“Chief Wheeler in?” I asked the woman at the front desk.
Before she could page him, Wheeler walked out of his office and stepped into the waiting room.
“You’ve been busy,” he said. “Step back to my office.”
I followed him into the other room. He gestured toward a couple of chairs across the desk from his seat, and we both sat facing each other for several moments.
“I’ve gotten three different calls about you today,” he said.
“It’s nice to know people care.”
“Oh, they care, all right. They care a great deal about people walking in out of the blue and dredging up muck from years ago that ought to be left alone. If I’d known you were going to drive around Prosperity upsetting people, I’d have let you stay at the motel in Morgan.”
I leaned back in my seat and soaked in his menacing-cop gawp. People who never hang around the police tend to be intimidated by them. I had learned a long time ago that intimidation is one more coin of the realm in law enforcement.
“Nobody will talk with me,” I said. “Just what did Katie do that was so terrible?”
Wheeler stood for a second and stared out the window of his office, his thumbs hooked in his Sam Browne belt. Then he turned and took his seat behind his desk again.
“I had only been chief of police for a couple of years when Katie took off,” he said. “Katie was what you’d call wild. I reckon the only way anyone could have contained her would have been with a whip and a chair.
“There was this boy, Roger Thoreson. Nice kid. Lived with his mother. His father was dead. Tall kid. Clear of eye. Athletic. Smart. A real winner. He was the class president at both the middle school and the high school. Three-letter man at Prosperity Glen. He turned down a football scholarship to South Carolina because Duke offered him a full ride on academics.”
“A shining light.”
“Like a beacon. Everyone loved him, expected great things out of Roger. Thought he was going to put Prosperity on the map. Roger took an interest in Katie Costner. Katie came with a lot of baggage, a lot of whispers behind her back. Everybody knew she was promiscuous. This is a conservative town. People who don’t conform spend a lot of time fending off those who do.
“I think, maybe, Roger felt bad for Katie. He started spending time with her. One thing led to another and… well, by August that boy was just plain girl-stupid over her. Most people think she was his first, you know, in bed. Roger started talking crazy, saying maybe he’d go to the state college over in Parker County rather than Duke. He even talked about getting married.
“His mother — shoot, just about everybody — tried to talk him out of it. It was like talking to a fish. Nothing got through to him. Then, about two weeks before school was supposed to start, Katie pulled the plug.”
“She broke up with Roger?” I asked.
“Told him it was over. Said she’d taken up with some boy over in Mica Wells. Roger drove over there, looked up the kid, and offered to fight him for Katie. The kid kicked Roger’s butt all over half the county. Roger had to go to the ER over in Morgan, get some stitches in his scalp.
“After Roger got back from the hospital, he and Katie had a terrible fight on his front porch. Stories vary depending on who tells them, but all the neighbors agree that Katie told Roger to get out of her life. Then she stomped off the porch, got in her car, and peeled out as she left the driveway.”
“Tough deal for a young guy.”
“Later that night, Roger’s mother went up to his room to tell him good night. She found him in a bathtub full of pink water, his eyes fixed on some point a billion miles away. When I got there about five minutes later, Karen Thoreson was still screaming.”
“The people in this town thought Katie killed their dreams for Roger Thoreson,” I said.
“That pretty much sums it up. If people didn’t like Katie before that, they plain despised her afterward. She tried to stand up to it. That only made people hate her more. Finally, she gave up, packed what belongings she had, climbed in her car, and drove away.”
“That’s why people didn’t want to talk about her,” I said.
“There’re people in Prosperity who still think Lee gave up too early at Appomattox. Katie Costner’s affair with Roger Thoreson is still an open wound. You ran around Prosperity today pouring salt in it.”
“You could have told me all this yesterday,” I said. “Could have saved me a lot of trouble.”
“You weren’t looking for Katie yesterday. You were looking for her parents. If I’d thought you were planning to dig up all the bodies in town, I’d have told you. That was my mistake.”
I drove back to Quincy’s house. He had been cutting the grass. I found him sitting on his front steps, sipping from a bottle of beer.
“Got another one?” I asked as I walked up.
“In the fridge.”
I grabbed a bottle and joined him on the steps.
“Nice little town you have here,” I said.
“We like it.”
“You might have mentioned that Katie Costner was the town hump.”
“I’m no gossip, Pat. That kind of thing doesn’t go over well with the congregation.”
“I think I understand now why Katie’s funeral will be so poorly attended.”
“It’s a sad story.”
“A lot of people hated her.”
“True.”
“You think any of them hated her enough to kill her?”
He had been raising the bottle to his mouth, but stopped halfway.
“What are you suggesting?”
“I haven’t been completely open with you, Quincy. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been trying to make that right. A lot of the things I do to balance the scales of my flimsy karma involve crimes. Like murder.”
“And?”
“I know a thing or two about murder. I understand some of the reasons why people kill. Revenge is one of the biggies.”
“I don’t know. It seems a stretch to me.”
“How so?”
“You can’t escape yourself. Katie might have fled Prosperity, but she had to take herself wherever she went. Her personality being what it was, she was certain to behave the same way wherever she landed.”
“Meaning that she was bound to make people angry with her no matter where she lived.”
“Seems reasonable. Maybe Katie pulled the same stunt she did with Roger Thoreson on some poor guy down in New Orleans, someone more inclined to kill her than he was to kill himself.”
“Maybe that makes more sense.”
“It’s certainly a simpler explanation than somebody from Prosperity harboring a grudge for five years before driving or flying all the way to New Orleans to do Katie in. I’ve made the arrangements for Katie’s body to be transported here. We could have her funeral the day after tomorrow, and then you can be on your way back home. Would that suit you?”
My curiosity about Katie had been satisfied. I called Farley and told him what I had learned. I also suggested that he might consider the possibility that Katie had been murdered by a disappointed suitor in New Orleans.
That done, I had little to occupy myself until Katie’s body arrived. Fortunately, Quincy had an excellent library. He left after breakfast the next day to make hospital visits. I foraged his bookcase until I found an interesting collection of stories. Then I settled in his living room to read.
The telephone rang around eleven o’clock. I hesitated answering it, since I was little more than a traveler using his home for shelter. Then I recalled that — as a minister — Quincy had to respond to any number of emergencies on a daily basis. The least I could do was take a message.
“Quincy Pressley’s residence,” I said.