Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek Read online

  As I approach the house, a small car darts away from the curb and barely misses me. Startled, the driver glances toward me and I see that it’s Ellen Forester—but she doesn’t look the way I’ve seen her before. Her expression is as bleak as anything I’ve ever seen. Her eyes are as dark as coal. She’s gone before I have a chance to react.

  Gabe LoPresto is standing in the front yard talking to a man I don’t recognize. He’s a burly guy, shorter than LoPresto but with several pounds of muscle to his side of things. He’s almost bald, with a bulldog face that exudes menace. He has his hands on his hips and his chin thrust out. LoPresto is gesturing toward the house, clearly exasperated. I climb out of the car and stand by it for a few seconds to give my presence a chance to register, but they’re too deep in their argument to pay attention to me.

  “Mrs. Forester hired me to do this job, and I don’t see where you come into it,” LoPresto says.

  “And I’m telling you she’s my wife and I can halt the work on this if I please.”

  “I’m afraid I have to disagree. Mrs. Forester said you two are divorced and this is her project and you don’t have anything to do with.”

  The man balls his fists. “Like hell! She can’t just walk away from me. And if you keep working on this house, you may find yourself wishing you hadn’t.”

  Two workers pulling shingles off the roof have stopped working and are watching the altercation.

  I move toward the two men. I don’t like the implied threat in the man’s words, but I’ve never known LoPresto to back down, and now is no exception. “You get the hell off this property. Don’t come around making threats to me.”

  “Who’s going to back you up when—”

  “I am, for one,” I say.

  “Who are you?” The man looks me up and down. He’s used to getting his way.

  “I’m the chief of police.” I don’t generally find it necessary to wear a badge, but I pull it out of my pants pocket and display it.

  “You look a little past your prime to be strutting around like you’re going to be of any use to anybody.”

  LoPresto comes out with short, sharp “Ha!”

  Startled, the guy turns his attention back to LoPresto.

  “I believe you’ll find Chief Craddock equal to whatever nonsense you want to dole out.”

  “Mr. LoPresto is prone to exaggeration,” I say, taking a few steps closer. “But unless you want to spend a little time thinking it over in our little jail—which is sufficient but not real comfortable—I’d suggest you do as he says and get off this property.” I don’t know why, but the look on Ellen Forester’s face as she sped away from here makes me want to punch this man.

  Maybe he sees a little of that on my face. He pulls his chin back ever so slightly.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I say.

  “You go to hell,” he says, and considers that enough of an exit strategy that he stalks off to a big black four-by-four truck. He gets in, starts the engine and revs it up, all the while looking back at us. Finally he pulls slowly away from the curb. There’s more menace in that slow move than there would’ve been had he peeled out. It comes to me now that if Ellen had to put up with him, I understand why she’s jumpy around men.

  LoPresto looks up at the guys on the roof and gestures for them to go back to work.

  “What was that all about?” I say.

  “I don’t know if you heard that a woman has come to town to start a new business.”

  “I met Ellen Forester.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “You already got your eye on her?”

  “Gabe, I just met the woman; I didn’t ask her to go to the motel with me.”

  He shrugs. “You could do worse. Anyway, she came along at the right time to buy old Mrs. Ellison’s place here. I don’t know any details, but Ellen said she inherited some money and decided to relocate—without her husband. She and I were going over the plans this morning, and the ex-husband came wheeling up here and started threatening her and threatening to shut me down.” He looks over at the house. “Be a shame for anything to happen to this house.”

  “Like what?”

  “Her ex said he was going to send somebody out to take a bulldozer to it. She told me he has a business with contracts to the highway department, so I guess he could do it if he took a mind to.”

  “Are you planning to take any security measures?”

  He puts his hand on his hips. “I may have to hire a security guard at night. Maybe get a restraining order. I don’t know what I’m going to do. This is a fine thing to come home to. Well…” He tears his gaze away from the house and looks at me “What can I do for you?”

  “I need to have a serious talk with you, Gabe.”

  “If it’s anything to do with Darla, don’t bother to say one word you’ll regret. She called me first thing this morning and told me she’d made a big mistake and wants to get back together.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  LoPresto grins. “You figured she’d see the error of her ways?”

  “Not exactly. I need a bit of your time. You free right now?”

  “It’s that urgent?”

  “It is.”

  “Hold on and I’ll be right with you.” He walks over to the house and hollers instructions up to the guys working there. When he comes back, he says, “Let’s go inside. I have a table set up there with a couple of chairs.”

  “Inside” is speaking loosely. The house has been stripped down to the studs. We walk up temporary steps into the living room. There’s still a mustiness to it, overlaid by the smell of fresh wood where some of the studs have been replaced.

  “Place needs a lot of work,” I say.

  “Stripping it down was the hard part. Once I pull a crew off another job that’s winding up, things will speed up here.”

  We sit down in two plastic chairs Gabe has set up next to a plastic table with plans laid out on it. With the place open to the air and no sun inside, there’s a heavy chill. Gabe turns on a space heater facing the table. “Now, what’s on your mind?” he says.

  In public LoPresto plays the fool, slapping people’s backs and making smart-aleck remarks. But he’s professional here at the job site.

  “Couple of questions. At the café yesterday, you said Darla thought you had more money than you do. Can you tell me what you meant by that?”

  He splays his hands out on the table. “I think I may have made more out of it than there was. She was being presumptuous and I think she knows it. Like I said, Darla called me this morning to make up.”

  “Presumptuous about what?”

  He pulls his hands back and lays them on the arms of the chair. “She was talking about wanting to get me involved with a place that needs some heavy renovation.”

  I nod. “Go on.”

  “Only problem is, she thought I should buy the place and do the renovations on spec. I told her that’s not the way it works, and that I couldn’t afford to buy a place that big anyway.”

  “She was talking about Slate McClusky’s resort.”

  He had been looking off into the distance, and his head whips back toward me. “How do you know about it?”

  “It came to my attention while I was investigating Gary Dellmore’s death.”

  “Wait a minute. What does this have to do with Dellmore? As far as I know, Gary Dellmore had nothing to do with this. Darla is a friend of Angel Bright’s, and she said Angel is sick and tired of Slate running the resort and wants somebody to buy it and fix it up.”

  “Did you ever go out there to look at it?”

  “Naw, this just came up while we were in Galveston this weekend. Poor little gal thought it was a great idea. She brought it to me like it was a present she was giving me. She was damn disappointed when I told her it wouldn’t work. That’s when she got all riled up and said she didn’t want to see me anymore. She had her feelings hurt, that’s all.”

  “Gabe, I hate to tell you, but no, that’s not all.”
>
  He goes still. Usually he starts blustering when things don’t go his way, but either something in my voice warned him that I’m dead serious, or deep down he knows he’s kidding himself.

  “I wish I could sugarcoat this, but getting you to buy McClusky’s resort is a scheme cooked up by Darla, Gary Dellmore, and McClusky himself.”

  I expected LoPresto to explode with anger or protest that I must be wrong, but he nods a couple of times, his expression blank. When he speaks, his voice is hollow. “I guess you wouldn’t say that unless you were pretty sure of your facts.”

  “That’s right.”

  He nods a few more times. “Well, I’ve been a fool, haven’t it?”

  “You fell for a pretty girl who was trying to pull the wool over your eyes, but you’re not the first man that ever happened to. The important thing is that you didn’t get sucked into buying the property.”

  A tic twitches in his eye. He rakes his hand hard across his mouth then slams it down on the table. “I don’t understand why they thought I would buy a game resort. I’m a contractor!”

  “McClusky was desperate and was looking for anybody who might be gullible enough to buy him out. The other two were just plain greedy. I suspect they thought you were just like them—that you would be excited at the chance to buy into a big project. Dellmore seems to have had a habit of letting his ideas outrun his good sense.”

  LoPresto gets up, walks to the frame, and leans against a wall stud, staring out into the yard. “That makes two of us.”

  “No, it doesn’t. You may have gone overboard with the girl, but you’ve got better business sense than they gave you credit for. And it’s a good thing, too. They figured if they roped you in, you wouldn’t go to the trouble to find out the biggest problem with the place.”

  He walks back over to me and sits. “What’s that?”

  “The property is under quarantine—they got hit with foot-and-mouth disease, so there can’t be hoofed animals out there until they test the soil and lift the quarantine. Without all those exotic animals, hunters don’t have any interest in going there. If you had bought the place, you’d have been sunk.”

  He laughs bitterly. “They’re right. I wouldn’t have thought to ask. I guess I’m lucky I couldn’t afford to buy the resort.”

  Before he can say anything more, one of the men who was working on the roof comes into the room. “Gabe, we’re all done up there. Can we take lunch?”

  LoPresto looks at his watch. “I didn’t realize it was so late. Sure. I may not be here when you get back. You know to get started pulling the plumbing in that back bedroom, right?”

  The guy gives him a thumbs-up. When he leaves, LoPresto stares after him and then inclines his head in my direction. “How did you get this information about Darla?”

  I tell him how it started, with finding files in the trunk of Dellmore’s car and the more I looked into it, the more suspicious I became. “McClusky’s finances are in a mess. He needs somebody to take that resort off his hands, and he and Dellmore hooked up with Darla to try to rope you into it.”

  He’s chewing his lip vigorously. I don’t want to hear the next question I know is coming. “You figure it was all plotted out from the start? That’s why she came after me in the first place?”

  “Gabe, it’s possible that after she took up with you, Dellmore and McClusky saw the opportunity to have her talk up the resort to you.”

  He nods, drumming his fingers again. “But you don’t think so.”

  “What difference does it make? Either way, you can’t trust her.”

  LoPresto puts his head in his hands. His voice is muffled. “It’s possible that she’s coming back to me because she told McClusky I’m not interested and he sent her packing.”

  I let the silence stretch out so he can get a sense of how desperate he sounds. Finally I say, “No, Gabe, that’s not the way it is.”

  He turns his head aside and glares at me. “You seem pretty sure of yourself. With Dellmore dead, I don’t see what she gets out of it now.” He gets up and paces to look out at the wintery backyard again.

  “I don’t know exactly what she gets out of it either, but I do know that she and McClusky are still planning for you to buy the place.”

  “Oh, no. No, no, no.” He turns back to me, shaking his head. “That doesn’t make sense to me. She doesn’t even like McClusky. She told me one reason Angel had taken up with Gary Dellmore is that McClusky is a mean son of a bitch underneath all that smiling glad-handing he does. In fact, she said she hoped I’d buy the resort for Angel’s sake because Angel hates the place. She wouldn’t do it for McClusky.”

  I’m hardly listening. All I can think about is Angel and Gary Dellmore. I remember that CD in Dellmore’s car. Why didn’t I see it before? I don’t even have to ask if LoPresto has any evidence of it. It makes total sense. It explains all kinds of little things.

  I get up from the table. “Gabe, I’m going to ask you a favor. Pretend everything is fine with Darla. Put off seeing her, whatever, but don’t tell her what I told you, at least for a few days.”

  Except where Darla Rodriguez is concerned, Gabe has always been sharp mentally. “Until you wrap up this investigation into Dellmore’s death?”

  I nod.

  “You think this deal has anything to do with that?”

  “I’m not going to take any odds just yet, but I’ll find out before too long.”

  LoPresto stoops down, picks up a bent nail from the floor, and hurls it outside. “I hope to God you find out one of them killed Dellmore and they spend the rest of their sorry lives in jail.”

  “You can count on one thing, Gabe. McClusky is in deep trouble financially, and now it looks like he and Dellmore committed fraud on the water park deal. One way or another, McClusky is in deep shit. I trust you’ll keep all that under your hat for now.”

  He gives a sharp, bitter laugh. “You can count on that. I’m already going to be the laughingstock here in town because I got in so deep with that little bitch. No need to tell everybody the worst of it.”

  There’s only one place I can think of that I want to be right now. If I go inside my house, I’m likely to get waylaid by Loretta. If I go to the station, somebody’s going to walk in and need something.

  I don’t want to read too much into it, but my cows seem surprised to see me in the middle of the day. Usually they come up close and mill around me when I come down to the pasture first thing in the morning, but now, at midday, they raise their heads and stare at me. Some of them continue to chew, looking at me with a hint of speculation. I lean on the fence and stare back, sorting out what I know.

  McClusky and Dellmore put together a deal to have the town invest in a water park. It looks like money from the loan was supposed to help McClusky shore up his slipping finances. Unfortunately, his financial problems came along when everybody else was in trouble. There’s no need for me to worry about the particulars, but the end result is that McClusky is as broke as Jarrett Creek. In the middle of it somehow Angel hooked up with Gary Dellmore. I should have seen that in the way she talked about Dellmore, the way she lingered on his name. And in the way she and Slate could barely stand to look at each other at the barbecue place—the way he spoke of her to me in a disparaging way.

  Did McClusky kill Dellmore because he was having an affair with Angel? It sounds plausible, but I have a strong core of doubt. Dellmore was running the scheme to get Gabe LoPresto to buy McClusky out. I don’t know what he was going to get out of it, but with him gone, McClusky is sunk. I’m not ready to think that McClusky was so blind with jealousy that he killed Dellmore because he was having an affair with Angel.

  That brings me back to the women in the mix. I need to talk to Angel as soon as I can get hold of her and find out how far the affair had gone with Dellmore. Were they serious? Was Dellmore planning to divorce his wife? And I need to talk to Barbara Dellmore again, to find out if she knew Angel and Gary were having an affair. She had every reason to
want to be rid of a husband who couldn’t keep his hands off other women. Not to mention that her husband had ruined her father financially. Angel may have been the last straw.

  I put in a call to Angel, and to my surprise she answers, so I know she’s not out at the resort. “Who is this?”

  “Angel, it’s Samuel Craddock. Where are you?”

  It takes several seconds for her to answer, her voice cold. “I’m on my way to Jarrett Creek. But I don’t have time for you. I’ve got business to take care of.”

  “Is Slate with you?”

  “No.”

  “I need to talk to you. I’ll meet you at your place and I don’t want you trying to avoid me.”

  She reluctantly agrees to meet me at her house at three-thirty. I have time to make a stop before I meet her there.

  Although Cookie assured me that Alan Dellmore did not know his son was involved in fraud, I have to ask Alan directly. And if I’m convinced he didn’t know, I want to warn him of what his son was up to. Clara answers the door and tells me that Dellmore has gone to the bank for a couple of hours but should be back soon. She insists that I come in for a cup of coffee, and we go into the living room where a fire is blazing in the stone fireplace. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to sit in here. I can’t seem to get warm.”

  She comes back with coffee and we sit next to the fireplace. “Alan has taken this so hard because of the fight they had before Gary died. I keep telling him that people have fights all the time—it’s part of life.”

  “Did they have frequent arguments?”

  “It seemed like they fought more and more lately.” She smiles a little, like she’s thinking of something private. She seems to be in such a reverie that I hate to break in.