I called Craddock, introduced myself, and told him of Jack Penn’s murder while he took notes on the typewriter. The Riverton PD, I said, had learned from the Crockett PD that Penn had no close living kin but that he had an ex-wife, Thelma Day, still living in Crockett. I wanted to talk to her.
“I’m leafin’ through the phonebook while you’re talkin’,” Craddock said. “Here’s three Days. Let me check the City Directory.” He came back a minute later and gave me her number.
“Bailey, I’d predate your keepin’ me posted on all this,” Craddock said. “If they get Penn’s killer call me up, day or night. Meantime, I’ll scout around here and see if I come across anything on Penn you don’t already know. Let’s trade information. We ain’t in competition and this story sure as hell beats the grand openin’ of the John Deere store.”
The phone rang a long time before she answered it, but when she did Thelma Day had one of these Deep-in-the-Heart-of-Takes-Us accents you always hear imitated but never believe. Believe it, she had it — also a very real ingenuousness. The Riverton Homicide people had already called her. She knew of Penn’s death, but she didn’t hesitate a split second before answering everything I asked and didn’t seem to begrudge me the time despite the kids I could hear screaming in the background. Every once in a while she covered the mouthpiece of the phone to yell something at them.
The upshot of it was that she didn’t know much — at least she didn’t think so. She and Penn were married in the middle of his four-year hitch in the Navy. They had dated a few times in high school, and when he had come home after some sea duty out of San Diego she’d fallen in love with his swagger, his uniform, and his exotic stories of Japan, Guam, and Hawaii.
“You got to remember, I’ve never been farther out of Crockett than Houston,” she explained. “All that adventure stuff just thrilled me right down to my socks.”
Five months before he was due for discharge, Thelma had to call Penn in San Diego to inform him that his twenty-year-old sister Joann was dead. Joann was a student at Southeastern Texas State College, a small liberal arts school in Houston. She had jumped or fallen from the window of her fifth-floor dormitory room. The post-mortem revealed the presence of some kind of drug in her system and her death was ruled accidental, probably attributable to drugs.
Joann and her brother Jack had been very close. Their parents were both dead and Jack had sent part of his Navy pay to Joann to keep her in school. “She wasn’t wild,” Thelma Day said, “but nobody knew who she ran around with at that place.”
Jack came home on emergency leave to bury his sister, then returned to San Diego to finish out his enlistment. When he was discharged, things had soured between him and Thelma. She said he didn’t seem to want to go to work, neglected her, and spent most of his time in Houston. “All he ever told me was that he had to find out what happened to Joann,” Thelma told me. “We couldn’t live on his musterin’-out pay and whenever he’d come back here from one of his trips to Houston, why, we spent most of the time argyin’.”
They had been divorced six months ago and she hadn’t seen him since.
“I got married again not long after our divorce went through,” Thelma told me. “I guess you could say I’m the marryin’ kind. Anyway, Ernie Day, my husband, he was a widower with three young kids — the ones you hear climbin’ the curtains in the background. Ernie’s got the Delco franchise down here and we’re doin’ just fine.”
Thelma said she had no idea why Penn had come to Riverton and no idea why anybody would want to kill him. “Jack never did anybody no harm,” she said with genuine sadness. “When Joann died he lost all of his ambition...” Her voice trailed off to a sigh.
I thanked her and told her I wished her and Mr. Day much happiness. I meant it. Before hanging up, I asked her if she had a photograph of Jack. She said she did and she would special-delivery it to me.
Next I called Jerry Quinn, Riverton’s homicide lieutenant, and passed along the information Thelma Day had given me. The story she had told his people was virtually identical to what she’d told me. Quinn said they were checking into Joann Penn’s death in Houston, hoping they could make some tie between that and Penn’s coming to Riverton. He said that tossing Penn’s two-room apartment had produced nothing significant — just his clothes and other personal stuff, a stack of magazines and paperback books, and some literature from Riverton College — no letters or notes or indication of any kind as to why or precisely when he had come to town, or what he had intended doing here. The college had no record of his attending classes and the literature found in his room was the common “Take One” variety of handout he’d probably picked up off a table in the registrar’s office at the campus.
Penn had visited the campus at least once. Quinn’s people had found a visitor’s parking permit from Riverton College in the glove compartment of his 1973 navy-blue Pinto Runabout, along with a campus map. The car had been found in the parking lot behind his apartment house. It had Texas plates and 63,000 miles on the odometer.
I called Craddock in Crockett — still loving the combination — and gave him a summary of the Thelma Day and Jerry Quinn information.
“Do you think Penn came up there because he found out somethin’ about his sister’s death?” Craddock asked me.
“It’s possible, but I can’t think what it might be,” I said. “Thelma said Joann’s death was all Jack could think about.” I told Craddock our homicide investigators were looking into the situation at Southeastern Texas State and asked him if he could find out more details on Joann Penn’s death or what Jack had been doing on the campus.
“I’ve never been on that campus,” Craddock said, “but I know where it is. I think I’ll mosey on over there early tomorra, bout when it opens. I’ll call you if I get anythin’.”
I reread my clippings. Penn had apparently visited the Riverton campus at least once, picking up the literature and keeping the visitor’s parking permit they’d given him at the gate. I had written of the college only once in the past couple of months, researching my “senseless-vandalism” column. Several faculty offices in the chemistry building had been broken into, a ton of file-cabinet paper had been dumped and strewn on the floor, desks had been ransacked, and a word resembling “hog” in two-foot-high letters had been spray-painted on a wall outside the offices. The campus police had investigated and reasoned that the vandals may have been searching for exams but, failing to find any, were content to render the offices unusable for a few days.
Our education editor, Connie Oates, had followed up on the vandalism incident but the campus police had turned up nothing new in the month since it had happened.
I wondered if Penn might have been the vandal. If so, what had he been searching for? Why would he bother to take along a spray can of paint if he had been looking for something? Nothing fit.
My second-day story on the Penn murder, which ran on Friday, was a routine recap of the case together with the oddments of information I had gathered from Lieutenant Quinn. For the customarily skimpy Saturday edition I wrote a brief Riverton Police Department Homicide Investigators Report No New Leads type of story and let it go at that.
Willis was in an editor’s conference when I dropped my no-new-leads story into his wire basket along with some other non-Penn copy. At the adjacent desk, Tanner, the Assistant City Editor, was working over the late edition of the Press with an outsized pair of shears, clipping the stories he would have city-side reporters follow up on.
Tanner smokes cigarettes himself, but he’s devoted to my pipe. He caught a whiff of my new aromatic tobacco and gave me his daily pipe crack. “What are you smoking now,” he asked without looking up, “fudge?”