CHAPTER
FOUR
After filing preliminary notes in the early afternoon, I check my cellphone. One message. “Hi. I’m coming back tomorrow afternoon, and you should plan on having dinner with me. I’ll see you then. Bye.”
I pick up the office phone, hitting speed dial. A few seconds later, a male voice answers with the texture of bark dust. “Yeah?”
“Larry, can you come in? We pulled a murder in LF.” The voice on the other end grunts and hangs up.
Forty-five years earlier, in Amarillo, Texas, in the maternity ward of St Anthony’s Hospital, Ernest and Phyllis Welk named their newborn in honor of their favorite entertainer. Family legend had it the singer was a distant cousin, though no hard evidence ever surfaced to support the claim. In a simple act of sincere and sentimental homage, Larry We
