Murder Takes to the Hills (24 page)

“Hi, Dave, it’s getting warm. Would you like a Coke or something?”

He looked embarrassed. “No thanks, Alex. I’m okay.”

I pulled out my cigarettes and offered him one. He started to reach for it, then pulled his hand back, as if he didn’t want to accept anything from me.

“What was all the excitement earlier? Clues jumping from every bush?” I blew smoke casually and leaned against the other fender of his car.

“I really can’t discuss that.” He turned beet red. “I—ah—look, Alex, it wouldn’t do either one of us any good if we were talking when
Jeffie
comes back. Which could be any time now. And—well—it might be a good idea if you had Pete Minot here. He’s a sharp guy.”

He stunned me. They were treating us—me—like a prime suspect. Cindy had been right.

“Thanks for the tip, Dave. Sara Blackstone already told me
Jeffie
has it in for
nonlocals
. I may give Peter a call.”

I went briskly up the deck steps and interrupted Fargo’s nap, who interrupted Cindy’s.

“What’s up?” She yawned.

I told her of the earlier activities and my brief conversation with Spitz.

“Damn!” She reached in my shirt pocket for her monthly cigarette. I admired and disliked her self-control. “Well, do you want me to go call Peter? Funny, he gave me his card last night. Maybe he also reads tea leaves.”

“Don’t call him yet. Let’s see what our
Jeffie
pulls next. Spitz apparently expects him soon.”

The sheriff arrived a little before noon, waving two warrants. One for the house and grounds, one for my car.
 

I suppose the search made some kind of sense as a precaution, but not much else. If
Jeffie
knew Mickey’s head had been hit with a rock, presumably he
had
the rock. Was he expecting to find blood-stained clothing? We’d had all night to weight it down and take it up to the “bottomless” tarn. Obviously his wallet had been found intact, and apparently his face had not been disfigured in some effort to prevent identification. So he would not find a bloody hammer in the mudroom.

Surely he did not expect to find a half-written letter: “And so, Mom, we’ll be home as soon as we kill Mickey.” Perhaps he deduced that one of us kept a diary and had made some guilt-ridden or triumphant entry.

Johnson and Spitz came inside, two other deputies started on the car. Cindy supervised the car search, while I went upstairs to oversee Johnson and the obviously nervous Spitz. They found literally nothing in the guest room except linens and soap in a small cabinet and extra blankets in the closet.

The kids’ rooms held a few games and books, some odds and ends of clothing and the ubiquitous linens. I followed them downstairs to see Cindy climbing the deck stairs. The car apparently had yielded nothing of interest. The deputies, she said, had moved on to the yard.

In the living room,
Jeffie
had ordered Dave to take the half-burned logs from the cold fireplace and out to the deck. Meantime he scraped around the ashes, scattering soot over himself and a large portion of the carpet. Cindy came in and immediately lost her temper.

“What the hell are you doing, you oaf! You’re ruining the carpet! By God, you’ll get the cleaning bill. What are you looking for? The plans for a nuclear bomb?”

“There might have been burnt clothes. It’ll probably vacuum clean.”

“It will require professional cleaning,” Cindy was now all sweetness. “Mr. Willingham will love to hear that.” Johnson looked slightly uneasy.

Spitz came in, holding his blackened hands before him like a gift.

“Go wash them in the mudroom,” I ordered, “before you touch
anything!
You, too, Sheriff.” He gave me a dirty look, but complied.

They returned marginally cleaner and looked around the rest of the living room. All the pillows were carefully shaken and felt, and Cindy and I exchanged a fast look. Johnson discovered a stack of household bills in a table drawer and went over them in detail.

“Mr. Willingham will be thrilled that you took such an interest in his personal business,” Cindy gushed. She was on a roll, and I didn’t envy the sheriff.

“McCurry could have been blackmailing him,” Johnson pointed out.

“And sent him a monthly bill which he filed along with the gas and electric companies’?”

Spitz gave the bookcase a fast once-over. Finding no secret panels, he announced he was moving on to the kitchen. I heard a drawer or two open and close, a cabinet door click shut and the squeaky oven door come open for a fast look-see. And the heartfelt kitchen search was ended. I heard his footsteps come out of the mudroom as we trailed Johnson into the master bedroom. I was last in the line of three, and Spitz crooked his finger at me in a come-here motion.

I quietly joined him in the mudroom, where he stood staring at the three guns.

“What’s this armory all about?” he asked softly. “Is there ammo for them?”

“They were here when we got here. I assume they are Ken’s. None of them had been fired or cleaned in a hundred years. None of them are loaded, but ammo is in that drawer. Take a look at the .22—it’s more a danger to the shooter than his target.”

He gently lifted the rifle from its pegs and turned it toward the window. Pulling back the bolt, he grimaced. “Jesus, what a mess.”

“The shotgun is the same and so was the pistol.”

“Was?”

“Yes, I cleaned and loaded it a couple of days ago, just for general safety—two
 
women alone, a rather isolated cabin, unfamiliar territory. It has not been fired, nor would it have been without extreme provocation and immediate threat.”

“You sound like a cop.”

“I’m a licensed PI, my brother is the cop.”

He stifled a guffaw, pulled the pistol from the holster, smelled it and looked it over carefully. Returning it to the holster, he reached as high as he could and placed it and its box of cartridges atop a bare rafter. They were out of sight from floor level, but where it had hung, there was a light spot on the wall. I looked around and took a full length apron from a wall hook—Mrs.
Fouts
’?—and hung it on the nail that had held the holster.

We looked at each other, smiled slightly and returned to the kitchen in time to hear Cindy yell, “You bastard!”

Dave Spitz ran for the bedroom, with Fargo and me hard on his heels. His broad shoulders blocked my view, but, looking around his arm, I glimpsed Sheriff
Jeffie
Johnson holding a brief, diaphanous, lace-trimmed black nightgown against his corpulent body and seemingly doing a little dance step.

“What happened?” I ducked under Dave’s arm and yanked the gown from Johnson’s unresisting grip.

Cindy was red with rage. She pointed to Johnson. “This dirty-minded pervert of a law officer held this gown of Frances’s up to his body and did his elephantine dance with it while he asked me if it is what I wear when you and I go to bed.”

“Jesus,
Jeffie
! What the hell were you thinking?” Dave looked mortified.

“Hey, folks, I was just kidding around. I didn’t mean nothing.”

“Did he touch you?” I’d kill him!

“No.”

“Even so…I imagine you report to the town council?” Spitz nodded for the frozen
Jeffie
.

“Good.” I tossed the gown back in the bureau and slammed the drawer. “I imagine they will be almost as interested as Mr. Willingham to learn you were cavorting with his wife’s
lingerie
and asking their cousin what she wears to bed at night!”

“I still don’t see why y’all are
makin
’ such a fuss…”

A deputy interrupted
Jeffie
by marching past us and dumping three river rocks on the bed.

“Look what, I found on the back porch, Sheriff.”

They were three of my four bookends-to-be. “There should be a fourth, Deputy. Why didn’t you bring that one in? It’s right beside the others,” I explained.

“There wasn’t no fourth. Just these three lined up along the edge of the back porch.”

“Oh, shit,” I sighed.

Jeffie
laughed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

We all trailed the sheriff down to his car, where he still had the fourth rock in a plastic bag in the trunk. It seemed a rather carefree way to handle evidence in a murder investigation.

He handed me the bag and I looked thoroughly at the rock, trying not to see the caked blood and little gobs of hair caught in the rough, almost flat underside of the rock I had once thought so pretty. It was brown with an orange cast and a couple of yellowish areas I had found interesting.

“Well,” I said, handing the bag back to him. “It could be mine or one very much like it.”

“So you admit it is yours.”

“No, Sheriff, I admit the possibility. And even if it is mine, it was kept on the back porch with three others in plain view, as your deputy can verify. Anyone on the path—or even the mountain road—could have noticed it and picked it up.”

“And I can tell you,” Cindy added, now demure and helpful, “you’ll find
Ms.Peres
’ fingerprints on it, probably mine and Mr. Mellon’s from the next cabin up. He noticed it and asked to look at it.
 
And, of course, if you are lucky, you may find the prints of the killer.”

“Mellon was the one who found McCurry. He walked down early to the mailboxes to get his Sunday papers from his mailbox and saw the body. He’s the one who called it in. He thought McCurry, maybe with some drinks in him, had fallen off the bridge. Mellon said a fellow did fall there, some years ago, and landed on his head…but he lived. Loony, but alive.” Dave seemed happy to provide this information, and
Jeffie
not pleased to hear it.

“Perhaps McCurry would have survived if he’d been found sooner, the night was pretty cold,” I put in. It was a weak effort, but any red herring in a storm, I always say.

“That doesn’t explain your rock being the weapon.”

I
propped
my foot casually onto the car’s bumper and lit a cigarette, willing myself to look like a good ol’ mountaineer. “Well,” I drawled, “maybe it’s not my rock at all.
 
Maybe somebody saw mine and liked it and just helped themselves to it. It could be in California by now. Maybe the one Mickey landed on was just coincidentally similar to mine.”

“And maybe not. Law of averages makes it mighty strange you find one unusual rock somewhere in the creek and then another one just like it turns up right where Mickey’s head landed…if he did fall.”

“If we hypothesize that it was my rock, it still makes no sense, Sheriff. There are probably dozens of rocks within reach of where he died. Why would I carry that one, which might be identified as possibly mine, down the hill? Why not just use one that came easily to hand?”

“Who knows? Maybe it was symbolic or something.” He smirked.

“Another question for you, Sheriff. What are those little scratches on the rock? They were not there when I picked mine up last week. They look like tiny little thumbtack scratches.”

“I don’t know myself. They were there when we first saw it. I was hoping you could tell us what they were.”

I shook my head and shrugged. “No. I’ve no idea. But it leads me to think that it is definitely not my rock at all. I most certainly would not have picked up one that was already marred.
 
As I told you, we were going to use them in the house as bookends. These marks, of course, ruin it, and prove that either it was never mine, or someone had it after I did.”