CHAPTER VI OF A SEVEN PART STORY
Fort Stockton had a long memory and a short attention span. The first meant people remembered things they probably shouldn’t. The second meant they were usually too distracted to connect those memories until someone interesting showed up and stirred the pot.
That someone, lately, was Parker McHale.
Folks who had grown up with her still occasionally slipped and called her by her old name. Eileen Parker. The name belonged to a skinny girl who used to ride a bicycle down Dickinson Boulevard with a spiral notebook in the basket and more questions than friends. Parker McHale, on the other hand, belonged to a woman who stepped out of black town cars wearing Italian silk stockings and sunglasses that cost more than the average pickup truck payment in Pecos County.
The difference between those two people was part ambition, part reinvention, and part Fort Stockton itself.
She was tall. Not runway tall, but tall enough that most men had to straighten their posture when speaking to her. Her hair was the color of dark walnut, cut just below the shoulders in a style that looked effortless but was almost certainly the work of someone in Los Angeles who charged four hundred dollars a visit for the highlights alone. Her cheekbones had the kind of geometry that made photographers nod approvingly. Her eyes were green, but not the soft pastoral green of spring grass. They were the sharper green of broken bottle glass under sunlight.
Her figure had always been a subject of interest in town, though no one had ever quite agreed on the details. The consensus was that she moved with the relaxed confidence of someone who had learned early that people were going to watch anyway, so she might as well give them something to look at.
That confidence had grown with time.
She dressed in a style that might have been described as severe if it hadn’t been so expensive. Tailored jackets, narrow skirts, silk blouses that caught the light just enough to suggest things without revealing them. The stockings were always silk, always immaculate, seams straight enough to satisfy a machinist with a micrometer.
When she walked through a room, people turned.
And Parker McHale knew it.
She had been born Eileen Parker in a modest stucco house three blocks from the Pecos County courthouse. Her father had died when she was barely old enough to remember him clearly. She’s the one who found him slumped over the wheel inside his Buick out in front of Alamo Elementary School. The trip to pick his daughter up from shell would be the last one he ever made in the horizontal position.
Her mother remarried a year later.
The new husband arrived with a smile that never quite reached his eyes and habits that made neighbors quietly lock their doors at night. He drank. He gambled. He borrowed money he never repaid. For a time he even tried selling used cars out of the yard until three of them turned out to have been stolen from Odessa.
Young Eileen Parker learned two important things during those years.
First, people lied constantly.
Second, those lies were usually easier to unravel than the people telling them realized.
By the time she was eighteen she had a byline at the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch. It started with small assignments. School board meetings. County livestock auctions. A surprisingly heated zoning dispute involving the placement of a Dairy Twin sign.
But the thing she liked best was crime.
There was a rhythm to it. Motive, opportunity, mistakes. The human mind, she discovered, was a messy machine that almost always left fingerprints somewhere.
Her first major story involved a string of burglaries that the sheriff’s department insisted were unrelated. Parker proved they were committed by the same man and published the evidence in a Sunday edition that sold out before noon.
She was twenty-three.
By twenty-seven she had written a crime novel loosely based on a Lone Star murder that still made old men lower their voices when it was mentioned.
She published it under a new name. Parker McHale. Her new first name was her old last name. Her new last name was borrowed from the woman she watched throw herself off the Empire State Building and land on the roof of a car right in front of where she and her parents stood.
The book sold well enough to attract attention from New York. The second one sold well enough to attract attention from Hollywood. By the third she was spending half the year in Los Angeles and the other half explaining to talk show hosts how she managed to write murder scenes that felt so… authentic.
Some critics wondered where the line between research and experience might lie.
Parker never answered that question directly.
She simply smiled.
Her success had not interfered with another of her talents. Parker McHale had always possessed an extraordinary ability to accumulate lovers.
Young ones, usually.
She said they had enthusiasm.
Fort Stockton had theories.
One of those lovers had been Mason McCullough.
Mason had been barely old enough to buy whiskey when Parker first took an interest in him. He was ten years younger than she was, lean and eager, with the kind of determined charm that made waitresses bring extra bread to the table without asking.
What he lacked in experience he made up for with aggressive willingness to please.
Parker found that admirable.
Their relationship had never been entirely secret. In Fort Stockton that would have been impossible. But it had been conducted with enough discretion that people could pretend not to notice if they preferred.
Which most of them didn’t.
By the time Parker left town for good, her reputation had already grown large enough to become local folklore.
Even years later she remained one of Fort Stockton’s most celebrated exports.
Which made her sudden return all the more interesting.
And then there was Deuce Cameron.
If Parker McHale was the town’s most glamorous mystery, Deuce Cameron had always been its most carefully ignored one.
He was tall. Taller than Parker by a comfortable margin. His shoulders had the broad solidity of someone who might have been a college linebacker if life had taken a slightly different turn. His hair was golden and worn longer than lesser lawyers dared. His jaw had the clean lines that advertising agencies liked to call “authoritative.”
His eyes were blue.
Not the friendly kind.
The colder variety.
When Deuce Cameron entered a room people tended to become aware of him immediately, even if they couldn’t say exactly why.
His full name was Tag Cameron the Second, though no one had called him that since elementary school. Somewhere along the way the nickname Deuce had stuck and eventually replaced the original entirely.
He was the only child of Tag Cameron and Victoria Cameron.
It was also the worst kept secret in Fort Stockton that Tag Cameron was not his father.
That distinction belonged to Boone Beckett.
Years earlier Tag Cameron had found himself in a delicate situation. Rumors about his personal life had begun circulating with enough enthusiasm to threaten both his business and his carefully cultivated image of masculine respectability.
The solution had been unconventional.
Boone Beckett was paid to father a child with Tag’s wife.
It worked.
For a while.
But secrets rarely stay buried forever in Fort Stockton.
Darnall Davis discovered the truth first.
Victoria had told him during what witnesses later described as “a moment of emotional weakness.” Darnall made the mistake of assuming that knowledge could remain a secret and harm no one.
He died the next day in what the police report described as an “unfortunate escape attempt.” Boone Beckette was the arresting officer, still on Tag’s payroll when it came to matters of life and death.
Boone Beckett died two years after that in a home robbery, though nothing had been taken and Boone’s service revolver was well within his reach.
Tag Cameron went to his grave convinced the matter had been handled permanently and efficiently.
Victoria never remarried.
She raised her son with a mixture of pride and quiet melancholy. She knew exactly who his father had been and never once regretted it.
Deuce left Fort Stockton for the University of Texas at Austin. From there he went to SMU Law School, where professors quickly noticed that he possessed two traits that rarely appeared together.
Intelligence.
And patience.
He built a reputation in Houston as one of the most relentless defense attorneys in Texas. He prepared cases the way oil men drilled wells: carefully, methodically, and without stopping until something valuable came up.
Clients paid accordingly.
Eventually he opened his own firm.
The retainers became settlements.
The settlements became fortunes.
Victoria occasionally reminded him not to visit Fort Stockton too often.
“It’s like moving backwards, darling.”
When he did return, the effect was immediate.
The line of women hoping to capture his attention could have wrapped around the Piggly Wiggly three times.
Which made his sudden partnership with Parker McHale particularly intriguing.
No one in town had ever suspected a romance between them before.
The moment they checked into the Cattle Baron Hotel the investigation began.
Reconnaissance was carried out with the precision of a military operation.
Two suites.
Top floor.
Adjoining.
The debate at the Grounds for Divorce lasted three days.
Matters appeared to clarify themselves when Mason McCullough emerged from Parker McHale’s room one evening and nearly collided with Trixie exiting Deuce Cameron’s.
For most people that might have been uncomfortable.
Mason and Trixie simply went downstairs to the hotel bar and compared notes.
The gossip did not slow down after that.
Weeks passed as the case against Howard Herleigh prepared for trial.
Howie himself wanted to plead guilty. He had little appetite for the spectacle that was unfolding around him. But Deuce Cameron insisted on fighting.
“Not guilty,” he told him calmly. “We keep every option available.”
The town waited.
Meanwhile Parker McHale seemed determined to reacquaint herself with every corner of Fort Stockton. She visited old haunts. She drank with former classmates. She asked questions. A lot of questions. Endless questions.
Always with a notebook under her arm.
Lucinda at the Grounds for Divorce suggested the obvious theory.
“Y’all are watching her next book happen in real time.”
No one disagreed.
The trial began in the fall.
Pecos County courthouse hadn’t seen that much activity since the rodeo committee tried to sue the weather in 1987.
Danny Mercer opened for the prosecution. He thanked the jury for their service and promised a brief trial.
“Three days at most,” he said.
He laid out a simple story.
Howard Herleigh murdered Melba Duncan for money.
At the defense table Deuce Cameron looked like he had stepped out of a GQ photo spread. Parker McHale sat beside him with the composed elegance of someone attending an opera rather than a murder trial.
Douglas Duncan watched from the gallery.
Mason McCullough sat behind Parker.
Rusty Hammer was present the first day and offered running commentary during recess.
Sister Thelma attended twice and brought cookies.
Hairless B29 arrived wearing sunglasses indoors and claimed he was studying courtroom architecture.
Lucinda and Delgado came together and refused to sit anywhere except the back row. It was the first time she’d closed The Grounds for Divorce mid day since the Blizzard of ’89.
A cluster of widows held signs that read FREE HOWIE until the judge ordered them confiscated.
The circus had arrived.
Danny Mercer presented financial records. Credit card statements. Stockbroker accounts. Tens of thousands of dollars charged by Howie on Melba Duncan’s accounts. He held up photos of the Lincoln Continental he’d treated himself to at Melba’s expense. Howie smiled faintly when he saw the color photos of the pearl ivory sedan blown up for the jury to see.
When the time came for cross-examination Deuce Cameron did something unexpected.
He remained seated.
“Nothing further.”
The prosecution rested.
The courtroom buzzed all evening. The Stockton Telegram-Dispatch printed extra copies.
The following morning Deuce Cameron rose for the defense.
He called one witness.
“Helen Herleigh.”
A woman stepped forward from the gallery.
She walked to the witness stand with calm determination.
Earlier that morning she had arrived in a triple-black 1977 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency Coupe that now sat quietly in the courthouse parking lot. The car looked like it had been designed specifically for dignified entrances.
Black paint.
Black vinyl landau roof.
Red pin-striping running straight along the body.
Faux-wire wheel covers over Uniroyal Tiger Paw tires.
Inside, the cabin was upholstered in black velour with wood-grain trim and Tempmatic air conditioning.
The 350-cubic-inch V8 under the hood idled with a deep mechanical confidence that suggested it had nothing left to prove. It was the last new car she and Howie’s uncle bought together before he passed. Twenty years later the miles were still low, the memories still fresh.
Helen Herleigh took the oath.
Deuce asked a few preliminary questions establishing her relationship with Howie.
Then he leaned slightly against the defense table.
“Mrs. Herleigh,” he said evenly, “do you have any idea who murdered Melba Duncan?”
The courtroom held its breath.
Helen Herleigh did not hesitate.
“Of course I do,” she said calmly.
“I shot her myself. Given the chance, I would gladly do it again.”
Gasps rippled through the gallery.
She continued.
“The gun is in the glove compartment of my Oldsmobile outside. And the necklace I took off that woman is sitting in the ashtray. I figured she wouldn’t need it anymore.”
Howie stared at his lap.
Danny Mercer looked as though someone had removed all the oxygen from the room.
Deuce Cameron smiled faintly.
Beside him Parker McHale bent slightly and adjusted the seams of her silk stockings. Mostly for Mason’s benefit, seated right behind her.
The judge ordered the jury removed.
Bailiffs hurried outside. They returned minutes later carrying two evidence bags. Inside one was a pistol. Inside the other was Melba Duncan’s necklace.
By sunset Helen Herleigh was escorted across the street to the police station.
Yellow tape surrounded the black Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency Coupe.
And at the Cattle Baron Hotel that evening the restaurant closed for a private party.
Fort Stockton could feel the ground shifting beneath its feet.
