Double Death
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brady,” she said, “I simply can’t believe my father committed murder then killed himself.”
She was Joyce Norris Hodges, the adult offspring of Brock Norris, the suicide half of a recent murder/suicide. At least that’s what the cops believed.
“People do these things,” I said. We were sitting in the offices of Brady Investigations on Executive Center Drive in El Paso. Outside it was 100 in the shade and expected to top 105 today. “Especially in this kind of weather.”
Joyce Hodges shook her head vehemently, her ponytail whipping around behind her. “Not my father. He was happy for the first time since my mom died. They were both happy.” I’ve always been attracted by ponytails on women, especially when they were pulled together high on the back of the head, like hers was. And ice-blue eyes, the kind you always have to look twice at to make sure of what you saw the first time. I suppose I should have been more sensitive to her recent bereavement, but I just couldn’t help myself.
“When was the last time you saw them?” I asked.
“At the wedding, just before they left on their honeymoon.” She was certainly well put together. Slim but not anorexic. A good eight inches of well-muscled thigh showed beneath the hem of the skirt of a sharp business suit. “They were as happy as any newlywed couple could be.”
Yeah, but that was before the honeymoon. I didn’t say it aloud. “Your father owned a transmission shop and she was his bookkeeper. There was a considerable difference in age between them, wasn’t there?”
“Yes. He was 58 and she was 32.”
“How did you feel about your father marrying someone so much younger than he?”
She blinked in surprise. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
I shrugged. When I shrug I shift enough weight around to make the chair wiggle. I was going to have to invest in some sturdier furniture. “I’m just trying to get a feel for the general emotional climate.”
She answered, but she didn’t look pleased about it. “I was happy that my father was happy.”
What she didn’t say was as important as what she did say. “Did the shop have any financial problems?” I asked.
She shook her head, setting the ponytail in motion again. “I don’t know. I haven’t gone through the books yet.”
In response to my questioning look she said, “I’m an accountant, Mr. Brady. If I find anything out of the ordinary, I’ll let you know.”
“That should be enough to get me started, Mrs. Hodges.” We both stood. I towered over her. At six-four I tower over most people who aren’t professional basketball players. My daughter, Tina, says I look like a wall about to fall over and crush the people I’m talking to. For that reason I do most of my interviews sitting down. Two hundred eighty pounds of ex-SEAL is less intimidating that way. Not much, but enough.
Mrs. Hodges left, a vapor trail of Chanel following her out. I was enjoying the lingering scent when Kathleen barged in bringing her own vapor trail of something new and quite nice.
Kathleen is a tall, athletic young woman who reminds me of that professional volleyball player, Gabrielle Whatshername. Kathleen also happens to be an ex-Navy Master-at-Arms. Currently she’s serving as my—uh—executive assistant with ambitions to be a private investigator herself.
“OK, Boss,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”
I groaned and plopped into the chair behind my desk which groaned too. I definitely need to get sturdier furniture. “You mean besides going back to your computer and leaving me alone?”
“Come on, Boss,” she said. “You’re going to need me to interview people.”
She was right. There were a lot of people to interview, the workers at the transmission shop and the neighbors to start off with. A good-looking woman might be just the thing to get some macho auto mechanics to open up and say more than they probably thought they should.
“All right.” I tore a couple of pages out of my notebook and handed them to her. She was grinning like her horse had just crossed the finish line six lengths ahead of the pack. “Talk to these people and find out if the happy couple was really all that happy. Also look for any reason that someone might have for holding a grudge against either of them.”
“Aye, aye, Boss,” she said and blew out of the office.
While Kathleen was out interviewing the Hodges’s friends, employees and neighbors, I went to see Lieutenant Johnny Soto of the Crimes Against Persons division of the El Paso Police Department. I met him for lunch at Anita’s Restaurant and Bar in Five Points, a few blocks from Police Headquarters.
The food was especially good at Anita’s. I had the Number One Combo: three beef tacos, two beef enchiladas with chile verde sauce, one pork tamale, refried beans and Spanish rice. Soto had a taco salad. Once we got the important stuff out of the way, I got down to business.
“What’s the official line on the Norris killings?” I asked.
Johnny stroked his Zapata moustache. “Why? That case is as dead as the Norrises.”
“Mr. Norris’s daughter, Joyce Hodges, doesn’t believe it was murder/suicide. Particularly the suicide part.”
Johnny took a gulp of iced tea. “Then she’s wasting her money and your time.”
He leaned forward to replace his glass and rested his forearms on the table. “The gun was his. Only his fingerprints were on it. There was no sign of forced entry, all the doors were locked.”
“What about the windows?”
“The windows in the living room and the bedroom were open because the evaporative cooler was on. But don’t read too much into that because they had stops installed on all of them. You couldn’t open them more than about 8 inches. Not enough for anyone to get in or out.”
“Any witnesses?” I asked.
“The neighbors across the street, the Hammonds. They had guests over for dinner that night. All four of them were in the front yard saying their goodnights when they heard the shots. They’re the people called it in. Five minutes later, the first squad car pulled up. No one entered or left the Norris’ house during that time.”
“Someone could have gone out the back.”
Johnny nodded. “Someone could, but they didn’t. There was no evidence of anyone other than Mr. and Mrs. Norris entering or leaving the house.” Just then the food came and we turned to more pleasant pursuits.
Johnny was convinced that Norris had shot his wife and then himself. I couldn’t blame him. Everything seemed to point that way, and he had other less clear-cut cases on his desk. A slam-dunk like the Norris case was nothing to be sneezed at.
On the other hand, just maybe he had missed something. He was a good cop, but even the best of us sometimes see only what we want to see.
Joyce Hodges wanted to see murder. As horrible as that was, it was better, easier to accept, than suicide, with all the guilt, blame and other baggage that came with it. At least with murder she could direct her anger outward. She wouldn’t have to wonder if her father was dead because of something she did, or didn’t do.
But this really did look like murder/suicide. I’m not one for stringing a client along to keep the money flowing, but I felt like I owed Joyce Hodges at least enough effort to positively eliminate murder. At least in my mind. Whether anything I could do would convince her was an open question.
Kathleen and I met the next morning to go over her interviews.
“All the employees said pretty much the same thing,” said Kathleen. “Hillary Murphy came to work for Norris about a year ago after he fired his previous bookkeeper. The business was going down, and Norris suspected the bookkeeper, one George King, was ripping him off but couldn’t prove anything. Norris was not a very good businessman.”
“Where’s King now?” I asked, thinking she hadn’t yet followed up. I should have known better.
“Vegas,” she said. “Opened up his own office. He’s probably due to be caught with his hand in the till any time now.” Kathleen was grinning at me. She knew I was testing, and she knew she passed.
“Anyway,” she said, getting back to the main track, “Hillary came in and took over. The other employees thought Norris had screwed up again. She came in dressed like a barrio queen, lots of makeup, pouffy hair, tight clothes and lots of skin. She grew up in the barrio, a Mexican mother and an Irish father who disappeared when she was a baby. Thing was she actually knew her stuff. The shop started making money.
“A couple of months later, she anglicized her appearance, and a little while after that she started dating Norris. They hit it off both professionally and personally and were married about a month ago. Everyone, both neighbors and employees said they were a happy couple. No tensions at work, no yelling at home.”
There had to be more. “And then?” I asked.
“And then,” continued Kathleen, “about a week after they got back from the honeymoon, things went downhill in a hurry. At work Norris started spending all his time in the shop. If something in the office required his presence, he’d go in, do whatever it was without speaking to his wife, then high-tail it back to the shop.
“According to the neighbors he started coming home later and later. Once he got there, there would be loud arguments accompanied by bangs and crashes.”
“Did he hit her?”
Kathleen shook her head. “The employees said there were no signs of physical abuse.”
“Any idea what caused the arguments?” I asked.
“None. There was no reason to think she was stepping out on him or he on her. Before the falling out they would go to work together, go home together, go out together. Typical newlyweds.”
“What kind of a man was he?” I asked.
Kathleen flipped through her notes. “Seemed like a nice enough sort. His employees liked him. Said he was fair. Always willing to help out on the difficult jobs, get his hands dirty. He’d overlook the occasional tardiness as long as you got your work done on time.
“Politically, he was conservative leaning toward ultraconservative. The shop radio was tuned to the station that carries Rush Limbaugh’s show. Every time something came up about gays, gay rights, or HIV he’d be ready with some nasty comment or other. Other than that, he was kind to women, children and dogs.”
“All in all,” I said, “not your average suicide.”
“Not unless,” said Kathleen, “something pretty devastating happened in that last week.”
“Yeah, but what could have been that disturbing to newlyweds?”
I got a call from Joyce Hodges just after lunch. She’d found something unusual in the books. I told her to come on by. I hoped she was still sporting that ponytail.
She came in wearing a crisp white sleeveless blouse, well filled out and unbuttoned to show a hint of cleavage, just enough to keep my interest. Her arms were well toned and lightly tanned. She wore black slacks made from a material that, while loose, clung to and showed off all the right parts as she walked. Instead of a ponytail, her hair hung loose about her shoulders. I was disappointed about the ponytail, but I bore up.
She sat down in the client chair and opened her briefcase. Taking out a small stack of photocopies, she handed them to me.
“Those pages show a series of transactions between my father’s shop and a couple of companies called Andrade Shipping and Olmec Parts and Supply.”
I shuffled through the pages. They might as well have been written in Greek. “Sounds like companies your father might have done business with.”
“Except,” she said, “for the amounts.”
I looked at the pages again. They didn’t make much more sense than the last time I looked. Luckily Mrs. Hodges was on a roll and didn’t wait for me to comment.
“From those two companies alone my father’s shop was cycling anywhere from $70,000 to $100,000 a month. And the amounts being collected from Andrade and paid to Olmec are remarkably similar, differing by what might be considered a commission.”
Mrs. Hodges’s eyes were wide. She looked a little feverish. “That woman was laundering money through my father’s business.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
She opened her briefcase again and pulled out some more papers, handing them to me. They had the seal of the State of Maryland on them.
“Those are the incorporation papers for Wet Mountains, Inc., located in La Veta, Colorado. Wet Mountains owns both Andrade Shipping and Olmec Parts. And,” she said, smiling with triumph, “the officers of Wet Mountains are Carlos Griegos and Hillary Murphy.”
I leaned back and thought about that for a while.
Mrs. Hodges interrupted my ruminations. “Don’t you see? That woman went to work for my father for the sole purpose of setting up a money-laundering scheme. He probably started getting suspicious, and she married him as a diversion. He found out anyway and confronted her and that Griegos person who killed them both.”
“Why would Griegos have killed her? She was his partner.”
Joyce looked annoyed. She was still attractive. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he didn’t want a partner any more.”
I could hear just what Johnny would say. Her husband found out about the money laundering, got enraged and shot her. Then realizing what he had done, he shot himself to avoid disgrace and jail.
That was a reasonable way to look at it, but the murder option just became more likely. I knew who Griegos was, a mid-level coyote smuggling illegal immigrants across the border for anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 a head. He started operations about a year before I left the Border Patrol. I knew for a fact that Griegos or his men had abandoned people in the desert to die or make their own way out if they could. Nothing had ever been proven, though. He was smart. And he apparently had a sense of humor. Along the Texas border with Mexico, illegals are known as mojados, wet ones, from getting wet crossing the Rio Grande. Griegos made a funny by naming his corporation Wet Mountains and locating it in La Veta, in the heart of the Wet Mountain Range of Colorado.
It looked like I needed to have a conversation with Carlos Griegos.
A little discrete questioning got me the information that Carlos would be hanging out The Windjammer, a strip club on Alameda.
I told Kathleen to saddle up, we were going calling. I know I complain about having to train her, but she was one tough cookie. I knew I could depend on her to not only watch my back but keep people off it as well.
We climbed out of my Explorer just after 2100 hours. Kathleen was a vision of biker chic. Her long black hair was tied back with a lavender do-rag. She wore a matching lavender sleeveless T-shirt under a leather jacket. A pair of biker’s leather chaps covered tight jeans and combat boots. She was a little overdressed for the weather, but the practicality couldn’t be argued with. Into each leg of the chaps was sewn a pouch that contained an ASP collapsible baton. In each jacket pocket resided a special holster containing a Smith & Wesson Model 640 hammerless snub-nosed revolver with 5 rounds of .357 Cor-Bon magnums.
I was also quite the fashion plate wearing steel-toed water-buffalo cowboy boots, jeans, a wide leather belt with a heavy buckle, white T-shirt and a red-plaid short-sleeve shirt worn untucked to conceal the Taurus Model 445 .44-special revolver in an IWB holster in the middle of my back.
We walked through the door, Kathleen moving to the left and me to the right. We waited a bit for our eyes to adjust.
This was “Boomtown”, a place where anybody was welcome from the toniest yuppie down to the neighborhood drunk. You could get anything you wanted here as long as you obeyed the rules. A lot of people thought that a place as wide open as this didn’t have any rules. They were wrong. A wrong word, a wrong move and those same people would wind up out on the street looking like road-kill. As for me, I was about to break some rules.
This place attracted all the predators looking for a little down time, every species from the jackals to the Kodiak bears. You could tell the pecking order by the seating arrangement.
The Windjammer had one central stage with seating all around it where the dancers made their money. The bar, where the management made its money, was against the right hand wall about halfway down. There were two exits other than the door we had just come in. One was through the dancer’s dressing room, the other at the end of the short hall to the restrooms.
The Kodiaks sat near the exits, backs to the wall. Everyone else fanned out from there in descending order according to the size of their teeth and claws.
I paid the cover for both Kathleen and myself. While I moved into the joint, Kathleen started chatting up the bouncer while keeping an eye on the room—and staying just out of the bouncer’s reach.
As I moved I scanned the crowd. If Griegos were here, he’d be near one of the exits.
Our entrance had made an impression. Predators always recognize another predator. I was heading toward the restrooms when one of the jackals started buzzing me.
He was a skinny little runt with a flat face and wide-set eyes. He had his right hand in his pants pocket. Either he was playing with himself or he had a knife. I was betting on the knife.
He was trying to get into my blind spot. It was a test to see where on the ladder I fit. Every time he tried to get behind me, I’d turn just enough to keep him in sight without looking directly at him. On his third pass I stopped, turned and pinned him with my eyes, a neutral expression on my face. He stopped and took his hand out of his pocket. He looked down and moved off to sit by the stage. I resumed my journey.
Carlos Griegos was just where I thought he’d be, in a chair right next to the restrooms. There was a beer on the table in front of him, nearly untouched. Next to that was a small stack of money.
Griegos was a dark, slim man. He wore his hair in a ponytail, gathered at the base of his skull. I wasn’t attracted. His eyes were small and closely set either side of a nose DeGaulle would have been proud of. I probably had close to 100 pounds on him. I couldn’t let that make me careless though. He was as dangerous as a Doberman with a gunpowder stomachache.
One of the dancers was giving him a table dance. She was completely nude in contravention of the city ordinance that required dancers in places that served alcohol to retain some semblance of modesty. She straddled his lap, her hands on his shoulders, his on her ass. If she got any closer, her nipples would put out his eyes.
Her right hand had started moving south when I sat down in the empty chair next to him. His eyes flicked toward me, then back to his lap bunny. He shifted his hands to the front of her pelvis. That was all the signal she needed. She got off him and stood for a moment while he plucked a twenty from the stack of bills and handed it to her.
There was a crash toward the front of the joint. His eyes followed the sound. My eyes followed his, then snapped back to his face while he was still taking in the sight of the bouncer moaning on the floor. Kathleen had moved back against the wall, her hands down along the outer seams of her chaps.
Four guys at a table near the stage started to get up, but stopped when Carlos raised his hand. They sat back down and Carlos turned to face me.
“You always let your woman do your fighting for you, vato?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Sometimes a woman is all that’s needed.”
His little eyes got squintier and the corners of his mouth turned even further down. After a couple of seconds he relaxed and smiled a little. We were done sniffing each other’s butts. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to kill me in the next couple of minutes if he thought he could get away with it, but the preliminaries were over. We both knew where we stood.
“Why you breathin’ my air, pendejo?” he asked.
“Name’s Jack,” I said. “I know your name. I also know the name of your little ex-playmate, Hillary Murphy Norris.”
“Never heard of her.”
“That’s odd, since both of you are listed as officers of Wet Mountains, Inc. Good name, by the way. Nice play on words. Who thought that up, you or the woman?”
“Oh, that Hillary Murphy Norris,” he deadpanned.
“Yeah, that one. The one that was laundering the money from your coyote business through her husband’s transmission shop.”
Carlos straightened up in his chair. He still had both hands in plain sight on the arms of the chair, like I did, so I didn’t move. “You la migra?” he asked.
“I was in the Border Patrol. No more. Couldn’t stand the bullshit. I’m private now.”
“Why you come here, then?”
“I don’t care about the money laundering. I don’t even care about your coyote business. What I care about is the Norrises being dead. What happened? You get jealous because Hillary married him and wouldn’t let you in her pants any more? Or did he find out about the laundering scheme and cut you off? Right now you’re looking awful good for a murder fall.”
“Why should I tell you anything? What’s in it for me?”
“You point me in another direction that looks good, I don’t tell the cops about you.”
“The cops, they gonna find out about me sooner or later.”
“Yeah, but if it’s later, maybe the murder beef is already settled.”
“The only murder beef is against a dead man. He shot her, then ate his gun.”
I shook my head. “I think you had something to do with it. When the cops find out about Wet Mountains, maybe they’ll think so too.”
“Bullshit, man. I got myself the perfect alibi.”
“Oh?” I asked.
“Talk to your friends in la migra. When that stupid whore got herself killed, I was a guest of the US government. Your homies pulled me into some bullshit lineup. Made me sit around three hours then sent me home.”
“You got people would do them for you.”
Carlos shook his head and smiled. “You just don’t get it, vato. That stupid bitch dug her own grave.”
I sighed. “All right, Carlos. I don’t get it. Why don’t you just tell me and quit beating around the bush? Somehow I don’t think you’re finding this conversation any more pleasant than I am. Just tell me what you know, and we can both go on about our business.”
Carlos picked up his beer and gulped about half of it down, grimacing. It had to be almost room temperature by this time. “That Hillary was just about the smartest person, man or woman, I knew when it came to money and numbers. She could hide an elephant in a cigarette pack.
“But when it came to men, she was dumb as a box of rocks. Before she hooked up with Norris she’d sleep with anything wearing pants. Wound up testing positive for HIV.”
“She had AIDS?”
“Naw, man. She wasn’t sick, at least not yet. Anyway, she slowed down a little after that. Then I turned her on to Norris as a way to shuffle money around. She picked up on it, went to work as his bookkeeper, and every thing went smooth.
“Until she thought she fell in love. Again. I told her it was a mistake to mix business with pleasure, but she was too stupid to listen.
“So she gets engaged to the old man. Wants to change her life. Come clean about the money laundering and the HIV. I tell her she’s nuts. She wants to marry the old fart, that’s OK with me, but she keeps her mouth shut. I made that point painfully clear, you know what I mean? Guess I didn’t make it clear enough.”
“So,” I said. “You think that after the honeymoon, she told him everything.”
He nodded. “You ever know a woman could keep a secret, man?”
It sounded plausible. I didn’t think he was lying. He wasn’t smart enough to have made up that story ahead of time and rehearsed it just in case some nosy PI started asking him about it.
In the car on the way back to Kathleen’s house, I went over everything with her.
“Makes some twisted kind of sense, I guess,” she said. “He was enough of a homophobe to have gone off the deep end when she told him she was infected with HIV. She betrayed him with the money laundering, then she infected him, maybe, maybe not, with a gay man’s disease. He killed her, then not wanting to face what people would think of him if he came down with AIDS, killed himself.”
“Plausible,” I said. “To you and me. To the cops. But to our client? She’s not going to want to believe it any more now than she wanted to believe it before.”
“What else can we tell her?” asked Kathleen.
I shrugged. Another family torn apart by passion and stupidity. Another statistic. Sometimes it wasn’t worth getting up in the morning. “Not a damn thing.”