Fort Stockton is unique in many ways.  The ability of those with connections to get done quickly whatever they want however, is just like every other town.

Prairie View Savings & Loan wanted a non performing asset off their books.  Mayor Goodman wanted back taxes collected, as they were already earmarked for a special project his daughter, Iwania, was soon to be heading up.  A discreet gift certificate provided to Mavis at the county clerk’s office expedited the paperwork. Mavis was always partial to a spa day.  A massage by Raul helped work out the kinks and knots that go with being a public servant.

All that to say, the deal for Mason McCullough and Franklin Danbury to buy the old place where Eileen had grown up sailed through quickly.  Permits were issued to rezone the property and convert the run down mansion to a Bed & Breakfast more quickly than it took for most citizens to replace a fence.  Mr. Horton, who lived across the street from the property, was at the Piggly Wiggly and asked Mayor Goodman pretty loudly how a zoning change got through for the project in record time, but he was denied the permit for a carport after attempting to get one for nearly two years.  That afternoon he was issued a code violation for the old Nash Rambler in his driveway that hadn’t moved in twenty years.

“Can’t be out in the open,” the Code Enforcement Officer explained.

“That’s what the carport was for,” Mr. Horton explained.

The fine was $250.  The point was made.

Mason asked Mrs. Drury, his former neighbor across the hall at the Alamo Arms, to work on the interior design of the Bed & Breakfast.  She had a flair for such things.  Mason saw it as an opportunity to still see her occasionally, though she’d become a married woman.  She worked at the Piggly Wiggly 29 hours a week on Register 4.  The schedule was set so she couldn’t receive benefits.  It did, however, allow her to continue her consulting work with Mason, which had benefits of its own.

At the job site, Franklin Danbury was behind the garage going over the next area to be dug up with the foreman of the excavation crew.  “Tell me one more time why we’re digging up this whole damn property, one section at a time?” The foreman asked.

Franklin made something up about soil samples, buried pipelines, and forgotten uncapped wells that didn’t make any sense to the foreman.  He wished he could have just come out and said they were looking for a dead body from two decades earlier, but of course he couldn’t.

The workers gathered around were all surprised when Perry Silverman pulled up in his new Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz coupe.  Perry still had the Kaiser Darrin he’d been given as a late graduation present twenty-five years earlier, but it didn’t very often leave the climate controlled garage it was kept in.  Perry treated himself to a new car every couple years, always white over red.  Always top of the line.  Normally always a Cadillac.

Perry felt the new Eldorado was, pound for pound, the equal of Mason’s Mark V.  “The only difference between the two has everything to do with how Ford and General Motors define luxury, and how much they think the average American is willing to pay for it.  In both cases when management had been asked about quality, they would each snicker and make some vague reference to Jaguar and then retort, ‘we got nothing to worry about’,” Perry explained to Lucinda the day he picked the new Cadillac up and stopped by the Grounds for Divorce for coffee.

Franklin and Mason came down the driveway to greet Perry, surprised to see him.  “I heard you two bought the old place,” Perry said.  “Had to come by and see for myself.”  The three captains of industry in Fort Stockton stood out in the shadow of the three new luxury cars parked in the street as they shook hands.

“So this is your new Jaguar?” Perry asked.  “Hadn’t actually seen it yet, only heard about it.”

“You were lucky to catch him on a day the damn thing isn’t in the shop.  He’s barely seen it himself,” Mason laughed.

About then Dharma Drury exited the house and made her way down the driveway, adjusting her skirt as she walked over to the blue Plymouth Grand Fury Brougham parked out on the street. The three men nodded over in Dharma’s direction and she smiled back coyly. Perry and Franklin both glanced over at Mason who looked sheepish.  “What?” He said.

“Good god, Mason,” Perry said.  “She’s a married woman.”

“I’ve been trying to tell him,” Franklin added.

About then the foreman walked down the drive to where the men had gathered. “Where do you want us to dig next?”

Franklin excused himself to map out the next area to be excavated. Mason and Perry were each about trying to convince the other that he had made a mistake in the choice of luxury car he’d purchased. A Cadillac man and a Lincoln man were about as competitive as a UT alumnus and an A&M grad.  They finally agreed that Franklin was the one who’d really made the poor choice.  “Who the hell buys a trouble prone British import in Fort Stockton?” Mason asked.  Franklin caught the tail end of the insult as he rejoined the two.

“Why the heck are you digging the whole place up, anyway?” Perry asked as he looked around at the dozers.  “You looking for Eileen’s stepfather?”  He let out a pretty good laugh as he said it.

“Why would you ask that?” Mason asked.  Both he and Franklin seemed to be frozen as they stood there.

“Inside joke, I guess,” Perry answered.  “Years ago Eileen wrote a manuscript and sent it to me.  It was for a story she thought would make a good movie.  Wanted me to read it. She basically had dramatized events from her own life into a series of crimes the young heroine was in the middle of.”  He chuckled again as he explained. “Had her mother killing off both husbands,  burying the second one out here in this very yard somewhere.”

Mason and Franklin both looked at each other.  There was a long awkward silence.

“At the end of the story does she kill her young unsuspecting companion after completing a sordid sex act with him tied to the bed?” Mason asked.

The laugh turned into just a slight smile on Perry’s face. 

“Yeah,” Perry said.  “That’s exactly how it ended.  Did you read it.”

“Apparently,” Mason replied.

“Did it strike you as odd that a young, attractive male would wind up dead in Eileen”s pool recently?”

“Sure.  At first,” Perry admitted.  “Till I found out Eileen wasn’t home at the time of the accident. In fact, she wasn’t even in California.  Hadn’t been for days. She couldn’t have had anything to do with the kid’s death.”

“How can you be positive?  Where was she?” Franklin asked.

“Back in St. Jo, Missouri,” Perry said.  “Doing research on a new book.  Based on something that took place a year or two back.  Someone put a murder contract out on some guy that worked at a radio station there. Poor bastard never saw it coming and authorities couldn’t come up with a motive.  They found his body in a dumpster behind the Shamrock Motel,  the hotel he’d inherited from his aunt and uncle a few years earlier. But at least his kids didn’t go without.  They came into a pretty big sum of money not long after their father’s murder.”

Mason and Franklin looked at each other speechless.

“Damndest thing,” Perry said.  “Authorities got a tip that the cash the murder victim’s kids came into shortly after their father was killed was actually part of the ransom money from the Greenlease kidnapping from the 50s that was never recovered.  But that was never proven. Odd, though, that was the case Eileen had done so much research on back in the beginning.”