Читать книгу Three Deuces Down - Keith Donnelly - Страница 15

The time had come to visit again with T. Elbert. My mentor, friend, and ex-TBI agent, T. Elbert Brown, was now confined to a wheelchair thanks to a drug dealer’s bullet five years ago. T. Elbert lived in an old turn-of-the-century two-story on Olivia Drive. The house was immaculately kept inside and out.

A few years after I moved back to Mountain Center, I met T. Elbert at an accident scene Billy was photographing. It was soon after I had been granted a private investigator’s license by the State of Tennessee. T. Elbert had been chasing a suspected drug dealer who had lost control of his car, hit a tree, and instantly ended his drug-dealing career. T. Elbert was searching the car for drugs and I was standing around waiting on Billy to finish photographing the scene. I asked if I could help and he said I could. He was dismantling the outside of the car so I went to work inside. I was about to cut into the driver’s side seat when I got a faint whiff of coffee. Further sniffing led me to the passenger-side headrest.

“Think I got something,” I said, removing the headrest.

I tossed it out of the car and T. Elbert cut it open. Coffee poured out and then a Ziploc bag of white powder. T. Elbert did the wet-finger test.

“Cocaine,” he said. “Good find.”

One backseat headrest was also loaded with coffee and cocaine. We continued to tear the car apart but found nothing else. By that time the scene was crawling with TBI agents. When we were finished he gave me his card and told me if I ever needed a favor to give him a call. I called him a couple of weeks later to run a license tag for me. Someone was parking illegally at the condo complex where I lived and the manager had asked me if I could find out who it was.

T. Elbert ran the plate and asked me out to lunch and that started our friendship. We talked sports, women, cops and robbers, and life in general. T. Elbert was my senior by fifteen years and had many stories to tell. He was a year from retirement when he caught the bullet.

In the early morning hours I always knew I could find T. Elbert on his front porch in his rocking chair. T. Elbert was about five feet eight inches tall with light brown hair flecked with gray. He was a slight man who always had a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. T. Elbert told his tales with great humor that always made me laugh and he delighted in telling them. He was a disarming man with great insight and I was certain those qualities had helped him be a very good agent for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

I parked in front of his house and got out of the Pathfinder. T. Elbert gave me a small wave and a smile as I walked up his front steps with a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts that contained large coffees and various weight gainers, a ritual I performed every Wednesday I was in town. If I were going to be out of town, I would send T. Elbert an e-mail. T. Elbert loved e-mail and he loved Dunkin’ Donuts coffee as much as I did. He had few friends and no family and although he never said so, I do not think he had many visitors.