Lady, go die

CHAPTER EIGHT

The two naked bodies were strung by their heels from a rafter in the barn, their fingertips almost brushing the warped planked flooring. Dried blood in frightful trails from countless wounds made vertical stripes down twin flesh in horrible design. The smears of blood beneath had clotted, merging into each other like an obscene Rorschach test ink-blot pattern peppered with blow flies trying to feast there.

The dignity of death was missing. The skillful surgery that had been performed on each, slowly and intricately, had wiped all that out. It was more like taking a look inside a slaughterhouse on a hot day.

Or maybe that was just my opinion because I had seen this kind of horror before and could be almost objective about it now. Not quite, but almost. The one thing that stood out was that, at one time, those two girls had been pretty.

I handed the grisly photograph back to Dave Miles.

“I remember reading about it,” I said. “Early this spring, right? But this doesn’t really resemble the Sharron Wesley killing.”

Dave had called me early at the Sidon Arms-seven o’clock. He had seen the write-ups in both the local and New York papers, saw my name, and called me. He said to come right out to his Quonset hut office at the brick manufacturing works near Wilcox. I pushed a note under Velda’s door, grabbed a napkin-wrapped cruller and paper cup of coffee at Big Steve’s, and took the heap for a thirty-mile spin.

“The common thread,” Dave said, “is beautiful nude women. Dead ones.”

“That’s typical fare on a sex killer’s menu.”

“Mike, my gut tells me it’s the same sick bastard. And there’s another kill, one none of the police authorities have ever connected up.”

One time Dave had been a big man, physically and professionally, an inspector in the New York PD, and Pat’s immediate superior.

But even as an inspector, Dave couldn’t stay off the street and two years ago he had gone in an apartment after a killer and a blast from the punk’s shotgun had taken off his lower leg, and he’d had to retire. He wound up as head of security at the brick-making plant that was Wilcox’s only industry besides tourism.

Now he sat behind his desk, looking slightly shrunken in an old suit, his plastic leg a disembodied thing propped against the windowsill behind him. A frown creased his face into a caricature of weariness and he shook his head.

“Oh, hell, Mike. Maybe you’re right to be skeptical. I just saw the write-ups in the papers this morning, and your name in the middle of it, and…”

I jammed a butt in my face and lit up. “Okay. So what’s this other kill?”

Some life came into his eyes and he leaned forward. “Six months ago a girl was strangled with her own nylon stocking out on a stretch of beach. Her clothes were gone. Never found. She lay there with the stocking that killed her still knotted around her throat.”

“Where was this?”

“Down a side road, about halfway between here and Sidon.”

He had my attention. Two strangulations. Two dead naked females, pretty ones.

“Whose case?” I asked.

“The Suffolk County Sheriff’s department.”

“What do you know about them?”

“They’re closer to real cops than the Sidon crowd, or our bunch here in Wilcox either. But it was months ago, and they weren’t able to run anything down.”

“Months ago when?”

“The strangled girl was early last fall, right after the season ended. You probably remember from the papers that the girls strung up in the barn were found on the other side of Wilcox. Just outside town but within the city limits.”

“Making it a Wilcox PD matter.”

“Yeah. Why, is that significant?”

I shrugged, blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “Maybe. If you have a sex fiend at large, you may just have a smart one. For the sake of argument, say he did kill the Wesley dame, too. That means in a fairly small area, he has managed to spread the killings out among three different jurisdictions-two small-town police forces and the sheriff’s department.”

“Can a maniac be that organized?”

“They never caught Jack the Ripper, did they? Look, what makes you tie it in? You’re not a cop, anymore. This has nothing to do with guarding a brick-making factory on the Island.”

Those hard pale blue eyes stared into my own and a grimace touched his mouth. “Because once you’re a cop, Mike, you never stop. Do I have to tell you? And I can smell it. These murders are connected.”

“Smells don’t hold up in court,” I said.

“But they sure can lead you to the rotten source though, can’t they?”

I chuckled dryly and had another drag on the Lucky. “I came to listen, Dave, and I’m almost interested. Make it fit. I don’t know the details.”

“They were women, they were young, they were pretty, now they’re dead. There’s a sex angle to each of them.”

“Sharron Wesley wasn’t all that young-she was in her late thirties. And she wasn’t molested.” Doc Moody’s autopsy had said as much.

“ None of these victims were molested, and that’s a telling link. Stripping them and killing them, that’s the sex angle.”

Which meant it didn’t have to be a “he”-they made killers in both male and female models.

“There’s one difference,” I reminded him. I thumped the crime-scene photo on his desk. “These kids were tortured to death.”

Dave Miles grinned at me, a hard, nasty grin. “I’m disappointed in you, Mike. Don’t you see the similarity in the crime scenes?”

“Are you kidding? A barn? The beach? A body found draped on a stone horse in a park, a week after the killing? There’s no similarity at all.”

“Sure there is. Maybe you just haven’t rubbed the sleep out of your eyes.”

I had another look at the photo.

And it came to me: the murderer had arranged each crime scene with a dramatic flair designed to turn his victims into a sort of grotesque tableau.

“Those crime scenes,” Dave said, “are staged for effect. For maximum impact. Like they were posed for a shot in a sleazy true-crime magazine.”

I tossed the photo back on the desk. “Okay. You have a point. But this isn’t New York, Dave. Who did the autopsies on the Wilcox barn girls?”

“We have a competent coroner in Wilcox. He says the girls were slowly slashed to death. Death by a thousand cuts. Hung up for slaughter, with their ankles bound above them and the wrists roped, and the fiend took his sweet time. The dirt floor was caked with blood an inch thick.”

He was trying to get me going. Pushing every button he could. Why?

I stayed professional. “The two strangulations make a similar modus operandi, but this torture kill, it’s different. You’re throwing me a curve, buddy. What did the Wilcox police have to say?”

His grin seemed to tighten down. “That’s the kicker, Mike. We don’t really have any. The city force has nine men who are only employees and don’t do much more than tag cars or arrest an occasional drunk. Yes, there’s this factory here, but otherwise we’re as much a tourist town as Sidon.”

“So who makes up this lackluster force?”

“They’re all local men who get hired when there’s an opening, given a briefing, then issued a uniform, badge and gun and assigned a beat. Most of them are military returnees using it as a between-jobs bridge. Out here we have an elected constabulary system with three men patrolling for speeders.”

Could a thrill killer have selected this little part of the world to take advantage of the kind of half-assed policing that Sidon and Wilcox had to offer? If so, that was damn shrewd-here we were, in Manhattan’s backyard, but well away from the jurisdiction of the kind of trained scientific professionals represented by Captain Pat Chambers.

I muttered, “Big fish in a little pond…”

“What, Mike?”

I stabbed out the spent Lucky and got another one going. “How about the Suffolk sheriff’s office?”

“That’s the other kicker. Last November John Harris didn’t run for re-election. He was a damn good man… made Deputy Chief Inspector in New York before he came up here, but he was diabetic and couldn’t take it after two terms in office.”

“Yeah, I know John. You’re right. Good man.”

Dave shrugged. “Maybe he could have taken care of this thing, but he died a month back.”

“Hell. I hadn’t heard.”

“His deputy was the only other trained person around, but when Harris quit, so did the deputy-took a job someplace out west.”

“So who’s in now?”

“Oh, Fred Jackson, a nice enough guy, all right, real nice guy. He was elected by popular acclaim just because he was a real nice guy.”

“Great,” I said. “Just fine.”

“He was born here, went to college upstate, taught six-graders for a year, got drafted and picked up some shrapnel in the Pacific, became something of a local hero and inherited his old man’s dairy farm. Now he’s sheriff.”

“No good, huh?”

“A nice guy, but no cop, Mike. No cop at all.”

“And you smell something.”

“That’s right. The county sheriff’s office is right here in Wilcox. You could talk to Sheriff Jackson, if you think it’ll do any good.”

“So could you. You’re still around.”

“That’s about the extent of it,” he told me. “ Around. Nothing more. Every so often they take off another hunk of my leg to try and stop happening whatever’s happening to it. Pretty soon there won’t be much left to take off. I can make it back and forth to the office, do my job well enough to hold it down, because I can still yell loud enough to scare people. And I have a few guys at the plant here back me up.”

A scowl pulled at my eyes. “What do they need security for in a place that digs up clay and makes bricks out of it?”

“Because our big contract is with the government. There’s a rare element in this ground that makes our bricks ideal for use in government facilities attached to atomic testing.”

“So you’re keeping the Commies away.”

He grinned. “No Ruskies have made it past Staten Island on my watch.”

I laughed at that, but I was getting itchy to get back to Sidon and my real case.

I said, “Listen, Dave, I can see why you think the Sharron Wesley killing might tie in to these others. It strikes me as kind of thin frankly, but… I can see it. What you don’t know is she was likely killed because of that casino she ran outside of Sidon. She appears to have stashed substantial cash on the grounds, just begging for a treasure hunt, and she has ties to big-time gambling in the city. Unless syndicate guys have suddenly started hiring kill-happy lunatics to carry out contract work, I can’t see how this ties in.”

He didn’t reply at once. Then he said, very softly, “You and I have been friends too damn long for you to just shrug me off, Mike. You backed me up in a shoot-out twice and I damn well saved your ass when Gorcey had a gun in your neck and was going to blow your damn head off.”

There was something hanging in the air I couldn’t quite make out.

Finally I said, “Okay. So I owe you. You probably owe me, too, but forget that. I know you have good instincts. Hell, great instincts. But so do I. There’s more to this.”

“There is.”

“Then spit it out.”

Dave nodded slowly, then pushed his chair around with his good leg and stared out the window at the complex of buildings that sprawled out to the west.

His voice was distant as he said, “Remember that little teenage girl whose family got killed when Thaxton burned down his building to collect the insurance?”

“Sure. She was a sweet kid. Doris something, right? Doris Wilson? You had me enlist Velda to put her up for a month before you found somebody to take her in. Nobody back in those days on the department ever knew how much of a soft-hearted slob you really are.”

His head half-turned, then he looked back out the window. “Nobody else ever took her in, Mike. I gave her a place to stay, saw to it she stuck out school and made sure she had whatever she needed. Helen and I, we never had any kids, you know. We couldn’t.”

I let him talk. My gut told me where this going, though I prayed I was wrong.

“When Doris graduated, she went to business college and wound up with a job right here in Wilcox. Here at the plant.”

“Damn,” I said.

“We stayed close. And if your dirty mind is thinking I was anything more than a father figure to her, then screw you, Mr. Hammer. After Helen died, I never wanted another woman. Maybe I was still doing things for the kid we never had. It wasn’t any trouble. More like a pleasure. Taking this job here was sort of like coming home for Doris and me, you know what I mean?”

I nodded, but he didn’t see me.

“That’s why I called you,” he said.

I still didn’t say anything. Slowly, he swung around in his chair and got another photo from his desk. Something had happened to his face-it looked gaunt and tired now. He handed me the photo.

It was another crime-scene shot, this one of the girl on the beach with the nylon stocking around her neck and her eyes popping and her tongue bulged out and her body arranged in an obscene spread-eagle that made a mockery of her beauty.

I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid, but it was Doris, all right.

I stabbed my Lucky out. “It’s a damn shame,” I said. “But I barely knew this girl. I’m not saying this doesn’t make me sick to my soul, but I’m already on that other Sidon killing.”

“This is another Sidon killing, Mike. And I’m telling you with every fiber of cop instinct left in this fouled-up body of mine, it ties in. And you’re the one to settle the score.”

Softly, I said, “Me?”

Those pale blue eyes were as hard and cold as ball bearings, but with a flaming rage at their core so intense I could hardly meet them.

“You. You’ll do it because we’re friends. And you’ll do it because you’re as professional a cop as any could hope to be, but you aren’t hampered by rules and regulations.”

That wasn’t fair-he’d heard me say that often enough and now he was feeding it back to me.

“And, Mike-you’re the goddamnedest, most cold-blooded killer I have ever seen in my life. And… you’re good at it.”

I looked down at my hands and suddenly the weight of the. 45 under my left shoulder seemed a little too heavy. When I looked up my face felt tight.

“I’ve had judges tell me that more than once. I can’t say I liked it.”

He didn’t back off an inch. “Well, tough shinola, sport! Because it happens to be true. I know you. Any time you pull the trigger, you are in the right. The bleeding hearts will never understand people like us. So feel flattered instead of getting touchy about it. I’ve killed people too and never lost sleep over it.”

That was more than I could say.

“Anyway,” he said with an awful casualness, “you’re a killer, not a murderer… and murderers need killing. Somebody has to do it. And I am electing you.”

“If you didn’t have one leg I’d knock you on your ass,” I said, halfway meaning it. “Even you being an old man wouldn’t bother me any.”

“You’re the one going soft, Mike,” he said with a grin. “You should’ve done it already.”

“Soft my ass. You pull me in here by the short hairs and expect me to like it?” I slammed a fist on the beach photo. “I was around that nice kid for a month before you got her squared away, and I can remember back. You’re a bastard, Dave. Laying this crap on me.”

Those pale blue eyes watched mine again and he said, “Okay. Blow the whistle and cry foul. All I ask is, play your hand out in Sidon. If it ties in, it ties in. If it doesn’t, we’ll talk again, and maybe get you to look into these kills. Because if somebody doesn’t step in, there will be others, Mike.”

He was right-whoever had been behind that torture kill in the barn was not going to stop. The hunger of whatever sick sexual satisfaction he felt in expressing his power and savagery over these innocents would want feeding again, and again…

Outside, the sun was heading higher, throwing an orange glow on the tops of the buildings, sparkling off the trees behind them. I stood up and shoved on my hat.

“Okay, Dave.” I stopped halfway to the door. “But lay off on the cold-blooded killer stuff, okay?”

He leaned back in his chair and nodded solemnly. “Sure, Mike. We’ll let some sick bastard find it out for himself.”

Like Sidon, Wilcox counted on the tourist trade, but unlike its neighboring community, it had the look of a real, quietly prosperous town. A block of storefronts had attractive display windows with apartments above, all the buildings uniformly white brickwork with bright, shiny metal trim. And on the corner at the end of the business district was a two-story white-brick building with a fresh, post-war look and, over the entrance, big metal letters that spelled out

SUFFOLK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.

I parked the heap at the curb, went in, and walked up to a counter that kept civilians away from a busy bullpen of tan-uniformed officers. Despite Dave’s misgivings, this place had a professionalism that underscored the joke that the Sidon PD had become.

Behind the counter, a tall, slender but curvaceous policewoman rose from a desk to greet me. With her short dark hair and black-framed glasses, she seemed to be working at not looking attractive but not making it. Even the lack of lipstick and the disinterest in her eyes couldn’t dull her appeal. There was just something about a girl in uniform…

“My name is Mike Hammer. I’m a detective from New York City. Private operator working on a case. Is Sheriff Jackson in?”

“Well, Mr. Hammer, you obviously don’t have an appointment with the sheriff. I can check his book. He might be available this afternoon.”

“What time do you get off for lunch?”

That flustered her. “Uh, what do you mean?”

“I mean what time do you get off for lunch. If I have to kill a few hours in your lovely burg, I might as well pass them pleasantly. A nice long lunch with you would make the time just fly. You know the town and I don’t. Where shall we go?”

“Let me check with the sheriff,” she said, and she didn’t mean about her lunch hour. Her cheeks were flushed as she reached for the phone. Somebody needed to tell her she could be a professional without trading in her charms.

She said, “Chief, there’s a Mr. Hammer from New York to see you. He’s a detective working-oh… Certainly, I’ll send him right in.”

The fact that I was important enough to rate immediate entry to the sheriff’s inner sanctum thawed out the policewoman just a little. She gave me a nice smile as she knocked on the wood-and-glass door just off the bullpen.

“Come in!” a male voice called.

She nodded and said, “Eleven.”

“What?”

“I take an early lunch. Eleven.”

She winked, went off, and I was thinking, Well, I’ll be damned, and strolled on in.

The sheriff wore a business suit with a dark-blue tie, not a uniform, and might have been a banker. He had a rugged, broad-shouldered look that had probably served him well as a political candidate, though his blond hair was thin and ineffectively combed over. Better stick to local elections.

He half-rose and extended his hand. I took it and his grip was firm. His smile was as business-like as his suit as he gestured to the visitor’s chair opposite his big mahogany desk.

They had some money to spend in Suffolk County, thanks to the tourist trade-this office was richly wood paneled with wooden filing cabinets, and my brogans were resting on carpet, not wood or tile. There was a big fancy county seal on the wall behind the chief, as well as some framed diplomas and photos, several of them color shots of him grinning with buddies in the Pacific. Navy guys in a tropical clime.

“I’ve heard of you, of course, Mr. Hammer. We do get the city papers all the way out here in the sticks.”

“I wouldn’t call Wilcox the sticks, Sheriff Jackson. You’ve got a handsome little town here. Population’s around, what? Twenty-five thousand?”

“Just twenty, but it swells to fifty during the season. Your notoriety in a number of cases isn’t the only reason I had no trouble recognizing your name, Mr. Hammer. Just this morning, in the press, you were mentioned in relation to the Sharron Wesley murder in Sidon.”

“Yeah, I’m looking into that.”

“In cooperation with the police department there?”

“What police department?”

His smile was immediate. “If I remember right, from one particular profile the News did of you and your colorful career, you served in the Pacific, too.”

“I did.”

“I’m glad that’s behind us.”

“Yeah. Listen, I was just talking to my friend Dave Miles out at his plant-”

“Terrific guy, Dave. How the hell is he?”

“Well, he’s fine as long as he doesn’t try to run a marathon. He pointed out some similarities between the murders of Doris Wilson and Sharron Wesley.”

He frowned. With his high forehead, that was a lot of frown. “Boy, I’ve read about the Wesley thing in the papers, but I can’t say I see any connection.”

“I didn’t say connection. I said similarity. The victims were both strangled, the bodies were unclothed, and the crime scenes were staged. As if for effect. Also, one body was on the beach and another in a park off the beach.”

“Well, not the same beach.”

“Not the same stretch of it, no. My understanding is you haven’t turned anything up on the Wilson case.”

He shook his head glumly. “Very little.”

“The similarities are there. I agree they are inexact, but Dave seems to think it may be the same killer as whoever tortured and killed those girls in that barn outside town, a few months ago.”

“That isn’t our case. That took place within Wilcox city limits.” He reached for the phone. “I can arrange for you to talk to Chief Chasen, if you like…”

“No. Not just yet, anyway. I have to say, I’m not convinced these murders are connected myself. It’s even possible someone killed Sharron Wesley and tried to make it look vaguely similar to this other killing, to muddy the waters.”

“That kind of thing has happened.”

“But I want to be up on this case. Two strangulations, two naked female corpses, there’s enough there that I want to carry any information available into my inquiry into the Wesley killing.”

He had started nodding halfway through that. “I’m afraid we have very little.”

“What do you have? Maybe if I could see the file-”

“There’s really not enough to bother getting it out. Doris’ car was found outside a roadhouse where she’d been seen dancing.”

“Was she there with a date?”

“No. Not even a girl friend. Some of her gang from work hung out there, and it was typical of that crowd to show up alone or in pairs or even in groups. She was a little tipsy-the autopsy showed a fairly high alcohol content in her bloodstream-and left about eleven, by herself.”

“This is that roadhouse between here and Sidon?”

“Right. The Hideaway. We questioned everybody there, from Doris’ co-worker friends to every waitress and both bartenders. Even the darn cooks, we talked to, and they never stuck their heads out of the kitchen.”

“Somebody grabbed her in that parking lot.”

“That is our theory. But we checked it. I even borrowed some lab boys from New York to go over that parking lot, and you know what they came up with? Gravel.”

“Anything else in that file?”

“Nothing pertinent.”

“Okay.” I rose and shook his hand again. I nodded toward the framed photos. “That’s the Philippines, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” He gave me an embarrassed grin. “We were on this island, handling supply lines. The Japs were hiding in these caves in the hills, and it got a little hairy. You know, they’d come out at night, looking for food. Grenade went off and I took some shrapnel. And you know, there were these native girls, but you could catch eight kinds of clap if you weren’t careful. Where were you?”

“In a fox hole,” I said, standing at his door. “Call Chief Chasen and tell him I’m stopping by, would you?”

Chief Chasen’s office was spare, but then so was the chief, a lanky Ichabod Crane kind of guy in a blue uniform. He was about forty and had an Adam’s apple that bobbed as he spoke and fought with his words for your attention.

“You know, there might be a tie-up at that,” he said, his voice a mellow baritone that might attract the ladies if he wasn’t otherwise a scarecrow. Of course, it had worked for Sinatra.

I said, “With the Wesley killing, you mean?”

“Yeah. Let me make a call.” He got on his phone and asked for “the paper evidence from the March 27 killing.”

Then he returned his attention to me. “The night of their murders, those two girls were seen in a bar in Sidon.”

“Sidon, huh? They were of drinking age?”

“Yeah, they were college girls from the city, but they were both twenty-one. Anyway, they took a booth at this bar. They weren’t with anybody, they were just laughing and talking. We questioned several local guys who went over and talked to them, just flirting, not getting anywhere. The girls said they were meeting some fellas somewhere, and that’s as much as we got.”

“Okay. So how did they wind up in that barn back in Wilcox?”

“Their car was found just outside Sidon. They’d had a flat. We had a witness come forward who was driving by when the two girls were getting into a fancy car.”

“What kind of fancy car?”

He shrugged. “That’s all the witness had to say. He just noticed these good-looking girls piling into a fancy car of some kind, leaving another vehicle along the side of the road with a flat tire.”

“Which way was the ‘fancy car’ headed?”

“Toward Wilcox, all right.”

“You checked thoroughly into the witness?”

“Yes. He had his wife with him and we talked to her, too. Nothing there. Just a good citizen coming forward… Ah, Officer Winch, let’s have that evidence.”

A fresh-faced young cop had come in carrying a clear evidence envelope, which he handed to the chief, who handed it to me as the young cop went out.

“Where did you find this?” I asked, looking at the clear little bag and its contents.

“In that car with the flat tire. It certainly wasn’t on the victims-they were strung up naked as jaybirds in that barn, poor things. We never did find their clothes.”

Her clothes were gone, Dave Miles had said of the girl left strangled to death, naked and spread-eagled on the beach. Never found.

Did that detail bind these killings together as surely as the nylon around Doris Wilson’s pale young throat?

I pondered that as I sat there staring at the contents of the clear evidence envelope: a matchbook with a festive New Year’s motif emblazoned with the words SIDON ARMS COCKTAIL LOUNGE.

By late morning I was back in Sidon, sitting in a booth across from Velda in the hotel bar where that matchbook had come from.

“I’m starting to think Dave is right,” I said. “Maybe these killings are the work of one maniac on the loose.”

A goddess in a yellow blouse, Velda gestured with both hands, palms up. “But how does a maniac fit in with Sharron Wesley’s gambling house? Not to mention all the dirty dealings our friend Dekkert is neck high in.”

“I don’t know,” I said glumly. “And anyway, I’m not convinced the kill-crazy son of a bitch who tortured and killed those college girls is behind the Wesley dame’s exit. But that nylon stocking strangulation? That’s close enough to Godiva to get my attention.”

She shuddered. “Mine, too.”

I threw down what was left of my highball. “It feels like I was already on the right track, looking for her silent partner in that casino. When there’s a murder, nine times out of ten, the motive is money.”

“But then there’s that other one out of ten, Mike.” She shook her head and the dark hair shimmered. “I admit I’m confused.”

“You’re not alone.”

“Makes me sick to think that nice Wilson girl wound up like that…”

“Dave’s right about one thing. That’s a score worth settling.”

She leaned across. “Listen, I almost forgot to mention-Pat called while you were out. He didn’t leave any real message, of course, after you warned him not to. You want to use the pay-phone booth?”

“No,” I said. “I have to kick this thing into gear. I have a few things for you to do, honey, while I’m gone.”

“Gone? Again?”

“Yeah. Talk to the bartender here about those two college girls, and if he isn’t the one who was on duty, find out who, and track him down.”

I dug in my pocket for my roll of bills and peeled off five tens like a poker hand and passed them across to her.

I went on: “There’s one taxi in this town. Round it up and head out to that roadhouse tonight, the Hideaway-put some nickels in the jukebox, be available for a dance, let a local yokel or two buy you a beer. Talk to the bartenders out there, too. Somebody may have seen something the night Doris Wilson disappeared. It’s not that I don’t trust these Long Island coppers to do their job, but… I don’t trust ’em to do their job.”

She smirked at me. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time on a vacation. Have her dance and drink with other men.”

“Vacation time is over. No more vacation till we’ve wrapped this up. And just in case there is a psychopath on the loose, you keep your wits sharp and your. 32 ready.”

“Roger. And you?”

“I have to head back into the city. I’ll talk to Pat, and by hook or by crook, I’m going to find out who Sharron Wesley was in business with.”