The Shooting Case

The Shooting Case

Cliff Terrell

Published by Life Force Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2012, Cliff Terrell

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Life Force Books

PO Box 302

Bayside, CA 95524

www.lifeforcebooks.com

The metric system never really caught on in the United States, unless you count the ever-increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

~Dave Barry

****

Chapter 1

As winter collapsed into the onrushing arms of spring, the usually uneventful town of Coulter, Mass, was shaken by an exceptional event. Charles Appleton Jr., overachiever, above average scholar, budding entrepreneur, emissary of restrained southern charm, received a bullet to each side of the heart effectively terminating his promising life and career exactly one week before his honors graduation from Coulter College. Recipient of two hollow point 9mm. slugs instead of a Magna cum Laude degree, he died almost instantly.

Mrs. Thomas Loomis, stated that at 3:30am on May 27th, Charles Jr. had repeatedly knocked on the door and rung the bell of her house. Believing the intruder might need help, her husband had opened the door only to be assaulted, grabbed at the throat by a raving maniac, the life slowly squeezed out of him. Loomis freed himself, while his wife grabbed a 9mm. handgun from a hallway table and, in front of their two young children, stopped the assailant cold as he renewed his attack. While young Appleton was dying in a pool of blood on the polished vestibule floor, Mr. Loomis called the Coulter Police.

There are no indicators that the two people in question ever knew each other, stated police spokesperson William Brainard. No trace of acquaintanceship between Junior and Peggy Loomis, or the Loomis family, for that matter. No letters, no phone calls, no visits, no e-mail, no ship-to-shore communications. Nothing at all.

On the morning following the attack, the police were at an impasse and time had not been kind to the investigation. The body tested negative for drugs and alcohol. Police interviewed Junior's college friends. Coulter detectives were dispatched to his hometown of Charlotte, NC to interview his parents and investigate his past life. After four months, We have no idea of why Appleton was in the house, was the only conclusion the police could come to. As a consequence, Mrs. Loomis was not charged with any crime.

The summer's leafy cover came and went, the Loomis family scrubbed and scrubbed until the vestibule floor was cleansed of blood, and, once again, Coulter College prepared to greet the incoming freshman class. In effect, life went on as usual with one small exception: exactly eight months later, the Appletons, as might be expected, did not accept the official version of their son's demise, in spite of investigators' conclusions that the boy must have just flipped out without any reason. The Appletons contacted Trevor Nash.

Nash had read about the Appleton boy in The Observer. Just about everybody in Charlotte had. Not that he was surprised at being called—he wasn’t—it usually took a while for a family to realize the official investigation was going nowhere.

Whipping a tight U-bee, he circled into a Myers Park driveway, pulling up in front of a white house whose tall columns overwhelmed any sense of architectural originality. On this chilly December day, Nash sat in the car, pulled out the bottle, and checked the label: SERZONE—Antidepressant. 100 mg. The final dose of the day. He shook out a tablet, gulped it down with a swig of Evian.

The maid opened the door before he could get his finger off the bell. Mr. Appleton! she wheezed. Nash focused on the hair. It was frizzy. Most blacks had their hair relaxed nowadays; it surprised him. That detective gent yo’all’s especting... She shot him a coy look as if she was holding something back for later, for the inevitable interview as a member of the household.

Chapter 2

If rich is letting your money work for you, instead of working for money, the Appletons qualified. But that fact was somehow obscured by the shrunken state of the man who answered the maid’s call. Charles Appleton's face was a mess of retracted capillaries as if he had once weighed 300 pounds and had since been ravaged by a mysterious illness that had sucked the corpulence out of his cells and left him a shriveled daddy longlegs.

Mr. Nash? he said, shaking Nash's hand and gesturing to an empty spot at his right that was quickly filled by a nimble old lady Nash took to be Mrs. Appleton. This is my wife, Loretta. In turn, Mrs. Appleton took Nash by the hand.

Pleased to meet you, Mam.

Now, I knew a family o' Nashes from Mobile, said the old lady. That wouldn't be your Nash family, now would it, Mr. Nash? Nash wasn't quite sure if she had said your nice family or your Nash family but, like so much polite Southern talk, that really wasn't the point.

Let's not kid ourselves, Mzz. Appleton. You and I both know that I'm from Hells Kitchen. You picked off my accent right away, didn’t you, Mam? After a moment's perplexity, Mrs. Appleton smiled at Nash.

Mrs. Appleton gave Nash's hand one last squeeze. It was powerful squeeze for she shared her husband's insect strength. Whatever had happened to her husband had happened to her, too.

Loretta, Mr. Nash and I are going to sit a spell in the sunroom and might welcome some refreshment. Mr. Nash... He led Nash into a little room that hung off the back of the house. Shuttered and shrouded by plants, the sunroom felt cool and protected, even though the direct afternoon sun beat down at an improvident 45° angle.

Mr. Nash... the old man gestured to a print sofa.

Sir. Nash waited for the interview to begin.

Yes, I like that, direct but not offensive. So many of your Northern boys don't know how to talk to our people down here. Mr. Nash, we loved our son. He was everything to us. You see, sir, we were practically golden agers, as they say, when Charlie Junior was born."

If you don't mind my asking, sir, why did you wait so long to have, uh, children?

Tennis, Mr. Nash, was our religion. One day we went to Tampa for a mixed-doubles tournament. Mz. Appleton and I... It rained three days straight. Mz. Appleton was very insistent, and what with no tennis, nine months later, the baby was born. I had just turned 58. One boy, one life...and our life ended. So you see how this present situation weighs so heavily on us. To be parents so late in life changes a person. And the police bungling... The old man’s eyes started to turn red.

Dried up and dehydrated longlegs though he was, Appleton still spoke like a fat man. And now that fat man—the one he’d began life as—was a prisoner, locked inside him, some sort of genetic imprint. What no fat man could ever expect—suddenly becoming thin—had happened to Appleton, but he had retained his fat man’s way with words.

But Nash wasn’t hung up on words. He'd sort them out later, after he got a dose of the gestalt: The music of the house, its smells, the people in it, their ways. Slowly, the events would piece themselves together, Nash knew, not because he was so clever, but because people were so sloppy. They liked to talk; they inevitably said something, added a twist here or there, forgot what they'd said the first time... And the lies would stagger forth like vengeful zombies, devouring their makers.

Only this time, it wouldn't work that way because there was no case, or whatever case there was, had been shut without ever being opened. And no one could pry it open now. He might pocket his two grand a week plus expenses, he could investigate in ever increasing circles of family and friends, acquaintances near and far, far and wide. Yet, he knew that he would never uncover anything. It was nailed shut like no case had ever been, just like The Observer had explained, a one-in-a-million freak case that defies logical explanation because there is no logical explanation; there is, in fact, nothing at all...

And Nash didn't believe that he was good enough to prove them wrong.

We take it sweetened, Mr. Nash. Appleton had wrapped his arms around his legs, and now, Tabitha, the maid was serving iced tea from two different pitchers. We can serve it unsweetened, Mr. Nash, if that's how you prefer it. Can't we, Tabitha?

Unsweetened is fine. I...uh...I... The maid took her time to put down the first pitcher and pour from the second despite the suspended intonation Nash used to prod her into leaving. With more sass than a runway model, the maid lifted her eyebrows at Nash and eclipsed herself.

What about you, Mr. Nash? Appleton continued after the maid had gone.

Nash brought his gaze in from the titles in the bookshelf. He didn't believe Appleton was looking for a modest detective. He raised his eyes and leveled them at the old boy. I've done some good investigative work for large firms and in the Navy, but, to be honest, this is my third private case.

I want you to tell me why you're the right person for the job.

Well, I was a POW. After I came back from Nam in '75, a few years of rehabilitation. Then, as a kind of compensation for three years as a POW, the Navy sent me to law school.

Where was that?

UCLA, near where I was stationed. Then I went into the Judge Advocate's Corp. in '81 and stayed with that until Operation Tailgate.

You’re famous for it...should I say, Commander Nash.

My name gives me an edge in this sort of thing. Doesn’t hurt going into a new line of work, but I still have to prove I’m up to it.

Operation Tailgate, the old man clucked, reminiscing. If anything, the good work you did was forgotten over the years. So, Commander Nash, are you up to it?

There’s only one way to find out, sir.

"An instant folkhero, now on the comeback trail... So why not private case work?

The two men studied each other.

That was in '87, Nash began again, After the Navy, I went to New York where I worked for Federated Mortgage as Chief of Security, then in '92 I came down here to the Piedmont Bank as their Chief of Security.

The old man nodded—an active listening nod—the kind business people are trained to use to make it appear they’re actually interested in what the ordinary person has to say.

I suppose you know about that, too? said Nash.

I know that the high-flying '80s were coming to a close and you more or less brought down the last of the high-flyers, Grover Pitts.

Grover and I left the bank in ‘96: me to Thailand for a year with my parachute kiss-off money and Grover to the state prison. When I got back, I looked around for a while.

About two years.

This is a small town.

He put the word out on you to the old boys network, Mr. Nash.

Well, it took me that long to realize that no other firm would hire me down here. Now I’m taking private cases. And here we are, wrapping up this interview so you can give me my first big case. What do you say, Mr. Appleton?

I’d say that would make you about 50-years-old, Mr. Nash. Investigative work is a young man's game.

The fighting fifties.

Yes, well, the way everyone’s dragged their feet, you may need to fight before this is over.

The job's mine?

For the time being, let's say yes, provisionally, that is.

Now that's the solid kind of answer I can wrap a year's monetary prospects around.

A year?

Mr. A, this case is almost a year old. There are no suspects, no leads, nothing. This is what they call in the trade, a cold case, an 'Unsolved Mystery.' After too much time, an unsolved becomes an ‘unsolvable.’ These cases—where the original police work might not have been done correctly or with the proper enthusiasm—can take a year, sometimes much more.

Where do we begin, Mr. Nash?

I'd like to talk to the household members today, Nash continued, and while we're at it, sir... He brandished a small tape recorder from his pocket. The appearance of the tape machine made Appleton’s eyes bug out even more. Being that I'm over fifty, I use this to jog my memory. The old man scrutinized Nash’s face for traces of irony. I hope that's all right, sir. I like to go over it after the fact.

I understand, Mr. Nash. Uh, well, beside my wife, there's only the maid. I'm sure she'll cooperate...

How long has she been with you?

About a year, yes... I reckon.

So she was acquainted with your son, then?

He was away at his university for the most part, his affairs...

"Affairs?

Yes, he had a pet groomin' business that he started all by himself while at University.

What was the name of that business?

"Lush Puppies."

References, sir? The effort was showing as Mr. Appleton unwrapped his legs. Sitting once more like a former fat man, he seemed at last to have lost the thread of their conversation. The maid, Nash prompted.

Oh yes, we always check them. You must call around. It's a tight community down here, Mr. Nash. Not too many of our colored people are newcomers; most are known by the better families.

If I could just get started with... Tabitha's her name? Do you recall her last name, sir? I won’t take up too much of your time today. Nash clicked on the tape. Appleton frowned and cleared his throat.

Yes, the maid... Mr. Nash. You can talk to her now.

Chapter 3

The pruning shears in Suzie Putnam's hands snapped aggressively at the shrubs and bushes guarding the perimeter of her house on Shenandoah Avenue, propelling tiny shards and lisps of leaves over her face and arms. Suzie looked like a large animated thistle—with freckles.

Suzie did everything around the house from simple painting to electricity and plumbing. She knew the rules and had the tools. And now she was in the garden, relaxing (if that was the word for such behavior)... Or, was she just waiting for Nash, snapping at the bushes, peeved that he wasn't already there. Really, she couldn't decide what she was doing.

All she knew was that she was escorting Nash to the Queen City Opera's production of Die Valkeries and she couldn't wait until the damned thing was over and she was alone with Nash in bed. She hadn't seen him for five days and a definite need was building up. Funny how at 39, her need for sexual gratification was so much greater than, say, at 19. Perhaps, it's all the work around the house, she mused.

A man without work was always punishing himself. A woman had to take that into consideration when he behaved defensively. She sighed and spoke out loud: Maybe he'll be easier to be around, now that he has a year long case to keep him busy.

Slightly embarrassed by the sound of her own voice, she looked around, immediately noticing a long limousine parked at an angle across the street. Not a real estate agent. In her neighborhood, they didn't ride around in limos with tinted windows and sinister hood ornaments—some kind of winged, headless statue of a woman. An airline pickup limo? Whoever it was, they were into more than waiting on a tardy passenger and although she couldn’t see the faces behind the tinted glass, a funny feeling told her her house in particular was being singled out.

Her gaze lingered for a long moment before she resumed clipping.

Nash was so serious, or at least she had never been able to make him laugh. He reminded her of the German Submarine Captain in Das Boot. The serious, pock-marked face, the sucked in cheeks and close cropped hair, covered by rumpled, right-on-the-border-of-grubby clothes. The rugged smell of men at close quarters. How could a Sub Captain make it to the dry cleaners, anyway?

She hated the opera as Nash hated her horse shows. So, in concert with the rules of the life they sort of shared, she escorted him to the opera and he escorted her to horsy events.

Those rules were few and simple: Nash came and went as he pleased, never talked about his work. When they went out together, it was mostly to events that he liked—except for horse shows and Episcopalian church services!—jazz clubs and concerts, opera, especially, and movies (she had become familiar, after all, with the persona of the German Sub Captain by attending the underrated German art flick with him).

They lived apart. Suzie ached to have a man around the house all the time but she reckoned that the man would never be Trevor Nash.

After all, they had met through the Personals. It wasn’t easy, meeting women in Charlotte, Nash had told her. He’d missed the seventies and now every woman in America looked at him with a traumatized stare of a rape victim. She told him things had changed while he was in Nam. Not to take it personal. Don’t take the Personals, personal, she quipped.

Playfully, he'd told her about his dates. From Caroline, he learned that people whose virtues matched up on paper were, in reality, not compatible at all. From Rosemary, he learned the protocol of maintaining a no-man’s-land between truth and fiction. Lies—okay, you could call them embellishments—were no good; but the truth was even worse. Dating is a tug-of-war so suitors put up with the lies—until things got serious. Then, both parties let go of the rope and truth came tumbling out, head over heels. Read the Classifieds if you don’t believe me, Nash told her. I already have, Suzie answered. Remember? That’s how you got into my bed.

Finally, he had chosen a woman whose paper virtues were the opposite of his. It worked; it brought him together with Suzie. After they made love the first night, he had told her that she was a rare bird—a problem free bird. My problems are the ones I can hammer and saw away, she'd replied.

Everything was fine, and yet, the one thing he would never tell her was—he didn’t entirely trust the classifieds—no lasting love could come by a method that brought eager drivers to used cars and common householders to secondhand furniture.

Suzie came from Western Virginia and was one of those who found Charlotte crowded and sophisticated. Nash belittled the town, she felt, unfairly comparing it to New York and Boston.

With one exception that she hadn’t told Nash about, Suzie had known only farm boys and insurance salesmen; Nash was something exotic. It could be seen in the way they shared time together. Nash spread out on the dining room floor torturing himself in esoteric Yoga poses while Suzie sat in an armchair reading a romance. Except for thinking, he volunteered, Yoga was about the only thing you could do in three by five prison cell.

Suzie worked around her house; Nash let the maid take care of his. They barely spoke, except at bedtime when he talked dirty to her...during the sex act, that is. She loved it, using it to draw herself in and out of climax. He picked up on it, composed his words carefully, like a poet experimenting with some obscure Elizabethan form.

They shared a kind of neutral no-man's-land with nothing in common, no commitments not even to sex—she needed it and Nash had it to spare like an undersea Captain's ennui.

He had handed her first clitoral orgasm, if, indeed, ‘handed’ was the correct term. She thought of more suitable words and, without meaning to, clipped the top of a rose bush completely off.

It had changed her life. No longer was she afraid to talk about sex, to ask a man for what she wanted; only that man had to be Nash. She loved him and, at the same time, judged that he didn't love her.

Suddenly, she remembered the limousine and turned to see if it was still there. Sure enough. As she turned around, the back seat window powered down. A familiar head moved from the shadow of the interior into the full sunlight. Josh Reed. What was he doing here? And the man in the front seat had lowered his window, too, revealing a third man in the passenger seat. Who were they? They didn’t look like the usual hired livery help. Finally, after lingering a moment, the senior US Senator from North Carolina tipped his hand to Suzie and bade the driver move on.

Chapter 4

If you look down on Charlotte, NC from one of its token tall buildings in the 1980s, you saw a lot of empty lots. Valuable land lying fallow, for parking and storage. Development without a plan—a work in progress.

First, the boom years of the 1970s, and the city decides it’s going places. Then, the eighties herald the rise of local banks to national prominence. And the big four—Wachovia, First Union, Nations Bank, Piedmont—start an architectural competition for most conspicuous headquarters. At the same time, a trend to restore old buildings. A few years ago, an NFL Stadium pushes in along the Expressway, and yonder, out toward the airport, a Coliseum for basketball. All in all, a patchwork of new and old—unfinished and desultory. No conscious mind had conceived it and no mind could predict its eventual form. As if the downtown was an afterthought, an asterisk to the real business of building comfortable communities for the rich around a half-renovated inner city.

Dilworth, Providence Park, Wendover. The outstretched areas to the south and east, remote and green, were barely visible from the tall downtown buildings. The world of Charles Appleton and his country club associates.

To the west, a black middle class equally obsessed with the American dream, had burrowed into Enderly Park, Westerly Hills—a lot less green, but many more K-Marts. The world of nameless folk, a few years out of the now defunct welfare system and only steps ahead of the repo man. People like Tabitha, the Appleton’s maid.

A demographic component was shaping the city as well. Over the last twenty years, as the manufacturing economy cooled down up North—layoffs, downsizing, assimilations—new blood headed south. Charlotte welcomed these newcomers, offering a wide-open, laid-back society, with few of the remnants of its segregated past. The local politicians made sure of it. In the sixties, they had faced the school desegregation crisis head on, taking the initiative instead of dragging their feet. And, after voluntarily integrating the schools, they had culminated the era of civic progress by electing a black Mayor, Owen Bannister—Trevor Nash’s best friend. Of course, with the white retrenchment of the nineties, the progressive era had come to an end. Owen was now the ex-Mayor of Charlotte.

Yet, black and white, rich and poor, native son and immigrant, residents all cherished their city and looked forward to the next millennium.

So when some contractor or promoter finally persuades Major League Baseball to erect a monument to the infield fly rule or the big banks bought up and developed the remaining sites, more empty lots would become occupied, and, bit by bit, the city might become a real city with a purposeful downtown.

Read about it in the headlines. The headlong rush to development, the shift in demographics, political intrigue, the occasional scandal, cost overruns. Nash had no time for the big picture; he was too preoccupied with drumming up standard PI fare. A wife suspects her husband of cheating, a businessman skips to Mexico, a missing child, stolen company funds, child support payments in arrears, loss of inventory, industrial espionage, skip tracing, year-old murder with a cold trail, police bungling. Yet, sometimes, headlines and human interest got tossed together—the little picture and the big picture—what Count Tolstoy referred to as ‘life and the reflection of life.’ Nash had a premonition that this case, if it ever amounted to anything, would mix the two together like fine olive oil over cheap iceberg lettuce.

He nosed the Olds onto 7th Street and headed towards Suzie Putnam's in Chantilly, one of the fringe neighborhoods northeast of Dilworth. He had things to do before getting on a Boston bound plane.

An hour before in the Appleton’s den, alone with Nash for her interview, Tabitha Greer had reclined in a leathered armchair in front of the pine paneled bookcase, folded her arms, and avoided his eyes. Nash flashed on her front door performance: short natural hair, smooth dark skin proportioned over an oval facial structure, assertive body language, as if she was looking forward to playing the maid in a whodunit. Now that she was in front of the detective in the den, she appeared less confident. The pictures was gone the next day... Nash couldn't remember her exact words at the penultimate moment. He flicked in the cassette and wound it back to the voice that sounded like it had been squeezed through the tightened neck of a balloon.

It’s been over one year, Yes suh, Mr. Detective man.

You acquainted with Charles Jr, were you?

Don't rightly feel ‘acquainted’ be the right word, suh. I make the beds, serve the iced tea, clean and cook. Do the laundry, too.

When the police from up north visited, what kind of questions they ask you?

They asked me if Mr. Junior has any girlfriends, or who I seen him in the bed with. I mean they asked me if sometime he might be—if I never seen him in bed with another man, or something. They asked me all kind of crazy questions. Does I know a Mrs. Peggy Loomis? Has I ever heard the Loomis name before?

And what did you tell them, Tabitha?

I tell them the truth.

An' what might the truth be?

That I only work here one year an’ I only see him at the school vacations an’ never with no other boy or no other girl in bed.

And what about Loomis? You ever hear that name mentioned?

Couldn't say I did or I didn't. Don't know no one name of Loomis, but can't recollect that I didn’t never hear it.

Nash turned and squared off with the maid as she raised her voice started to flutter.

"I didn’t tell them that the pitures on the table was gone the next day, and now the room is locked and the key aroun' ol' lady Appleton's neck. I didn't tell ‘em that