$11.00 and Change

As murders go, this one was pretty mundane. It was your basic run of the mill robbery gone bad. At about 12:45 on the morning of February 15, 1986, a 63-year-old white male was shot once while working the front desk at a local motel. The murder weapon was never found, but was determined to be a 38-caliber handgun. A single shot entered the victim’s chest, penetrated his left lung and heart, and exited just below his left shoulder blade. He died at the scene. That’s more or less what the police report said. For the vast majority of the city, it warranted little more than the time it took to read about it in the morning paper. There was a little more to it than that. No, I take that back. There was a lot more to it.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, it’s never good. Sometimes it’s just a wrong number and all you’ve lost is a little sleep. But sometimes, you’ve lost more. February 15th, just barely. It was 1:30 in the morning, it was snowing, and the phone was ringing. That wasn’t all that unusual in this house. Police chiefs get called a lot in the middle of the night. Bad things happen in the night. People get drunk and things get out of hand. Teenagers joyride way too fast, and sometimes they don’t make it home. Officers get hurt or hurt somebody. The phone rings a lot.

In 1986, my father was the Chief of Police. With him in the house that night was his wife. He never called her that and he didn’t call her by her name; hadn’t since their first child was born years and years ago. She was Mama. She never called him anything but Daddy. It defined them. They did other things of course. He had been a police officer for over 30 years. She had raised four children and helped raise all the grandchildren. But together they were Mama and Daddy.

I was in the house that night too. My 4-year-old son and I had moved home after my divorce, but not before I’d tried to do it alone. I couldn’t. I needed them, but mostly I knew my son did too. The baby wasn’t there that night. He spent Friday nights with his dad across town.

My brother was also in the house. His little boy, only slightly older than mine, lived with his mother in Atlanta. But my brother was back home now and my parents were glad. They were always glad when any of us was home.

My two sisters were not home that night. One lived in another state, another in a different town, both with their own families. It wouldn’t be long before their phones would be ringing too.

We all heard it. Daddy was a light sleeper, conditioned by years of shift work and most recently by this, and he answered it on the first ring. Mama sat up next to him rigid with fear. She never got use to it; and no matter how many times it happened, it always terrified her. Was it one of the children or the grandchildren? Was it her mother? She thought of them all, each one separately and all of them together. Mothers can do that. There were so many to worry about, so much to fear. She was trying to believe, in fact willing it to be some kind of official police business.

I was already out of bed and on my way across the hall. My baby wasn’t home. Like Mama, I was scared to death. Somewhere inside I knew it was probably something else. Surely it was. How many times had this happened before? Still, my baby wasn’t home.

My brother was in the furthest room in the house and was willing himself away. He hadn’t been asleep long and couldn’t be sure if it was a dream or not. It had only rung once – maybe he had been dreaming, but then he heard his father’s voice and he knew it wasn’t a dream.

The last thing Daddy said into the phone was “I understand.” As he hung up he turned to her and said, “Mama get up and get dressed. We’ve got a problem. They’re sending officers to the house and they won’t say why.” She didn’t understand at first and asked him what that meant. In two words, her blood ran cold and she literally ran across the hall to see if everybody was home. We passed each other in the hallway. The two words that sent terror through her? “It’s family.”

Moments later, the knock came and I got to the front door first. There was a Captain and a Lieutenant standing on the other side of the door but I didn’t want to let them in; I didn’t want to know. Somehow I knew that when I opened that door, life would be irrevocably changed. Only one thing was stronger than my need to run as far and as fast as I could. My son wasn’t home. I opened the door but before I could say a word, the Captain said, “I need to talk to your Dad.” I had only enough breath left to whisper, “Is it Kenny?” By that time, my parents were standing behind me at the front door and the Captain said, “No honey, it’s not Kenny. Now take your Mom into the other room. We need to talk to the Chief now.”

For the next few minutes we all tried to hear from another room the whispers coming from the living room. We couldn’t, not until we heard Daddy say, “I’ve got to tell Mama.” When he walked into the kitchen his face showed only worry, worry for her. “What is it Daddy” was all he heard. As he put his arms around her shoulders, he quietly said, “Mama, it’s Bill. Somebody shot him.”

Bill Hagood was my grandmother’s husband…of nearly 40 years. He was ten years younger than his wife, but he didn’t know it. She’d never ever admitted her age and years later, after multiple strokes had taken her ability to talk and sometimes to remember, she didn’t even know when she was born. Filing for her Social Security was a nightmare since there were no birth certificates when she was born, whenever that was. But that’s a different story. He was her husband and she adored him.

He was an outgoing, gregarious, loud man. He was a restaurant and hotel manager by trade and she helped him when she could. Throughout their lives together, they’d lived here in town, moved to Roanoke for a while, and then to Myrtle Beach. They’d returned here after her first stroke and moved down the street from my parents. We knew him only as Granddaddy and our children as Great Papa. He was a Shriner and she a member of the Eastern Star. He had a lot of jobs and a lot of friends, but mostly he had a lot of mouth. He had something to say about just about everything. He made up goofy names for everybody that nobody ever figured out. We were known, in descending order, as Pots, Squirrel, Leroy, and Toots. We never knew why. He was funny that way.

A week earlier, he had taken my grandmother back home to a small town in South Carolina where her niece had passed away from cancer. He took her down on Saturday morning and stayed with her through the funeral on Monday afternoon. She decided that she wanted to stay a few more days, but he needed to get back to work. They agreed that she would stay the next week with her sister and eh could come back the following weekend to pick her up. He did return a week later. We all did. We buried him there the following Monday.

At the time of his murder, he was the manager of a local motel in downtown Greensboro. He usually worked during the day, but had received a call from his night clerk that day. It was Valentine’s Day and the clerk’s wife and children had been out of town. They were coming home that night and he asked if he could take the night off so that he could be there when they returned. My grandfather readily agreed since his sweetheart was out of town herself and he really had nothing better to do.

It is here that the sequence of events has been pieced together. Apparently, he arrived at the motel sometime around 11:00 pm. He took his dog, a very spoiled poodle named Prince, with him for company. He did that a lot. Sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 am, someone entered the front door and approached the desk. For reasons known only to the murderers, he was shot once through the heart. It might have been of some comfort for our family to believe that at least it was fast. One shot through the heart would have killed him instantly. Maybe it happened so fast, he didn’t realize he was about to die. We were denied even that in the end. According to the police investigation, there were two shots fired. The first one missed. He knew. His last seconds of life were filled with terror because they missed, and he knew.

Somebody shot him. Mama heard him to be sure. But that can’t be right. Who shot him? Why would somebody shoot Bill? Questions swirled in her head as his words slowly registered and then her eyes focused on him and she said, “How bad is it – where is he? We’ve got to get to the hospital.” As gently as he could, he said, “Mama you don’t understand. He’s not at the hospital. He’s dead.”

As the reality of what he said sunk in, her thoughts went immediately to her mother. This would be on the news. Would they cover it that far south? My God – would she hear it on the news before they could get to her? They had to go and they had to go now. So they did. At 3:00 on that cold snowy morning, they left for the three-hour trip to South Carolina. They had called relatives there and asked that they call the family preacher and have him meet them at the house. She wasn’t sure her mother would survive this news. She was not well, but she was strong. She already survived cancer…twice. She’d survived heart attacks and strokes. She’d already lived years longer than the doctors thought she would, but this – this may very well be more than her heart could bear.

The next hours and days were much like you would expect when there is a death, unexpected or otherwise, in the family. There are family and friends to call and arrangements to make. There are hymns to choose and obituaries to write. There are suits and ties to pick out, and coffins and flowers. You do all these things because you must, but you do them in slow motion – like moving through fog, not sure of your next step or even if you’re going in the right direction. What made these days different was that he didn’t die of a heart attack or a tragic car accident. He was murdered. And so between meetings with the funeral home and the florist, there were meetings with detectives. There were police officers on the doorstep. There were newspaper headlines announcing the murder of the Police Chief’s father-in-law and reporters asking for interviews.

Mama and Daddy went that night to South Carolina and they brought my grandmother home. Two days later, we all went back. The funeral itself was blurry and hard to remember. Still too much grief; still too hard to see through the fog. There was one thing we all remembered though. Attending the funeral that day in a small town 150 miles away was the night clerk who had asked for the night off. He was inconsolable.

Nothing about those days could in any way be construed as funny – at least not at the time. Now more than twenty years later, there may have been one notable exception. One member of the family, my aunt, arrived at the airport. When she deplaned, she was – well there’s just no delicate way to put this – she was lit up like a Christmas tree. She was and always had been a loud obnoxious drunk. Oddly though, most people saw her that day before they heard her. She was hard to miss. She walked through the gate dressed in a pink cape, a pink hat, and pink high-heeled fur-trimmed ankle booths. Oh yeah, did I mention she was also drunk? Some years later, she gave up drinking and moved back to that same little town in South Carolina. Without the alcohol, she was great fun…and she dressed better.

They never did catch those responsible for his murder. Oh they have suspects – several. Some of the detectives even thought they knew who did it. They still think so. They just can’t prove it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. There’s one now in a Florida prison that might have done it. There are three others who at the time seemed the most likely, all career criminals, two still serving time for armed robbery and rape. The other released some years ago on parole. They even think they know which one actually shot him, if they are the ones in the first place. That’s a pretty big if. Still, the suspected shooter is still in prison and that helps some. The only thing they still don’t know is why. Some have said robbery was the motive, but there was only $11.00 and change missing from the register. Some say it was a robbery attempt and he argued with them and wouldn’t give them the money. That seems more likely. He always did have a lot of mouth.

Life goes on, at least that what everyone says, and so I suppose it does. We all came back home and over the next weeks and months, things returned to something like normal…for most of us. But for one, for my grandmother, life was never normal again. She found joy in nothing. She even became a little angry every morning when she opened her eyes and had to face another day without him. And as her will to fight slipped away, so did she. The cancer returned and there were more strokes. She had to move into the house with my parents so Mama could take care of her. That wasn’t an easy task and Lord knows my grandmother didn’t make it any easier. But Mama was good at it. She fed her and bathed her and made sure she took her medicine. She carted her all over hell and half of Georgia if that was what she wanted. She kept her alive for seven years and it made my grandmother furious. She didn’t want to be here any more. She didn’t want to wake up every morning without him. And finally, one day she didn’t.

There was one other thing that made those years following his death even harder. It was perhaps the hardest thing of all. For seven years, all conversations with my grandmother were one-sided. In 1986, she said goodbye to my grandfather and she never spoke again. We buried her beside the husband she adored and we all knew that Mama had been right after all. She hadn’t been strong enough for this.

It’s been more than twenty years since that cold night in February when the phone rang. It’s been all but forgotten here except when the newspaper does a story every few years about the city’s unsolved murder cases. So much has changed over the years. One thing hasn’t.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, it’s never good.