“ Then you'll tell us what you can about Purdy?”
“ All right… all right.”
Meredyth indicated to Lucas to watch out for the guard. Lucas started to protest, but she put a linger on his hps and said, “It's for a good cause.”
She then turned and seductively moved to within inches of Goddard, who stank of Old Spice shaving lotion and cigarette breath. She ignored the sickening odors and the man's ugly little gnome appearance and beehive- shaped head and alligator-gray skin. She passionately kissed him and allowed him to guide her hand to where he wanted to be touched. “Easy… easy,” she cautioned, feeling his grip tighten and his body shiver in one wave after another.
She broke it off, and Goddard stumbled to his seat, holding his privates and looking as if he'd been given the greatest gift of all time.
Lucas and Meredyth returned to the interrogation table, its oak surface again a barrier between the officials and the condemned man. “All right, you got what you wanted, now it's our turn,” instructed Meredyth. “Out with it. Anything and everything you know about Purdy and his hatred for Judge DeCampe.”
“ Yeah… a deal's a deal.” He was aglow now, his eyes riveted to hers. “You're some lay, Doc.”
“ Never mind that. Out with it.”
Goddard took a deep breath, still touching himself, as he spoke. “Hell, every other conversation we had, he was going to fuck her over, until he started getting really weird.”
“ What do you mean, really weird?”
“ Ahhhh, mouthing off how he'd like to be fucking her while she's straddling him on The Chair-Old Surefire we call it in here. Jimmy Lee got quite graphic about it. Want to hear more?” he asked, leering at Meredyth. “Said it'd be one hell of a fuck, you know, his penis frying up in her at the same moment they both are electrocuted together. Her pussy electrified along with his organ, and them fusing together like that.”
Lucas grabbed him by the arm, shouting, “That's enough bullshit, Goddard! Get to the point.”
Goddard snatched his arm away and growled, bear like.
“ Just get on with it,” Meredyth firmly said, her green eyes pinning him.
“ All right, and after that, Purdy started talking even more weird shit than that.”
“ Like what?” demanded Lucas.
“ Look, I got no reason to say no more against Jimmy. He was a stand-up guy. Cut two bastards bad who run up on me.”
“ What's the worst weird shit he told you in connection with the judge, Mr. Goddard?” pressed Meredyth.
“ Look, I'm no fool. I watch the TV news. I know what you people want, and it's going to cost you.”
“ We had a deal, Mr. Goddard,” said Meredyth.
“ I want my appeal heard.”
“ We don't have any juice there,” said Lucas.
“ But we'll do everything we can in that regard, Mr. Goddard,” Meredyth replied, holding a hand on Lucas's arm when he had come out of his seat toward Goddard.
“ All right, if you're sure you're going to go to bat for me, I'll tell you what I know.”
“ Please go ahead”
“ J. P.-I called him J. P.-he said shit like, 'When I'm dead, I will have her.' “
“ Her? The judge, you mean?” she asked.
“ Have her in what manner?” asked Lucas.
“ Said he would share his coffin with her. Said it was all arranged. Said God told him how to do it. Said his father in heaven had arranged it with his father here, on earth. Said it was ordained, foretold, all that shit. He even believed it was coded into his Bible that DeCampe would lie down with his dead body and follow him into the next world. Crap like that. I only listened and agreed with him and went along because he never done me no harm.”
“ So… what about you, Mr. Goddard?” asked Lucas. “Do you want to see Judge DeCampe dead?”
“ Jimmy wanted to ride her into eternity. Me, I just wanted her to die slow and suffer. I guess maybe he had more imagination.”
Lucas produced the faxed artist's sketch of the suspect, the aged man who had abducted DeCampe, according to FBI sources. 'Take a close look at this. Do you know the man in the picture?”
“ Ahhh… looks roughly like Jimmy Lee's old man, yeah.”
“ How would you know what he looked like?”
“ Old Isaiah? Hell, Jimmy Lee showed me his picture more'n once. Claimed he loved his mama and papa. Seen her picture more than the old man's, but yeah, that looks like his old man, all right.”
“ That fits with the old man with the van and two coffins,” said Lucas.
The interview came to an abrupt halt when Meredyth stood, rushed the door, and banged for the guard to open it.
Goddard shot to his feet, shouting, “What about my appeal? What're you going to do for me?”
Lucas, who stood a head taller than Goddard, intercepted him with a threatening glare that halted the man. “We'll do whatever we can,” he lied and then rushed out after Meredyth.
Outside the interrogation room, Meredyth held up the artist's sketch and said to Lucas, “If this is James Lee Purdy's father, and he's been here to collect his son's body, then Warden Gwinn can ID him. We don't need that low- life belly crawler Goddard.”
“ Hell of a show you put on back there, but are you OK?” Lucas asked Meredyth as they approached the warden's office in the company of a guard who had been assigned to them. Already the prison was abuzz about their visit and why they were here.
She breathed deeply. “I'll survive. Been through worse, and I think Goddard did definitely put us onto the right path. I'm not exactly a stranger to the James Lee Purdy case. The guy was a classic megalomaniac. Some kind of weird complexes that it might take a lifetime to unravel, but he had a definite fixation on DeCampe, if Goddard's to be believed.”
“ Yeah, big if. If Goddard can be believed.”
'Trusted no, but believed, I think so. He seemed a little afraid of Purdy himself, if my reading between the lines is as accurate as I think.”
“ So we need a far more serious talk with Warden Gwinn, the keeper of this asylum, and this time, we'll put the tough questions to him.” Lucas grasped his aching neck in his large right hand and massaged it as the winding way to Gwinn's office came to an end.
Gwinn, a thin, sickly looking man, stood to greet them. “I told you… wasting your time with Goddard.”
“ Not entirely,” replied Meredyth.
“ Oh?”
“ He had a lot to say about another of your inmates, a Jimmy Lee Purdy,” Lucas added.
“ Purdy died last Sunday in Old Surefire. Again, you're barking up the wrong tree, Detective Stonecoat.” Gwinn displayed a self-satisfied grin on feeling a step ahead of them.
“ We don't think so.”
“ I see, then you think that Purdy arranged for something to happen to Judge DeCampe after his death?”
“ How about on the evening of his death?” replied Lucas. “Who came to claim the body?”
“ Purdy's father.”
“ Did he look anything like this?” Meredyth pulled the police sketch of the old man from his breast pocket.
Gwinn studied the face. “Doesn't look like the same man, no. Eyes are all wrong. That turn at the mouth upward. No… I'd say Purdy's mouth was pulled down, like gravity had a- hold.”
“ But it could be Purdy's father. He had the same general features?”
“ You could say that.”
“ All right, but it was the old man who took possession of the body after the execution?”
“ Yes, correct.”
“ And he had these general features.”
