Outside the Box
by Gary Clifton
part 1
Central Expressway, normally a rush hour parking lot, was double gridlocked by heavy rain in Dallas on that cool April morning. My cellular buzzed. It had to be either the Almighty warning me to straighten up or Detective Red Harper calling me to dump a murder case in my lap.
“McCoy,” I answered.
“Buddy Norman,” Harper growled. A call from the mortal world trumped the Alternative.
“No, Harper, this is Davis McCoy, famous Dallas Homicide Detective.” But I knew who he meant. Donnie Gale “Buddy” Norman was a fallen dove who had been a lieutenant on the suburban Crown City Police Department.
The summer before, a rape allegation by an arrested female doper and a questionable shooting of a suspect had made him locally famous. The Internal Affairs investigation leaked, as it typically did, and it came to pass that the last two allegations were not the only blemishes on Buddy’s report card.
Surprisingly, he’d been able to resign and avoid a trip to the joint. I wasn’t sure where Buddy had ventured, but that he’d landed right-side up somewhere, even in a cesspool, was a given. Every cop in the territory knew him. Buddy was such a greasy loser, no cop would loan him a buck to buy flowers for his mother’s grave.
“Somebody broke into his house and shot him and his ol’ lady,” said Harper. “Your Rabbi, Captain Oliver, called me. Said you didn’t answer. You’re primary on the case.”
Answering Oliver’s calls was a matter of talking to yourself. Rumor was, he’d only yielded to potty training at gunpoint. I’d made my AA meeting the night before. A phone conversation with Oliver after that was beyond the pale. But he wasn’t even close to the biggest flop in cop management; he could read and the like.
“Dead?”
“Wife, Eleanor, is in the morgue. Buddy’s in Parkland. Too bad it wasn’t the other way around. Maggs is already out at the scene.” After myself and Harper, Detective Margaret “Maggs” Wilson was the third member of the current penitents clapped in the basement tagged with the name Cold Homicide Squad, commonly called “The Dead Bin.”
Harper read off a far north Dallas address. It was closer than downtown. “On the way,” I said. Although the three of us were still confined to cop purgatory, personnel shortages had forced the captain to assign us homicides in the regular rotation with the rest of the homicide dicks. The cases we caught usually were dogs.
The Norman house, behind a tangle of emergency vehicles, was only almost a mansion. How and why the hell did a lieutenant in a suburban police department live in such an affluent Dallas neighborhood?
Maggs and Harper were standing inside the entry hall, out of the rain.
Maggs nodded. “Silent alarm hit the Northwest substation at 4:37 a.m. First responders saw no vehicle or suspect on foot in the area. Wife took three to the head. Buddy’s shot in the left calf. Patrol guys said the wounds appeared to be a .38. No weapon recovered.”
“No loud alarm, siren or something inside the house?” I asked.
She shook her head. “If so, it malfunctioned.” Maggs, her golden eyes beautiful even in a dimly lit hallway, was a knockout. Smart, athletic, with beautiful bronze skin, she was not available to dirty old men. She lived with a female traffic sergeant out in suburban Garland. “Perp jimmied a first-floor window, climbed inside over a flower box, crept upstairs, then shots fired. Got away before we could answer the alarm.”
“Flower box?” Harper squinted.
“Yeah, it was the only window out of view from the next-door neighbor and mostly hidden from the street. Perp tiptoed in the window through the tulips, tripped the silent alarm,” she chuckled. “But get this, blood trail from Buddy’s side of the bed back to the window. He musta followed the shooter. Lucky he didn’t stop another bullet.”
“No footprints in the mud?” I gestured upward toward the rain.
“Uh, no, there’s a flagstone patio beneath that window. Guy fleeing would leave no tracks.”
The bedroom was a slaughterhouse. The Medical Examiner had removed Eleanor Norman’s body, leaving the bed a bloody horror. The powerful fragrance of a room deodorizer partially muted the smell of decaying raw blood.
Harper said, “Somebody needs to hang here. Door to door, witnesses and the like. I volunteer to go to Parkland to visit with Buddy.” Nearing mandatory retirement, Red Harper had been in Homicide since before color TV. A head shorter than me and twenty years older, he had the general appearance of a lowland gorilla with a rim of red hair circling the back of his head. “Tough” and “Harper” were synonymous terms.
Maggs shrugged. “I’ll handle the scene. Y’all swim to Parkland and see what this toad says.” Her comment was punctuated by a violent clap of thunder.
Lab squints began showing up. I told the supervisor to watch for a freshly fired .38 revolver hidden somewhere. She stared at me like I had an ear of corn growing out of my forehead. “McCoy, we know how to search for evidence.”
As Harper and I left, we took a quick look at the window Maggs had described. The screen was awry, flowers in the box crushed, and the dirt inside a rain-soaked morass.
Harper grunted, “Not tulips. Pansies. My wife makes me plant the damned things every fall. They last until the weather heats back up.”
A shiny red convertible, top down, parked beneath a carport at the rear of the driveway, caught my eye. It was a Cadillac XLR, a hundred thousand dollar plus gussied-up Corvette. I leaned in and jotted down the odometer reading. “Harper, less than three hundred miles. I don’t believe I ever saw wheels this snazzy with that kinda mileage.”
The license was a dealer tag. Harper called it in to the alarm office. “Tag belongs to Texwest Motors just a few blocks from here. Heard the FBI has that outfit on their organized crime lists. Believe they’re out of Chicago.”
I said, “We’ve found Buddy’s new employer. Mob connected car salesmen probably do better than minimum wage.”
* * *
Buddy Norman had already been moved out of Intensive Care to the third floor. He was flat on his back with his bandaged right calf elevated. “McCoy and Harper,” he drawled. “Oliver sent the sub-varsity.” He was slender, mid-fifties, with ample gray hair combed straight back. I wondered who’d taken time to brush it for him.
Harper said through his unlit cigar stub, “Who’d you piss off enough for this, Buddy?”
The hard eyes smiled. “Y’all know this bidness. Ya’ make a bunch’a enemies.”
I said, “The high-dollar Caddie in your driveway comes back to Texwest Motors. Travelin’ in some pretty fast company there, dude.”
“Man’s got bills, has to find a way to pay them. Y’all oughta know that on your lousy cop’s pay,” he sneered.
Harper grinned, his cigar stub wedged in a corner of his mouth. “Them Chicago boys ain’t too forgiving if you get in a pinch. And mob life has plenty of ways to get jammed up.”
“I’m just the executive sales manager, boys. No mob stuff for me.”
“Sorry about your wife, Buddy,” I contributed. “Could this be a result of some goofy deal in your new mob world? Maybe Mafia fever?”
“Crap, McCoy, it’s some doper.”
“Who and what did you see or hear?” I asked.
“Slight tinkle of glass, but I didn’t wake up fully. Then some sucker busted several caps. They hit Eleanor bad, and you see this?” He gestured to his bandaged leg.
“Pretty selective marksmen,” I said. “How many make up ‘they’?”
“Figure o’ speech, McCoy. Mighta been only one guy... dunno.”
“You don’t keep a piece near your bed?” Harper asked.
“Yeah, but it was one and done, boys. In and out before I could react.”
I asked, “So you didn’t try to shoot back?”
“No time, McCoy. They got away with my pistol. I followed a guy downstairs and saw him bail out the window. Couldn’t get too close. He had my pistol, and I was unarmed and already shot. Christ, you ever been shot at?”
“Yeah... and hit, Buddy. You grapple for the gun?”
“Naw, no chance.”
I stepped out into the hall and dialed Maggs to ask her to see if she could get a line on a pistol registered to Buddy. As I re-entered the room, a dead ringer for Frankenstein pushed in behind me, nearly knocking Harper off his feet — a very bad idea. Wild-eyed and mud-pie ugly, he was followed closely by a chick who graded out at about 9.7, with long blonde hair and legs that went all the way to the floor.
Harper said softly, “Lemme pull off this clown’s head.”
Buddy sputtered, “Wait, these are my associates from Texwest... uh, General Manager and chief counsel Michael Cardiff, and my assistant, Melony St. Clair.” He held up a sort of restraining hand. “Michael, these guys are from Dallas Homicide. McCoy and Harper.” His tone was similar to saying the baby had two heads.
Cardiff, officiousness dripping from him like a snail darter in heat, gave Harper and me the up and down. I was busy giving voluptuous Melony a dose of the same.
Cardiff took center stage. “I must warn you that as lawyer for both Texwest and Mr. Norman, I order you: no questions or other harassment of my client.”
I postponed my inspection of Melony’s finer points and said, “Not sure what the hell that means, Mr. Carpet, but we intend to pursue the murder of Eleanor Norman and the attempted murder of Mr. Norman here. If you wanna run blocking back, feel free to try to do so but, in the meanwhile, get outta my face. If you’ll ante him up as a suspect, then we’ll read him his rights. Otherwise, piss off.”
“It’s Cardiff. I’ll need to monitor any conversation with Mr. Norman and or any witnesses who may have some contact with our security programs.”
Harper said through his cigar stub, “Not so sure about that, dude.”
Cardiff sniffed, “Smoking in a hospital. I’d expect nothing less.”
Harper grinned. “Ain’t smokin’. Eatin’ it. Ya’ oughta try it. Might improve that bad breath.”
Thunder rattled the windows. I looked at Harper. “Let’s all find a seat and talk a spell.” Cardiff and I took chairs, Harper stood, and Melony slid onto the edge of Buddy’s mattress. He grimaced manfully at the movement. She reached out and patted his shoulder, a tender gesture that seemed as out of place as a rabid bat under the oxygen tank. We’d found our hair brusher. Where the hell did she fit between a mob-controlled car agency and a dirty cop?
In minutes, it was apparent that Cardiff was a total dip and that none of the trio intended to answer one cogent question.
Harper remarked as we left, “Seems normal here. Some mope breaks in, murders the wife, puts one round in a long-time and proven dirty cop, and we hit an iron fence behind some red-mouthed car dealer’s lawyer.”
“Coulda been a legit home invasion murder, Red.”
He looked at me skeptically.
On the way out, we cornered the floor nurse who estimated Buddy could be released in two days.
As we walked out into the rain, I said, “Two days oughta allow some serious eyeballing of Buddy Norman’s cases and social contacts, plus time enough to try to figure how on earth a guy with holes in his underwear could worm his way as a big shot in a mob outfit.”
“Maybe he was connected before?”
“Somehow, I don’t see Buddy with enough sophistication to pass the mob entrance exam.”
* * *
Maggs had made it to the basement cubbyhole of the Dead Bin at Department Headquarters on South Lamar before us. I wondered how she’d worked the crime scene and not gotten wet in the storm. Harper and I looked like we’d just crawled out of a soggy dumpster.
Harper asked, “Find that .38, Maggs?”
“No handgun permit or other record of a .38 like the one Buddy says he kept at bedside. Perp musta been wearing gloves. Crime scene search found no murder weapon. No neighbor heard or saw squat before the shootin’ started or any fleeing suspects. But get this: Buddy filed for divorce five months ago, and it appears to be a brawl. Michael Cardiff is Buddy’s lawyer in the case.”
I asked, “Wonder how many couples involved in contested divorces not only sleep under the same roof, but in the same bed?”
Harper said, “Guys, this doesn’t pass the smell test. Looks to me like Buddy capped his wife and flesh wounded himself. How the hell he got his wife in bed with him in the middle of a divorce is somethin’ we gotta figure out.”
“Looks fishy to me, too,” Maggs said.
Melony St. Clair was one of those unusual names relatively easy to tag. Matter of fact, Cardiff was sort of the same, a double attaboy. We spent a few hours tapping the computers and telephoning leads, including the Texas Department of Public Safety and a couple of Ms. St. Clair’s employers, before she disappeared into the secret world of organized crime.
The magic computer also gave us the skinny on Buddy Norman’s case results over the years. His conviction rate was pretty good, allowing for the normal dose of dopers who claimed they were framed by some evil cop. In his case, fact and fiction were hard to discern.
Maggs, leaning over her computer, said, “Melony St. Clair has an arrest for prostitution under another name when she was eighteen. Got a couple of arrests for DWI. Probation on the first, the second dismissed. Divorced her husband last year. St. Clair is her married name. Husband runs a liquor store, Saints, on Greenville Avenue. Name’s Harry.”
Harper contributed, “When Buddy Norman got forced off the job, he had a ‘possession with intent to deliver’ case filed on a chick named Kimberly Forsythe. The computer soundex system gives a next of kin as Michael Cardiff, attorney at law. Gotta be Cardiff is Buddy’s boss-lawyer over at the car place, who we just spoke with? Cardiff is a lawyer licensed to practice in Texas, but a native of Chicago with reported mob connections and a couple of arrests. Buddy’s in up to his chin. Suppose Buddy helped fix that dope case on the Forsythe woman?”
“Yup,” I said.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Gary Clifton
