A Peach of a Murder Read online

  Like it or not, she decided, she was going to have to talk to Mike again, and fill him in on what Mattie had told her about the way Newt Bishop had treated his son all those years ago.

  Chapter 8

  Phyllis was waiting at Mike’s house-a nice brick home in one of the newer residential developments on the north side of Weatherford-when he got home that evening. He came in looking surprised, knowing she was there, because he had seen her car parked out front.

  “What is it, Mom?” he asked her. “Something wrong?” Phyllis laughed. “I ask you,” she said to Sarah, her pretty blond daughter-in-law, “is that any way for a son to greet his mother?”

  “Absolutely not,” Sarah said with a smile of her own. Phyllis got along well with Sarah and thought the world of her most of the time, although there were those very rare instances when she wanted to speak up and offer some unasked-for advice. She always bit her tongue on those occasions, though, and kept her opinions to herself.

  “If you two are gonna gang up on me, I’m not even going to try to defend myself,” Mike said as he hung his Stetson on a hook near the kitchen door, where he had just come in from the garage. “I’m sorry, Mom. I just didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting to come over, but I found out something-about Newt Bishop, I mean-and h*ante4 to talk to you about it.”

  That got Mike’s interest, right enough. But he paused long enough to give Sarah a quick kiss and ask her, “Where’s Bobby?” -

  “Getting a little nap before dinner. He was worn out from playing all afternoon.”

  “He didn’t take his first step yet, did he?” “Not yet. It’s going to be soon, though.” “Boy, I hope I’m here for it,” Mike said. “So do I.”

  Mike came over to the kitchen table where Phyllis was sitting, and took one of the empty chairs. “Now, what’s this about Mr. Bishop?”

  Phyllis hesitated, still reluctant to stick her nose into the investigation. But what she had found out might be important, she reminded herself.

  “I was talking to Mattie this afternoon, after you left,” she began, “and I asked her about Newt and Darryl. Darryl was in Mattie’s class when he was in second grade, you know.”

  Mike nodded, not rushing her. She knew he probably felt a little impatient and Wanted her to get to the point, but he would never say that.

  “Mattie said that Newt was … not very nice to his family back then,” she went on.

  “He was abusive?”

  “Well … Mattie said that sometimes when Darryl came to school, she could tell that he’d been beaten. with a strap. Evidently Newt wasn’t quite that physically abusive to his wife, but he made life difficult for her, too.”

  Sarah said from the stove, where she was stirring a pot of chili, “I wouldn’t put up with something like that. Anybody who mistreated my child sure-as heck wouldn’t be able to feel safe closing his eyes around me ever again.”

  “It was a different time back then,” Phyllis said, echoing Mattie’s comment from earlier in the day. “People just felt differently about what was acceptable and what wasn’t.”

  “Right and wrong don’t change that much, though,” Mike said as his forehead creased in thought. “And a little boy

  who’s abused is liable to grow up to be an adult with a lot of hate in him.”

  Phyllis said, “That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it made me wonder…”

  “If that was a strong enough motive for murder?” Mike nodded grimly. “People have killed for less, that’s for sure. And it’s interesting that Darryl Bishop didn’t say anything about any of this when I talked to him a little while ago.”

  “You went to talk to him?” The question came quickly from Phyllis. She realized that the thought of Mike questioning Darryl bothered her, and it took her only a moment to understand why. Darryl was a murder suspect now, and he hadn’t been before.

  “Yeah, I talked to the sheriff about what you told me earlier-you know, about thinking it was Darryl’s pickup you , saw at the farm-and he told me to follow up on it. Darryl admitted right off the bat that he was there that day.”

  Sarah came over and sat down at the table, too. The smell of the chili she’d left simmering on the stove was wonderful, but Phyllis barely noticed it. Sarah seemed worried, too,, as she said to Mike, “Did you ask him if he’d had a fight with his dad?” She exchanged a glance with Phyllis that showed they shared the same worry. Killers sometimes turned violent when they were confronted.

  Mike seemed pretty casual about the whole thing, though, and obviously he was all right. “I asked him if there had been any trouble between them lately, and he said no. Said he and his dad weren’t particularly close, but that they hadn’t had any problems.”

  “That wasn’t the way it looked to me,” Phyllis said, “and they were close enough so that Darryl’s been letting Justin help out in the peach orchard this summer.”

  Mike nodded and went on, “I didn’t press him on his story or tell him that we had a witness who saw him and his father arguing. I didn’t want to spook him. Seemed like it might be a better idea to get some more background first, maybe see if I can turn up anybody else who can testify that there was bad blood between them, and tell us the reason why.”

  “Well, I’m sure you know the best way to handle something like this,’ Phyllis, said. “Lord knows I don’t know anything about murder investigations.”

  “If it really was murder,” Mike said. “We haven’t positively established that yet. There was a scraped place on the locking lever of that bumper jack where something might have hit it and knocked it loose, but we can’t be sure when it was put there. Might be totally innocent. We fingerprinted the jack and the tire iron and didn’t come up with any prints but Mr. Bishop’s.”

  “So it still could have been an accident.”

  Mike shrugged. “With an old jack like that … yeah, it could have slipped. But I don’t think that’s what happened, and neither does the sheriff.”

  Sarah asked, “What about an alibi? Did you ask Darryl where he went after he left his dad’s farm?”

  Mike didn’t seem to mind the questions. “Yeah, I asked him. He claims he drove home and then went on to work. Problem is, his shift at the truck stop out on the Interstate where he works as a mechanic didn’t start until two o’clock that afternoon. He showed up for work when he was supposed to, but he would have had time to park his car out of sight of the barn, circle around on foot like we talked about, knock that old Caddy off the jack, and get out of there and go’ on to work like nothing happened.”

  “So he doesn’t have an alibi,’ Sarah said. “Not one that’s worth anything.”

  “It was Justin who found his grandfather,” Phyllis said. “Darryl would have to have known that the boy was somewhere right around there. Could Darryl have done such a thing knowing that it was his own son who would probably find the body?”

  “Folks who lose their heads and commit murder don’t stop to think it through. They don’t think about what the total effect of their actions will be. If they did, there would probably be a lot fewer killings.”

  “So what now?” Sarah asked. “You’ll continue investigating?”

  “Yeah. Darryl may be starting to wonder if we’re looking at him as a suspect. The sheriff talked to him after Mr. Bishop’s body was found, of course, but at the time we didn’t have any reason to think that Darryl might have been there that day. And even though he didn’t deny it now, he sure didn’t volunteer the information then. Now that we’ve come back to him again and he’s had to admit that he was there, he may start to worry. We’ll be keeping an eye on him, though, in case he decides to run.”

  Phyllis frowned. “How can he do that? He has a job, and a son.”

  “You’d be surprised what desperate people will do, Mom. Darryl could take Justin and leave town, leave the state if he wanted to. He hasn’t been charged with anything, or even officially brought in for questioning. There are
plenty of cases on record where fugitives have changed their names and dropped completely out of sight for years. Sometimes they’re never found.”

  “And if he tries to get away?”

  “We’ll try to hold him as a material witness, but even that would be tricky, since we’re not officially investigating a crime. Even a halfway decent lawyer would have Darryl sprung in a hurry. What we really need is more evidence … but I don’t know if we’ll get it.”

  “So if he did do it,” Phyllis said, “there’s a chance he’ll get away with it?”

  Mike sighed. “That’s one of the things that’ll drive you crazy about this job. Sometimes guilty people do get away with what they’ve done.”

  Her son’s words stayed with Phyllis as she drove back across Weatherford in the gathering twilight. They mixed

  with the things Mattie had told her, and she thought that for a lot of years, Newt Bishop had gotten away with his crimes … the crimes he had carried out against his wife and son.

  But in the end, retribution-whether at the hand of God or man-had caught up with him.

  She had to put those thoughts aside and concentrate on her driving. Her eyes weren’t as good as they once had been, and dusk was a bad time for her. But she reached her house without any trouble and put the Lincoln away in the garage.

  When she came into the house through the kitchen, she found Carolyn at the stove. The smell of cooking peaches was id the air, along with something else—the smell of some ingredient that Phyllis couldn’t identify. Carolyn moved quickly, getting between Phyllis and the stove. “You didn’t need anything over here, did you?” she asked over her shoulder.

  Phyllis knew perfectly well that Carolyn didn’t want her to see what she was cooking. She wasn’t going to be pushy and nosy-maven though, technically, this was her kitchen so she said, “No, not at all,” and went on through the dining room to the living room and the den.

  Eve and Mattie were watching an old Cary Grant movie on one of the cable channels. Eve was watching,, anyway; Mattie had dozed off in her chair. Phyllis didn’t want to disturb her just yet, although later she would see to it that Mattie got to bed all right. She nodded to Eve and went on upstairs.

  The sound of another TV playing came through the open door of Sam Fletcher’s room. When she looked in, she saw that he was sitting in the rocking chair, watching the portable TV he had brought in earlier. The television had a DVD player sitting on top of it.

  Sam smiled at her from the rocker. “Want to join me?” he asked. He nodded toward the TV “It’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. I’ve got a fondness for the Duke.”

  “I appreciate the invitation,” Phyllis said, “but another time, maybe. Is there anything you need?”

  “Nope. That was a wonderful dinner. I don’t think I’ve ever had roast cooked in Coke before. It was mighty good, and that gravy was the best I’ve ever had. So I’m full, and I’ve got plenty of movies to watch and books to read. I do believe I’m pretty much set.”

  “That’s good to know. If anything comes up…” “I won’t hesitate to holler.”

  Phyllis smiled. “Good night then … Sam.” “Good night, Phyllis.”

  He went back to watching the movie and rocking slightly. On the TV, John Wayne said, “Never apologize, Mr. Cohill.… It’s a sign of weakness.”

  Phyllis walked away, smelling the scent of peaches that , filled the house, thinking about Newt Bishop, and wondering if he would still be alive if he’d ever been “weak” enough to apologize for the things he had done.

  Chapter 9

  It was Mike’s case. The sheriff had pretty much said so. And Mike would have been lying if he’d said that he didn’t feel any pressure because of it. He had been a deputy for six years, loved the work, loved the people, loved the feeling that he was making a difference in the world.

  But a murder case … Well, that was different. That was high stakes.

  When Mike went to work the next day after his mother’s visit, Darryl Bishop was more on his mind than ever. Darryl had a motive now. It wasn’t a matter of an unexplained argument anymore. Dar yl had good reason to be angry with his father, good reason to hate him, in fact.

  But all that had happened a long time ago, Mike reminded himself. Could anybody nurse a grudge for that long and still have it be strong enough to prompt a murder?

  Or would the passage of time just make the hate that much stronger?

  The Parker County Sheriff’s Department was not housed in the historic county courthouse downtown on the square or in the sub-courthouse closer to the Interstate, but rather in a compound of its own a few blocks east of downtown that was also the location of the county jail. As Mike walked through the building, he met Sheriff Royce Haney, who jerked a thumb toward his office and said, “Come on in for a minute, Mike.”

  “Sure, Sheriff,” Mike replied. He wondered what Haney wanted with him but wasn’t really surprised when the sheriff brought up Newt Bishop’s death. The mysteriousness of it weighed on everybody’s mind.

  “I read your report about your talk with Darryl Bishop,” Haney said as he settled into the big chair behind his desk. “You didn’t press him about why he went out to his dad’s farm that day?”

  “He said he was just checking on his son, Justin. The boy’s been staying at the farm, helping his grandfather with the orchard. That seemed reasonable enough. Also I didn’t want to let on to Darryl that he was under too much suspicion.”

  “Because you plan on asking more questions of other people who knew them?”

  “That’s right.” Mike explained it as he had to his mother and Sarah the night before. “I want to see if I can turn up any more evidence that there was trouble between them.”

  Haney nodded. “Good idea. But it might be a good idea, too, not to put all your eggs in that one basket.”

  “What do you mean, Sheriff?” Mike asked with a frown. “You don’t want to concentrate on one suspect so much that you forget about everybody else. I know that seems to be the way it works in some departments, but I believe in keeping an open mind. If Bishop really was murdered, somebody had to be pretty mad at him. Try to find out if anybody besides his son had a reason to hold a grudge against him.”

  Mike nodded. Even though sheriff was an elected office, and therefore a politician’s job, Royce Haney had been in law enforcement for a lot of years and had plenty of wisdom to pass on. Mike always tried to pay attention to what Haney had to say.

  “All right, I’ll look into it,” he said.

  Haney went on. “Folks kill for three basic reasons; love, hate, or greed. Or some combination of those. See what you can turn up.”

  Mike nodded as he got to his feet. “Will do, Sheriff.” “You don’t have to worry about taking your patrol shift while you’re doing it, either,” Haney added. “I want you to concentrate on the Bishop case.”

  Mike felt his eyes widen a little in surprise. It sounded like the sheriff was making him an investigator, at least temporarily. He had figured that he would have to balance looking into Newt Bishop’s death with the rest of his regular duties. The idea that he could stick to the one case was exciting.

  “A lot of people knew Newt,” Haney said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re getting pressure to find out who’s responsible for what happened to him, but I’d still like to get it cleared up as quick as we can.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mike said. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “I know you will.” The sheriff’s voice hardened slightly. “Don’t let me down, son.”

  Mike didn’t intend to.

  As he left the sheriff’s department, he thought about what Haney had said. Love; hate, greed… or some combination of those three things. The hate could apply to Darryl Bishop because of the why Newt had treated him as a boy. Mike wondered if greed figured into it as well. Darryl had a decent job at the truck stop but was far from rich. With his father dead, would he inherit the farm and its lucrative peach orchard? The land itself would be worth a
lot with the way Weatherford was growing. Cut up, it had to be worth at least a million, maybe more.

  Mike knew he would have to find out if Bishop had left a will, and if so, what the terms of it were. Was it also reasonable to ask if anybody else might profit from his death?

  Greed meant money, and the best place to find a money trail was the county clerk’s office.

  Mike’ headed for the sub-courthouse.

  Early that afternoon, Mike walked into an office on North Main, about a block from the square. The sign painted on the

  glass door read LANDERs REALTY. A middle-aged woman with orange hair looked up from a desk and seemed to be a little surprised to see a deputy sheriff. “Can I help you?”

  “Is Mr. Landers in?” Mike asked.