Lucas sat up now and reached for his large knife, examining the gleaming long blade. He stood up and once again leaned in over the hole in the mattress, which to him looked like a winking eye.
By using his Bowie knife, which he carried in a holster below his coat at the small of the back, Lucas could see where brown bloodstains trailed through the matted material and clung to the springs below, as if in search of a life force. But he had to dig about the hole to see this. It was as if mattress and material had closed ranks over the wound and what remained of the blood the coroner's people had left behind.
Lucas next moved the large four-poster bed aside just enough to get at the spot below where the arrow had embedded into the plush and expensively carpeted floor. Here, too, the M.E. had been at work, cutting out a swath of the warm brown-and-beige-flecked carpet. Lucas stared down at the hole cut through the carpeting, finding it impossible to tell how large the hole had been before the coroner had gotten at it. Fortunately, no one had actually ripped up the floor beneath, and it was here, using the tip of his own knife, that Lucas investigated the hole in the masonry floor. Again, the force of the arrow was evident, in that it had penetrated concrete. The M.E. must have had photos taken of the hole. Lucas now made a quick guesstimate of the size of the arrow tip. It was as wide as two and a half, possibly three centimeters, plenty wide enough to cause great damage, large enough to bring down a moose in the wild.
“One hundred fifty pounds of pressure on the bow,” he said aloud now, more for the benefit of the man standing behind him in the doorway than for himself. He didn't know whether it was the guard who had followed him in or someone else. He only knew-sensed, rather-there was someone at his back.
“Heard you movin' things around. We were told everything… that is, nothing's to be touched. The ET's mayn't be completely through in here.”
“Oh, sorry. Want to help me put this bed back, then?” Lucas remained calm.
“Sure, no problem.”
“Just wanted a look at the results…”
“You all done in here now, Detective-Ahh? What'd you say your name was?”
“Plumber, Jack Plumber.”
“Plumber, huh?” The uniformed officer helped replace the bed and seemed appeased when Lucas said that he was through in the bedroom.
“But I'd like to look around the rest of the house, get a feel for the way Mootry lived, you know.”
“He lived damned well.”
“I can see that… but he also died damned badly.”
There was the unspoken reply lingering on the officer's lips: Then why in hell do you need to stomp around here any more if you know all that? But all he said was, “Do what you gotta do, Detective. You come all the way from Dallas, you sure don't want to have to make a second trip down here.”
Obviously, the cop at the gate had told this man that Plumber was with the Dallas PD. There was a detective with DPD named Jack Plumber. A phone call to the right precinct, and they could check up on Lucas's alias.
Lucas thanked the other man and started out across the great expanses of the palatial home. He doubted he'd dare take time to get to the second floor, much less the third or the fourth. “No one was staying with the judge when he was killed?” he asked the cop, who was heading back to his post.
“Not a soul. Didn't have any family, but when he threw a party, word is everybody stayed over. He got his kicks that way, they say.”
“Great Gatsby, huh?”
“Who?”
“Never mind…”
“Whatever you say. Detective.”
“One question, officer.”
“Shoot.”
“Have you or your partner at the gate used any of the facilities inside here?”
“Facilities, sir?”
“Bathroom toilet, telephone, fridge?”
His slight hesitation gave him away. “No, no, sir.”
“No drinks from the icebox, nothing? It's important. Save me a lot of time if you'll be honest with me. Besides, I'm sure the coroner took your prints to rule out any they find on the inside.”
“Well, we got a little hungry earlier,” he confessed. “Well, I noticed the sandwich. Any drinks?”
“Just a Pepsi, two, we pulled from one of the 'frigerators.”
“One of the refrigerators?”
“There's two in the kitchen.”
Stonecoat nodded. “I see. Did you and your partner use glasses?”
“No. we just took the cans and that's all we touched.”
“And you disposed of the cans?”
“In the trash, yeah.”
“In the trash inside or outside the house?”
'Tossed 'em into our vehicle, so's nothing would be disturbed, ahh, sir.”
Both the men were relatively young, likely no more than a year or two out of the academy. “Okay, good, and thanks for your honesty. We'll keep it between us.”
This seemed to appease the guard, who quickly returned to the front entrance. Lucas's questions had gone a long way toward keeping the other man at bay. Lucas knew he was walking a tightrope; he knew he hadn't much time alone here before someone close to the investigation might waltz in. Either one of the two guards could at this moment be checking up on him. A single call to Fred Amelford, chief investigator on the case, could send squad cars squealing in from all directions to end this night with his arrest. Maybe he ought to get out of here while the getting was good, he cautioned himself. But then, what risk was there in that?
He instead began to look over the living room area, where he found a pair of coasters on a marble table-one of those tables held up on the back of a jade elephant that must weigh a ton. Other than the two elegant coasters, there was nothing else out of place in the room. He wondered if the cop had lied to him, if he and his partner hadn't had a drink of some sort here amid the splendor of the old man's estate, using the marble table and coasters.
He went through an enormous ballroom, which was “put up” in neat order. From there he found a lavatory large enough to put his entire apartment into, with room to spare.
He moved on to a relatively small and cozy dining room, which was still large enough for a football squad to practice plays in. Nothing un toward here.
Another door off this area led him into the spacious kitchen area, large enough to accommodate twelve chefs, if you could keep them from cutting one another's throats.
The kitchen was also home to an enormous walk-in freezer, as well as two jumbo refrigerators, all stocked to bulging; there were large stainless steel cabinets with a huge chopping block running down the center, below which were additional cabinets and not two but three dishwashers.
Apparently, the judge enjoyed lavishing his wealth about on others who came here for gala events and parties. Lucas recalled something in the news accounts about his employing his home as a place for fund-raising events on a grand scale, with such guests as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Merle Haggard as his draws. One paper called him the most beloved benefactor in all of Houston, an altruistic horn-blower and enthusiastic supporter of the human spirit. People high up in such organizations as the March of Dimes, the American Diabetes Association, Al-Anon, Alzheimer's Research, AIDS Research, Cancer Research, Farm Aid, the Red Cross, Disaster Relief Fund of Greater Houston, Advocates for the Homeless-”You name it,” said one official.