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Authors: Penny Warner

Dead Body Language (5 page)

BOOK: Dead Body Language
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I was alone by the small, secluded reservoir—just the way I like it—except for Sluice Jackson, the ragged old miner, wearing his floppy beaded hat. The beads are actually dangling earrings that Sluice makes and sells to the tourists as he shuffles up and down the main street. At the moment he was hunched over a leather bag mumbling to himself. He looked around anxiously as he pulled out what appeared to be a small metal dowel glinting in the sunlight. Another one of his old mining tools, no doubt.

I had to admit, the old guy made me a little nervous. Mainly because I couldn’t understand a word he said when he talked to me. But then, I don’t think most folks really understood him. Sometimes, when working late at night down at the newspaper office, I’ve seen him on his way to the cemetery where he does odd jobs, talking to thin air as if he were Cosmo Topper entertaining spirits.

Sluice caught me watching him. He tightened the straps on his backpack, rubbed his wayward eyebrows, then started in my direction. I quickly packed up my lunch remnants and, tossing a few crusts to the squirrels, made a leap toward my bike. I felt sorry for Sluice, but I wasn’t in the mood for a mumble-fest. It was hard enough reading the lips of those who spoke meaningful sentences.

Too late. He toddled faster than I leaped.

“I din’t take it. I din’t do it. It wern’t me. It wern’t.” He was shaking his head and clutching his leather sack and talking to me as if I had accused him of stealing.

I smiled weakly and tried to look as though I knew what he was talking about.

“It wern’t me,” he said one last time, then he turned and walked away. I watched him go down the hill toward town, shaking his head, still in some kind of denial. I
wondered, briefly, what he didn’t take. He probably didn’t know himself.

It was just after one forty-five when I arrived back at the Penzance Hotel. As I reached the top step I spotted Miah in the hallway, arms loaded with comic books.

“Hey, Miah,” I called. I shook my index finger in the air, made a twist at my nose with the manual alphabet letter “F”—which looks like the common gesture for “OK”—then opened and closed my thumb and index finger at my mouth, signing: “Where’s my
Fox And Crow
?”

He smiled apologetically and shook his head, tossing the too-long blond forelock over his eyes. He said something aloud but I couldn’t make it out at that distance. I gave the universal sign for “What?” by screwing up my face.

“Wait—” he managed to sign, wiggling his fingers with difficulty under the armload of comics. He disappeared into his tiny shop, then returned moments later carrying a few comics in one hand and signing with the other.

“No
Fox And Crow
—sorry. Got a couple of
Little Lulu
s. And check this out—a 1956
Betty And Veronica
. You want it?”

I’m taking some liberties with American Sign Language here. Basically a few superfluous words are omitted and the syntax is reordered—it somewhat resembles Chinese. But that was the gist of it. What he actually signed was more like, “None, Fox, Crow, none. Sorry. Got few Lulu—Look! 1–9-5–6 B-E-T-T-Y, V-E-R-O-N-I-C-A. Whoa! You want, you?”

Miah does a great job of matching facial expression to content, which helps with comprehension—head shakes, eyebrows raised, that sort of thing. He gets his point across most of the time and that’s what counts. To tell you the truth, I have a little crush on him. He has these long, smooth, lanky fingers that were born to sign, among other things. So what if he’s only twenty-five.

I don’t really need to use signs with Miah. Most of the time I can understand his speech, when he isn’t trying to shake his long forelock out of his face. But we primarily
sign to each other to give him more practice. Part of the job requirement at my newspaper was the knowledge of sign language, but there weren’t a lot of folks in the area who knew ASL. Miah was willing to learn, had taken a course down at the local community college, and in the past six months had become proficient enough to interpret for me in most situations. He was a natural.

“Both
Lulu
s have Witch Hazel,” he signed, crooking his finger across his nose in an unsuccessful attempt to make the sign for “witch.”

I laughed. “Thanks a lot. You just called me ‘ugly.’ ” I showed him the correct way to move his crooked index finger to make “witch”—arched outward from his nose, not dragged horizontally across the middle of his face. He shook his head and spoke without signing. “Damn! I always get those two mixed up!” Then he made the sign for “pea brain,”

I unlocked my office door and asked Miah to take down phone messages and start typing ads while I checked my desk for the damn mystery puzzle I had scrawled on the restaurant napkin. I’d had a great idea at the reservoir about how to kill the high school principal without having to unlock the door and was ready to finish it up. But the search proved useless—the napkin seemed to have mysteriously disappeared, until it occurred to me where I might have left it.

I knocked on Boone Joslin’s office door and turned the knob. This time the door opened. I pushed it slowly—remembering the surprise I’d received the last time I had burst into Boone’s office.

But it was the smell, not the sight, that stopped me cold this time.

“W
hoa!” I shouted, then inhaled again as if it were my final breath. “Is that sourdough bread? I haven’t had real San Francisco sourdough since I left the city! Where’d you get that?”

Dan Smith was hovering over the hot buttered bread and a file folder on Boone’s desk, tapping his pencil in a rhythmic beat. There was a trace of butter on his mustache that he licked off as he looked up.

I knew the radio was playing because I could feel the vibrations of a bass guitar or drum through the floorboards.

“Murrf,” I think he said. I don’t know what it meant. He was a little hard to read with his mouth full of sourdough bread. He gulped down the large bite with a swallow of cola, wiped his mustache and lips with the back of his hand, and extended the remainder of the loaf to me. “Want a bite?”

I tried to shake my head, but I don’t think I looked very sincere. “Where’d you get it? Not in Flat Skunk.”

“Stopped overnight in San Francisco on my way here. It’s day-old, but I heated it up in Boone’s microwave.
Tastes like fresh.” He set the torn loaf down next to the open file and steam wafted up, along with the pungent aroma. Warm bread. I tried not to drool.

Boone’s office was practically a home-away-from-home, complete with all the necessities—a microwave oven, convertible sofa bed, exercise bike (“like new, never used”), portable TV and VCR, and Nintendo Entertainment System. Everything a good private investigator needs.

I moved in slowly, my attention temporarily distracted from the bread by a legal-size envelope on the desk. It was tinted the shade of raspberry sherbet and almost obscured by the file Dan had been reading. Peeking out from the envelope were enough twenty-dollar bills to wallpaper my office.

“I … I think I lost my napkin in here.” With great effort, I tore my eyes from the money and glanced around the room, which looked considerably tidier than earlier in the day.

“You need a handkerchief?” he asked tentatively, pulling a white hanky from a deep Levi’s pocket.

“No, I wrote something on a paper napkin from the café. I thought I had it with me when I stopped by this morning and now I can’t seem to find it.” In my once-over search for the napkin my eyes fell upon the cash again. I looked up at Dan Smith.

He did a quick body search, then shrugged. “Sorry. Seems like quite a few things have disappeared around here lately.”

“No word from your brother?” I asked, edging toward the desk for a closer look at the bills.

He frowned and rubbed his jaw. “Nothing.” He looked at the envelope, then at me. “It’s five thousand dollars.”

I picked up the envelope. Five thousand dollars. That rang a bell.

“Where’d it come from?” A familiar perfume rose from the envelope.

“Believe it or not, I found it in the microwave when I went to zap my bread. Boone’s always hiding his stuff in
strange places, ever since he was a kid and Mom found his
Playboy
collection in the all-too-predictable bottom drawer. I assume this is what our mysterious office visitor was looking for. Guess he missed it.”

I frowned. Something wasn’t adding up. Too many odd things had occurred since Dan Smith had arrived in Skunk.

“Did you call the sheriff?”

He scratched his beard again. “No. I didn’t think it would be a good idea. Like I said, Boone doesn’t like people going through his stuff, especially the cops. But I am getting a little concerned about my brother. That’s a lot of money to have lying around. Why didn’t he take it with him?”

I studied Dan Smith as he stroked his mustache back and forth with a thick, tanned finger. The stroking was disconcerting. “You think the money has anything to do with that file you’ve been looking at?” I indicated the folder on the desk.

He picked it up and closed the cover.

“I found it on the floor near the filing cabinet. Nothing inside, only ‘Whiskey Slide’ written on the cover and a name on the inside. The rest of the files seem intact. I’m afraid it doesn’t tell me much.”

“What name?”

He looked puzzled.

“What name was written inside?” I repeated, more insistently.

“Lisa … uh …” He pulled open the cover. “Risa Longo.”

Risa Longo! The woman Lacy Penzance was searching for. The long-lost sister. Had Boone found her in Whiskey Slide?

“I think you should have called the sheriff,” I said, watching him for a reaction. His face remained blank and he had stopped rubbing his mustache. “I realize Boone has a habit of going off for days when he’s working on a case. But this—this is different. His office has been broken into. One of his files has been tampered with. And all that cash …”

Dan’s eyes shifted suddenly toward the door, and a chill ran up my back. I turned around abruptly.

Miah was standing in the doorway looking very upset.

“What?” I signed, turning my palm up and shaking my open hand forcefully.

“Phone. Someone—” He signed without mouthing the words, presumably so Dan wouldn’t understand him. But the curious expression on his face told half the story. “Woman. Refuse leave name. Said, tell you run ad—not! Sounded like she crying, upset, much. Finish, hung up.”

I turned back to Dan to see if he had caught any of this. Some of the signs were obvious—telephone, crying, hung up—but he looked more puzzled than Miah. That was fine. Miah and I had an understanding. When talking business in front of others, we don’t use speech.

“What’s up?” Dan asked.

“Uh, got a phone call. From … my mother. Her car … broke down, you know how it is.”

Dan didn’t move.

“Gotta go,” I said bluntly. I pulled off a small hunk of bread, then followed Miah back to my office.

It was probably Lacy Penzance—she was the only advertiser who could have been upset about the ad she placed, unless the woman with the lost poodle had heard bad news. The rest of the ads were the usual collection of garage sales, help wanted, and run-of-the-mill lost-and-found. I keyed in a computer command and watched Lacy’s ad appear on the screen.

“Damn! I didn’t get her phone number when she was in this morning,” I said to myself out loud, then turned to Miah. “Try the phone book. If you can’t find her number, maybe it’ll be in that frog-jumping committee file. Or the Friends of the Pioneer Cemetery file. If you find it, give her a call and I’ll tell you what to say.”

Bless Miah—he had some surprising talents. He got the number by calling Mickey Arnold at the sheriff’s office. Mickey was like an older brother to Miah, what with the sheriff being Miah’s father and all. It didn’t hurt that the deputy had a little crush on me either. He was a great source of information at times.

Miah dialed Lacy’s number but there was no answer. What, I wondered, was her problem now? Had she found Risa Longo herself? Was that why she was canceling the ad?

Reluctantly I told Miah to pull the ad, then I gave up on Lacy Penzance for the time being.

By seven that evening half of the inside pages were neatly ready to go to press—mostly ads. In the next two days I had to finish the front and back pages—mostly news—plug in a few fillers, and complete that damn mystery puzzle, which had become a mystery in itself. Although everything was done by desktop publishing on my PC, it would take me all of Thursday to add the finishing headers and footers, graphics, and fonts. Then I had to get it over to the printer in time to publish by Friday night for distribution Saturday morning.

It might be tedious work to some, but I loved every minute spent at the computer creating my newspaper. Being a deaf student in a hearing high school, I was prepared primarily for the secretarial route. My teachers thought that was about all I could do in life with my disability. But I mastered the computer, read every manual ever written for my word processing and desktop printing programs, and watched my growing expertise open doors at a number of interesting jobs. That, along with a degree in journalism, helped me get the position at the
Chronicle
. I’m convinced the computer will change the Deaf community’s way of life in the very near future.

BOOK: Dead Body Language
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