The Big Thaw - Donald Harstad [74]
“’cause,” said Lamar, “I got kinda curious, and I called Jack Reed.”
Jack Reed was president of one of the local banks. Curious, indeed.
“I said, ‘Jack, I got this attorney bugging me ’bout having to repossess some stuff from Cletus Borglan, due to some business failure …’” He smiled. “Jack says, ‘No way.’ Tells me that Cletus is in no way in any financial trouble. So I says, ‘Anything happen that might have hit him on the stock market, or the futures market?’ And Jack said ‘No,’ that everything was fine.” He turned to George. “Jack’s Cletus’s banker.”
“Oh.”
That was one of the main differences between the new model FBI agent and the old model sheriff. The agent would spend eighteen hours getting information necessary to get an application together to ask the court for permission to dig into somebody’s financial records. The sheriff would just go to the banker and ask.
“So, I figure that, since there ain’t no financial information of a bad nature, there ain’t no business problems up here that anybody’d get too excited about. So, I think, if it ain’t financial, what is it?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s almost got to be a death in the family, like. But nobody in the family died.”
“Yeah.” I knew where he was going. I loved it.
“But, I got to thinkin’ that maybe somebody ‘in the family’ was involved in a death. Or two …” Lamar grinned. “I think our man Cletus was told about the dead brothers a long time before we tried to fill him in.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. Yea, boss.
“So I went one step further, and I got a tape here of the telephone conversation Sally had with Inez Borglan on the day the bodies was discovered. When she called to see if Cletus could come up, and he was already on his way?”
All calls made from dispatch are taped. Without exception.
He opened his other shirt pocket with a Velcro rip, and pulled out his minirecorder. He carefully turned the volume up, and placed it on my desk. George moved in a bit closer.
“I got it right at the part we want,” he said. “You can hear the rest later.” With that, he pressed “play”
There was some hiss in the tape, and voices coming over Sally’s radio console were an irritation, but the conversation itself was clear enough.
SALLY: INEZ, THIS IS THE NATION COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. COULD I SPEAK WITH CLETUS, PLEASE?
INEZ: OH … OH … GOD …
SALLY: IT’S ALL RIGHT, INEZ. REALLY. COULD I JUST SPEAK TO CLETUS?
INEZ: HE’S ON HIS WAY. HE LEFT THIS MORNING, AND HE’S ON HIS WAY.
SALLY: HE’S COMING HERE? BACK TO NATION COUNTY?
INEZ: I JUST KNEW IT.
SALLY: INEZ, HOW CAN I CONTACT CLETUS? WHERE’S HE FLYING IN TO? CEDAR RAPIDS?
INEZ: HE’LL GO RIGHT TO THE FARM. YOU KNOW
SALLY: HE’S GOING TO THE FARM?
INEZ: HARVEY WILL GET HIM TO THE FARM.
SALLY: HARVEY?
INEZ: OUR HIRED MAN. HARVEY WILL GET CLETE IN CEDAR RAPIDS. HE’S GOING RIGHT TO THE FARM. I’M SORRY. SO SORRY.
SALLY: THAT’S ALL RIGHT, INEZ. WE CAN CONTACT HIM. WHAT TIME DOES CLETUS GET TO CEDAR RAPIDS?
INEZ: HE LEFT ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO. I’M SO SORRY.
SALLY: DO YOU HAVE A FLIGHT NUMBER?
Lamar stopped the tape. “That don’t sound like much,” he said. “But if you think about it, why the hell is she so sorry? What is it that she knew was going to happen?” He looked at us. “She sound really stressed to you?”
“Sure does,” I said. And she had.
“Very,” said George.
“Now nothin’ against females, or anything,” prefaced Lamar, “but they do worry a lot, and it ain’t that unlikely for a female to say she knew something was gonna happen beforehand, no matter what it is. Right?”
Lamar’s idea of “politically correct” was to use old high school biology terms, like male and female.
“I thought that was just my mother,” said George.
“When a male subject says he’s ‘so sorry,’ he means he’s sorry for himself, like when he gets caught. But,” said Lamar, “when a female subject says she’s ‘so sorry,’ she ain’t sorry for herself, she’s sorry for you. Or about something that happened to you.”
“Okay” I said.
“I think,” said Lamar, conclusively, “that somebody called Cletus and said, ‘I just killed two guys at your