PART IV A SUDDEN DEATH #4
As for me, I drove home, grabbed some clean clothes and jumped into one of my pre-2012 cars.
I picked the most bland and nondescript one I owned: the Hyundai Elantra. (My Minnie Winnie was far too recognisable for covert surveillance.)
Then I drove it across the border into Louisiana, heading to the town of Pine Hollow to watch a Confederate statue get taken down.
Pine Hollow, Louisiana
11 October, 0300 hours
It happened in the dead of night—at 3 o’clock the next morning, a Saturday—but that wasn’t exceptional for ceremonies like the one I was observing from a hotel across the square (with a steady supply of sultanas at my side).
All the workers wore black ski masks.
This, too, was standard. At other Civil War statue removals, protesters had pelted the workers with rotten food.
What was unusual was that all the workmen here were contractors paid for by a private ladies’ society, not public workers employed by the county or the state.
Using cutting torches and winches, it took them an hour to remove the gigantic bronze statue of General Beauregard from its plinth.
I’d done my research on the statue.
It had been erected in 1911 during the frenzy of Confederate statue building that had occurred across the South at that time.
It had been paid for by the ‘garden’ society which had also bought the small patch of land on which it stood.
This had been a particularly thorny issue in the legal battle to remove it.
A stocky foreman—in his ski mask—directed things.
Occasionally, a lady in a black Moncler puffer coat appeared beside him and pointed up at the statue or the ropes.
She was the real boss here.
She didn’t wear a ski mask but her features were covered by the hood of her expensive puffer coat and a yellow scarf wrapped over her nose and mouth.
Wisps of platinum hair, however, stuck out from her hood.
Mrs Clara Kingman.
Standing behind Mrs Kingman was a second woman in a ball cap and a black Under Armor face mask and sporting five earrings in each ear.
Mary Beth the bodyguard.
After the statue was freed from its plinth, the workers lowered it onto a long semitrailer rig, covered it with tarpaulins and drove off into the darkness.
Mrs Kingman and her bodyguard escorted it in a beat-up Ford Explorer.
I hurried downstairs, jumped into my Hyundai and followed them into the night.
I trailed them north for almost an hour.
Following someone is an art.
The first rule is simple: don’t get spotted.
This can be tricky since you can’t drive too close to your quarry or they might see you, but then you can’t linger too far behind or you might lose them.
Trailing a target as big as a semitrailer, however, isn’t that hard and even at that hour, there were enough other cars on the highway to enable me to keep in touch with it from a distance while also blending in with the traffic.
The second rule of following someone is: when you’re doing it, make sure you aren’t being followed yourself.
For a time, I thought a Toyota Camry seemed to be shadowing me but it turned off at the Leesville junction.
At 5:52 a.m. the semitrailer with the statue pulled off the highway onto the state road past Hornbeck, closely followed by Mrs Kingman’s Ford.
They wound down some dark forested back roads for a time, then abruptly turned right, passing through the gates of a large property with a high fence.
The gates opened as the rig and the Ford arrived and closed as soon as they’d gone through.
Whoever was at the property had been waiting for them.
I noted the address: 2261 Maple Drive.
I checked the property records on my laptop.
The registered owner of 2261 Maple Drive was Ms Clara Beatrice Montpierre, a.k.a., Mrs Clara Kingman.
Sure enough, later that morning, as I dozed in my car, sleepily watching the gates from a quarter-mile away, Mrs Kingman emerged in a sleek new Audi, sitting in the passenger seat while Mary Beth drove.
Their faces weren’t covered anymore, but draped loosely around Mrs Kingman’s neck was the yellow scarf she’d worn the night before to conceal her face.
Curious to see where she went the morning after escorting a Confederate statue to its new home, I followed Mrs Kingman, of course once again at an appropriate distance.
It was a gorgeous sunny day—a ‘Louisiana Saturday’—and it turned out that Mrs Kingman was going to spend it with some other wealthy families doing what the landed class have done on sunny weekends for centuries: play polo and hunt.
Ten minutes from the estate at Maple Drive, she arrived at an expansive property filled with gorgeous trees and a grassy -pasture. I parked a short way down the road, keeping watch.
Cut out of the pasture was a polo field.
This property was not nearly as private as the one holding Mrs Kingman’s new statue. It was open for all the world to see and I could observe it very easily.
In its dirt parking lot were all manner of expensive cars: Audis, Porsches, Range Rovers.
Wealthy older women sipped champagne while grey-haired men in blazers smoked cigars. Children frolicked, chasing one another.
Younger women in bright sundresses and high heels gathered around the younger men, dashingly dressed in polo attire (collared team shirts and boots) or hunting attire (herringbone jackets with elbow pads).
Sunshine, champagne and horses. It was all rather bucolic. A nice way to spend your Saturday.
Suddenly, my phone buzzed.
My alert had been triggered.
Someone had purchased superstrong wheated bourbon and children’s soccer gear.
I checked my phone to see the—
A fist banged on my passenger-side window.
‘Hey! What are you doing!’
I turned and saw two men in matching polo team outfits glaring in at me.
It took me a moment to recognise them: they were the Kingman boys, Tad Jr and Beau.
Beau pressed his face up against the glass.
‘No photos, asshole! This is a private party!’ he declared, his face beetroot red.
I rolled down the window.
‘I’m parked on a public road,’ I said.
Beau flared. ‘I’m sick of you gossip columnists and paparazzi. Get the fuck outta here—’
The older one, Tad, held up a hand.
‘Quiet now, Beau. This isn’t a reporter.’ He nodded at me. ‘You’re that private detective who came through Victorville last week, the hero who saved that missing woman. Had a shootout with Crazy Eli.’
Tad was much calmer than his younger brother. More collected, more refined.
Beau was still worked up. ‘I don’t give two fucks who he is, Bubba, I want him gone—’
Tad Jr looked at me closely, as if trying to recall my name. ‘It’s Mr Speedman, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘I figured with the discovery of that poor young woman and the death of her captor, your investigation would be concluded. Is there anything we can help you with?’
I gazed evenly back at him.
‘Nothing right now.’
Tad smiled. ‘Public as this road may be, this is a private gathering we’re having. A day of polo and hunting in honour of my brother’s upcoming wedding, and we’d prefer not to have anyone watching. It makes some of our friends uncomfortable. If you wouldn’t mind moving on, we’d appreciate it.’
I kept staring at him.
He returned my gaze with the quiet confidence of the truly wealthy. He was a cool customer, Tad Jr.
I looked back out at the crowd on the polo field.
A few of them were peering in our direction, including Clara Kingman in her yellow scarf and Tad Kingman Sr in his hunting outfit.
‘Sure,’ I said finally. ‘No problem. I got what I needed.’
And I had.
Beau had given it to me.
He’d called his older brother ‘Bubba’.
I drove away.
In the South, the nickname Bubba is often used for someone who is named after their father, a ‘Junior’.
This was another thing Cyrus Barbin had spoken of: something about ‘Bubba’s party’ when I’d mentioned that LaToya Martyn had gone missing in 2018.
I’d have to look into that.
Cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss leaned over the road, casting mottled shadows.
I passed Mrs Kingman’s property on Maple Drive as I headed back toward the interstate.
There weren’t many other cars around.
It would take me a couple of hours to get back to Houst—
It hit me from the right.
I never saw it coming.
A pickup T-boned my Hyundai so hard it hurled it into the air.
As my car rolled sideways and my world rotated crazily, the airbag inflated, punching me in the nose.
I had a split second to see it.
The big bull bar on the Chevy pickup that had struck my Hyundai.
The Hammer’s truck.
Then my little car smashed down onto its side, slamming to a halt, and my world went black.
I woke in a plush king-sized bed in a gorgeous bedroom with a view of a magnificent lawn ringed by trees. Gravel paths, fountains and statues decorated it all.
Inside my bedroom, striped wallpaper covered the walls. Antique bronze lamps sat on elegant side tables.
Morning sunshine lanced through the windows.
I was wearing silk pyjamas. Light blue. Very comfortable.
My own clothes were on an armchair nearby, neatly folded. I think they’d been washed and pressed. My backpack sat on the floor below them.
Even my Casio watch was resting neatly in a small porcelain tray on the dresser.
‘Ah, Dr Speedman, you’re awake,’ a woman’s voice said from behind me.
I turned.
Mrs Clara Kingman sat in an armchair on the other side of my bed with her bodyguard, Mary Beth, behind her.
At Mrs Kingman’s side stood her husband, Tad Kingman Sr, and his main security man, Deek Hammonds.
‘How are you feeling?’ Mrs Kingman asked. ‘From what I was informed, it was an awful collision.’
Her accent was almost languidly Southern.
Informed was pronounced info-armed.
Awful was oar-ful with a whole extra syllable.
I touched my head and felt a bandage above my left eyebrow.
‘I’ve got a hell of a headache, but I think I’m okay,’ I said.
Mrs Kingman shook her head. ‘Goodness me. One has to be so careful on these back roads. All those blind corners, shrouded by all the moss on the trees. Accidents happen more often than you might think.’