Sassafras, Part 79

Rick

As soon as I got in my car I flipped open my phone and called Boyd. I was surprised to get through.

“Boyd.”

“Get my message?”

“Rick! Sure is good to hear from you. I was just about to send in the bloodhounds.”

“Don’t you check your voicemail?”

“Oh, I’ll get around to it. I was busy all weekend with a hostage negotiation in Branson.”

“I didn’t hear anything about that on the news.”

“Well, of course not. You never hear about half of the things I do, young man,” he drawled with that slow Texas accent of his. It was easy to think he was just a dumb country bumpkin if you didn’t know better, but I’d been in his office and saw the diplomas and awards on the wall, the pictures of him shaking hands with presidents, or in his Marine uniform. “Any time my job makes the news I consider it a personal insult. A job well done is a job unpublicized. What do you have?”

“Just a murder witness.” That ought to get his attention.

He gave a soft whistle. “Somebody’s talking about Santos?”

“No, not Santos. Jenny. That waitress I told you about. The one that looked like a hit and run? I have a witness saw her fighting with a county sheriff. Did you ever ID the man in the picture I e-mailed you? The guy with Sneider.”

“That would be Officer Stapleton. Not the brightest bulb in the package, but well connected. His uncle is a judge, his grandmother was Miss Missouri, second runner-up for Miss America. His step-father is the governor’s personal assistant. Old money, but not much of it’s left. Personally, he’s a real piece of work. Has a file almost as big as Sneider’s. Probably be bigger if his parents didn’t still clean up after him. Is he your man?”

“I don’t know. All I’ve got is a nickname, Hollywood, and that he was involved in breaking up a bar fight at Tanner’s last summer that left a man with a broken arm.”

“I don’t know anything about a Hollywood. Or a bar fight. I don’t have Stapleton’s file here in front of me. It’s back at the office. Any connection between Stapleton and Sneider besides a picture?”

I had to think for a minute. “I don’t know. I don’t have anything connecting Sneider to Jenny’s death besides hunches and a generally bad attitude about the man. He’s just been acting squirrelly ever since she died, but he never was exactly normal. I know somebody at the sheriff’s department has him sweating about it, but I don’t know who it is.”

I pulled in the parking lot of the Monte Vista and got out. “Look, I’m home now. I’ll get on-line and see what I can find out and call you back.”

While my laptop booted up I jumped in the shower. When I got on-line I looked up Stapleton’s police file. It didn’t take long to find a complaint against him for police brutality last summer, but there weren’t many details. The whole thing seemed to have been hushed up pretty thoroughly. All I got was the name of the person complaining, Andy Martin. I looked Martin up and eventually found him living in a high-brow subdivision in Jefferson City. A big step up for an auto mechanic. An auto mechanic who was treated for multiple fractures of the left arm last summer. I smelled a payoff. And a connection, however thin.

I decided to try calling him, but got his wife, girlfriend, some female voice on the phone. I said I was a lawyer for the sheriff’s department, but she didn’t have anything to say to me. When I mentioned Stapleton’s name she questioned his parentage and intelligence and hung up. I liked her attitude.