Ed Lynskey - Isabel and Alma Trumbo 02 - The Cashmere Shroud (9 page)

R
iding home after their confab with Dwight, Isabel, their driver, was mulling over how irascible Alma had turned since Sheriff Fox had visited them. She wasn’t at her sharpest when her mercurial nature governed her actions, which sometimes bordered on impulsive and ill-advised. Isabel weighed if she should caution Alma against going off half-cocked, but Alma was already aware.

“
The plot thickens,” she said. “We better stay on guard, above all me.”

“
Sterling advice.” Isabel noticed how the friskier breeze had turned the oak leaves inside out, exposing their paler undersides. That was a weather sign of rain in the offing, but she’d believe it only when she felt the first drops spattering on her upturned face.

Alma
fussed inside her pocketbook but not for her keys. “I’m sure I bought a roll of peppermint LifeSavers when we last shopped at the IGA.”

“There’s a six-pack in the
kitchen’s penny candy jar,” said Isabel.

“They must be what I remember
getting.” Alma ceased her pawing. “Here’s a question for you. Do you get the sense Sheriff Fox is bluffing us?”

“About his charging Sammi Jo with
Ray Burl’s murder?” Isabel paused to deliberate. “Maybe, but if he is, why do we draw so much of his concern?”

“
He likes to call it our ‘meddling’ in his police affairs.”

“We’ve been known to do a bit of that from time to time.”

As they made the turn on Church Street, Alma shifted her pocketbook in her lap. “If he’s just stirring up a big smokescreen, we should be asking what he’s actually got up his sleeve.”

Isabel laughed. “Oh come on
, Alma. Listen to us prattle on like this. You give him too much credit because he’s not that brainy or sneaky. This is Roscoe Fox we’re talking about, not Steve McGarrett or Theo Kojak.”

Alma
smiled at the references to their past favorite TV cop shows. “But is Roscoe taking a different tack on us? Something we haven’t thought of to predict?”

“
He’s all bluster and bark to conceal his deepening frustrations over not getting any positive results. That’s why he refuses to take his crosshairs off Sammy Jo.”

Alma
nodded. She saw their neighbor lady, Mrs. Agnes Ruby Stringfellow, had painted her wraparound porch the shade of robin’s egg blue. Agnes Ruby was a widow like Isabel who ran the Senior Folks’ Center located only a block up and over from their brick rambler. Agnes Ruby rode choppers into her late 70s, smoked stinky cigars, and could cuss the ears off a rap idol. She was also trying to lobby them to drop by some afternoon and join their guilty pleasures such as leathercrafts, basket weaving, and, most exciting of all, playing Parcheesi or Chinese checkers.

Well
. Alma had informed Agnes Ruby in no uncertain terms the sisters played one, and only one, game: Scrabble. If the Senior Folks’ Center should ever adopt it as one of the guilty pleasures, they’d check into participating. But until such time, Agnes Ruby could go blow smoke rings from her Harley before she’d ever see Isabel or Alma at the Senior Folks’ Center.
Basket weaving
, Alma had fumed while hanging up the phone. The lady was “tetched in the head,” as their father Woodrow used to mutter behind their mother Gwendolyn’s back.

Isabel
now parked in the driveway. Pie-crust brown grasshoppers, energized by the August heat wave, were jumping over the lawn. As girls, they used to chase them down to catch and use as bait to fish in the Coronet River. In similar fashion, she’d love to identify something they could offer as bait to entice out Ray Burl’s killer.

The far-fetched idea
was lifted straight out of the plot to a Golden Age mystery novel. Isabel didn’t put much stock in such a ruse’s value in the twenty-first century. Today’s killers were too sophisticated and guileful to trip up and stumble into such a simple trap laid for them.

“
Why don’t we in a bit take a spin out to the turf farm?” asked Alma. “We’ll go see with our own eyes where it all went down.”

Isabel looked
to Alma. “This being a Saturday, I doubt if it’s open.”

“Do the
customers not come in on Saturdays?”

“
Ray Burl the foreman was probably there for the Saturday hours, but Mr. Barclay won’t have found a suitable replacement this soon.” Isabel undid her lap-and-shoulder belt. “But you’ve got me curious enough to go and personally see the layout.”

“
Inside it should be cooler.” Alma also unbuckled her lap-and-shoulder belt. “I feel like a baked yam sitting out here under the sun.”

***

Pooped out in her apartment over the drugstore, Sammi Jo felt torn over whether to phone Reynolds and beg off from their date. Not that they’d made any grandiose plans beyond chowing down at Eddy’s Deli, or if they could ignore their growling stomachs, going all in and driving the seven miles north to Warrenton, the closest town of any larger size.

Once there, t
hey’d enjoy their pick of any fast food chain restaurant on the west bypass. His favorite was a Greek pizzeria while she was more taken with the pancake house unless it was Sunday morning when she went for the delicious brunch served at a steakhouse.

When her cell phone
inside the carrying case she clipped to her waistband rang, she found her caller was Alma.

Sammi Jo was hip to their
proposal to canvass the turf farm. Reynolds could always hang around the drugstore downstairs chatting with Eustis, slurping down a root beer float at the soda fountain, or reading the latest comic books if she wasn’t back in time.

She felt relieved the
ir relationship hadn’t progressed to where they felt comfortable enough to exchange door keys. She doubted if they’d get that serious. Reynolds was a fun dude to pal around with, but did he measure up as husband material? Were kids, SUVs, and a home mortgage part of his foreseeable plans? Did his quest for speed found at the drag race track keep him amused enough? If he proposed to her, she’d feel obligated to ask the diamond ring’s karat size he’d selected. Then she’d give it the sparkles-on-the–wiggled-finger test.

She sighed
out loud. Quiet Anchorage didn’t offer a young single lady a pool of eligible, much less desirable, bachelors to romance, marry, and grow old together with. Although Isabel had married the local boy Max, Alma had moved away before she got hitched twice. Sammi Jo might have to follow in Alma’s footsteps. On the other hand, new folks were relocating to these parts all the time. Sammi Jo might expand her vision beyond her circle of friends and meet a new guy who’d sweep her off her feet, which allegedly occurred once in a girl’s lifetime. Thinking of that heartened her spirits. Right now it was back to work. She put aside her love life and donned her deerstalker hat.

She
owned the brand of answering machines that recorded her telephone conversations, and she’d accidentally taped a call she’d had with Ray Burl. She remembered the recording, found it, and replayed it, her ears sharp to catch any clues Ray Burl may’ve dropped while he spoke. She’d phoned him during their murder investigation of Jake Robbins.

Clarence Fishback, one of Roscoe Fox’s
backstabbing deputy sheriffs no longer on the scene, was mentioned. Sammi Jo activated the recording and let it run as she stood over the answering machine, listening up. She’d caught him on a rare day when he’d felt loquacious: he’d probably never held a longer conversation with her.

“Hi, Daddy, just
me here saying hey there.”

“Sammi Jo? What’s the time?”

Her pulse quickened at the cadence of his familiar twangy drawl.

“Eight o’clock
.”

“So it is. Don’t you need to be at work?”

“Well, that’s why I called. See, I landed this new gig.”

An exaggerated moan came
from him
. “What’s the job this time?”

“Before I say, promise you won’t blow your stack.”

He laughed
. “After all this, nothing you can throw at me is a shocker.”

“I’ve taken up the private detective trade.
Isabel and Alma Trumbo started a new firm, and they asked me to come and work for them.”

He laughed again
using his gruff charm that was there when he needed it to be
. “The gumshoes in the old movies are an odd bunch.”

“What do you think of it?”

“Any honest labor tied to a steady paycheck is cool by me. I didn’t realize we’d a demand for private eyes in town. Are they bonded and licensed?”

“Not yet but it’s in the works. We’re still setting up shop, and Megan Connors is our first big case.”

Ray Burl scoffed.
“I can flat-out say she is no killer.”

“Same thought here. Any theories on who pulled the trigger?”

“I’ve been too busy to give it much thought. Jake didn’t go out of way to pick fights. He kept to himself and fixed the cars. His daddy Hiram and I were road dogs back in the day. Now, Hiram had an Irishman’s temper, and I’d lay betting odds Jake also kept one buried deep inside of him.”

“Clarence and Jake were pals who fought over their race
car.”

This time Ray Burl grunted.
“Even so, Clarence lacked the grit to take out a gun and use it on Jake.”

“Crazy Willie swears a UFO did in Jake.”

Ray Burl used a dry chuckle
. “True story. Ages ago on a whim, he rode the Greyhound to a convention held in Roswell and got hooked on reading the spooky science fiction stuff.”

“That accounts for his bizarre slant on life.”

“That’s just his shtick. Crazy like a fox, Willie is perceptive if you’re able to look beyond his goofiness.”

“So, do you think this PI job can pay the bills?”

“Sure. Go kick some major butt for Megan.”

“Your vote of confidence is appreciated. How’s the turf farm treating you?”

Sammi Jo listened closer for any clue about the place where he was found murdered.

“My crew humped under the flood
lights until midnight. An eighteen-hole golf course in Gainesville needed a rush, and we made schedule.”

“Now I know where I got my working fool genes. Well, I better also make some money.
It’s been swell talking to you,”
Sammi Jo had said to close out their phone communication
.

She was
now left shaking her head before the recording had completed its replay. His murder the previous Thursday had wrecked her young heart. Nothing in their exchange offered her any new insight as to who might’ve harbored a serious grievance against him. She’d run smack-dab into another stone wall. His twangy drawl almost speaking to her from beyond the grave was eerie to the point of creepy, and it unnerved her.

Her first
impulse to erase—her finger rested on the answering machine’s button—his words preserved on the tape wasn’t a strong enough one, and she spared their recording. Her finger lifted off the button. Later, Isabel and Alma might want to give it a close listen and see if they picked up on anything Sammi Jo had overlooked. If they also contracted a case of the heebie jeebies like the one perturbing her, then she’d destroy the recording.

A
mbrose Barclay had gone into the turf farm business after growing up on his father’s dairy farm. Their cows got milked twice a day, early morning and late afternoon, 365 days a year. Barclay grew bone-weary of the incessant chore. After his father drowned atop a silo filled with shelled corn that sucked him down and suffocated him like quicksand, the farm went to Ambrose.

He married the
shiniest apple of his eye, Elsie Denise China, who managed the volunteers at the hospital ladies’ auxiliary. The Barclays adopted a young boy, Alexandru, from Romania and a younger girl, Biyu, from China. Without a shred of guilt, Mr. Barclay sold off the dairy herd and planted the farm’s flat terrain in commercial sod. The townies leered and snickered behind his back at his folly, but he’d done his homework and figured out how to turn a buck. In time, he promoted his hardest worker Ray Burl Garner to be the foreman.

“Mr. Barclay was over the moon on how Daddy ran the turf farm,” said Sammi Jo from the rear seat. Isabel was at the helm. They’d just cleared the Farmers Co-op on Main Street, which appeared busy as it always did. “He was Mr. Barclay’s golden goose, and he knew it.”

“Is it your
contention Mr. Barclay had no apparent motive to see your father dead?” asked Alma, up front with Isabel.

“
Not if Mr. Barclay is all about raking in the profits as I’d say he is from what Daddy told me,” replied Sammi Jo.

“
Did he get along with his boss?” asked Alma.

Isabel took the question. “She already answered that,
Alma.”

“Not necessarily,” said
Alma. “Ill feelings between employer and employee can still breed even if the money is flowing in like it was there. Sammi Jo?”

“Daddy
never had anything negative to say about Mr. Barclay,” she replied. “As long as there was plenty of work to be done, Daddy was a happy man.”

“Sis, are you cool
enough?” asked Alma.

“
I’m comfortable, thanks,” replied Isabel. “Turn off the air conditioner if your nose is turning into an icicle.”

Alma
sought to make it a majority. “Sammi Jo, how do you want to cast your vote? Should the A/C be left on or turned off?”

Several
car lengths of silence ensued, and when Alma turned around in the front seat to see what the matter was, she confronted something stunning. Her mouth dropped, but no words expressed her instant sympathetic reaction. Fat tears trickled down Sammi Jo’s cheeks despite her visible effort to strain and hold it together. Her chin quivered, and her bottom lip protruded.

She swiped her
fingers to scrape away the tears, but new ones welling up in her eyes replaced them. She had the poise to give Alma the
sh-h-h
gesture with her index finger put to her pursed lips. Sammi Jo didn’t want Isabel to know, but Isabel had glimpsed Sammi Jo crying in the rearview mirror.

“
Are you wrestling with a bout of the blues, dear?” asked Isabel.

Sammi Jo did the
finger swipe again, allowing her extra time to compose herself. “Before you came, I played an old recorded phone conversation between Daddy and me on my answering machine. I hoped to discover something he said that might be of use to us, but I was too optimistic. We just talked, and the sound of his recorded voice resonated louder in me just now. Give me a minute, and I’ll be back on the beam with you.”

“Take all the time you
need,” said Alma. “Losing a father like you did is a big stress.”

“
Our father Woodrow died many years ago,” said Isabel. “Not a day goes by that I don’t touch on our parents. They never stop being your mom and dad, even in their deaths leaving this world.”

“Doesn’t the
greeting card verse say time heals wounds?” asked Sammi Jo.

“Perhaps that’s true in love but not so much in death,” replied Isabel. “Our turn is rolling up
fast, and we should phone Mr. Barclay and announce we’re coming to give him the third degree.”

“I’ll just say we’re getting together for a
neighborly cup of coffee and chat,” said Alma.

She
used her cell phone and made the call to the turf farm’s listed business phone number. Isabel was traveling down the potholed lane running between the washboard flat fields of emerald green bluegrass. The crews had mowed it trim and neat as the White House lawn is for the Easter Egg Roll as seen on the TV news. The stalks of wild Queen Anne’s lace and chicory bloomed white and blue flowers, respectively, alongside the lane shoulders.

“
The nice bluegrass belongs pictured on the front of a postcard,” said Sammi Jo.

Alma
’s phone rings attracted no greeter, and she gave up as they drew within view of the brick office and three varisized outbuildings, all fabricated from corrugated steel panels riveted together. Rolls of harvested sod on the wood pallets were stacked like hotcakes atop the flatbed that a tractor trailer would haul to the client’s site readied for planting. The forklift used to move the pallets was parked to the side of the OFFICE, as the door sign read. The shingle hung out below it identified the top banana as MR. AMBROSE BARCLAY, CEO.

Alma
thought Ambrose took himself a bit too seriously. He’d started out from the same modest beginnings as they all had in Quiet Anchorage. His luck happened to turn out better than the majority of his neighbors or peers. Not everybody could sit at the top of the heap. The townies knew of his hit-the-lottery fortune by heart, and it was the frequent talk of the town.

Besides the
fecund smell of tilled soil, Sammi Jo also registered the stronger, sweeter scent of the mowed grass. She’d read in a brochure Ray Burl had left that researchers determined cut grass gave off a natural chemical that revived people’s despondent moods. She was curious enough to volunteer to mow Isabel and Alma’s lawn the next time it was needed to see if the released grassy smells afforded her any relief to beat the blues.

“Where is everybody?”
Alma searched through the sedan windows. “Doesn’t the crew stay busy six days a week?”

“
Ray Burl can no longer crack the whip,” said Isabel.

“Then wouldn’t Mr.
Barclay step up and fill in?” asked Alma.

“
As the big shot CEO, he’s not inclined to deal with grass unless it’s on the links, and he’s taken along his caddie and bag of golf clubs,” said Sammi Jo.

“
I’ll tell you where I’d start our inquiries.” Alma aimed her forefinger at the brick office building. “If anyone is around, they’d be working in there.”

Before they could
haul out of the sedan, the office door gave way, and a young lady stepped outside. She was plain, a polite way of saying mousy, but she wore a smart professional suit. Her right hand shielded her eyes from the sun, and she squinted at the ladies who stared back from sitting inside the idling sedan. Isabel turned off the engine, patted at her hair, and tugged up her door latch.

The
professional lady, her eyes still shaded by her hand, watched their progress over the walkway up to the office. She tucked a black Etienne Aigner handbag under her other elbow as if she’d just stepped out of the restroom and not taken their phone call. She lowered her hand, and her nod coincided with her automatic smile at them.

“Might I help you?”
she asked.

With that accent, s
he’s got to hail from New Jersey
, thought Alma. “We’re hoping to spend a little time with Mr. Barclay,” she replied. “Is he available?”

“
Do you mean for placing a sod order?” The professional lady tugged at the cuffs to her business suit jacket. “I can process whatever your order is. Are you resodding your lawn in bluegrass or fescue?”

“Let’s restart this
proceeding. I’m Alma Trumbo. She’s my older sister Isabel Trumbo, and this young lady is Sammi Jo Garner.”

The
professional lady followed each of the introductions Alma made with nods until she finished with Sammi Jo. “Oh my,” said the professional lady, her fingers brought up to her mouth. “Garner. Are you related to Ray Burl, by chance?”

“
Since Quiet Anchorage isn’t exactly as big as New York City, you can pretty much assume I am,” replied Sammi Jo. “The late
Mr. Garner
was my father, and that explains why you see us here.”

“My
deepest sympathies, Sammi Jo. That was so awful and horrid. He was a sweet man and well-liked here.”

“Thanks
, but might we make this more civil? I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“
I’m Karmine. Karmine Meriwether. I take care of the office needs around the turf farm.”

“Are you a one
lady band?” asked Isabel.

She put on a nice
r smile, and Isabel found herself drawn to and liking Karmine. “It’s just me holding down the fort,” she replied. “Mr. Barclay doesn’t like for me to work alone after what happened to Ray Burl. But I’ve got my cell phone and pepper spray close at hand. The windows and doors are locked up tight. I park my car around back so nobody from the road can see I’m here working by myself.”

“Where is the work crew?” asked Sammi Jo.

“Mr. Barclay gave them the Saturday off after everything that has happened,” replied Karmine.

“Y
ou’re not a native, are you, Karmine?” said Sammi Jo.

“
I’m from a Hoboken neighborhood that is an easy stroll from Sinatra’s Monroe Street. I packed up the U-Haul to move down after Mr. Barclay offered me the job.”

“
Congratulations,” said Sammi Jo. “Why did he pick you over the pool of homegrown applicants?”

Karmine
scowled, the wrinkles furrowing her forehead. “Because I didn’t have to be trained on the financial software package he’d bought. I had the right skills to come in and hit the ground running, and it impressed him to pitch me a job offer on the spot. I snapped it up since I need the work.”

Isabel nodded. “It
looks as if you’re taking care of business in a marvelous fashion.”

“
Well, he doesn’t mind going off and leaving me in charge. Anyway, he’s not here, and I don’t expect him back until Monday.”

“Did he leave town?” asked Isabel.

“He likes to go with his family to his beach bungalow. I’ve got his private cell phone number, but he’d be livid and fire me if I gave it out, so I won’t.”

“We’re not here to get you into
trouble with your boss,” said Isabel. “As Sammi Jo says, we’re informally looking into Ray Burl’s murder.”

Karmine
’s frown deepened. She squared her shoulders in the business suit jacket, and she looked hot and flustered.

Or
else she wasn’t used to wearing the formal clothing,
thought Isabel who couldn’t tell for certain which was the case.

“I don’t
get you,” said Karmine.

“We’re private
investigators like you may’ve seen in the movies,” said Sammi Jo.

“I see,” said
Karmine although it was unmistakable she didn’t grasp the uncommon concept of small town private eyes who were also female. She lifted her arm to point the way, and she dropped her handbag. It plopped on the pavement. “I can show you where I found Ray Burl’s body, if that interests you.”

Sammi Jo stooped down and retrieved
Karmine’s handbag.

Its
weight surprised Sammi Jo. She’d forgotten what a pain toting a handbag could be. She’d quit carrying one because her handbag upgrades had gotten larger and heavier from containing the more stuff she didn’t need. So, she jettisoned the handbag and now traveled light with her driver’s license, a sawbuck, and a credit card in her hip pocket.

“
We’re very interested since you asked,” Isabel said to Karmine. “Lead us to the spot where you found him.”

Isabel
met Alma’s pleased eyes. They knew who reported the dead body to Sheriff Fox.

Karmine
paraded them across the asphalt lot. The door to the largest of the three outbuildings a softball’s pitch away was where they stopped.

Karmine
looked at Alma. “I figured the CSI techies would draw a white chalk outline of where Ray Burl lay on the pavement, but they did no such thing. They just tied up the yellow police line tape and snapped a bunch of creepy pictures. He didn’t leave a big bloodstain for the crew to scour away.”

Isabel didn’t
clarify how the chalk outline seen on the TV cop dramas was a stage prop, or so Sammi Jo had googled it for them.

“
You’re standing right about on the same spot where I found Ray Burl killed,” said Karmine to Alma.

The
superstitious chills rolling through Alma spurred her to take a backward pace. Isabel shuddered after Alma did.

“Did Ray Burl
make use of a locker, desk, or office we can search?” asked Sammi Jo.