Murder Ballad Blues by Lynda McDaniel

Author:Lynda McDaniel [McDaniel, Lynda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781734637137
Publisher: Lynda McDaniel
Published: 2020-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37: Della

When Abit left, I pulled out the envelope the postman had delivered and carried it to the backroom. I sorted through pages and pages of names and deposits from Westonia Bank printed on an old dot-matrix printer. I didn’t know those were still around, but I imagined my guy—I’d given him the moniker DEEP POCKET—had chosen it and his cut-out words to make everything harder to trace. And he’d likely worn latex gloves while handling it all. I thought about taking these documents and those I’d found in Jessie’s trashcan directly to the authorities, but before I did, I needed a better understanding of what I had.

The bell over the door had been jingling, and from the rising level of chatter I could tell the store was filling up. I spent the rest of the day out front. The store didn’t clear out again until right before closing time. Once I locked the front door, I grabbed a cup of lukewarm coffee before settling down again with the packet.

Three pages contained long lists of small deposits into dozens of accounts—what I’d learned was a scammer’s way of avoiding regulatory thresholds. That must have been where Johnny Ray Meeks and his crew of small-time crooks came in. Another page contained a list of names, some of which I recognized: people of influence and money in the area. My heart did a tap dance as I pored over the remaining pages that included photographs of property for sale and other real estate transactions.

But in the end, what did I have? Just a lot of suspicions, nothing I could take to local authorities, who I reminded myself had already signed off on the burned shack that nearly took Nigel’s life. I couldn’t help but worry that county officials, maybe even Sheriff Horne, were somehow in on this, or at least looking the other way for kickbacks.

Other transactions I recognized as properties Nigel had forged documents for. No way could I mention those to Horne; Nigel was lucky to have gotten out of the country without that tagging along after him. Or keeping him from ever returning.

Dammit. This all felt like crazy tail-chasing. I stuffed the papers back in the envelope until I could talk with Alex. He was upstairs packing to go back to D.C., but I’d see what we could figure out tonight after dinner.

I used to feel sad when Alex left, but not so much lately. I worried there was something cold about that, but I figured we’d been together long enough for a lazy comfort with one another to infiltrate our lives. Maybe that was why we were still together.

I would miss his cooking. For our farewell dinner, he was making shrimp scampi with linguine and a late-season tomato salad on lettuces from my back garden. I’d hired Louis, Elbert Totherow’s grandson, to plow a good-sized section of the meadow behind the store after I’d found an old copy of Ruth Stout’s How to Have a Green Thumb

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