Playing the Devil Read online

  Wendy finally managed a response. “I can understand that completely. And I also agree with you that this is something Ross or my father or any of the police don’t need to know about. You’ve got to find a way to stop beating yourself up, though. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “It’s easy to say, but hard to do,” Carly added. “It was that gash, Wendy, that gash. The ugliness of it, the brutality behind it.”

  Wendy was slightly puzzled now. After all, she had shielded Carly from the actual sight of the wound. She had only told her that it was there and not gone into detail describing it. “You’re going to have to try as hard as you can to get it out of your head. It should be easier for you than it’s been for me since that evening. At least you didn’t lay eyes on it.”

  Wendy’s words appeared to have no impact on Carly at all. “But what I was going to do was so wrong, and yet I would have done it and then been stuck with the consequences. I’ve created this hell for myself, and I can’t make it go away. Why . . . did I do it?”

  “You’ve told everything you should have,” Wendy said. “It’s up to the police to run with that much. But they don’t need to know about things you were thinking leading up to the murder, or even afterward, if it doesn’t relate to anything you actually saw or heard or did. Thank goodness we can’t be put in jail for our worst thoughts, or we’d all be locked up and serving time right now—every single one of us. That’s the truth of the matter.”

  Carly waved her off, still avoiding eye contact. “I appreciate all that, but since you just brought up the matter of the truth, have you ever wanted to kill anyone and gotten to the point where you would actually have done it?”

  Wendy exhaled quickly. “No.”

  “But I had gotten to that point. You see the difference, right?”

  Wendy mulled things over and decided to take a different approach in order to try to help lift her friend out of her mental state. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did things get so bad between you and Brent? Didn’t they start out well enough? Weren’t you in love with each other at some point?”

  “Sure, we were. I thought he was perfect husband material.” Carly’s tone began taking on a brighter, softer quality, and her eyes took on the distant look of fond memory. “Brent was the heartthrob of Rosalie High School, and I was one of many girls who dreamed of snaring him. We all thought about what beautiful children we could make with him. Then, wonder of wonders, he asked me out. We continued dating then and in college, and then he asked me to marry him right after he graduated and headed to law school.”

  Carly paused, and there was once again an edge to her voice. “But he began changing once he started practicing law. If you want my opinion, he viewed every case the way he viewed his football games in high school and college. He felt that everyone should cheer him on, the way they did when he was a quarterback. But he forgot that every time he won a huge settlement, somebody else lost, and he wasn’t very gracious about it. He rubbed it in and threw his weight around, and I think that’s when his so-called ‘fan base’ began to slip away from him.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Carly made a sweeping gesture with a rather glum face. “I’m sure you’ve noticed all the football photos on the walls. Snapshots of plays, players and coaches on the sidelines, final scoreboards, fans posing with him—why, there’s one of the Four-Second Game touchdown in every room of the house. Except the bathrooms. That’s so out of character for him because, you know, he always viewed himself as the king of the world on the throne.”

  The pun lightened the mood, and the two women managed a brief chuckle, even if it seemed a bit out of place. “The bottom line is that Brent was a man who needed to be worshiped constantly, and if it wasn’t volunteered, he made people kowtow to him anyway. If he perceived that he wasn’t getting his proper due and respect from someone, he went out of his way to punish them for it. There were no exceptions to this, even if Brent’s perceptions were wrong.”

  Wendy needed no further explanation, as Carlos, Hollis, Mitzy, and Deedah all quickly came to mind. Not to mention the greenskeeper, Gerald Mansfield, whom she had never met. But the pair of Tip Jarvis and Connor James continued to remain somewhat of a puzzle to her.

  “What was the deal with his golfing partners? Did he really lash out at them because they beat him on the course for once?”

  Carly did a face palm while shaking her head. “I’m afraid so. He was that petty. But he would have you believe that those two men envied him. Remember that phrase he used—what was it, oh, yes—jock sniffers. Somewhat of a nasty concept, if you ask me. The locker-room language these athletes will come up with.”

  “I certainly agree with you,” Wendy said. “I’d never heard the term before until Brent said it to us.”

  “Well, it wasn’t true that they were, in my opinion. Brent, Tip, and Connor ended up together by default. Their wives, Shelley Jarvis and Louisa James, and I, we all belong to the Rosalie Garden Club, and we’re great friends on all the social committees. We dragged our husbands to all the balls and fund-raisers over the years—‘dragged’ being the operative word—and that’s how the three of them got to know each other. Over many, many drinks at many parties, they found out they had golfing in common, and everything just evolved from there. I guess they even thought of it as their ‘way out.’ ”

  Wendy pressed on. “What about The Four-Second Game? How did they overcome that since they played for the rival teams?”

  “I think they called a truce and put it in the past at one point. But then Brent dredged it all up again and added that revelation about the officials being paid off. I think that pushed things over the edge.”

  “Do you think he was telling the truth?”

  Carly became emotional again as her voice quavered. “He swore me to secrecy about it all those years. It makes me think he was. But that’s another reason I wanted to talk to you. I know for a fact that Claude Ingalls, the clock operator, was living for a long time out at Rosalie Retirement Home. At least that’s what Brent told me at some point. I called out there once to confirm it, and I was told that Mr. Ingalls was in the independent wing, not assisted living or memory care. Of course that was a few years back. Should I tell that to the police or not so they can question him about everything, that is, if he’s still alive?”

  Here, Wendy was quite emphatic. “You don’t have to. I’ll tell Ross myself, and the police will definitely follow up on the lead. So that will be taken care of, and you can stay out of it completely. As for your desire to drown your husband, that’ll just be our little secret. I can readily understand why you needed to get it off your chest, and I hope talking to me has helped in some way.”

  “I don’t know,” Carly told her. “Sometimes I think this whole unbelievable thing will do me in.”

  Wendy took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m glad you turned to me then. But you have to try to forgive yourself.”

  “I’m telling the truth when I say that I really don’t miss Brent at all, but I’m still ashamed that I thought about doing what I was going to do to him for even one split second.”

  “The best thing is for you to just keep it to yourself, as I said,” Wendy added. “No one else needs to know.”

  “It shouldn’t have come to this,” Carly said. “It’s all my fault. It’s been a couple of years since David graduated from college and started his teaching career up in Milwaukee. I should have served Brent divorce papers then and walked away from all this. That was my chance for freedom. There was no love left between us, and I knew it as well as David knew it.”

  “Why do you think you held on, then?” Wendy continued, her voice as gentle as possible.

  Carly threw her hands up in the air and shrugged. “Inertia, I guess. I’d become someone deadened to change. Someone afraid to be on my own again at my age. I don’t know. Pick one. It was the mistake of my life. And now, here we are with Brent’s body down in Jackson taking a number to be autopsied.
Then after that, he’ll be cremated. At this memorial service, though, I know I’ll feel nothing. Except guilt. That gash . . . and the guilt.”

  “I’m glad you told me all of this if it’s helped you in any way.”

  Carly managed a weak little smile that didn’t last long. “I’m going to try and take your advice about letting go of all this if I can. I hope I’m up to the challenge.”

  The two women hugged, said goodbye, and Wendy left Brentwood feeling that she had accomplished something in giving good counsel to Carly. It was the least she could do for a bridge-playing friend who had been put through the wringer.

  * * *

  On the drive back to Rosalie with its undulating kudzu-covered ravines on either side of the highway, Wendy revisited the hypothetical secret Carly had divulged so reluctantly to her. Now she knew something about what had gone on that night at the RCC that no one else knew. Well, that wasn’t quite right. It was something that might have happened, but no one would ever know about it if she kept Carly’s trust. Was it the right thing to keep it from Ross or her father? Did it have a bearing on the actual murder? Carly was clearly an unstable mess because of all she had endured recently—that much was abundantly clear. But why hold that against her? She had weathered the storm of being married to Brent for decades, and that had obviously taken its toll on her.

  As Wendy entered Whiteapple Village on the outskirts of Rosalie, she decided that it would definitely be wrong to betray Carly in any manner whatsoever. The evidence clearly pointed to Carlos’s pestle as the murder weapon, and that was what Ross and the CID would run with. In fact, Wendy knew that Ross would likely be interrogating Carlos Galbis right about now downtown at the police station. She decided to send him a text to bring him up to date:

  just finished with Carly Ogle, went well.

  His response arrived about thirty seconds later:

  just about to go in and start w/ Carlos Galbis. Ttyl.

  kiss, kiss.

  Inside the interrogation room with its institutional green walls and TV camera affixed high up in one corner, it was Ross’s observation that Carlos Galbis presented a very straightforward, clean-cut appearance and impression, just as he had the evening of Brent Ogle’s murder. Although he was not wearing his customary bartender’s tux, he was still impeccably dressed in a navy-blue jacket, white shirt, and red tie. To say that the outfit suggested someone who wanted to make a point about being an American and perhaps loyal to its flag was an understatement, and Carlos lost no time in getting around to just that.

  “To answer your question about why Mr. Ogle liked to pick on me, you have to understand first, Mr. Rierson, that my father, my Poppo, barely got out of Cuba alive when he was just a boy of fourteen. His father—MiGrando, we called him—was a food broker in Havana at the time of Castro’s revolution and takeover from Batista. Those were dangerous times, and life was cheap. So because MiGrando was considered a capitalist and therefore the enemy doing business with America, he was in line for the firing squad. Castro seized his warehouse and his home, but MiGrando, Mamacita, and Poppo got away along with my uncles and aunts and shipped out to New Orleans in the nick of time to start a new life. They were stowaways on a freighter. Then later on, they came up the Mississippi River to Rosalie and MiGrando started a new food brokerage business right here. It did not take long for him to study to become an American citizen. He and Mamacita and Poppo were all grateful to have a country to adopt, and when Poppo married my Mommi and had me and my brothers and sisters, we were all just as proud to be Americans as they were.”

  Ross was showing off his customary interrogation smile and said, “That’s all very stirring, Mr. Galbis, and I’m glad to hear it all worked out for your family, I truly am. But I believe you were going to explain why Brent Ogle bullied you, and I think you’ve gotten off track a bit.”

  Carlos sat up even straighter in his chair and brought his hands together. “No, sir. I just wanted to be sure you understood that my family—all of us—are legal immigrants. Mr. Ogle was always implying that we were not—or rather, I was not. It seems to me that the current political climate regarding immigration has made things worse for certain people, and Mr. Ogle upped the ante. He referred to me as a wetback sometimes, as if I’d swum across the Rio Grande, or as someone needing a green card, and he never called me by my given name. I also speak perfect English, being the third generation of the Galbis family to live here in America, but sometimes when he got really drunk, Mr. Ogle would speak to me in some sort of pidgin Spanish. You know—putting o’s on the ends of words. Making up things like drinko and quicko. He was drunk like that the afternoon he was murdered, including all the time he was in the hot tub, of course. That trip out when I took that last drink to him, he was half-asleep when I called his name. Maybe he was about to pass out.”

  “But he was alive when you left him that last time?”

  “Yes,” Carlos said emphatically. “And mad as hell that I woke him up, cussing all over the place. I thought for a second he might even throw the drink on me, although he was never one to waste liquor. Still, he was capable of anything.”

  Ross nodded sympathetically but pressed on. “How did that make you feel when he treated you the way he did all the time?”

  There was a flash of anger in Carlos’s face. “I won’t lie to you, Mr. Rierson. I had to bite my tongue all the time. I didn’t dare go and complain to Mr. Voss when he was alive because he and Mr. Ogle were like this.” Carlos crossed his fingers and held them above his head. “I have not only been making a good living as the RCC’s bartender, but I have a good reputation around Rosalie as well. People will come out there just to try one of my mint juleps, and they keep coming back for more. It keeps me well in the black supporting my wife and three children. Especially the tips. Except nothing much to speak of from the pockets of Mr. Ogle. Ever. He treated us all like his own personal slaves.”

  “Not surprising from what I’ve heard,” Ross said. “At any rate, we have to deal with the fact that it was your pestle that was used to club Mr. Ogle over the head. There’s no way around that. I want you to try and give me the best timeline you can about your whereabouts during the half hour of the blackout. It’s in your best interests that you be as accurate as you can, if not regarding the exact minute, then the sequence of events as you remember them.”

  Carlos took his time, eyeing the ceiling intently before he finally caught Ross’s gaze and spoke. “I remember very clearly that when the power went off, I wanted to call my wife, Elena, to see if the power was off at home, too, and if everything was okay with her and the children. But there’s a part of the roof over the bar that interferes with this old phone of mine sometimes, as I told you before. So I have to go out to the portico to make calls now and then. That’s what I did, and I was able to get through.”

  “How long were you out there, do you think?”

  Carlos considered again. “Maybe five minutes. My wife likes to go on and on, and she even put my oldest boy on so he could tell me he was looking after everybody for me. That Carlos Junior, he is my little prince, and he wanted to tell me all about this book he’d finished reading all by himself. My wife started reading to him when he was very little, and now, he can’t get enough of books.”

  Ross nodded approvingly. “That will serve him well, I’m sure. But moving on—was there anyone else out there under the portico when you arrived, or did anyone else join you during that time?”

  “No, I was alone the whole time,” Carlos said, sounding very sure of himself. “I do remember seeing phone lights before I went out there, but there was no one around later.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. It’ll help me makes some sense of this portico business.”

  “Pardon? ”

  “Miz Carly Ogle and Hollis Hornesby have told me that they were also out on the portico before and during part of the blackout but that no one else was there. I have to check into the possibility that someone is not telling me the truth.�
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  The expression on Carlos’s face clearly indicated that he had taken offense at Ross’s words. “But I am telling you the truth, Mr. Rierson. If they said they were there, then they must have come and gone before I went out there. I am a hardworking, honest man—a family man. Perhaps some would say I had every reason to take my pestle and hit Mr. Ogle over the head with it, but I can assure you, I did not. It would be against my religion to take a human life. I go to Mass regularly here at the Basilica.”

  “I understand and applaud you for that, but you will concede that you were away from the bar long enough for someone to have sneaked into the great room, taken it, and then used it to murder Mr. Ogle, will you not?”

  “That is undoubtedly what happened, Mr. Rierson,” Carlos said. “Because I assure you again, I did not do such a thing.”

  “Did you by any chance notice that the pestle was missing when you returned from your phone call under the portico?”

  Carlos sounded supremely confident. “I did not for two reasons. First, it was obviously very dark, and second, I did not expect it to be missing so I did not search for it. Why should I expect such a thing—that someone would be plotting a murder, such an obvious work of the Devil? In any case, everyone in the building knew I used the mortar and pestle frequently to make juleps and mojitos, and they all knew where I kept them both. They were always out in plain sight as the tools of my trade.”