A Welcome Murder Page 5
Mom said we were going to stay with Aunt Connie on Pleasant Heights. Aunt Connie had said I was welcome to stay in the garage apartment behind her house, rent free, until I got my feet on the ground. I didn’t tell Mom that I didn’t plan to be in Steubenville long enough to get my feet on the ground. My plan was to visit with the folks for a few days until they headed back to Florida, then get my cash and put Steubenville, Ohio, in my rearview mirror before the general came looking for me.
Of course, my luck ran true to form and things began going awry two minutes after I got back to Jefferson County. We stopped at the Town & Country Market outside of Wintersville on the way home because Mom wanted to make city chicken and mashed potatoes for my return.
“You want to come in?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
“I’ll just wait in the car,” I said. I took one of the models out of the bag and sliced open the cellophane wrapper with the hobby knife. Finally, I was starting to feel free. The window was down and the air fresh; the sights were familiar. Unfortunately, the first voice I heard was a familiar one, too.
“Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, he’s free at last.” Placing both hands on the side of the Buick and leaning toward the open window was Rayce Daubner. I looked up briefly, then back to my model. “Why, just the other day, I was thinking . . .”
“There’s a rarity,” I said.
He squinted, and his nostrils flared. “I was thinking it was ’bout time for ol’ John-eeee Earl to be getting out of prison.”
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking, too, Rayce. Thinking about how much I’d like to see this hobby knife buried in one of your eyes.”
“You don’t have the balls. You never did.”
He was carrying a six-pack of beer in a cardboard carton. He leaned down and put both palms on his knees, the beer carton dangling from the fingers of his right hand. “I know you just got out, but do you think you can score me some coke?” He started laughing. I pulled on the door handle and pushed out with all I had, catching him right across the bridge of the nose with the top of the door. He flew backward and landed on his ass, and beer bottles went flying, sending frothy explosions and amber glass skittering across the asphalt. As I hopped out of the car and started toward him, a Jefferson County Sheriff’s cruiser pulled into the lot. I was fresh out of prison, with a hobby knife in my hand, and the guy who had set me up was sprawled on the asphalt, bleeding from a gash across his nose.
Chief Deputy Toots Majowski got out of the car, pinching his temples with one hand like he was fighting off a migraine. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“I accidentally opened the door into Rayce’s nose,” I said, slipping the knife into my pocket.
“Accidentally?” Majowski asked.
“We were talking, and a bee flew into the car and I panicked. I’m allergic to bees.”
Rayce stood, wobbled, and blinked me into focus. “You’re going to be sorry, Hollywood,” Rayce said, walking past me toward his car, dabbing at the cut with the sleeve of his T-shirt.
That was the last time I ever saw that worthless piece of shit alive. He got into his car, swearing, blood dripping down his face. He peeled out of the parking lot. Majowski shook his head and said, “Welcome home, Johnny. Good to see you. Try to keep your ass out of trouble.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ALLISON ROBERSON
My great-aunt Mae had breath that smelled like her insides were rotting away, and wild, white whiskers that spiraled away from her upper lip and chin. Yet she insisted on greeting me by wrapping her spindly fingers around my head, the fingernails of her thumbs pressing against my cheeks. She would then pucker up and deliver a foul kiss right on my lips.
For my fourteenth birthday, she gave me a diary. By the looks of the yellowed box that held the diary, I suspected that she had regifted something that had been in her attic for twenty years. But I actually liked the diary, which had a section in the front with such categories as My favorite foods are: . . ., The names of my pets are: . . ., and When I grow up, I want to be: . . . . Under this last category, I wrote that I wanted to be a movie star, a famous singer, a veterinarian, a model, and married to Mark Lindsay, who was the lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders.
When I was sixteen, our English teacher, Mrs. Graeter, had us compose a term paper on our future plans. I wrote that I wanted to be a pediatrician and, perhaps, an English teacher. I didn’t really want to be an English teacher, but I thought that might ingratiate me to Mrs. Graeter. I made no mention of wanting to be a movie star or a singer or of wishing to marry Mark Lindsay. Although I still harbored those dreams, under no circumstances would I commit them to paper and risk the possibility of having it read to the entire class.
By the time I was eighteen and a senior, our guidance counselor, Mr. Jankowski, pulled me into his office and asked me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was a heavy question. I told him that maybe I wanted to be a secretary or a dental hygienist or a dietitian. I was clueless, but I needed to give him some answers so he could fill out my file, feel as though he had done his job, and more importantly, get off my back.
I am the first to admit that I have never been the most focused or most directed person in the world. However, I can tell you with absolute certainty that not in my diary, not in my term paper for Mrs. Graeter, not in my conversation with Mr. Jankowski, and otherwise never in my life did I say that my dream job was to be the chief dispatcher for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. Yet, at age thirty-five, that is exactly where I find myself, seated in a room of blaring scanners and squawking police radios, while my ass grows daily, straining against the seams of the hideous, department-issued gray slacks with navy and gold piping. I never had great aspirations, yet it pains me to admit that I am without talent and possess not one quality that would qualify me for anything more than the position I currently hold.
The building that houses the administrative offices of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, on Market Street, was built in 1898, just as the steel and mining industries were hitting a peak that would last for the next seven decades. It’s a three-story, Victorian-style building constructed solidly of red bricks that were made at the Steubenville Brick and Tile Company, just a quarter mile away. It was built to house both prisoners and the county’s chief law enforcement officer and family. In days long past, the jail occupied the first floor of the building, while the sheriff and his family lived on the upper two floors, though prisoners and family alike used the same front door and it was the job of the sheriff’s wife to cook meals for the prisoners. A separate jail was constructed in 1961, and the original building was converted to house the radio room, the detective bureau, and administrative offices.
At least once a day, twice if things are slow, I escape to the third floor of the sheriff’s office where an alcove hides a recessed porch behind a widow’s walk. I go out to the alcove to smoke a cigarette in peace, free of the mayhem of the office. Prisoners are shuttled through the office en route from their jail cells to the courthouse, and I am sick of seeing unkempt men in jumpsuits and handcuffs who reek of urine, vomit, and alcohol. They leer at me, flipping a nervous trigger that makes me crazy for a cigarette. My children hate that I smoke, and I do my best to hide it from them, but I have no intention of stopping. It’s a release for the edgy case of nerves I’ve developed since moving to this godforsaken town. The alcove provides a refuge where I can unwind for a few minutes and enjoy a smoke, hidden from view of the street, and scan the patchwork of rooftops that dot the hillsides that slope toward the Ohio River.
Steubenville is a dingy, gray city that is dying a slow death. On many mornings, the fog rolls up out of the Ohio River Valley, covering the city until all that is visible is the yellow haze of the streetlights. From the far edge of Steubenville—Pottery Row, as it is still called—comes the occasional whistle of a passing freight train. Across the river in West Virginia, the Weirton Steel Corporation kicks out soot
y, black smoke that hangs throughout the valley. Even on cloudless days, Steubenville is a gray lady. Its old homes, built into the steep hillsides at a time when the town boomed and steel and coal were twin kings, now sag under their own weight, stripped by the acrid smoke and bleached by years of neglect.
Along Market Street are the brick buildings that once housed the heart of a vibrant business district. There were theaters, five-and-dimes, bakeries, grocery and butcher shops, and clothing stores jammed together all along the avenue. Now, people drive to the mall in St. Clairsville or Pittsburgh, and the buildings along Market Street are vacant or house secondhand clothing stores or craft shops that open only on weekends.
I first visited Steubenville a week after Fran and I were engaged. We flew in to Pittsburgh and rented a car. By the time we drove up windy Sinclair Avenue and got to his boyhood home off of Lover’s Lane, I was so sick that I made him stop the car so I could throw up in a ditch before meeting my future in-laws. We spent three days in Steubenville; I couldn’t wait to leave. The town was depressing and dirty, and everyone spoke with a hillbilly twang and called us “yunz guys.” It’s a place where they keep their chipped-chopped ham in the icebox, where they drive “Chivies,” and where every plant with a petal is a “flahr” and every plant with a thorn is a “jaggerbush.” It was like living in the lyrics of a bad country song. I couldn’t believe that someone as articulate as my future husband, Francis Roberson, had grown up in the Ohio River Valley. Never did I dream that I would someday be living here. In fact, had I any idea that we would someday come back here to live, I would have dumped Fran and run like my hair was on fire. I would have gone back to Washington and married Alfred Vincenzio, no questions asked.
I’m a city girl, having grown up in a Baltimore suburb. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, and my dad worked for the US State Department. Dad was only a mid-level dignitary, so we never hosted kings or presidents, but every undersecretary of agriculture from every Third World country you can name came to dinner at my parents’ home. They were always little dark men with bowling-ball heads, thick accents, impeccable manners, and obedient wives. Many evenings when I would rather be hanging out with my friends, I had to sit at the table, listening to accented prattling on the best methods of harvesting sugar beets.
After graduating high school with no clear direction, I enrolled at Towson State University as a history major. I have no idea where that motivation came from, but it didn’t last long. Towson gave me the boot after a year of mediocre attendance and worse grades. I enrolled at community college for two years, accumulating a jumble of credits in no particular area. Finally, my father said he wasn’t spending another dime on my education unless I enrolled in what he called a “real college” and began working diligently toward a degree. I told him that I didn’t have much interest in college, real or pretend, and so he pulled a few strings and got me a job as a secretary at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. That’s where I met Fran.
I noticed him the first time he walked past my office. He was handsome and had the arrogant swagger of every rookie FBI agent in the academy. It was a couple of days before he summoned up the courage to stop in and introduce himself. He was friendly and said that he was just completing his FBI training, but the FBI was a temporary job until he could figure out how to become president of the United States.
I laughed politely.
“I’m serious,” he said.
I laughed harder. “Sorry,” I said, still unsure whether he was serious. After a few minutes of idle chatter, I said, “Well, Mr. President, I have work to do.”
He left, but he stopped by the next day and asked me out. “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to ask out other FBI employees,” he said.
“It’s totally against the rules,” I said. I knew that because I had been secretly dating one of Fran’s classmates, Alfred Vincenzio. I frowned and said, seriously, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to report you.”
His eyes widened and he started to sputter, but I couldn’t hold a straight face. When he realized the bluff, he grinned and said, “You got me.”
After one date with Fran, I broke off my relationship with Alfred, who was enraged. I don’t think he liked me all that much, but it was a slight to his Italian masculinity that he would get bumped for Fran Roberson. Alfred never spoke to me again, and things became very cool between him and Fran.
We got engaged a year to the day after our first date. We were married in a small ceremony at the United Methodist Church that I had attended since I was a child. We lived in Atlanta, Dallas, and Minneapolis over the next eight years as Fran began his climb up the ranks of the FBI, becoming a star in the bureau’s white-collar crime division. He appeared to have a bright future in the agency, though he never quit talking about the presidency. He was always reading self-help and motivational books, and at the most inopportune times he would call me to his den and read me some stupid passage and ask, “What does that mean to you?”
“It means you have too much time on your hands, Francis,” I finally told him. “While you’re sitting there reading, I’m trying to get dinner ready, check homework, and clean the wax out of Bennie’s ears.”
“You can’t get to the White House without being able to speak inspirationally,” he answered.
“You can’t get to the White House by reading a book, either,” I countered. After a while, I just ignored his talk. We had two beautiful boys, Fran had a great career, and I was very happy in Minneapolis. I humored his talk about the presidency, but I couldn’t imagine any scenario, any bizarre set of circumstances, that would place Francis Roberson on the path to the Oval Office.
Then that dunderhead Beaumont T. Bonecutter became the first sheriff in the corrupt history of Jefferson County, Ohio, to become the target of a federal investigation for taking kickbacks from drug dealers.
It was no secret in the valley that lawmen took payoffs from the mob to turn a blind eye to their gambling and prostitution operations. But as the steel mills and coal mines began losing purchase in the valley, people moved away in search of work. Without the steelworkers and coal miners, organized crime lost its loyal customer base and the traditional vices of gambling and prostitution disappeared. Drugs became more prevalent and, to offset their lost gambling and prostitution revenue streams, lawmen began accepting payoffs from small-time drug dealers.
Thus, Jefferson County wasn’t nearly as lucrative for dishonest sheriffs as it had once been. This was a major disappointment for Beaumont T. Bonecutter, who had run for sheriff believing he would become rich from the illegal payoffs. When he found out how meager the payoffs were, he began squeezing the drug dealers for more money.
Things began to unravel for Bonecutter when he arrested a marijuana dealer named Chinky Leonard for possession of drugs with intent to distribute. The arrest occurred after Chinky could no longer manage the exorbitant payoffs that the sheriff demanded. Chinky had anticipated that such a day would come, and he had surreptitiously taped several telephone conversations with Bonecutter. After the arrest, Chinky handed his lawyer a micro tape of the telephone conversations. In one of those conversations, Bonecutter threatened to castrate Chinky if the payoffs didn’t increase. Two weeks later, the headline in the Herald-Star read:
Bonecutter Target of Federal Probe
for Accepting Illegal Drug Payoffs
Despite the sheriff’s bluster about a witch hunt, he crumbled under the pressure of the federal investigation. He developed a mysterious illness—some type of rare heart, kidney, and prostate disease that he invented—and resigned. That night, I got the phone call from Fran’s father. We chatted for a few moments, exchanging pleasantries, before I handed the phone to Fran. This was followed by my husband saying, “Really . . . That’s interesting . . . No kidding . . . That’s great . . . Yeah, sure I’m interested . . .” He looked over at me, swallowed, and said, “Of course, I need to talk it over with Allison.”
At that moment, I instinctively knew that I
would soon be living in Steubenville, Ohio. A week after Bonecutter resigned, the three Democratic commissioners appointed Fran the interim sheriff. You would have thought the Messiah himself was returning to Steubenville. Fran Roberson, the former quarterback of the Steubenville Big Red, Ed and Francine’s boy, who had graduated with honors from Bethany College and went on to become an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was coming back to Jefferson County to straighten up the mess left by that damn Republican, Beaumont T. Bonecutter.
Now, just for the record, Francis Delano Roberson leans somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun and was no more a Democrat than I was the Queen of Sheba, but he became one the minute he got the call from his dad. Edgar Roberson was a Roosevelt Democrat—thus Francis’s middle name of Delano—a former union steward at the steel mill, and the undisputed leader of the Jefferson County Democratic Party since 1965. Fran had never voted for a Democrat in his life. Once we moved back, he told people that he was the best kind of Democrat—“one that had been a Republican, but had seen the light and the error of his ways.” He could barely say it with a straight face.
Fran was the appointed sheriff for one year before running for the position in his first election. He was unopposed in the primary and then soundly thrashed the Republican nominee, a township constable who was little more than a sacrificial lamb. The landslide victory reignited his talk of becoming president of the United States. I said, “Francis, I love you with all my heart, but you’ve just been elected sheriff of a backwater Ohio county by defeating an opponent with a harelip and an eighth-grade education. Don’t you think it’s a little early to be talking about the presidency?”