January Juggling The Jentons
A Xara Smith Mystery By Bill McGrath
Copyright 2007 Bill McGrath
Smashwords Edition
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Xara Smith Mysteries By Bill McGrath:
January Juggling The Jentons
February At Feldman’s On Fifth
March Of The Mustangs
April At The Antique Alley
May Might Mean Murder
June Jumping the Jaguar
July Jill's Justice
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
CHAPTER-01.
I never intended to become a Private Investigator. It just sort of happened. Life tends to do as it will regardless of what our dreams are. Me? Well I never really had many dreams. Still, for a tough six foot three inch tomboy it is not a bad profession.
My name is Xara (rhymes with Sarah and sounds like it starts with a Z). My mother, God love her, gave me that exotic first name simply because our last name is Smith. I think she expected I would be something special. I guess I am, but it usually doesn’t feel like it. Oh I was special growing up. Quite special. In fact so special that I often fell asleep softly crying about it.
Starting very early in life I was a good deal taller than average. My mother dragged me from one Doctor to another always convinced that I had some sort of special condition or disease that caused me to be so tall. The good Doctor would tell her that I was perfectly healthy, just tall for my age. Of course that would be after he would run a dozen tests that all required poking me with needles and me walking around in my underpants in front of him and his nurses.
Dear Mother, of course, would never accept the answer that I was healthy, just tall, so after a few weeks she would find some other doctor we hadn’t seen yet and we would repeat the process.
My height caused me a lot of problems when I was young. For instance, I was labeled a problem child. I had no problems at all but the adults around me needed some education. I mean when I was four years old I was as tall as an average six-year-old. Every adult would simply expect me to behave like I was six but I wasn’t. I was four, duh!
When I started school, I was not only taller than every girl in class but also taller than every boy in class. You think that made me a target? Sure did.
Of course there were some advantages to being tall. Starting in fourth grade and continuing all the way through high-school I was on the girl’s volleyball team and the girl’s basketball team, was the captain of each team, and let’s not be humble here – the star of each team. Height wasn’t the only advantage I had in sports. God made me tall but I made me strong and fast. I did these with a lot of hard work. I do not know what you spent your allowance and babysitting money on, but I saved up and bought a set of weights with mine. The time other girls spent on the phone or in front of a TV or gossiping with some friends I spent pumping iron or jogging in the hills around our small-town Arkansas neighborhood.
The worst part was that if you could look past my height I was a really pretty and very nice little girl. Like most young ladies I did not consider myself pretty but looking back at the few pictures I can find I have to say that I was a doll. By the time I got to high-school it was pretty clear that I was always going to be taller than most girls, but the boys were starting to catch up. Our high-school had students for four years. As a freshman I was asked out by Junior and Senior boys all the time. Of course I turned down the dates. Surely my parents would not have allowed me to date older boys, but it never really came down to that. I just wasn’t interested.
What really pissed me off though was the girls. I mean practically every girl has a best friend growing up. Even those that move into town half way through high-school were able to join some click or something. I lived in the exact same house from the day I was born till after high-school. I always went to the closest public school to my house, so I graduated with several dozen kids that I had done twelve years of school with yet not a single one was ever my best friend. During the sports seasons I got a lot of respect, but never friendship. I do not ever remember spending the night at a friend’s house. I can remember only three class-mate’s birthday parties that I attended and all three invited everyone in class. I guess with the girls I was just too big and too pretty. At least that is the way I remember it.
About the middle of my junior year I accepted a date from a senior. It was to a school dance. My mother made it a way bigger deal than I did. Yes it was fun to dress up, but I spent all night, I mean every single minute of the date, trying to keep this ass-hole’s hands off me. So much for my first date. I quickly followed that date with three or four other first dates and they all were pretty much the same. My senior year went by rather quickly with college scouts graciously watching the girl’s game at 6:00 P.M. when they were actually in town to scout the senior boys later that night. I did have a date to prom. Lost my virginity that night just because I was tired of guarding against it. The boy was nothing special. I still remember his name but I can’t seem to remember much else about him.
How unfair life is finally dawned on me during the last half of my senior year of high-school. I had just spent the last nine years being the most dominant player in two sports. I had more trophies on my mantle than the boy they named “Athlete of the Year” at the awards banquette. Without a doubt I was the best athlete in the school and could whip the ass of any student male or female. All of that and I didn’t receive a single scholarship offer. Not one. Several of the boy jocks would escape this dusty little town, but not me because I was dumb enough to be born without dangly parts.
I was eighteen, a high-school graduate, no money for college. There were three choices. Choice one, marriage, ha, ha, ha. Choice two, the wonderful world of community college. I went with choice three. I joined the United States Navy. In our town the recruiting offices are all crammed together on the second floor of a strip mall. Why the Navy? Well, to tell the truth, I had all intentions of joining either the Army or the Marines that day, but when I walked up there the Navy office had a mannequin in the window of a tall blonde woman in a cool blue uniform. Hey, I told you I am a blonde.
So I was actually in the Navy for six years. I won’t bore you with the details of how I got there but I ended up working Shore Patrol in San Diego. This was back in what we refer to as the Reagan years. San Diego has always been a big navy town. The 80’s were no different. What was different was the military itself. It was changing. It was no longer a male only world. Women could now have real jobs. I had taken a few classes on military science and police science and worked my way through a grueling training regimen to become the closest thing the navy has to cops, shore patrol. I was the only woman of my graduating class but there were other female SPs when I got the assignment.
I had been in the Navy for three years, working shore patrol for two, and had just turned 22 years old when I found out I was a lesbian. It actually came as a big shock to me. I mean here I was this big butch looking military cop surrounded by a million men in uniforms when one of my fellow feminine officers hit on me. Surprise, surprise, surprise. I never fell in love with her but I sure did fall in lust. As far as the military was concerned it was “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” so life as an SP just went on. I didn’t stay with the same girl, but from that time forward all of my very few sexual experiences have been with women.
Of course it ended up costing me a career. Some guy found out, and took some pictures and used them as evidence. He didn’t have anything against me. He was trying to get back at the other girl in the pictures. Oh well. I resigned the Navy before the Navy resigned me. So I moved to Dallas just to get the hell out of San Diego.
I rented an apartment in the suburb called “Irving” which is right near the airport. I think I chose to live near the airport just in case I had to get out of Dallas as quick as I had left San Diego.
Once in Dallas my first order of business was to find a job. My plan was to find just about any job at all and then start thinking of going back to school. It didn’t turn out that way though. I got a job at a legal firm because I had a lot of law and order type training and I could type fast and accurate. If it had been a great big law firm I never would have gotten out of the typing pool but at the small firm I was working at I got a couple of breaks. The first one was that one of the partners had a son my age who was making a living by doing investigations for the clients of the law firm. He mostly trailed around taking pictures of husbands who didn’t know it yet but were about to get divorced.
The second break was that this investigator liked me. He kept hitting on me and my big beautiful blondeness and I wasn’t quite sure I could tell the son of the boss I wouldn’t date him because I was gay. So eventually I agreed to go out with him if it was just to share take-out while he was on a stake-out.
We got along fine and he found out that I knew more about his line of business then he did. I mean the navy had trained me in all the equipment he was using and given me some very extensive self-defense training and weapons work. Plus, I usually helped him figure out what to do next on a case, and I guessed right more often than guessing wrong.
After about half a dozen take-out stake-out dates I was officially assigned to work with him and didn’t have to spend the day typing. Of course he still thought he was going to get into my pants. I guess it is a good thing he wasn’t too bright.
After a year of playing his assistant I went and got my own PI license. Again my Navy career helped a lot. Because of the Navy I already knew how to fill out tons of paperwork and I knew way more about weapons then the idiot teaching the weapons safety course I was required to take. During that first year with the law firm I stayed in my apartment and had saved up the grand sum of $600.00. Now though, being paid a good deal more because I was licensed, I started really stashing away some cash because I had a plan. I did not want to live the rest of my life in an apartment and I also did not want to live the rest of my life depending on a paycheck from someone else. I wanted a house I could buy and own, but I also wanted to start my own private investigation business. I knew I would never qualify for a mortgage without a steady pay check though, so I continued to work for the legal firm for three more years and lived like a pauper until my bank account was a healthy 25K+.
At that time I bought a house in Irving and moved in. Three months later, after all the paperwork was filed away and the bank lost interest as long as I made the mortgage payment on time, I quit my job and Dallas County noticed a new business registered at the County Clerk’s office called “Xara Smith Discrete Investigations.”
The house itself was pretty cool. It had originally been built in the 1950s as part of a family oriented block in North Irving. It was originally a three bedroom two bathroom house with a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and mud room on the first floor, and three bedrooms and a second full bath on the second floor. In addition it had something few north Texas houses had and that was a full basement. I had heard people talk for a couple of years about the land masses that all come together in the area making a very unstable mix for the foundations that almost guaranteed that a basement would leak a lot if you had one there but I had the basement inspected before I bought the place and the inspector told me it hadn’t ever had any problems.
Over the years the house had changed but not as much as the neighborhood. In the late 1960s the DFW area built its shiny new airport halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, and they certainly needed some new highways to get too and from it. Highway 183, also known as Airport Freeway, plowed its way through the little neighborhood and the house I would buy had been left facing the highway with a driveway that cut off of the service road running east alongside the highway. The house was approximately halfway between two exits, and it was because of this that I really wanted the house. You see it was zoned for either residential or commercial use so I could legally live in the house and also legally use it as an office for my business, plus it made locating my business easy as long as you could get on a major freeway that connected with 183.
The previous owner had sold golfing equipment for about six years out of the house and I learned it had been a coin shop, which also sold comic books before that. To accommodate these businesses, the wall between the living room and dining room had been removed making the first floor dominated by one large room and a decent sized kitchen. The small bathroom was still quite nice and the mudroom easily held a washer and drier. But the best thing that had been done was that one of the previous owners had built a back porch and then later enclosed it with an aluminum frame and screens which were eventually replaced with a more solid wooden frame structure filled with Plexiglas. It was a wonderful sun porch that ran the entire length of the back of the house and opened onto the small back yard. There was a small built in pool just off the sun porch and I do admit that this girl had snuck more than once, after dark, buck naked, into the pool. Naughty little me.
Now some four years later I was sitting in the living room, or “office” as I thought of it wondering if a job would come along soon. It had been a struggle at first getting that first client through the door and solving the first mystery and getting the first check. From that time on I had desperately tried to keep a balance of eight grand in my savings account. I figured out my bills and with eight thousand dollars I could make six months of mortgage payments and six months of utility payments plus six months on my health insurance so if I got no business at all for six months I needed to have at least eight grand to fall back on. I looked up my balance on my computer and it was just over six thousand. I needed a case.
I did get a little help from time to time with my bills. I mean right now I had a roommate. I’d had a few girlfriends over the years and Laura was the current version. She was a full seven years younger than me. She worked as a stripper using the stage-name “StarLight.” Spent her nights on a small stage dancing naked in front of men who would occasionally slip a dollar into the elastic band she kept high on her right thigh. After collecting her dollars from hopeful but unfulfilled men she would crawl into bed next to me and give me more physical pleasure in five minutes than most women get in a month. It is not that I had anything against Laura, but I just did not have time right now for a fulltime relationship, so I am afraid poor little Laura was on her way out, and she didn’t even know it yet. On the other hand she was contributing a little cash to the household expenses so I couldn’t just toss her to the curb. Vaguely I wondered how many of the cheating husband divorce cases I had worked were fueled by the same motivations. I knew other investigators in town and some of them used girls like Laura in their investigations. When a woman suspected her husband was cheating but the investigator couldn’t catch him in the act they would occasionally have someone like Laura lure the unsuspecting man into a compromising but well lighted and therefore easily photographable position. I, myself, had never yet opted for this investigative technique, but to all you married guys out there, be advised that it does happen from time to time. If she is young and cute and has no reason at all to be in bed with you, check for two-way mirrors on the wall.
Laura and I had recently celebrated Christmas together and just three weeks ago we had gone to a nice New Years Eve party. I really didn’t want to end the relationship but I admitted to myself that not wanting to end a relationship was no reason to extend it if it wasn’t going to go anywhere after that. I decided to postpone any decisions on Laura for a few days, which made me feel really guilty because I knew I was just using her for ready cash and good sex but what the heck.
Well, that is my story, Xara Smith Private Investigator. The introduction is done. Let’s get on with the case.
CHAPTER-02.
I looked up from the computer when the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone in particular but it was a Tuesday morning just before eleven so my shop was open for business. The sign on the door clearly told the person standing on the front porch to walk right in but the place still looked more like a house than an office so most people did exactly as she did and rang the bell. As I opened the door I got the usual reaction. She was tall for a woman so she was use to looking down on other females, even many males, but with my full six feet and three inches she had to look up to meet my eyes and this always seemed to surprise tall women. Oh well.
I got her into the chair in front of my desk. She was all business. She got right to the point.
“My husband is going to try to kill me. I want to divorce him, before he gets around to it.”
She said this calmly, watching my eyes as she spoke. I am sure she wanted to gauge my reaction. I tried to give her little to judge but the words she spoke had a lot of meaning. So simply had she taken control of the interview. I must do something to get control back.
“Coffee?” I asked.
“Please,” she answered, “black, artificial sweetener, no cream.”
In less than a minute I had returned with two identical coffee mugs. It was easy though to tell the difference. Hers, black and sweet, mine containing no sweetener but a large spoonful of that white powdery artificial creamer. I put the two mugs on my desk and took out my standard contract. It is basically just a form I fill out with a few pertinent details like her name and contact information. In the body of the contract it goes over my fees and there is, at the bottom, of course, a place for us both to sign.
“Have you spoken to the Police?” I asked her.
Smugly she responded “Yes, and they will be happy to investigate after he actually does something illegal. That won’t do me much good though as I won’t be alive to help in the investigation. That is why I am looking for someone who can investigate before he actually breaks one of the laws of this state.”
I told her that before we could go any further we would have to execute a contract so that I would be bound and unable to divulge things she told me similar to client-attorney privilege.
It wasn’t really true. I had no legal reason to keep my mouth shut no matter what the contract said. The grand jury could ask me any question it wanted and I would have to answer. The police too could question me and I would have to answer if I wanted to keep my license. Still, I had found in the past that most clients seemed to be more comfortable about talking with me after we had signed a legal looking document.
There were two other reasons though that I wanted to get her name inked on the contract quickly. The first and most pressing matter was that I needed the work and as soon as her name was on the document I would start getting paid my standard fee whether or not I did a thing for her. Secondly, the sooner we went over the contract the sooner we could get it out of the way. There were some things in it that needed to be there, and it would be a real shame to spend a couple of days working on the case and then not be able to agree on a contract, so it simply must be executed before any real effort is put in. One of the clauses in the contract states that in addition to the regular fee and expenses I was also entitled to eight percent of anything she collects for the first year after my working for her if it is a direct result of my efforts while on the case.
What that means is that if some woman hires me to get evidence against her husband, and then if I spend three days following him around taking pictures of him and his girlfriend, and then if the woman uses the pictures in her divorce of the guy, and then if the judge gives her alimony, I will be entitled to not only my fees for the three days work, and my expenses for gas and film and the like, but that I am also entitled to eight cents out of every dollar she collects in alimony for the first year they are divorced.
I really do not like this clause myself but my lawyer had convinced me originally to include it in my standard contract. Since then though I simply explain it to the client and we see what happens. The very first case I ever did using the contract resulted in the woman getting five hundred dollars a month in alimony. Based on the alimony then I was entitled to forty dollars each month from her if her ex-husband actually paid. She did send me a check every single month but more than half of them bounced so I was spending all my time talking with the bank and running her down for a lousy forty dollars and I ended up doing it month after month for a full year. Generally now when I complete a case I just ignore the clause and never make any attempt to collect my eight percent. Eight percent sounds like such a small amount but the math works out so that if I ever get a case where the judge awards the woman a million dollars as a settlement I will get an $80,000 bonus! Whoopee! Of course, I have not yet had that case.
I started at the top of the contract filling in the date and then asked her what her name was.
Once she told me her name I knew I should have probably recognized her. She was Elizabeth Jenton. For the last ten years she had played second-wife/trophy to Billy Joe Jenton. Billy Joe was the city of Irving’s best known divorce attorney. He was sort of in the same business as I was in and, in fact, he had hired me more than once when his caseload bulged beyond the abilities of his own private investigators. It was a well worn rumor in town that if a rich woman was getting a divorce, Billy Joe was representing her. The second rumor, supposedly as true as the first, was that about half the wives he represented ended up warming his sheets at night. Proving his infidelity would have been a snap, but she wasn’t here for divorce work, she was here for protection. I had to be really careful with this one.
Elizabeth Jenton, or “Betz” as she was better known, had been one of Billy Joe’s clients and about a year after her divorce from her first husband which came at the same time as the funeral of the first Mrs. Jenton, the two walked a short aisle in Las Vegas and returned to north Texas as Man & Wife. He had been in his forties then and she had reached the ripe old age of twenty-three. She had inherited Billy Joe’s two kids who were a girl, Adrian, seven years old who was already an independent little cuss who claimed she did not want or need a new mother, and a son, Bobby, but called Bubby, who was just four and desperately needed a new mother.
Betz life for the past ten years had been dedicated to three things. The first was getting the kids through school and not in jail without too much publicity. At this time the kids were now a senior and a freshman in high-school with both, of course, still living at home. The second was looking good on Billy Joe’s arm when he had to make one of his numerous public appearances. Together they would arrive and then the trophy wives would gather together and chat while the power husbands gathered at some other spot, talked business, and ogled each other’s trophies. The third was that she sincerely tried to keep Billy Joe happy with a clean house, good food, and any kind of sex he wanted any time he wanted it. She knew from the start that he was a cheater because that is how they met to begin with, so she had to pretty much ignore his numerous liaisons, but publicly she was a good and loyal wife and privately she made every effort to make the marriage work. Well, at least that is what she was telling me but I knew he would paint a much different picture.
Every investigator in the world knows that nobody tells 100% of the truth. It is not so much that people tend to lie on purpose, but they always present the facts that make them look good and seem to overlook the facts that cast a shadow on their character. A good investigator will interview the wife and then interview the husband and know that the truth lies somewhere in between their two separate versions.
I gathered all the information and went over the terms of the contract. Before signing it she asked what I would do to keep her safe during the course of my investigation. I asked her if she were still living with Billy Joe and what precautions she was taking herself. She told me that she had moved out about a week ago and was living with another woman. She was quick to tell me that there was nothing going on romantically in her life at all. No boyfriends, no dates. The woman she was living with was a person she had met while working on a charity event a year and a half ago and they had been friends and charity workers ever since. I got the address and phone number.
I asked if she had recently, or ever in the past, hired a bodyguard or guard service. She told me that Billy Joe and the other residents living in the neighborhood where their house was subscribed to a guard service that basically kept a squad car full of armed guards cruising the neighborhood, but other than that she had never been guarded by professionals.
I suggested that she certainly should consider hiring a pro to protect her while my investigation proceeded and offered to make the arrangements. Without asking me the cost of such a service she agreed to have me take care of the details and asked me to set it up as quickly as possible.
I hurried through the paragraph that told her my rates were $400.00 per day plus expenses plus 8% of what she collected. She did not question a thing or even bat that old proverbial eyelash. We both signed and she wrote me out a check for three thousand as a retainer against my first few days working for her and, of course, to pay the guards I hired for her. I also advised her not to contact her husband for any reason at all and that I would personally bring the guard by that I hired for her as soon as I got it set up. I gave her my cell number and watched as she put it in her cell phone. With that done I asked her to tell me why she thought Billy Joe was going to kill her.
Betz told me that she had actually heard Billy Joe talking on the phone and tell someone else that he was going to kill her. I asked for more detail. She lit a second cigarette, took in that first long puff, held it in for a few seconds, then blew out a long stream of second-hand smoke.
“I play tennis every Tuesday at the club” she started. “My partner and I have the indoor court reserved for 10:00 till 11:00 A.M. We usually play for an hour, and then eat lunch at the club, and then maybe shopping or a movie so I usually leave the house at nine on Tuesday mornings and don’t get back home till two or three. I know the guys that play Tuesdays from 9:00 till 10:00 and they are both a lot better than I am so I like to get there in time to watch most of their match before playing mine, so last Tuesday, which was January 10th, I said good bye to Billy Joe as he headed into the office and then put on my tennis outfit and headed for the club. I got there about 9:15 or so and sat in the bleachers watching the guys play. About 9:45 my partner called my cell and told me she was sick and wouldn’t be able to play. I gathered up my stuff and went by the pro shop to cancel our reservation. I drove back home and was surprised to find Billy Joe’s car in the driveway. I wasn’t trying to be quiet or anything but he apparently did not hear me come in. I had entered the house by the back door that leads into the kitchen and found him sitting there at his desk in the den, which he uses as an in-home office. He was facing away from the door and still didn’t know I was there. A naughty little idea popped into my head and I backed into the kitchen. I quietly removed my tennis outfit leaving it there on the floor of the kitchen. I got out two glasses, filled them each with wine, and headed quietly back to the den to see if I could, you know, distract Billy Joe from his phone call. As I approached he was still facing away from the door. I snuck a little closer and that is when I heard him clearly say ‘With Betz dead I won’t have to pay her off or give her any alimony’. Well my heart just froze. I mean there I was naked ready to jump his bones in the middle of the day and he was sitting there talking about killing me. I backed out of the den and put the two wine glasses down on the counter in the kitchen. I grabbed my clothes from the floor and my purse and didn’t even get dressed until I was out in the driveway behind our house. I got in the car, got the hell out of there, and just drove around for a while. At three o’clock I drove by the house, saw that Billy Joe’s car wasn’t there, went inside, packed two suitcases of clothes and jewelry and left. I went directly to the house of my friend where I am staying, then called the police. That was a week ago today, and here I am.”
This was going to take a while. I asked Betz if she liked Asian food and then I ordered delivery. While we were waiting for the food I made a call to a friend at one of the guard services and got 24x7 bodyguards set up. The trouble is that they don’t just have a dozen big tough guys sitting bored in a closet waiting for an assignment. The guard service was going to have to arrange some schedules but promised they could have the first shift by my office at 5:00 P.M.
Next I got out a couple of other official looking documents and we filled these in. The way things are today most companies are pretty tight lipped about giving out information but with a waiver signed by Betz I was sure the doctors and hospitals would allow me to copy the Jenton family medical records without a warrant. I might not ever need to see these records, but I had once solved a case and kept my client out of jail by looking at past medical records and proving the victim in that crime could not have sustained the injury he was claiming my client had caused, so I always asked for this medical waiver. There was an additional reason I would need these. I certainly did not wish to alarm Betz, but the medical waiver she had just signed also allowed me to require the state to perform an autopsy on her body should she be found dead even if her husband opposed the autopsy. I found that by asking for a medical waiver for each family member it distracted the client from thinking about what they were signing for themselves. She also signed waivers, at my request, allowing me to look into her credit cards and bank accounts. Hopefully she and Billy Joe would hold joint accounts but knowing Billy Joe there would be several accounts that did not have her name on them.
I asked her about the friend she was staying with. In her opinion Billy Joe would not know this person at all, and would not know how to get in touch with her, Betz, except through her cell phone. She admitted he had called her cell several times but she had not answered any of his calls. He had last tried to contact her that way on Sunday. He had left messages and she played them back for me but they all seemed to be truly just a husband looking for his missing wife.
The Fort Worth/Dallas area is a huge metropolis but the city of Irving, although right in the middle of that metropolis, is still a small town. I felt that it would be a good idea to stash Betz in another suburb. I approached this by suggesting that she was putting her friend in great danger and she did not argue at all. I have some really good friends, Dutch and AJ, who live in a suburb called Arlington, which is just south and west of Irving. Laura and I were at their house just the month before exchanging Christmas presents. I had noticed that the house next door to them had a for rent sign out in front. I dialed AJ’s phone and she was kind enough to give me the number on the sign. I called the realtor and made an appointment to see it at 2:30. Yes it was available and yes, if I brought my checkbook we could rent it on the spot. The biggest problem was that it was completely unfurnished. The one thing I had wanted though was that it had a garage. I wanted Betz’s car stashed. We would rent her a ride if she needed to get around but I put that off because the guard service might be able to provide a car with their guard.
The food arrived and we got to the business of chowing down. We were two tall strong women and there were no men around so we left our manners at the door and attacked the grub.
I gave Betz the address and directions to the rental house in Arlington and followed her there in my car without incident. I took her next door and introduced her to AJ and we sat in AJ’s living room looking out the window waiting for the realtor who was about ten minutes late. The house was a nice three bedroom three bath room and was way more house than we actually needed but at least it would do for the purposes of stashing Betz and I felt it would be nice to have her close to AJ, someone I knew and trusted. Betz didn’t argue when I filled out the lease in my name and she also said nothing when I handed the realtor my corporate platinum to pay the rent. I did make it clear to her after the realtor left that she was paying for the rental but that we did not want to leave a paper trail her husband could follow. I called the guard service and told them the address and told them to have the first guard show up there at 8:00 P.M. and be prepared to stay all night.
With Betz’s car stashed safely in the garage and my car parked in AJ’s driveway we piled into AJ’s car and headed for one of those furniture rental stores. We rented two bedroom sets, a living room set complete with TV and stereo, and a dining room table and chairs. Again my platinum took a big hit and we even paid extra to get it delivered right now. We watched as they loaded up a big truck and followed it back to the rental. It didn’t take them long to get everything unloaded and set up. Betz complained that we didn’t have cable. Not much I could do about it right then but I did promise to do something about it the next day. With the house basically set up but bare we three women piled into AJ’s Amanti and headed for Wal-Mart.
Betz wouldn’t admit it but I am sure this was her first ever trip to Wally World. Still we went up and down every single aisle and loaded up on all the things you need in a house. I mean we needed shower curtains and rugs and toilet paper and dishes and pots and pans and shampoo and on and on and on and that didn’t even include the food we bought. In addition Betz had basically the clothes she was wearing and the few things she had packed in haste when she had fled Billy Joe. We had to get her a few outfits and new undies. We checked out with three full carts and as spacious as the Amanti’s trunk was we still had to ride home with AJ driving, Betz comfortably riding shotgun, and me crammed in the back seat with about a hundred bags.
We pulled into the driveway and immediately there was a problem. I mean I did not want Betz to be seen around the neighborhood so once she was in the house I wanted her to stay there, and AJ, God love her, has a little problem walking too much and I had already sent her all the way through Wal-Mart, so that meant that yours truly had to unload the whole car and carry all the stuff inside the house. We had only unloaded about seven or eight bags of stuff when we spotted a big problem. The house had no refrigerator. I hadn’t noticed before. There was a really nice stove, and a built-in microwave, but no fridge. Once again though it was AJ to the rescue. About a year ago AJ had bought a new fridge herself and had put her old one in her garage because I told her I wanted it and here a year later I still had not picked it up. Well thankfully her husband, Dutch, was just pulling into the driveway so he helped me wrestle the box across the driveway and into the new kitchen.
I have to admit once I got the bags inside the door Betz really took over putting the stuff away. I mean if I were in her place I would be all worried and scared and thinking my life was over and wallowing in self pity but she was spritzing around like a teen-ager who was setting up for her first slumber party. She actually seemed happy in the manual labor of setting up a new household.
Exhausted, I sat my ass down at the dining room table and pulled out a steno pad and a pen. I started making notes including the massive expenses I had already gone through. My notes were pretty copious. I have always found that if I wrote everything down I could always trim it down later, but if I did not write it down when it was fresh then I would loose it forever.
The guard arrived and I introduced him to Betz, AJ, Dutch and myself. He went by the name Bear, and that is what was on his company ID card. I had expected as much because I had worked with his agency before. Their guards were all given false names and it was the only name the actual client ever got. It was their attempt to keep the guard separate from the people he was guarding, keep him as a guard and keep him from becoming a friend. It was important that he be allowed to do his job and not be encumbered with emotions like friendship. Bear was my height and about 290 pounds of solid muscle. His skin was darker than any flesh I had ever seen. His head was shaved. His smile was savvy and his pearly whites glowed like a million stars. He was polite but also very self-confident. He looked fabulous in his uniform, which was tailored to fit like a glove, and he had a large silver 44 strapped to his waist. I took two quick short breaths and immediately started reconsidering my commitment to lesbianism.
Together Bear and I made a circuit around the house from the outside and then we checked every window and door making sure all were locked. I shooed Dutch and AJ home thanking them copiously for their help. I made sure Betz put Bear’s phone as well as Dutch and AJ’s in her cell phone, but warned her not to call unless there was a serious problem. I told her not to answer her phone unless it was one of us but told her to leave it on so she could get messages. I would be curious to see what her hubby would say if he called. At her insistence I allowed Betz to call the woman she had bunked with for the past week and let her know that Betz was safe but not coming back. I promised to meet them there at the house the next day in the morning, and left them to play house.
When I got to my own humble abode Laura was there and we sat down and had a nice conversation. I let her know what my newest case was all about but was very careful to not tell her who was involved. I worked about an hour putting my notes in order and filing away my receipts then sat in a bubble bath for thirty minutes. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep that night.
CHAPTER-03.
Early Wednesday morning I made a list of the people I wanted to talk to. The first step would be to gather some background information but my primary clue at this point was the phone call Betz had overheard. I certainly wanted to find out who Billy Joe had been speaking with so that became the first action item. There was a lot more though that I wanted to find out. For instance, why was Billy Joe at their home at all? According to Betz’s story Billy Joe had left the house at his usual time dressed for the office where she assumed he was going. He knew she had the Tuesday tennis date. I was curious if he ever got to the office that day or had he left the house and simply awaited for her to vacate the house and then returned. If so, why? Was this the first time he had been at the house in the middle of the day when he was supposed to be at the office, or was it a habit? To answer these questions I could simply interview his neighbors and co-workers, but I couldn’t very well do that without letting him know I was investigating him.
I knew a girl named Mandy that I really did not like very much but I had to put up a good front for fairly often. She was valuable for two reasons: First she worked for the local telephone exchange and second she was very bribable. She was one of those women who just grate on your nerves but doesn’t realize it, and therefore she has no friends at all. I have found that if I offered her a little friendship once in a while she would pull luds on just about anything I asked her. Sure I had a signed authorization for Betz, but Billy Joe hadn’t signed a thing, and the phones were probably in his name. I spun my rolodex to her number and gave her a call. I caught Mandy at her desk and told her what I was after. She promised she could have the info ready by the end of the day so I had to invite her to dinner at my house followed by her passion which was a couple of rounds of scrabble. In the past couple of years I had cheated to loose several times trying to keep her in the game, but she thought she was good at it. Oh well. Since it was getting so close to the end of the day, and I had a few other things to get to, I put Mandy off till the next evening and set up a next night date for lasagna and scrabble at my house.
That piece of business done I called the local cable company and found that they wouldn’t even have to visit the house unless I needed new wiring. I paid the deposit over the phone and they threw a couple of switches or whatever they do and I told them I would call back if I needed any wires run through the house.
It was raining when I locked the house/office and ran to my six year old Taurus. It fired right up and I put some old Lynard Skynard on the CD player. I headed west on 183 till it hooked up with 360 and headed south into Arlington. I got off one exit early and dashed into my favorite bakery where I picked up a dozen of the best bagels in the world thinking it would make a nice breakfast for everyone. Fat chance.
I pulled into the rental where I had stashed Betz. When I walked in the door Betz was sitting at the dining room table with Bear’s replacement, Tiger, who could have been Bear’s clone and the first thing that popped into my mind was “I wonder how much it would cost to collect the entire set.” AJ was there and she was at the stove. I walked in just as she was loading up plates for Betz and Tiger who were comfortably seated at the table. I poured myself a cup of coffee and before I got to the table AJ put a plate down for me. The sausage and eggs were delicious. I do not remember buying any hash browns at Wal-Mart but there they were on my plate. Yum.
I tried to conduct a little business while we ate the feast but nobody wanted to stop chewing long enough to talk. Finally, over a second round of coffees I went over the schedule with Tiger and set some ground rules for him and Betz. I wanted Betz protected but I wanted it to be as little like living in prison as I could make it. Therefore I did not forbid them from leaving the house but insisted that they not go to Irving, not go anywhere where they were likely to run into anyone Betz usually hung out with, and always traveled in disguise. This did not mean radically changing Betz physically. It simply meant she would wear a scarf and sunglasses when not in the house. Reluctantly I handed Tiger a copy of my credit card. I did not want Betz to leave any paper trail at all, but I made it clear to her that my credit limit was nothing like what she was used to.
I shooed AJ home and then tested my technological skills by hooking up the cable to the TV we had rented. Fortunately it worked on my first try because one try was all my skills would have permitted.
Betz and I then sat down and had a long conversation. I wanted to get a good idea of the daily life and schedule followed by Betz and Billy Joe. One thing particularly bothered me. According to Betz she had left home a week ago, and I had heard nothing of it at all. I mean Billy Joe and Betz were the media darlings of Irving Texas. Why had I not read any news stories of a missing socialite? Why had the police not broadcast an adult version of the Amber alert? Other than calling Betz cell phone what had Billy Joe done to try to find her?
I questioned Betz about her disappearance and if it had happened before. She actually started crying during this conversation. The previous day when she had walked into my office she appeared strong and tough and aloof. Now she appeared more like a scared little girl. Apparently she no longer felt the need to put on a front for me and she felt free to let her emotions out. Her answers assured me that this was the first time she had ever been away from Billy Joe since their marriage. There had been a couple of times over the past years when Billy Joe had been away for a week-end hunt or fishing trip with some good old boys, but in those cases she had been at home with the kids and he had called her each night and he had been where he had said he would be and he had come home when he was supposed to come home. He had stayed late at the office way more times then he needed to and she recognized that these late nights often occurred at the apartment of some other woman rather than the office, but he always came home even if it was late. She had no idea why he would want her dead. She had simply heard him talking about it and had fled. I am sure there was more to the story she was telling me but she gave me what she was comfortable with and I didn’t press to hard.
I ended up with very little of what I really wanted which was Billy Joe’s schedule. His job simply was not a nine to five gig. He did leave the house Monday through Friday in the morning, but a good deal of his legitimate business would be conducted in places other than his office. She could never count on him being home at dinnertime, but she didn’t exactly spend a lot of time cooking dinners for him either. No matter how I worded the question she kept weaving the answer so that it ended with her trying to be a good little wife who was very forgiving and constantly ready to keep him satisfied. I finally realized that she knew a lot about how she and Billy Joe got along when they were together but she really knew very little about what he did when he was not at home with her. Even when I asked about some of the appearances they made together she gave the impression that she was playing the part of the bauble on Billy Joe’s arm rather than playing the part of Betz Jenton. She would focus on looking good and behaving like a socialite in front of the cameras and it didn’t matter to her whether it was a political rally or an opera. Her job was to look good for her man and show the world they were a happily married couple who loved each other and took their job as parents seriously. I tried to press her about Billy Joe’s recent clients. It would be a matter of public record to look up the trials he had been a part of but I also knew that a lot of his clients ended up settling things before they actually got to trial so there might not be any official record of these clients. Betz could give me very little about who the recent clients were but she did let slip that lately they were not all divorce cases. According to Betz, Billy Joe had done a lot of work recently for a couple of big real estate people.
It was time for me to go to work. I could have justified staying with Betz all day and protecting her from harm for another twenty-four hours, but that is why I had hired her the guard service. My job was to find out if there was any real danger to the woman and if so figure out a way to make that danger go away.
I said good-bye and hopped in my car. As I pulled out of the driveway I noticed AJ peeking out her front window. She would probably be back with Betz before I got to the end of the block. I said a silent prayer that I hadn’t placed my good friend in danger.
It was almost noon on Wednesday so I stopped at Joe’s Coffee Shop. In Irving this is the place that the old timers gather and many of them fondly remember being there with their parents years before. More deals were consummated here at Joe’s than any office in Irving. The coffee was delicious, the waitresses flirted, and the gossip was spoken not whispered. There is always a bunch of businessmen there and the back of the restaurant was usually filled with real-estate folks talking about the market being about to turn in their favor. I was sort of hoping that Billy Joe would be there but he was not.
The talk at Joe’s revolved around two things this day. Both had to do with the Dallas Cowboys. I had picked out a table in the middle of the long dining room. To my north, where all the commoners were sitting, the talk was centered around the upcoming playoff game. Dallas had not actually won a playoff game in nine years but with a record of 9 and 7 they would host the Philadelphia Eagles this Sunday at Texas Stadium, which is actually in Irving. Most of the talk was about how they would forcefully march through the playoffs one game at a time and then play in the Super Bowl. I was tempted to get on this bandwagon and really pull for the Cowboys, but if I were a betting woman I would have placed a yard on the Eagles. There were two different men sitting in that end of the restaurant that I recognized as attorneys. As far as I could remember neither of them were exactly friendly with Billy Joe, and both of these men were sitting at full tables so it would be hard to just barge in on them. I decided to leave them alone for now.