we were making.”

  “I can imagine,” Joshua commented in a soft voice.

  Rick stared into space while recalling what had happened next. “You should have heard her scream when we saw those eyes on that man’s face when I shone that flashlight on him, I’ll never forget it.”

  Murphy reminded them of Lulu’s words in her letter. “Lulu said that the memory was seared into her brain.”

  “I believe that.” Rick cleared his throat before continuing. “He had been shot or stabbed. There was all this dried blood on his chest. I thought it was a joke, and he was a store dummy because he was so stiff, but then—We went and got Sheriff Delaney.”

  “All of you together?” Joshua asked.

  “None of us had the guts to stay alone with that dead body.”

  “Then what happened?”

  Rick let out a quick breath. “There was no body.”

  “It was gone?”

  Nodding his head, Rick recalled, “I led Delaney right back to the stall where we all saw it. Johnny and I even dug through that old musty hay with our bare hands looking for it, but it was gone. The sheriff made some sort of joke about him going back to the cemetery on the hill where he belonged, but that was all the joking he did. He threatened to take us all in and call our folks for filing a false police report.”

  Joshua wondered, “Why didn’t he?”

  “I think it was because he did half-believe us. I mean, your daddy never lied. He told me once that when he was a little kid that his mom caught him in a lie and he couldn’t sit down for a week. He never told another lie ever again and everyone knew it. So, when Johnny told Delaney that there was a dead body there, he had to have believed him.”

  Ruth went into the kitchen to retrieve another beer for her husband. When she wordlessly asked if he wanted another, Joshua declined with a shake of his head while mouthing, “No, thank you.”

  “What happened to it?” Joshua sensed Rick had been struggling to answer that question for decades.

  Rick’s tone held a hint of fear despite the safety of years and distance. “The killer had to have moved him. That’s what Johnny said…” His voice trailed off.

  Joshua sat forward. “What did my father say happened?”

  “That the killer moved him,” he whispered.

  “If he was as stiff as a board, then rigor mortis had already set in,” Joshua said. “It takes a while for rigor mortis to set in.”

  J.J. was puzzled. “But if he had been dead for a while, why would the killer have moved him after they found him?”

  “Because he didn’t want him found,” Rick answered the obvious.

  “My son’s point,” Joshua explained, “is well taken. If the killer left the victim in an abandoned barn long enough for rigor mortis to set in, how did he even know you found him? Plus, why go to the trouble of moving the body again after you left to get the sheriff?”

  “Like Johnny said, the killer was there when we found him.” Rick looked questioningly at Ruth. She appeared equally puzzled.

  “He stuck around in an abandoned barn hours after offing the guy?” Joshua shook his head. “That makes no sense. If I was the killer, I would have been long gone.”

  The Pendletons didn’t offer any other suggestion.

  Joshua’s mind was working on the answer to his own question. He stood up to gaze across the yard at the two young boys going down the slide.

  Murphy voiced a thought. “Someone had to have told him that the body had been found. The killer came back to move it before they got back with the sheriff.”

  “Who told him?” Joshua asked his son.

  Rick insisted, “We were the only ones who knew we found that body and we stayed together all the way to the sheriff’s office and back to the barn. None of us told anyone.”

  “No, you did tell someone,” Joshua argued. “You told the sheriff. Did Sheriff Delaney call anyone before going back to the barn with you?”

  “Yes,” Rick replied. “He called his deputy at home and told him. He ordered him to come in and hold the fort while he was gone.”

  “But you don’t know for a fact that that was who he called,” Joshua said.

  “Who else could he have called?” Donny asked.

  “The killer or an accomplice to give him a heads up to get rid of that body.”

  “Damn,” Rick gasped. “Johnny was right.”

  “My father was right?”

  “After we left the barn, on the way home, Johnny was driving. I remember he had a death grip on the steering wheel. We could all see it. Claire asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Don’t you get it?’ like we were stupid. Lulu went nuts. She said, ‘You mean the killer was there?’ and Johnny said yeah. Dummy that I am, I still didn’t get it. I asked him if he saw the killer and Johnny said, ‘Yeah, he was standing right there. He was the one wearing the badge.’”

  “I want to go home!” Jan heard Beth screaming from the examination room. “Now!” She made her way down the hall to see what was going on with her friend.

  “Calm down!” Tad yelled over the shrieks. “You can’t go anywhere until we bring you down to earth.”

  Jan peered around the corner into the room.

  A nurse and an orderly had pinned Beth down onto the examination table. Her bare legs flailed from under the white sheet draped across her lower body. There was hatred in her eyes while Tad struggled to inject an IV into her arm.

  Beth broke an arm loose and slapped the doctor across the face. The attack caused him to drop the needle and recoil from the patient. The orderly pulled her back.

  “I hate you!” Beth spat at him. “I’m telling Maggie everything, and then she’ll hate you, too!”

  “Shut up!” Tad’s hands close to her throat, she dropped back down onto the table. His eyes bore into hers. “Keep still,” His voice dropped to a low threatening tone, “unless you’re ready to die here and now.”

  “May I help you?”

  Jan shot through the ceiling when the voice barked into her ear. She stammered out an excuse to the nurse, who reminded her of a nasty English teacher she had in school.

  The nurse’s stern expression was enough to send her hurrying back to the waiting room where she sat down and picked up an eighteen-month-old magazine to read an article about the new and exciting life of an actor who had committed suicide the month before.

  “I have a job for you kids.” Joshua scooped vanilla ice cream into a row of bowls lined up along the kitchen counter.

  An ice cream connoisseur, Josh
ua considered low fat, frozen yogurt, or fat free, sacrilege. His sundaes were a family event. Everyone would gather around the kitchen to watch him make their personalized frozen delicacies.

  “Go through all the books Doc Wilson left in my office and pack up all the medical books and journals. Tad is taking them.”

  “What about the rest?” Tracy took the pan of hot fudge sauce off the decades-old stove and set it on the table next to the ice cream carton. She missed her microwave oven in San Francisco. Frieda Thornton didn’t believe in modern conveniences like microwave ovens and bread makers.

  “Well, it’s going to take me a lot of time, but I’ll have to go through them and determine what ones are worth anything. The rest I’ll donate to the library.”

  Donny whined, “Dad, all those books are going to take forever.”

  “Then I’ll know you kids aren’t getting into trouble,” Joshua replied. “It has to be done. I can’t put my law books in that office until those are out.” He waved a cream-covered scoop at them to make his point. “This is what happens when you don’t buckle down and do what has to be done. Wilson’s daughter didn’t want to deal with it, so now I have to.”

  Murphy illustrated to his siblings, “And now Dad doesn’t want to deal with it, so we have to.”

  After putting the lid on the carton of ice cream, Joshua handed it to Tracy to put into the freezer. “Okay, Donny, what do you want on your sundae?”

  “The usual.” Leaning across the counter, Donny licked his lips while he watched Joshua dole out the whipped cream.

  Sarah perched on the kitchen stool. “Dad, I don’t under-stand why the sheriff would have killed that man. Lulu’s letter said that Reverend Rawlings was the murderer.”

  “No, Lulu said that she saw a picture of the dead man in the reverend’s office,” Tracy reminded her while Joshua presented Donny with his sundae and proceeded to the next one. “I’ll bet that picture is long gone.”