What a good story that would be, right? A man not old enough to be your daddy. Red hair, hundred and ninety-seven pounds. Guess what his hobby was. "
Brazil released West's arm. He groped for words but didn't have any.
"Backgammon, photography. He wrote the newsletter for his church, wife's dying of cancer. They got two kids, one grown, other a freshman at UNC. Anything else you want to know about him? Or is Mr. Parsons nothing but a story to you? Little words on paper?"
Brazil was visibly shaken. He started walking off to his old BMW as the Honda in the Mental Health parking lot burned and he no longer cared. West wasn't going to let him off so easy. She grabbed his arm.
"Get your goddamn hands off me," Brazil said. He jerked his arm free, unlocked his car door, and got in.
"You screwed me, Andy," West told him.
Brazil cranked the engine, and squealed out of the parking deck. West returned to the LEG and didn't go straight to investigations because she had a few of her own. She stopped off at the Records Room, where women in their own special uniforms ruled the world. West really had to court these girls, especially Wanda, who weighed somewhere between two-fifty and three hundred pounds and could type a hundred and five words a minute. If West needed a record or to send a missing- person report off to NCIC, Wanda was either a hero or hell on earth, depending on when she was fed last. West brought in a bucket of KFC once a month, and sometimes Girl Scout or Christmas cookies, depending on what was in season. West approached the counter, and whistled at Wanda, who loved West. Wanda secretly wished she was a detective and worked for the deputy chief.
"Need your help," West said, and her police belt was making her lower back ache, as usual.
Wanda scowled at a name West had scribbled on a slip of paper.
"Lord have mercy," she said, shaking her head.
"If I don't remember that like it was yesterday."
West couldn't be certain, but thought Wanda had gained more weight.
God help her. Wanda took up two lanes of traffic.
"You sit on down." Wanda pointed with her chin, as if she were Chinese.
"I'll get the microfilm."
While Wanda's minions typed, stacked, and racked, West went through microfilm. She had her glasses on and was hurt by what she saw when she got to old articles about Brazil's father. His name, too, was Andrew, but people had called him Drew. He had been a cop here when West was a rookie. She had forgotten all about him, and had never made the connection. Christ, but now that she was looking at it, the tragedy came back to her and somehow put Brazil's life in focus.
Drew Brazil was a thirty-six-year-old robbery detective when he made a traffic stop in an unmarked car. He was shot close range in the chest, and died instantly. West took a long time looking at articles, and staring at his picture. She headed upstairs to her division and pulled the case, which no one had looked at in a decade, because it had been exceptionally cleared, and the dirtbag was still on death row. Drew Brazil was handsome. In one photograph, he wore a leather bomber jacket that West had seen before.
The scene photographs clubbed her somewhere in her chest. He was dead in the street, on his back, staring up at the sun on a spring Sunday morning. The. 45 caliber bullet had almost ripped his heart in half, and in autopsy photographs, Odom had two thick fingers through the hole to demonstrate. This was something young Andy Brazil need never see, and West had no intention of talking to him ever again.
Chapter Five
Brazil was looking up articles, too, in the Observer file room. It was amazing how little had been written about Virginia West over the years. He scrolled through small stories, and black and white photographs taken back in a day when her hair was long and pinned up under her police hat. She had been the first female selected as rookie of the year, and this impressed him quite a lot.
The librarian was impressed, too. She peeked at Andy Brazil about every other second, her heart stumbling whenever he walked into her domain, which was fairly regularly. She'd never seen anyone research stories quite the way this young man did. It didn't matter what he was writing about, Brazil had to look something up or ask questions. It was especially gratifying when he spoke to her directly as she sat primly at her neat maple desk. She had been a public-school librarian before taking this job after her husband had retired and was underfoot all the time. Her name was Mrs. Booth. She was well past sixty and believed that Brazil was the most beautiful human being she had ever met. He was nice and gentle, and always thanked her.
It shocked Brazil to read that West had been shot. He could not believe it. He scrolled faster, desperate for more details, but the lamebrain who had covered the incident had completely missed an opportunity for a huge lA story. Damn. The most that Brazil could pin down was that eleven years ago, when West was the first female homicide detective, she had gotten a tip from a snitch.
A subject West had been looking for was at the Presto Grill. By the time West and other police arrived, the subject was gone. Apparently, West answered another call in the same neighborhood, and the same subject was involved, only now he was really fried and irritable. He started firing the minute West rolled up. She killed him, but not before he winged her. Brazil was dying to ask her about it, in detail, but forget it. All he knew was that she took a bullet in the left shoulder, a flesh wound, a graze, really. Was the bullet as hot as he had heard? Did it cook surrounding tissue? How much did it hurt? Did she fall, or bravely finish the gunfight, not even realize until she held out a hand and it had blood on it, like in the movies?
The next day Brazil drove to Shelby. Because of his tennis prowess, he had heard of this small, genteel town in Cleveland County, where Buck Archer, friend of Bobby Riggs, who had lost to Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes, was from. Shelby High School was a well-kept brick complex, and home of the Lions, where students with money got ready for college in big cities like Chapel Hill and Raleigh. All around was farmland and cow towns with names like Boiling Springs and Lattimore. Brazil's BMW rumbled around to the tennis courts, where the boys' team was holding a summer camp. Kids were out with hoppers of chartreuse balls. They were whacking serves, overhead smashes, cross-court shots, in pain and sweating.
The coach was prowling the fence, clipboard in hand, dressed in long white Wimbledon pants, a white shirt, a shapeless hat, zinc oxide on his nose, and all of it out of fashion and old.
"Move your feet. Move! Move!" he called out to a boy who would never move anything fast.
"I don't want to see those feet stop!"
The boy was overweight, and wore glasses. He was squinting and hurting, and Brazil remembered the suffering inflicted by coaches and drills. But Brazil had always been good at everything he tried, and he felt pity for this kid and wished he could work with him for an hour, and maybe cheer him up a little.
"Good shot," Brazil called out when the boy managed to scoop one up and push it over the net.
The boy, who did not play in the top six positions, missed the next shot, as he searched for his fan behind the green windscreen covering the fence. The coach stopped his tour, watching this blond, well-built young man heading toward him. He was probably looking for a job, but the coach didn't need anyone else for this camp, which was the most worthless crop in recent memory.
"Coach Wagon?" Brazil asked.
"Uh huh?" The old coach was curious, wondering how this stranger knew his name. Oh God. Maybe the kid had played on the team some years back and Wagon couldn't remember. That was happening more and more these days, and it had nothing to do with Johnnie Walker Red.
"I'm a reporter for the Charlotte Observer" Brazil was quick and proud to say.