Spare Parts: A Ted Mitchell Detective Novel (Ted Mitchell Detective Novels Book 4) Read online

  Titles by Jeffrey Kinghorn from:

  RMJ DONALD

  Fine Books and Plays

  Plays

  Shoulders

  In a Coal-Burning House

  Courage

  Screenplay

  Something Happened

  Ted Mitchell Detective Novels

  Inside the Loop

  The Cutter

  1-800-Forgive

  Spare Parts

  Novel for Families/Young Readers

  When We Were Happy

  Poetry

  Good Company

  SPARE PARTS

  A Ted Mitchell Detective Novel

  Jeffrey Kinghorn

  This novel is a work of fiction and is a product of the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, incidents and locales are, therefore, used factiously. Any resemblance to those living or dead, or to actual events is entirely coincidental

  Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey Kinghorn

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-9884982-7-3

  RMJ DONALD

  Fine Books and Plays

  PO Box 8

  Barrington, NH 03825

  SPARE PARTS

  One

  Solitude.

  There’s no obtaining it without collateral damage.

  I was secluded in my fortress at the Hogg, when on a third call, the panic in Adrienne’s voice as she began to leave a recorded message made me pick up the phone. Allison was on her deathbed, could I come right away?

  Pre-dawn traffic was light. Even so, I had trouble finding parking at Ben Taub General, a charitable hospital in the Fannin corridor. Business was brisk. I arrived in time for a flat line on the heart monitor, and a verbal confirmation of the time of death.

  Adrienne stood rigid by the bed in which her daughter lay motionless, gaunt, gray, and cold. An I.V. line was removed and the monitor turned off. “Murder,” she said. She had turned to me with an ironclad resolve and added, “I want whoever did this to her.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “She showed up at my front door the day before yesterday,” said Adrienne, “with a fistful of cash and a fever spiking three digits.”

  “Sepsis,” said the attending Resident, as she placed Allison’s arm under the sheet and brushed the hair away from her closed eyes. “We’ll have to notify the authorities.”

  “Twelve hundred dollars,” said Adrienne.

  I had to piece the details together.

  The doctor said, “She was probably offered a lot more than that.” Adrienne and I looked at her until she felt our gaze and turned back. “Hard to cry foul,” she continued, “when the pain wakes you up on a park bench with half the promised amount in one pocket and a bottle of Tylenol in the other.”

  The ghoulish particulars of tabloid headlines looped through my mind, grisly details of hotel room surgeries that took place in the likes of India, Mexico, Pakistan, Brazil, or Russia. Easy enough to be dismissed as internet flotsam. Allison’s kidney had probably been couriered out of the country within an hour of its harvest. Adrienne’s head would not stop shaking. “Twelve hundred dollars,” she murmured again.

  The doctor added, “We’re seeing more and more of this in Houston.” She smoothed the linen over Allison and left the room. “Take your time,” she said, on her way out the door.

  I kicked myself for not having answered the phone on Adrienne’s first call. I might have had the opportunity to ask a question or two of Allison. “She say anything?” I asked.

  “That the money was for Grace,” said Adrienne, “and that she wished it were more.” Adrienne had refused money from Allison, knowing that it was earned working the streets. Parental rights had been severed by the court. Adrienne had full legal custody of Grace. She allowed Allison to visit, but not to live under her roof so long as she remained in the life.

  There had been countless offers to help while Allison obtained a GED, followed by an additional offer for paid tuition at the community college. Adrienne had also tried to interest her daughter in studying martial arts as a way to build self-esteem. There had been a part of Allison that wanted everything her mother had offered, though her life-long rage had her in its grip and forced her to rebel.

  Adrienne had ended her marriage to Allison’s father years before upon acknowledging that she was lesbian. Her husband’s response, in cahoots with her mother, had been to wrest full custody of Allison, and to severely restrict Adrienne’s rights. By moving away and moving on, Adrienne reasoned that she had sacrificed her maternal devotion to the greater wellbeing of a child who would never have understood the presence of the strange woman stationed at the court-ordered periphery of her life.

  Allison had seen Adrienne’s abandonment as the prime betrayal in a lifetime of adults who had given up on her whenever her behavior had proved difficult. She had, therefore, perfected the art of being difficult if not outrageous. She responded to her mother’s invitation to reconnect in adulthood as an opportunity to make Adrienne pay the price for a life that had long since derailed.

  I left Adrienne standing at Allison’s bedside so she could say goodbye in private. I waited in the hall. If the police were to be alerted, questions would be asked, and I wanted to hear the answers myself, as well as to be there to support Adrienne. I was sick of feeling like the lesser friend. I’d never had many friends. Only a couple of serious relationships, one of which was a marriage that had unwound over a longer period than it should have, and had turned messy.

  When Adrienne came out of Allison’s room it was clear she had shed some tears. I faced out a window and could see nothing but my own reflection against the still-dark night, and then Adrienne’s, as she joined me in front of the glass. We said nothing, though we did clasp hands, my right, her left; it was a toss-up as to who reached out to whom. A nurse with a squeaky shoe walked briskly from the work station at the end of the hall to one of the rooms several doors away. The night continued black. I felt at home in the dark. Neither of us was in much of a hurry.

  Two

  A frequent flyer in the murder business meant I spent a lot of time at crime scenes, morgues, and cemeteries. We stood over Allison’s open grave in the Glenwood Cemetery on Washington Avenue in sight of the downtown skyline. A tree-shaded, undulating carpet of lush green lawn, the last stop in that hiccup between eternities. No church service. Adrienne remained unaffiliated after a short run as a member of a Houston Mega Church that had self-destructed thanks to the sordid details of its charismatic pastor’s not-so-secret life with a young transgender boy.

  We had gone from a small gathering at the funeral home to a larger one at graveside, where we gained mourners who looked every inch to be hustlers, all genders, their grief on display, in contrast to Adrienne’s, which was contained, though I knew for a fact she was hurting. The real surprise was the presence of Allison’s father and grandmother who had flown in from Virginia. Allison’s father, Adrienne’s former husband, Reed Thomas, was a tall, lean man. His hair had gone white on the sides. Clean shaven and angular, he could not take his eyes off the sex-trade mourners who had gathered on the other side of the coffin.

  Adrienne’s mother, Constance Davenport, stood by his side. There was a likeness between mother and daughter that had skipped Allison, graceful and prominen
t brows over penetrating eyes. The same hairline. Coloring was fair. And their mouths were uninflected up or down. Hard to say what Mrs. Davenport’s age might be; logic said sixty-something.

  I wasn’t sure what I felt was grief as much as it was sympathetic sadness for Adrienne. That coupled with a familiar determination that organizes my every waking thought around solving a case to which I had responded viscerally. I wasn’t there to mourn; I was there to work.

  We had picked up the Virginia contingent at the airport the previous afternoon and had delivered them to the Sheraton downtown. We left them to settle into their separate rooms and went back later to take them to dinner. We ate in the hotel dining room on the mezzanine at their request, neither of them interested in venturing far. It was a good choice, as it allowed for quiet conversation and a convenient return to lodgings at the end of the evening.

  Adrienne was compelling in her desire for me to accompany her, and while I felt out of place at a time so significant for family, I found the reunion of adversaries instructive. Not a little surprising, Adrienne’s mother and former husband were nice people. I had the sense that Allison’s father, despite the fact that his daughter had died, was there out of respect for the grandmother, as I was there out of respect for Adrienne. All of us were exhibiting our best behavior.

  The evening turned on the unsolicited moment when Reed Thomas offered that he regretted having deprived Adrienne of access to Allison all those years before, and that he had failed her in not having had a clue about parenting as much as he had the unyielding need to hurt the woman who had so undone him

  “When did you first begin to feel this way?” said Adrienne.

  “Almost immediately upon bringing her home,” said Reed Thomas.

  “We could have done something about that,” said Adrienne.

  The grandmother had been staring at her folded hands. “I persuaded him against contacting you,” said Mrs. Davenport. Adrienne turned to her and waited. “I was mortified,” continued Mrs. Davenport, “humiliated. I was grateful you had moved away and had broken all contact. It was a long time before I felt I could get out and mix again in our small community. The scandal.”

  No one spoke for several interminable minutes. Adrienne nodded almost imperceptibly, as if allowing time for consolidation of understanding. Too, she displayed a commitment to compassion and consideration instead of to thoughtless reaction. “So,” she said at last, “we all allowed Allison to pay the price for our failings. We were supposed to be there to protect her.”

  “I prayed about it every day,” said Constance Davenport. “I was sure that right intention would allow us to find our way.”

  “And?” said Adrienne.

  “I was wrong,” said her mother. “Completely wrong. We were lost.”

  “Adrienne,” said Reed Thomas, “it’s not enough to apologize. I’ve come to ask you to forgive me.”

  “We both have,” said Mrs. Davenport.

  All eyes found Adrienne. “I have fantasized about this moment for years,” she said. “Dreamed about it. It was a brutal undertaking to try and make myself stop.”

  “It would not have been in me to do that” said Reed Thomas.

  “I wanted to own my life,” said Adrienne. “I wanted to live every minute of it. I wanted to forgive and move on.”

  Her mother said, “And have you?”

  Adrienne looked her in the eye. Neither of them flinched. “No,” she said.

  “You hate us,” said Constance.

  “Who could blame her?” said Reed Thomas, to fill yet another awkward silence.

  Adrienne did not shy away from her mother’s gaze. “I think I did,” she said. “I was able to move off of that. Eventually.”

  “Eventually,” repeated Mrs. Davenport. “Such a long road from hatred to forgiveness.”

  The wait staff sensed that our table required a wide berth, no coffee refills, no check. I looked up to see our waiter reconnoitering from across the dining room. I shook my head to keep him at a distance. He nodded in understanding and so ensured a generous gratuity.

  “I’m working on it,” said Adrienne.

  Constance Davenport said, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “I’m not used to failure,” said Reed Thomas. “It touches everything. I doubt I’ll ever be out from under it. There is no end.”

  “I did not expect this,” said Adrienne. She placed her hand on my forearm and held it firmly. “I was afraid to come alone.”

  I had been leaning on the table and became aware that my companions’ manners were impeccable. I used the moment to correct my error. It was a self-conscious move. In addition to Adrienne’s deeper attentiveness, her touch had begun to agitate me. And not in a bad way.

  “I couldn’t have boarded the plane,” said Mrs. Davenport, “if Reed hadn’t been there.”

  “What about your family?” said Adrienne. “Your wife? Your children?”

  For a moment, Thomas looked as if he’d been ambushed. “Allison never felt she belonged with us,” he said. “Not entirely her fault, that.”

  “You mean,” said Adrienne, “she didn’t feel welcomed?”

  “I was trying to rebuild a career,” said Thomas. “It wasn’t easy.” A momentary veer off track. He stopped and collected himself almost before anyone else noticed. “No,” he said, “she did not feel welcome. I could have done more.”

  “Eventually she came to me,” said Mrs. Davenport. “Iit was clear I couldn’t handle her. I was in over my head. My prayers were never answered there.”

  “You’re both depriving me of bitterness,” said Adrienne. “What am I going to do without it?”

  “There can be a kind of satisfaction in holding on to bitterness,” said Thomas.

  “I stopped praying altogether”, said Mrs. Davenport.

  “I thought I’d found my way back to it,” said Adrienne. “It didn’t last.” Her television evangelist had gone down in flames. He had taken his family with him too. Another messy ending.

  “Take a look here, people,” I said. The table had once more becalmed itself. “We’ve got a young lady to bury tomorrow. It was her place to rebel, and she did a good job of it. The table is covered in blood. I’d like to suggest that you’ve made a good beginning. But no one gets a Purple Heart for simply showing up and coming clean.” I folded my napkin and placed it beside my plate. “I’m going to excuse myself because there is nothing more that would be useful for me to learn, and I no longer belong here. I’ll take care of the check.” I leaned toward Adrienne and whispered. “Will you be able to get yourself home okay?

  She snorted a chuckle and rubbed my back. “Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine. You’re a Prince.”

  That touch of hers again, another spark.

  Reed Thomas stood when I did. He offered his hand. “We’re grateful to you,” he said.

  I nodded and looked down at Constance and Adrienne and said, “Ladies.” In taking my leave, I made it a point not to look back, as it occurred to me that I might want to start practicing what I preached about moving forward.

  I regarded Reed Thomas to my right at the other end of the casket. Mrs. Davenport and Adrienne stood between us. In the years since sharing her backstory with me I had conjured Adrienne’s former husband to be slimy, grotesque, horned, tailed, and emitting of a smoldering sulfuric glow. The man in fact had a military bearing, a thoughtful gaze, and a tone of voice in normal conversation that made one think he was perhaps not…what…unkind? I cautioned myself against the pull of early impressions.

  Adrienne’s mother, too, had softened in reality to the harridan I’d expected—due perhaps in part to the physical resemblance to her daughter. Despite several intense emotional exchanges over the years, I continue to be impressed with the granite-like resolve of Adrienne’s inner strength. If the likeness to her mother obtained there, as well, it was easy to see how formidable they would be as adversaries.

  Across the casket the straggling group of latecomers
continued to arrive singly and in pairs, even as the final words were being spoken. They looked weary, as if they were unaccustomed to venturing out into the unrelenting Houston daylight. It was not yet noon. Torn denim figured prominently, as did leather, pierced flesh, and ink. This held true for the males as well as the females. I assumed they were females.

  It had ceased to surprise, though it never failed to impress, as to whom you encountered at funerals. Law enforcement personnel were often present in plain clothes, consistent with the frequency of perpetrators who showed up to gloat over holes they’d caused to be dug in the ground. No such presence for Allison, which figured after the minimal interest displayed in the case from the investigators who eventually showed up at the hospital the night she died, Sergeant Diane Ebbersole and Officer Wilson Taggart, a female and an African-American male respectively—a partnership no doubt championed as part and parcel of HPD’s Equal Opportunity resolve. Had Ebbersole been Asian or Hispanic, the department could have hit a diversity trifecta instead of a mere double dip. They had been professional and courteous, with Taggart quiet and big enough to have been considered brawn, while Ebbersole was the more vocal and wiry such that one presumed her to have been the brains.

  What became clear after learning that Allison had worked the streets was that they could offer little encouragement for an eventual close to the case beyond a report, an autopsy, and the low expectation of even a meager clue. It was not difficult to see that there was going to be nothing priority about the case for this team. I had stifled my inclination to call Mulcahy and Seldeen, but decided not to complicate protocol by asking for favors. At least not that early.

  Thus, there was no surprise, nor any real disappointment, when those who met at the casket comprised family, paid funeral personnel, and a rag-tag group of street professionals whose solidarity in grief made them the natural place to start. My eye kept returning to the one with black enameled fingernails, something about a sense of inevitability in the graveside repose she projected.