A Virtuous Woman

Book 3: A Newspaper in Texas

by L.J. Breedlove

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Female Sleuths; Political Thrillers; Romantic Suspense; texas; political intrigue; female lead; small town suspense; newspaper editor

Synopsis

A WOMAN'S PLACE?
Ruthie Brewster was on a mission to make sure every abused woman in Plains City, Texas, has a safe place to go.
Until someone killed her.
Plains City Gazette news editor Katy Williams admired Ruthie a lot. She's appalled the police seem less than committed to finding her killer. A local minister thinks what she was doing was of the devil and that she got what was due her. Even her own brother seems unmoved by her death.
Then someone kills another woman on the board of the Women's Shelter. It looks like the killer has a list. And Katy's public support for the Shelter just added her to the list.

Release date: December 16, 2020

Print pages: 227

Sample

A Virtuous Woman

Editor’s Note

This is the third book in A Newspaper in Texas, a historical mystery series set in the 1980s. It’s 1988. We have a woman running for vice president on the Democratic ticket. She isn’t well received in Texas where they think she sounds like a damn Yankee — but then again, she is a damn Yankee.

Molly Ivins — who would later gain fame nationally when she nicknamed George W. Bush “Shrub” — is kicking butt as a columnist at the Dallas Times Herald. Newspapers are booming in Dallas and across the state.

Feminist is no longer a dirty word elsewhere, but in Texas, it is still considered an insult to be called one. In Texas, women politicians succeed wearing high heels, with teased blonde hair and plucked eyebrows, and a penchant for calling people honey.

Or as another famous Texas woman, Gov. Ann Richards, would say a few years later: “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

This book is dedicated to all the women who made the world a better place. Even if they had to dance backwards in high heels to do it.

 

Chapter 1

(Friday, May 6, 1988, 3 a.m., Plains City, TX)

The kitchen probably hadn’t been updated since the ‘50s until a couple of hours ago when someone decided to decorate the room with blood splatters.

Before that, it had been an old-fashioned kitchen with yellow walls and worn gray-patterned linoleum. The appliances were ancient and large enough to feed crowds of people — they had been white.

It was amazing how much blood could splatter when an amateur decided to cut someone’s throat with a butcher knife. The murderer hit the carotid artery, and the victim had just enough time to try to fight back. In the struggle, blood splattered across the kitchen before she bled out on the floor.

The police were carrying a body bag out the back door as I peered around the officers looking for Police Chief Jerry Don Hilliard. I was grateful I’d arrived after they’d removed the body.

I’d just met Ruthie Brewster at a luncheon where she was the guest speaker. She’d made an impression on me. Ruthie was the director of the Women’s Shelter, which also ran the safe houses in town, as well as supporting the clinic that offered abortions. She was intensely driven and the main reason women in Plains City, Texas, had any place to go when they were the victims of violence. This wasn’t the first grisly crime scene I’d been at, but knowing the victim, however slightly, made it worse.

Normally, I wouldn’t have been here at all. I was an editor, not the cop reporter. Unfortunately, my cop reporter shared custody of his young daughter and she’d been with him when the call came in. So, he called me. At my boyfriend’s house. How embarrassing is that?

 

“Katy, the phone, it’s for you,” this gravelly male voice kept repeating.

When it registered, I opened my eyes and squinted. “Sam?” I asked. “What time is it?”

“About 2 a.m.,” he said, handing me the phone.

“Hello?” I said, still drowsy.

“Katy? It’s Danny.” I shook my head to clear it. Danny Ferguson was my cop reporter.

“Yeah, Danny. What’s up?” I reached over and patted Sam on the shoulder to let him know that I was back in the land of the living. He grinned, used to the difficulty in getting me awake. I wondered briefly how Danny knew to call me at Sam’s place, and how many of my staff knew the same thing. Reporters are used to keeping track of people and what they’re doing; they make great gossips. It was a problem if you liked keeping your private life private, which I did. Of course, I also liked knowing all the gossip on everyone else.

“There’s been a murder,” Danny was saying, as I tried to focus in on his words. “But I’ve got my daughter for the night and can’t leave her. Can you find someone to cover for me?”

“Did you try Eric?” I asked.

“No answer.”

“What about his beeper?”

“Nothing.”

I sighed. “Okay. I’ll check it out myself. What’s the address?”

He gave it to me, and I jotted the address down mechanically on the notepad Sam thrust at me.

“That’s the Women’s Shelter,” I said, recognizing the street address. “Who was killed?”

“The director. Ruthie Brewster. Her throat was cut with a kitchen knife. It’s probably going to be ugly, Katy.”

 Ruthie?

 I thanked Danny for calling, a somewhat stupid thing to do when someone wakes you in the middle of the night to send you out on a murder story. I handed the phone back to Sam who hung it up.

“Work?” he asked. He was unusually tolerant of my job. He put in quite a few extra-curricular hours as a high school coach, but I’d dated other men who were tolerant of their own 60-hour weeks and resentful of mine. And even a saint would be resentful of telephone calls in the middle of the night. He baffled me.

I crawled out of bed and struggled to get dressed. Sam lounged against the headboard of the bed. His broad shoulders and bare, hairy chest tempted me to curl up against him and to hell with work. I looked away, but not before I saw his grin. He knew full well how he affected me, damn him.

“Someone killed the director of the Women’s Shelter,” I said, zipping up my jeans. “Danny’s got his daughter for the night, so he can’t go.”

“Any particular reason why you have to go see for yourself? Couldn’t you get the information from the cops in the morning?” Sam’s voice was mild, but I gave him a quick look. Sometimes I wished he get mad about my work just so I could quit waiting for the blowup to happen. As it was, I was always holding my breath.

“I could,” I admitted. “Probably would, except I had lunch with the woman just yesterday. She’s done a lot of good for the community, Sam. I want to check it out myself.”

“The chief should hire you,” he said.

“I don’t think he’d appreciate the suggestion,” I said, smiling as I leaned over and kissed him. We took the time to do it thoroughly.

“See you tonight for dinner?” he said, as I pulled away and headed for the door.

“Sure,” I said. “We’ve got a party to go to, remember?” We weren’t quite living together, but I had to admit that I hadn’t been eating too many meals in my small basement apartment lately. Sam’s house, with its Danish modern furniture and white tile kitchen, was much more attractive. And Sam was most certainly better company than a television, not to mention a better cook than Budget Gourmet.

I let myself out of the house and drove across town to where the shelter was located. The location was kept secret; I’d just learned it recently when I signed up for the peer counselling sessions. The safe home network was even more secretive. Still, people had to know about it.

The shelter surprised me, although I can’t tell you what I’d been expecting. It was an old farmhouse-style home with a big front porch, and scraggly grass in a poor, blue-collar neighborhood. There were cop cars all around.

I spotted the young cop I knew best and angled toward him.

“Katy, you covering cops these days?” Hank Fields asked as I walked up to him.

I explained about Danny. “Long shift for you, too. What happened?”

Hank shrugged. “I owed someone a trade for a long weekend. Chief’s in the kitchen, go see for yourself.”

There’s an old joke about road crews: it takes six to dig a hole. One to dig, three to watch, one to supervise the digger, one to supervise the watchers. Cops are like that. Cops were everywhere. Some of them were actually collecting evidence in the kitchen, others were talking to the women who were staying at the shelter. But there seemed like quite a few who were just supervising.

I wriggled my way through the crowd toward one of them. Jerry Don Hilliard, Plains City’s police chief, was a 50-year-old Texan with political ambitions. He was an imposing sight with his military-cut gray hair, broad shoulders and just a slight paunch. He was a good ol’ boy and wasn’t always comfortable with what he saw as my Yankee feminism, but we’d come to have a measure of respect for each other during past year. Last fall hit all of us hard. He’d liked Vern Cooper, and he had taken his secret KKK leadership hard. But then, everyone liked Cooper. He ran a hardware store that had been in his family for generations, donated generously to the booster club, and served on the school board. And, it turned out, he was also the leader of the local chapter of the KKK and a serial killer. I shut down my train of thought or I’d be having hysterics in front of all these cops.

“Katy,” Jerry Don Hilliard said by way of welcome.

“Chief,” I said, nodding my head. “What happened?”

“If you’re here, you probably know as much as we do,” he pointed out with some irritation. Cops are not overly fond of reporters. I don’t lose much sleep over it; reporters aren’t particularly fond of cops either.

“Some kid came down for a drink of water and found Ruthie dead,” he said. “Someone slashed her throat with a butcher knife.”

“That’s it?”

He gestured at the uniformed men standing around us in answer.

“Any idea which person killed her, Chief?” a male voice asked at my side. I turned to look and smiled in recognition at Seth Brewster, Ruthie’s older brother.

Seth was in his mid-50s, a distinguished, gray-haired man, who even in the middle of the night, was dressed impeccably in gray slacks and a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar. If Jerry Don Hilliard was a Texas good ol’ boy, Seth Brewster was the stereotyped Southern gentleman with the gracious manners one associates with Ashley in Gone with the Wind. He was a bulwark in the state’s Democratic Party, a legal lion, and respected by everyone I knew.

“Sounds like you aren’t surprised that someone did, Seth,” Jerry Don observed.

Seth Brewster frowned and shook his head. “She’s always had a knack for making people angry,” he said with a sigh. I wondered what family skeletons were rattling their chains in his memory. He was a decade older than his sister; surely there was more to that comment than just sibling rivalry.

“Yeah,” Jerry Don said. “I’ve had a run in or two myself.”

“I’m not surprised,” Seth said, and the two men looked at each other in that tolerant, male way that says what can you do with them? They’re women.

Impatiently, I asked, “Was there a struggle? Surely she wasn’t caught by surprise?”

“Some struggle. You’re right, she had to have seen the perp come in. We figure the knife was on the drainboards by the sink.” The chief snapped back into his professional cop mode. “There’s no way the person could have gotten over there without Ruthie seeing him. Or her. She probably knew who it was. Knew her attacker, I mean.”

I nodded. No matter which door the attacker had come in, Ruthie would have seen or heard him. Or her.

“Did you find the knife?” I asked.

“Yeah. It looks like whoever did it, dropped the knife and fled out the back door. We’ll know more when the coroner is done. Maybe the child interrupted the murderer, causing them to panic and run out the door.”

“How is the child?” I asked. “She must be terrified.”

“Doc sedated her. It’ll be a while before she can answer questions.”

It would be even longer before she forgot the grizzly sight she must have stumbled upon. “How old is she?”

“Nine,” the chief said with some grimness. I didn’t blame him. Not only was I sick for the girl, but that was awfully young to be a credible witness. Even if she did see something.

“Any idea about a motive?” I asked.

It was Seth who answered that. “Practically everyone who knew her had one,” he said, with remarkably little family loyalty. “Ruthie wasn’t a very likeable person.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. “I found her likeable enough,” I said mildly.

“You would,” the chief said with a snort. “Ruthie was driven. She was on a crusade to save women from male oppressors as she called them. And she was impatient with those of us who move a little slower.”

In Texas you’d need a magnifying glass to detect any movement at all, I thought sourly. Women’s rights weren’t exactly popular causes.

“I take it she didn’t get along with her family,” I said to Seth.

He shrugged his shoulders gracefully. “She was family. You know how it is. You fight, but you’re still there when it counts. She marched to a different drummer that’s all.”

Smothering my irritation at how he patronized her, I asked Seth some of the things I needed to know about: her age, next of kin, the kinds of things that we’d need for the obituary. The funeral home would provide one later, but we’d try to get some of the information into the paper today.

She was 44, no children. Her next of kin were her father, Seth Brewster, Sr., and a long list of half-brothers and sisters. I decided some of that could wait for the funeral home.

“Not married?” I asked.

“Not now,” he said. “She was a long time ago; it didn’t last long.”

“She graduate from school here?” I asked. Seth nodded, and gave me a brief run-down of her life: college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, back to Plains City in 1975 where she’d gotten a job with the local state employment office, and then started the crisis line,  followed by the safe house network, and six years ago, added the shelter to her accomplishments.

“Why did she get into this?” I asked curiously. Ruthie hadn’t answered that question for me at lunch. Now she never would.

Seth shrugged. “Saw a need, I guess. Plains City had a real need for this kind of thing. So, she did it.”

“And the abortion clinic?”

Jerry Don snorted. “Last thing we needed here.”

Seth rolled his eyes. “I suppose she saw a need for that too. Not everyone can go to Dallas.”

Seeing a need didn’t explain a driven woman like Ruthie, but I wasn’t going to get a better one from Seth Brewster. It was likely Seth didn’t know why. They didn’t appear to be very close.

“She live here at the shelter?” I asked him.

“Yes. This was her life. She was obsessed with its survival. I tried to convince her that she needed to have a normal life, to put this cause into perspective. But I failed to get through to her,” Seth said.

I nodded, wondering if a ‘normal life’ meant getting married and having children. It did when my mother called.

 “Had she reported any threats, chief?” I asked.

“Yeah, she always had threats made against her,” Jerry Don answered, his eyes following what his officers were doing to collect evidence. “Angry husbands primarily. But they wouldn’t really do anything.”

“Jerry Don, those husbands were angry because she protected their wives from abuse,” said a woman who stood behind Seth. An amply built woman, she had a scowl on her face and hands on her hips. “They’d already proved themselves capable of violence. Why in heaven’s name do you think they wouldn’t follow through with a threat against Ruthie?”

“Now, Mrs. Massengil, you know that’s different,” the chief protested.

“What’s different?” I asked.

“Just because a man might hit his wife when he’s been drinking doesn’t mean he’s a dangerous man!” the chief said with some protest.

I looked at him, opened my mouth then shut it.

“His wife might see it differently,” Mrs. Massengil said dryly.

I found my voice. “I don’t believe that came out of your mouth, Jerry Don.” I added my protest to hers. “No wonder you and Ruthie didn’t see eye to eye. That’s positively Neanderthal.”

“Now, Katy, don’t get your shorts in a bunch,” the chief said. Seth flinched at the phrasing. “I didn’t say he had the right to beat his wife. He don’t, we all know that. But it don’t mean he’s going to go out and assault somebody.”

“Hell, no,” I said disgustedly. “Why should he? He’s got a punching bag at home to take his frustration out on.”

The chief and I glared at each other while Seth shifted uncomfortably.

Mrs. Massengil looked at me with a wide grin. “I don’t believe I know you,” she said.

“Katy Williams, city editor at the Gazette,” I said and held out my hand. She shook it.

“Bobbi Massengil. Let’s talk somewhere else,” she suggested. “I’ll fill you in on those threats.”

“How much of this you going to print?” Jerry Don said with alarm.

“As much as I can,” I said. “Read the paper later and see.” I was irritated enough to consider sticking my tongue out at him, but it didn’t seem particularly professional.

With that, Bobbi pulled me through a small dining room and up the back stairs to a small bedroom. “We’ll have some peace here,” she said, gesturing me into a rocking chair. She sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s nice to see someone willing to take Jerry Don on and be able to get through to him. Ruthie never could.”

“Ruthie didn’t have access to a newspaper to print her views and have them read by 55,000 people,” I said dryly. “It does tend to give one’s words a bit more punch.”

She laughed. “Ruthie, well, Ruthie was driven just like the chief said. And she was impatient. But getting the chief to move on something would try a saint. You heard him.”

“Yeah,” I said. We were both silent for a moment thinking about that. “Tell me about the threats,” I said abruptly.

“Chief’s right, most of them have been from irate husbands wanting their wives to come home,” she said. “Mine for instance, hounded her for weeks, calling her a dyke, saying she stole me away, threatening to charge her with kidnapping, all kinds of abuse. But she was cool. Just said if he wanted me to come home, he needed to start getting counselling. ‘Course he refused, saying he didn’t have a problem.”

I looked at Bobbi Massengil curiously. She didn’t seem to be beaten down, didn’t measure up to my view of the downtrodden victim.

“Yeah, I know. I don’t look like an abused wife,” she said, with a self-depreciating smile. “But my husband beat me every payday for three years. I guess, well…,” she paused, then continued rapidly. “Look, I’m a fat, old broad who works in a beauty salon. I never figured I’d get married at this late date. When Steve proposed, I ignored all the warning signs and jumped in. When he slapped me the first time I was stunned, but I wasn’t willing to give up the good things just ‘cause of that, you know?”

I nodded. “And then?”

“It didn’t stop with just being slapped,” she said with a shrug. “Finally, I realized he was going to kill me one of these days. Or, I would kill him. Then I came here. Ruthie’s been helping me put my life back together.”

“So, most of her threats came from men like your husband,” I said.

“Yeah, until recently. She’s been getting calls, anonymous calls, about how she’s a sinner and God would punish her. She was really upset about them. You know, it was funny, she gets these abusive calls from men who have been violent, and she handles them no problem. But then these anonymous calls got to her. She was scared about something, but she wouldn’t talk about it.”

I thought about that. “About the Women’s Shelter? Or the abortions?”

“Both.”

“The threats start about the time she started bringing in the doctor from Dallas?”

Bobbi thought about that and then nodded. “Guess so. A couple of months ago.”

“Who’s the doctor?” I asked but Bobbi didn’t know. “I wonder why she wouldn’t talk about it.”

Bobbi shrugged, and looked troubled. “I don’t know. I’ve been here the longest of all the girls, and Ruthie and I are about the same age. She confided in me about some things. But not this. I only knew about the phone calls, because I was in the kitchen one night, when I heard her slam down the phone. She came into the kitchen and she was crying. I made her tell me about them, although even then she wouldn’t say much.”

“Any idea when they started? The calls, I mean?”

“About a month ago. But they’ve been gettin’ worse. Almost every night, now. I think it was organized by someone; you know?”

“Any idea who?”

Bobbi shook her head, then stopped. “Maybe that church, what its name? The Church of Good News? I took a message from the pastor one day, and when I gave it to her, she was really upset.”

The church didn’t ring a bell with me, but that wasn’t particularly surprising. There were as many churches in town as there were bars, maybe more considering that Plains City was mostly a dry town, and the bars were confined to a two-mile stretch out by the western city limits. I’d never seen a place with so many churches: the listings for Baptist Churches alone filled a page in the telephone directory.

I thought of something else. “Bobbi, what happens to the shelter and the clinic now? How are the finances set up?”

Bobbi’s eyes widened. “I don’t know,” she said. “My God, what if they close us down? Where will we go?”

I didn’t have any answer for her, but I knew it was important to find that out just as soon as possible. If Seth didn’t know, maybe one of the board members would.

“How many women here right now?”

“About nine, and five kids,” she figured, counting on her fingers.

I was surprised, the house didn’t look that big.

“And there are more in safe houses, you know, houses where women can stay if they’re afraid their husbands will find them here,” Bobbi added.

“Okay,” I said, making a few notes. I handed her my business card. “Let me know if you hear anything, or if you run into any problems here. I’ll see what I can find out.”

The second floor was silent when I walked back down the stairs. Below, people were leaving there as well. The residents of the house were still huddled together in the living room with one officer. Another officer stood in the doorway to another room. I assumed they were questioning people in the second room, one at a time.

I went back into the kitchen. Cops were still checking through things. Jerry Don was there, but not Seth Brewster.

“She tell you anything?” Jerry Don said, jerking his head toward the stairs.

“Said Ruthie had been getting some threats that really bothered her. Anonymous calls calling her a sinner and promising God’s punishment.”

“Pranks,” the chief said, dismissing them. I was irritated. What did it take to make a threat real to this man?

“Chief, you’ve got lots of threats, and you’ve got a dead body. Now it stands to reason, one of those threats was real, don’t you suppose?”

He frowned, but he didn’t argue.

“What happens to the shelter?” I asked.

“There’s a foundation for tax purposes, but Ruthie primarily ran the place. I don’t know what happens now. Depends if anyone else thinks it’s important enough to keep going.”

“Don’t you? I would think in your business, you’d be glad there was somewhere to take women whose lives are being threatened.”

The chief sighed. “It isn’t that simple, Katy, for all you women’s lib types who want to make it so. You talk to some cops who get the calls. It’s the most dangerous call there is. Lots of women don’t want a place to go. And if they do leave, they go back.”

“So? The shelter still has a function,” I said.

“I don’t know. I guess. But you can’t work your marriage out if you run away,” the chief said. “It takes two to fight, and it takes two to work things out.”

I suddenly felt tired. I hadn’t had a lot of sleep. I was at the site of a bloody murder of a woman I knew. And I just couldn’t cope with a cop whose education was sadly lacking.

“Chief, you’re wrong,” I said finally. “But I’m too tired tonight to put it into words. Domestic violence is just that, violence. You’re supposed to protect the victims.”

“It isn’t that simple,” he repeated stubbornly. We looked at each other without any mutual understanding.

“I’ll call you later,” I said, finally, giving up in defeat. “I’ve got to get into the office.” I walked away with one last look at the bloody kitchen. Add it to your memories that haunt you, I told myself bitterly. I stopped in the doorway.

“Chief, you might want to think about moving these women out of here,” I said suddenly. “We won’t print the address, but it’s going to be available to anyone who reads the police report. Not to mention those who listen to the scanner. It isn’t a safe house anymore.”

“Sh... shoot,” he said. “Yeah. I’ll leave an officer here. Maybe Human Services will know what to do.”

I nodded and went outside. The air was mild, and I could see the stars. Many of the police cars were gone, and the street was deserted. Most of the neighboring houses were still dark. I got into my car, and glanced at the dashboard clock: 4 a.m. I really didn’t need to be in the office for another two hours, even with this story to write. I sighed, trying to decide what I should do. I could go in and get started early. I could go to the Denny’s out by the freeway and have breakfast. Or I could sit here and cry, a small voice said. I’d been fighting that voice a lot lately. I needed to go home and grab a change of clothes.

Instead, I started the car and headed back to Sam’s. I let myself in with my key and took a shower. Then toweled off and crawled back into bed.

Sam rolled over and opened one eye. “Katy?” he mumbled.

“Hold me,” I said, and my shivering stopped as I felt his arms wrap around me. “Hold me tight.”