A Murder of Justice

THIRTY-SIX

Your daddy called. Said you’d be over.”

Jose nodded in a way that was almost a courtly bow. “Thank you for seeing us on a Sunday, Mrs. Osmond.”

Erect, as if on parade, Virginia Osmond came up to just below Jose’s shoulder. Her voice pulsed with a slight tremor, and her green eyes had a hollowed-out but luminous look.

“My partner, Mr. Kearney.”

Osmond gave Frank a minimal smile and motioned the men inside. “I fixed coffee and biscuits,” she said. “You don’t mind?… Sitting in the kitchen?”

Jose nodded again. “Kitchen’s the soul of the house.”

Frank got an impression of scrubbed… clean… neat. Smells of furniture polish, floor wax, and years of baking. The living room: two armchairs, a breakfront bookcase, and a camel-backed sofa. On a small table between the armchairs, a lamp, reading glasses, and an open Bible. The lamp was on, and the reading glasses rested atop the Bible.

A floral hall runner led back to the kitchen.

It was a kitchen from the 1940s or 1950s: old-fashioned white enamel sink, refrigerator, and gas stove. A brightly colored oval rag rug covered much of the polished dark green linoleum. Four dowel-backed wood chairs waited around a sturdy harvest table. The only jarring note: ranks of prescription drug containers filling a stainless-steel surgical tray on the countertop.

Three places had been set at the table, two on one side, one on the other. Napkins, ceramic mugs, woven-rush placemats, cream, sugar, and a butter dish.

Osmond motioned to the two chairs. “Please.”

Frank and Jose sat. Osmond brought a coffeepot from the stove and filled the three mugs. A second trip to the stove for a basket of freshly baked biscuits, wrapped in a napkin. She offered the basket to Jose.

He took it, unfolded the napkin, and offered the basket to Osmond. She mouthed a “Thank you” and picked out a biscuit. Jose took one and passed the basket to Frank.

Jose paid close attention to buttering his biscuit before he looked up and said, “Mrs. Osmond, we need to talk about Martin.”

“Your father told me.” Osmond sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap.

Frank started. “People say Skeeter Hodges was selling drugs. That he made a lot of money that way.”

Osmond nodded warily. “Yes. People knew… they knew he was selling.”

“And people say that Martin and Skeeter spent time together.”

“Yes.” The admission came out, dragged across years of pain.

Frank was about to ask Osmond if she knew of her grandson’s dealing.

Of course she knows. What will it get you if she says yes? What will you do if she says no?

So instead he asked, “It bothered you, didn’t it?… Martin spending time with Skeeter?”

Osmond gazed through him as though she hadn’t heard. Then, almost inaudibly, “It bothered me a lot.”

“Did Martin ever talk with you about Skeeter?”

She shook her head. “Only when I brought it up.”

“And then?”

“And then he’d say they were just friends.”

“Nothing about Skeeter selling drugs?”

Again Osmond shook her head.

“When was the last time Martin and Skeeter hung out together?”

“They were together the afternoon Martin died.”

Frank asked, “So Martin and Skeeter Hodges were good friends?”

Osmond shook her head vigorously. “No. No they weren’t. They weren’t good friends.”

“But they were seen a lot together. And Skeeter was there at the funeral.”

“That didn’t mean good friends. That Hodges boy was not good. Not good for Martin. Not good for anybody. He was a tempter. He beckoned to the bad that is in us all. He was a bad friend.”

“And he beckoned to Martin?”

Anguish crossed Osmond’s face.

“Yes. He beckoned. I tried to give Martin the strength to say no. I thought Martin had shed himself of Skeeter. But he went back. I failed him. I raised him from a baby. His mama died and I raised him and then I failed him.”

“ ‘Shed himself’?” Jose repeated. “When was that?”

“Almost a year,” Osmond replied. “Almost a year to the day he got killed. He said he found Jesus.” Her eyes went rheumy, and she sat so still she might have been stone.

“And he went back… when?”

“June that year,” she managed in a pained whisper. “It was June.”

Jose said gently: “You found him… that night he died.”

“Yes.”

“Tell us what you saw and heard.”

Osmond closed her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered, then she opened her eyes. “It was late… late for me… almost eleven. I was reading.” She gestured toward the living room, and Frank pictured the armchair and the lamp and the Bible.

“I hear Martin’s car pull into the driveway. I don’t hear him race the engine the way he usually does. I didn’t think anything about it for a while. But I realize I heard the door slam twice. And I didn’t hear him set his alarm… his horn always honked when he did that. So I went out, and he was in his car. He was lying down on the driver seat. He wasn’t breathing. I ran into the house and called nine-one-one and then went back to the car. He still wasn’t breathing.”

Osmond fell silent. Just as Jose was about to prompt her, she resumed. “And then I knew… Martin was gone.”

The old woman hugged herself, and rocked slowly back and forth, eyes distant, looking for something that she’d never see again.

“There was a sudden emptiness,” she whispered. “It was like something took flight from inside me… and it flew right out of my life.” Her eyes hardened. “They said Martin died of a drug overdose. They said heroin. But I knew Martin. I knew he would not do drugs.” Osmond’s hands began trembling.

Jose looked at Frank, who just looked back. There might be more. There probably was. But for now, it was time to go.

“Why now?” Osmond asked.

The question froze the two men as they pushed back from the table.

“Ma’am?” Frank was not certain he’d heard right, and if he had, what was Osmond driving at?

“Why now?” Osmond repeated. “My Martin’s been dead two years. Nobody came to talk to me when it happened. Now you back about Martin. Is it really about Martin? Would you be here if it wasn’t for that white man getting killed?”

The coldness penetrated the wall. It was something that writhed in Frank’s guts, something he wanted to pass off to Jose. And because he wanted to, he didn’t.

“No, ma’am, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that white man getting killed.”

On Virginia Osmond’s front porch, Frank pulled deep at the morning air. He felt Jose’s hand gripping his shoulder.

“Jesus, Hoser.” He had to work to get it out.

Jose’s grip tightened. “I owe you one. You said the right thing.”

“Telling her it makes a difference who gets killed?”

“Always has,” Jose said, “always will.”

Frank looked down the street, toward where Skeeter Hodges’s Taurus had been parked.

“Truth always have to hurt?”

“No.”

“Then somebody’s gettin’ our share of the good stuff to pass out.”

“Think she’s a forgiver?” Jose asked.

Years earlier, over beers at the Tune Inn, Frank and Jose had decided there were three kinds of homicide victim’s relatives: forgetters, forgivers, and forevers. Forgetters put things behind them and moved on. Forgivers shed tears for the killer as well as for the deceased. Forevers never forgot and damn sure never forgave.

“I don’t know,” Frank said.

“Reads her Bible.”

Frank remembered walking in… the Bible and the reading glasses. “I think an Old Testament woman.” It was one of those things he’d say sometimes, not quite knowing how it came into his head or out of his mouth.

Jose nodded. “Daddy teaches the New Testament, but when he preaches, it’s the Old every time.”

Frank looked at the driveway where Martin Osmond had died. “She knows more than she’s telling us.”

“Everybody knows more,” Jose said. “Everybody always knows more.”

“Think she knew Martin was up to his ass in dealing?”

“Probably. Mothers know those things. They might not know everything there is, but mothers know enough.”

“She was his grandmother.”

“Mother, grandmother”-Jose shrugged-“same thing.”

“Martin and Skeeter together the day Gentry was shot. Then Martin buys it later that same night.”

Jose didn’t seem to be paying much attention. He was looking up the street. “Spring gardenin’ goin’ on.”

Two doors away, Edward Teasdale saw them coming and got up slowly from his knees. He stood waiting, a pair of gardening shears in one hand.

Ivy had grown through and over the chain-link fence surrounding Teasdale’s front yard. The ivy was closely trimmed, so it made a low green wall around the azalea-filled yard.

Frank and Jose stopped on the sidewalk.

“Morning, Mr. Teasdale. I’m-”

“You’re Kearney and you’re Phelps,” Teasdale said, pointing with the shears.

“You got a minute or two we can talk?” Jose asked.

“More about Skeeter?”

“Some him, some Martin Osmond.”

“Martin?” Teasdale asked. “You talked to Missus Osmond?” he asked, making certain Frank and Jose had touched all the bases.

“Unh-hunh.”

“Then what you need to talk with me for?”

“Martin lived here on the block,” Jose said. “He died here. Maybe… just maybe… you can tell us something that can help us clear up some things.”

Teasdale thought about that, then waved the shears at the front gate. “Come on in. Sit on the porch, you like. Or go inside.”

“Porch’s fine,” Jose said.

The porch ran across the front of the small house. A low brick balustrade held flower boxes filled with geraniums. The four massive rush-bottomed wood rockers faced the street in a precise row.

Teasdale took an end chair and turned it to face the other three.

Frank eased himself into one of the chairs and pushed back slightly to test it. The big chair rocked smoothly. Just the right amount of motion with the least effort. He caught Teasdale appraising him.

“Rocks good,” Frank said. “They cut the rocker rails wrong, chair won’t rock right.”

“Chairs over a hunnert years old. Wife brought those up from her daddy’s farm down by Charlottesville,” Teasdale said. “We’d sit out here summers. Friends come by…” Teasdale trailed off, thinking of a time he had had a wife and they could sit on their front porch and friends could walk down Bayless Place on a summer night.

Teasdale rocked a moment, then asked, “Why you asking about Martin? And why now? Two years later?”

Jose asked, “Anybody talk with you when Martin died?”

“No.”

“You lived here, what… thirty-some years?”

“Six,” Teasdale corrected, “thirty-six.”

“And Martin… his grandmother took him in after his mother was killed?”

“Boy wasn’t in school yet.” Teasdale rocked back, eyes on the ceiling in recollection. “That’d be late sixties sometime.”

“Different times then,” Jose said.

“Last of the good times. Nobody knew what we’d see.” Teasdale scanned Bayless Place, as if trying to recall it as it had been thirty years before.

“You saw him grow up.”

Teasdale nodded. “He’d come up here. I’d give him a quarter to do chores. Weedin’, cuttin’ grass. Boy liked to work. He got older, taught him to take up for himself. Missus Osmond’s a good lady, but there’s things a boy got to learn from a man.”

Sadness dragged at Teasdale’s eyes.

“Bad,” Jose said, “him dying that way.”

“Bad, him gettin’ messed up with people who do shootin’ and drugs. Bible tells us about livin’ by the sword.”

“People say he and Skeeter were buddies,” Frank said.

Teasdale gave Frank a skeptical look. “His grandmother say that?”

“No.”

Teasdale studied Frank, then said, “Real battle was between Skeeter and Missus Osmond. Over Martin. She was always on that boy. I thought she’d won. Then…”

“Won? How’d she win?”

“She told me one day… a Monday… that Martin had found Jesus. Woman’s face shined. Like she had a fire inside. Like a young girl almost, excited, giggly.”

“Didn’t last,” Jose said.

“For a while… I thought maybe… Then Martin… he started hangin’ out with Skeeter again.”

“You remember when it was,” Jose asked, “he found Jesus?”

“Year… about a year… before he died.”

“He died February 1999,” Frank said.

“That’d be about right. Sometime early 1998.”

“You have any indication he was doing drugs himself?” Jose asked.

“No. You said you talked with Missus Osmond, she told you, didn’t she… that Martin didn’t mess with that shit?”

Jose nodded, like he’d heard Teasdale’s question but wasn’t answering.

Teasdale paused a beat. “I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You after finding out about Martin? Or finding Skeeter’s killer?”

“Both.”

Teasdale cleared his throat and spit over the balustrade in the direction of the street. He stood and squeezed the gardening shears in the air as if to warm them up.

“Wouldn’t waste my time on Skeeter. Justice done there. Sum’bitch got what he deserved. Got what he shoulda got long time ago.”

Kevin Gentry recruited Martin Osmond,” Jose said.

Frank nodded. The two sat for a time in the car on Bayless Place not talking, but putting Gentry and Osmond together.

“What happened was, Rhinelander and Gentry set out to bag Skeeter,” Jose said. “With a little help from Senorita Free Drugs and maybe from his pals at the Agency, Gentry spots Martin Osmond as a potential source. Does his recruiting magic… persuades Osmond to go back into the business with Skeeter. Skeeter finds out… he and Pencil kill them both.” Jose paused, then asked, “We got a time for tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

“You, me, and the mayor… Rhinelander, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah. Tomorrow’s Monday.”

Oh Lord, give me a day when I don’t have to dread the next day. A cottage on a Spanish hillside where you could sit under the olive trees and look across to Granada or up above at the impossibly blue Andalusian sky.

He realized Jose was staring in his side-view mirror.

“Angry man,” Jose said, still watching as he fastened his seat belt. “Almost sounded like he lost a son.”

Frank found Teasdale in the rearview mirror. The big man was savagely attacking the azaleas with the shears, cutting away the winter kill.