J. Margos - Shattered Image

“I’ll do my best.”

Leo drove into town from her houseboat on the lake and parked her Jeep in front of my house. I came outside just as she drove up. She got out of the Jeep wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a windbreaker. She pulled up her trouser leg and smiled.

“As ordered,” she said.

“I see,” I said. “Let’s go in my Mustang.”

“Cool! I haven’t ridden in this hot rod in a while, it’ll be fun.”

“I think we should visit Jimmy Hughes again first. I want to ask him about Lori Webster and his brother. Let’s see if we can get him to tell us anything.”

“Works for me. Tommy says he’s not talking to them. Just stalls them.”

I cranked up the Fastback and we backed out of the driveway and took off in a blue streak.

When we got to Jimmy’s, he was outside working on his truck in his carport. He pulled his head out from under the hood as we pulled up. He wiped his hands on an old red rag as we walked up the gravel driveway.

“Y’all back again?”

“Hi, Jimmy, how are you?” I asked.

“All right, I guess. Got too many people asking a lot of questions, but other than that, I’m all right.”

“I want to ask questions, too, Jimmy. I want to ask questions because I have to know what happened to Addie. Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”

He shrugged. “I guess so, although she’s gone now and there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. Already figured she was gone a long time ago.”

“I know you care, Jimmy, because you came forward and identified her.”

“Way I look at it, I just did what I was supposed to. So, what is it you want to know now?”

He was direct. He definitely did not want us there any longer than necessary. He stood behind the truck and made no move toward the house at all.

“We’ve been told by your mother that Doug had a girlfriend. A girl named Lori Webster. Do you know her?”

He shrugged again. “I know her. So what?”

“I was wondering if you could tell us anything about their relationship-how involved they might have been. It could make a difference as far as his relationship with Addie.”

“He dated Lori, and I already told you that I know he and Addie didn’t have a thing. What else?”

“I was hoping you could give us more details than that, Jimmy.”

“Like what?”

“How involved he might have really been with Lori, and anything you know about her now.”

“Can’t help you.”

That was it. He shifted from one foot to the other, and rolled some of the gravel from the driveway under his right boot.

“That all?” he asked.

I sighed. He wasn’t giving, and we knew from Mike and Tommy that Lori had just been here the day before. He was a tough case. He had seen too many things in the war, and he just wanted to be left alone. I knew too many men from my generation who were just like him.

“I got to finish working on my truck.”

I could see he wasn’t going to talk today, so we said our goodbyes and left Jimmy Hughes to finish his truck maintenance.

We drove out to Manor. It was an icky day weatherwise. It wasn’t really overcast, but it wasn’t sunny either. It was one of those depressing low-light days where the sun comes and goes and you wish it would just do one or the other and stay that way. We talked about the case on the way to Manor.

“What did you think about Jimmy?” I asked.

“He does a great imitation of a clam.”

I nodded. “The problem is, I can’t tell if he’s really hiding something, or he’s just being him.”

“I watched his eye movements while you were talking to him. His eyes shift to the left a lot, and he looks down. He also exhibits other minute body-language cues, especially the way he blinks and his eyebrow movements-all these cues that I noticed are cues for evasion and lying.”

“So, he is hiding something.”

She nodded. “I believe he is. You know the stats on who discovers the body, right?”

“You mean, the person to discover the body is usually the killer-those stats?”

“Right. The same stats would apply to someone who ID’s a body.”

“Like what Jimmy did.”

“Exactly like what he did. It could be a coincidence that he saw Addie’s face on the news and that he was the first one to call in, but the stats say it probably isn’t.”

“He was never involved with her, and he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, so why was he so interested in identifying her?” I mused out loud.

“He had a potential motive, and he’s been seen recently with someone else who had a similar motive.”

“Lori Webster.”

“Lori Webster,” she affirmed. “Think about it, Toni, either one of them could have done this alone, or they could have done it together. Why would these two people-one who moved away to Austin almost thirty years ago, and one who moved to Georgetown sixteen years ago-why would these two people still have anything to do with each other? They have one thing in common as far as I can see.”

“He loved Addie, and she loved Doug.”

“Bingo.”

“Jimmy had been left behind years ago, but gave up when Addie married Dody, then he finds out his brother is having a thing with Addie-and at the same time Lori is getting dumped off by Doug.”

“It’ll be interesting to talk to Dody in person-to get his take on all this. Jimmy says his brother wasn’t involved with Addie. I wonder what Dody says.”

“Apparently he’s not saying much of anything to the boys.”

I pulled off the main road and drove up the gravel driveway to the front of Dody’s ramshackle little house. It looked virtually abandoned. There was an old, beat-up, partially rusted-out pickup truck parked to the left side of the house. In the front yard, a chicken wandered by, and out in the grass amongst the cedar trees two goats grazed.

“Lovely,” Leo remarked.

“What did you expect for a guy who’s drunk ninety percent of the time? He hasn’t held a job for more than six months in the last fourteen years.”

“Great.”

We walked up onto the rickety wooden porch and I knocked on the door. Dody answered. He was wearing worn and dirty jeans and a filthy white T-shirt that had a hole in the left sleeve and one in the bottom near the hem. He reeked of everything foul.

He cleared his throat. “I ain’t buyin’ nothin’ today, ladies,” and he started to close the door.

“I’m not selling anything, Mr. Waldrep. I’m the forensic sculptor who reconstructed the face of your wife. This other lady is an associate of mine.”

He stopped his closure of the door and squinted at both of us. “What do you want with me? I already talked to them cops. I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to my wife. I don’t have nothin’ else to say about it.”

“Please, Mr. Waldrep. We just have a couple of questions and then we’ll go.”

He continued squinting at Leo and me, and then opened the door. “Come on in then, but don’t tarry too long. I got things to do.”

I doubted that seriously. The only thing I imagined that Dody Waldrep had to do was to drink more than he already had. He was slurring his words, and as we watched him walk through the room back to his chair, we exchanged glances that told me Leo had also noticed the wobble in his step.

He practically fell into the chair, and then motioned for Leo and me to sit on the sofa. It was a horrible excuse for furniture and I imagined that it was probably a breeding ground for all manner of mites and who knew what else, but I sat anyway.

“So, what is it you need to know that I ain’t already been asked?”

“First of all, Mr. Waldrep, are you aware that more bones were found near the river yesterday?”

“Heard sumpthin’ about it on the news. Didn’t pay much attention.”