“ That fits with the old man with the van and two coffins,” said Lucas.
The interview came to an abrupt halt when Meredyth stood, rushed the door, and banged for the guard to open it.
Goddard shot to his feet, shouting, “What about my appeal? What're you going to do for me?”
Lucas, who stood a head taller than Goddard, intercepted him with a threatening glare that halted the man. “We'll do whatever we can,” he lied and then rushed out after Meredyth.
Outside the interrogation room, Meredyth held up the artist's sketch and said to Lucas, “If this is James Lee Purdy's father, and he's been here to collect his son's body, then Warden Gwinn can ID him. We don't need that low- life belly crawler Goddard.”
“ Hell of a show you put on back there, but are you OK?” Lucas asked Meredyth as they approached the warden's office in the company of a guard who had been assigned to them. Already the prison was abuzz about their visit and why they were here.
She breathed deeply. “I'll survive. Been through worse, and I think Goddard did definitely put us onto the right path. I'm not exactly a stranger to the James Lee Purdy case. The guy was a classic megalomaniac. Some kind of weird complexes that it might take a lifetime to unravel, but he had a definite fixation on DeCampe, if Goddard's to be believed.”
“ Yeah, big if. If Goddard can be believed.”
'Trusted no, but believed, I think so. He seemed a little afraid of Purdy himself, if my reading between the lines is as accurate as I think.”
“ So we need a far more serious talk with Warden Gwinn, the keeper of this asylum, and this time, we'll put the tough questions to him.” Lucas grasped his aching neck in his large right hand and massaged it as the winding way to Gwinn's office came to an end.
Gwinn, a thin, sickly looking man, stood to greet them. “I told you… wasting your time with Goddard.”
“ Not entirely,” replied Meredyth.
“ Oh?”
“ He had a lot to say about another of your inmates, a Jimmy Lee Purdy,” Lucas added.
“ Purdy died last Sunday in Old Surefire. Again, you're barking up the wrong tree, Detective Stonecoat.” Gwinn displayed a self-satisfied grin on feeling a step ahead of them.
“ We don't think so.”
“ I see, then you think that Purdy arranged for something to happen to Judge DeCampe after his death?”
“ How about on the evening of his death?” replied Lucas. “Who came to claim the body?”
“ Purdy's father.”
“ Did he look anything like this?” Meredyth pulled the police sketch of the old man from his breast pocket.
Gwinn studied the face. “Doesn't look like the same man, no. Eyes are all wrong. That turn at the mouth upward. No… I'd say Purdy's mouth was pulled down, like gravity had a- hold.”
“ But it could be Purdy's father. He had the same general features?”
“ You could say that.”
“ All right, but it was the old man who took possession of the body after the execution?”
“ Yes, correct.”
“ And he had these general features.”
“ Generally speaking, maybe yes.”
Meredyth thought how this man qualified everything he said, a typical politician. She asked, “What about the old man's vehicle?”
“ Wouldn't know. I had left before then. Did not meet Mr. Purdy Senior except to see him through the glass, sitting like a zombie up front during the execution. Didn't make eye contact. He didn't seem or appear capable of it. May've been on drugs for all I know.”
“ Who takes care of turning over the remains?”
“ It was taken care of by a guard and honorary inmates who've earned the respect of the guards.”
“ I see.” Lucas realized now that Gwinn had not seen the old man face-to-face, nor had he talked to the elder Purdy. That all the dirty business of cleaning up after an execution-once the show was over-fell to inmates and guards.
Meredyth broke the uncomfortable silence. “According to the only eyewitness we have, Judge DeCampe's abductor shapes up to be old man Purdy.”
“ And that old man left here with two pine box coffins in his van,” finished Lucas. “One housed his fried son's body, and the other was intended for the judge.”
Meredyth added, “Goddard corroborates our worst fears, that the old man means to bury his son and the judge, and she most likely alive.”
Visibly shaken, Gwinn's mouth moved, but only an unintelligible utterance sounded.
Lucas stormed at him. “Last time I looked, the State of Texas still supplies pine boxes for death row inmates, but somebody had to have given or sold the old man that second coffin. Any guesses who?”
“ Pine boxes can be had at any funeral home. You just have to ask.”
“ Do you really believe that is how Purdy came to have two coffins in back of his van, Warden?” asked Meredyth. He bridled and puffed up as if every fiber had filled with air. “All right, we build pine boxes with gold-chrome-plated handles in our inmate wood shop. Keeps idle hands busy. Takes some stress off to work a plane and a sander.”
“ We'll want to talk to your man in charge of the wood shop where they make the coffins for death-row inmates.”
“ There're three of 'em. Each on different shifts. As for the coffins, we supply them to public funerary homes all over the state, and some out-of-state locations. It's the only alternative to those high-priced Cadillac models, and there're a lot of sharecroppers in the state who don't want to go broke over a funeral.”
“ So a coffin or two going out the door wouldn't necessarily be missed?”
“ You'd best talk to my men.”
“ Before we talk to them, let me see their records,” suggested Meredyth Sanger.
“ If you wish, Dr. Sanger.”
“ We're trying to win a race here, sir, against time. Perhaps we can save some time by my going over the records. Sometimes it's in the ink-the handwriting. I'm something of a handwriting expert,” she explained. She had taken up the science of reading handwriting after learning how it served Kim Desinor, when she and Lucas had worked with her on the Snatcher case two years before.
The warden only frowned at this, punched a button on the intercom, and shouted, “Shirley, I want three personnel files in here stat. Bill Lowry, Karl Tubbs, and Jake Pascal. Got that?” He then turned to his visitors and said, “I trust every one of my guards here at Huntsville. They're the best.”
Before even meeting the three guards who rotated over seeing the wood shop, Meredyth Sanger had a fix on Jake Pascal as being the rascal who had sold a second coffin under the table to the old man, based on his handwriting. They didn't bother speaking to the other two men. Summoned to the warden's office, Pascal was immediately apprehensive and defensive, and spilled his guts the moment Meredyth displayed the artist's sketch of the elder Purdy.
“ I thought it'd be OK, you know. The old man said it was for himself, for when his time would come. Said he didn't have nothing in this life but the van he'd just bought. When we loaded his son into the van around by the shop, I just had the boys toss in another for him at no charge.”
“ No charge?” asked the warden.
“ Sir, I swear, I didn't take a cent for it. You can ask Fletcher and Columbo; they were the ones who helped load the coffins. No mystery about it.”
“ What kind of van did the old man drive?”
“ Ahhh, fancy, large, expensive, well carpeted. Roomy. Both the boxes fit in side by side. He'd taken out all the backseats.”
“ What make and model?”
“ Chevrolet, I think. Big American job. Maybe a Ford. I didn't pay any mind to that. But I wondered where he'd put the seats he'd removed so the boxes would fit.”
“ So he anticipated getting two coffins before he ever got here?” asked Lucas.
“ Look, we all knew Jimmy Lee pretty well after ten years. Jimmy asked me as a favor to him to cut out a coffin for the old man. I… I was expecting the old man and his request.”