“Cassandra Smith,” she answered.
“Want to join me for dinner tonight at Big Bob’s?”
“Sure. What time?”
“I’ll pick you up at seven.”
There was a pause. Dead air brought about by unfinished business.
“Can you take a few days off next week?” I asked.
“I think so. What do you have in mind?”
“I have to go to New Orleans. Want to join me in the French Quarter?”
“Sounds promising. Count me in,” Sandy purred in her sexiest voice.
“Great. See you tonight.”
“Tonight,” she said and hung up.
The outer door to the office opened and Jake raised his head for a moment, then resumed his snooze. I knew it was Billy. Anyone else, other than Sandy, and Jake would have been on his feet in a defensive posture. Jake could not see the outer door and I was constantly amazed at how he could distinguish one person from another. Dog radar, I concluded.
Billy walked in and sat down.
“How was Knoxville?”
“Enlightening,” I said. I proceeded to tell Billy everything I had learned from the trip.
“Sounds like Ed Sanders’s death might not have been an accident,” Billy said. “Too many coincidences.”
“I agree.”
“What’s next for you—Hoffman?”
“Hoffman,” I confirmed. “What did you learn?”
“Not much. Woman I know works for East Tennessee Travel. I bought her dinner Tuesday night and then we went back to her office and spent hours on her computer looking for possibilities that would match the Fairchilds flying out of any airport within a three hundred mile radius. Anything that fit we tracked down. Confirmed home addresses and made a few phone calls pretending to be customer service. Everything checked out. If they flew out then they probably flew separately, which would make sense because it would be almost impossible to track down that many possibilities. Wednesday I drove to Tri-City Airport and checked the parking lot for their white Jeep Cherokee. No luck. Then I followed my hunch and drove to Atlanta and checked all their parking lots for a white Jeep Cherokee Limited. I found ten, none with Tennessee tags. I’m convinced that they didn’t fly anywhere.”
“Maybe the Cherokee didn’t have Tennessee tags.”
“Figured you’d get around to that,” Billy smiled. He reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet and extracted a folded piece of paper.
“Tag numbers,” he said, obviously pleased with himself.
“Smart,” I said. Billy smiled.
I picked up the phone and paged Roy Husky. He called immediately.
“Speedy Gonzales, I assume,” I said as I picked up the phone.
“You got anything better to do than try to be funny?” he snapped.
“Not really. I do have a question though. Were the tags on Ronnie’s Jeep Tennessee tags?”
“Probably, but I’ll check to make sure. And it was Sarah Ann’s Jeep, not Ronnie’s. Call you back,” Roy said.
Billy went to get coffee and I followed to get a refill. He poured mine and then his and we both added sugar and half-and-half. I remembered the first time I saw Billy drink coffee. Didn’t know Indians drank coffee, I had teased.
This Indian does was Billy’s rumbling response.
The phone rang and I put it on speaker. I was sure it was Roy.
“Youngblood,” I answered.
“Tennessee tags,” Roy barked. “You guys getting anywhere?”
“Yes and no,” I answered. “Drop by sometime and I’ll fill you in. How is Fleet?”
“Keeping busy but the suspense is killing him. He still thinks Sarah is dead or he would have heard from her.”
“What do you think?”
“I think maybe they took the money and skipped, but something doesn’t feel right. I can’t talk now. Just find her,” he added and then he was gone.
“What now, Blood?” Billy asked.
“The Big Easy, Chief, the Big Easy.”
Sandy and I were on a Monday afternoon flight to New Orleans, and she was asleep with a book in her lap, while I revisited Sunday’s sports pages. We had spent much of the weekend together at the lake house. Dinner at Big Bob’s Friday night had been a welcome relief from the emptiness I was feeling about Sandy’s impending departure. Sylvia, Big Bob’s wife, had fixed a huge pot roast with new potatoes, carrots, and delicious brown gravy, baked apples, and homemade yeast rolls. Big Bob and I ate to the point of gluttony and then sat on the front porch with our feet up sipping after-dinner drinks and discussing the upcoming football game between Tennessee and Georgia that we were attending Saturday.
We drove down in Big Bob’s marked Chief of Police car, which gained us access to parking next to the stadium—professional courtesy and all that. Big Bob knew a few Athens policemen and Georgia state troopers, which led to more introductions and a lot of good-natured kidding. All the Georgians were positive this was going to be their day. I was introduced as a detective on the Mountain Center force. PIs were not necessarily held in high esteem.
Our box seats were in the loge level of Sanford Stadium. The tickets had been sent to me by an Atlanta publisher whose IRA account I was still handling as a favor, and my reward was Tennessee-Georgia tickets every other year.
Big Bob and I were both nervous about Tennessee’s chances but as game time grew near I was feeling an unexplainable sense of calm. Seconds before kickoff I turned to Big Bob and asked, “What do you think?”
“The Georgia fans are entirely too cocky,” he said. “I think it filters down to the team. I believe we will kick butt.”
“You may be right,” I responded. Kick butt we did. Tennessee dominated from start to finish in a rout that could have been worse. Reading about it now as we winged to New Orleans was just as sweet as it had been on the ride home from the game with Big Bob.
I looked at Sandy and wondered what life was going to be like after she left for Atlanta. There was only one way I could keep her from leaving and I was not ready to make that commitment. Absence makes the heart grow fonder or out of sight out of mind? Very soon I was going to find out.
I rented a car at the airport and we drove into the city. I took the Poydras Street exit and cut over to the Residence Inn on St. Joseph in the warehouse district right next to the French Quarter. We unpacked and settled into our suite by opening a bottle of KJ and sharing it in our kitchen that overlooked the courtyard. When the wine was gone we checked out the four-poster bed.
Later Sandy and I had dinner at a corner table of Mike Anderson’s Seafood Restaurant on Bourbon Street. We arrived late and the dinner crowd was thinning out, which let us dine in relative quiet. We talked about everything except her move, but the essence of it hung in the air creating a subtle tension that had not previously existed between us. Our parting was not going to be easy.