Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery #1: The Killing Circle (A Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery) (21 page)

The first name on my Santa Rosa list of two was Avery McDermott on Sycamore Street, Milton. I drove slowly down the street past municipal row to a pleasant, tree-lined avenue. There wasn't a gas station on every corner in Milton and it took me a while to find one and get directions.

I passed through a section of Milton with old rambling houses and cottages on spacious lawns. Then the houses got smaller and closer together, and by the time I turned down Sycamore Street, lawns were almost nonexistent and the residences ramshackle. I found number 406 by a process of elimination and went up the three steps where I noticed the number, under several layers of paint, over the top step, underneath the screened door. A man in a white undershirt and a fat cigar jutting angrily out of his mouth answered my knock. He pushed the point of his belly up against the screen, which put him about two feet away from me on the other side of the door. He planted himself and grew out of the flooring.

“I ain't answering no survey questions and I ain't buying nothin’,” he said and bit his cigar.

“I'm not conducting a survey and I'm not selling anything,” I answered. “I'm looking for Lucy McDermott.”

He chewed his cigar over that and said, “My wife's name is Ethel.”

“Do you know Lucy McDermott? Or maybe you're related to her,” I suggested.

“No.” He uprooted himself and closed the door in my face.

I made a firm decision to try a different approach with George, who lived on (you might know) Myra Street a couple of miles to the east of Milton.

Myra Street was a combination of the old and the new. The house I was looking for was of the latter, a low-slung ranch-type affair with a picture window and horseshoe drive. They were still working on the sidewalks in front of it. I parked and jumped across the moist, dug-up earth and went up the drive to the door. Another screen separated me from George, a tall thin man with nervous eyes, one long eyebrow above them, a beak of a nose, and a gaunt face.

“Mr. George McDermott?”

“Who's askin'?” It was a shallow voice that clipped the words out. Not at all the kind of voice you'd have expected to come out from underneath that nose.

“The name is Rafferty. I'm a private investigator from New Orleans.”

“That so,” he said like he was real interested.

“I'm trying to locate a woman named Lucy McDermott. Ever heard of her?”

He paused longer than he should have had to. “No, can't say that I have,” he said, “but I tell you what. You hang on there and I'll go get my wife. She's always gettin’ together with the womenfolk around here and she just might know. You hang on.”

He made sure the screened door was locked, closed the door behind it and locked it, too, and I hung on. I should have known better but the idea to bolt didn't get strong until I had smoked a cigarette halfway down. I ground it out and was leaving when I heard the lock being turned. George McDermott shoved a pudgy woman, who kept running her tongue across her top lip, ahead of him to the door. She coughed discreetly and swiveled her head to glance up and back at him and got a prod in the back for bothering.

“I never heard of a Lucy McDermott,” she blurted, her voice raising an octave on the first syllable of Lucy.

“You sure now, honey?” The words were crawling from George's mouth now. “This man's come all the way from New Orleans to find her, so it must be important.” His eyes darted from the street to me and back again.

The woman didn't answer She didn't have to—George had stalled long enough. A black and white job with a cherry on top turned into the horseshoe. Two men in khaki uniforms alighted lethargically from the car, one of them resting his hand on his gun butt.

“This here's the man, Earl,” George clipped self-importantly.

“Well, now, you done right to call me, George.” Earl turned his receding sandy curls to me. He still had on sunglasses although the sun had long since started slipping its way into the west. “Looks as if you and me are going to get the opportunity to know each other, mister,” he drawled. I thought grimly of going through the Big City P.I. Has Showdown With Small Town Law Enforcement Official routine. “Give him a go over, Shark.”

Shark had a face that could have stopped a train. His nose was so bent it looked like it was trying to get in his right eye, one cheek was going to be blue and puffed and a little higher than the other one forever. I could have fit my kitchen table in his mouth and used his top lip for a tablecloth. But Shark knew his business. He lumbered over with his right hand still on his gun butt and with his powerful left twisted my right arm behind me and shoved me over to the car, thereby indicating that I should assume a position against the car amenable to search. I did. He poked, prodded, slapped, scraped me down and swiftly extracted my gun.

“Thought you'd want to know, Earl,” George was saying behind me.

“Sure thing. I always want to know when we got a visitor.” Shark turned me around so I could see him niftily slide my gun through the air where it thudded neatly in Earl's hand. “Well, now, mister,” Earl said as he inspected the machinery, “I think we oughta let the McDermotts here get back to their peaceful home life while you and me have a nice informative chat back at the department.” His deputy's badge glinted in the light over the door.

“That's too bad, George,” I imitated Earl's drawl and threw some disappointment around the edges. George's one eyebrow shot up involuntarily. “That you won't get to watch me bite the deputy on the hand.”

Earl gave a derisive laugh as the door whooshed back into its frame, but Shark didn't like my sense of humor. “Watch that business,” he muttered threateningly through his thick lips and pushed me down into the back seat. The doors locked me behind a strong mesh screen. Shark climbed in front with Earl.

“You sure you wouldn't feel safer if I was wearing handcuffs?” I asked, but no one answered. I wouldn't exist until we were in the sheriff's office.

30

The Dead Aunt

Earl slapped a straight-backed chair on the side of his desk and eased himself on top of a frayed cushion in the seat of a wooden swivel chair behind it. Six pairs of eyes watched every move. The only person in the big room who was uninterested was Shark. He busied himself with the loose papers lying all over his desk. Earl carefully removed his sunglasses and rested them on top of a plastic pen holder. A finger darted under a stack of paper, bending the edges back so he could sneak a look at whatever was underneath. He diddled around some more so that he could build up the suspense that was already killing me. When I could stand it no more, he leaned back, folded his hands over his stomach, and gave me his undivided attention.

“State your name and your business,” he said efficiently. I did. “You got an identifying card?” He leaned forward, extending his index and third fingers. I took out my wallet and showed him. He looked at it a long time, then turned it over and looked at it some more. I got a hard stare as he handed it back. He examined me almost as minutely as he had the card. I held my eyes open for inspection and remembered not to sigh too audibly. This Earl was tough, no two ways about it. He set his face into a plastic smile.

“Now you know, Rafferty, most gun-carrying strangers who come to our town here remember to drop by and give us a howdy-do. I guess it slipped your mind, though.” He was being so polite I wished I had a raw beefsteak to shove down his throat.

“No, it didn't slip my mind,” I said. The smile started slipping out of the corners of his mouth. “I didn't know it was a town custom.”

He tightened the smile into a grimace. “Well, now you know.” He picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked it slowly a couple of times. “Just what business you got in our neck of the woods?”

“I'm sure George was happy to fill you in on that.”

The pen clicked to writing position and he shoved the point into the stack of papers. “I want to hear it from you,” he said, not quite yelling. The paper shuffling around the room slackened and stopped. The only sound was the slow click of the pen as Earl's big thumb mashed the button. Furtive eyes darted conspicuously and ears flapped in the breeze. Earl swept the room through slits and the paper moving resumed. Things must have been slack in Santa Rosa.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess George was too excited to get it straight.” His big thumb came down so hard on the pen that his nail turned white. “I'm trying to locate a woman named Lucy McDermott for questioning in connection with the murder of her employer in New Orleans. I understand she spent time in the neighborhood of Gulf Breeze. Could be she has relatives in the area that she might be staying with, so here I am.”

He stared at me with a face devoid of comprehension, or any expression for that matter “Hey, Shark. Where've I heard the name Lucy McDermott before?”

Shark swiveled his chair languidly. “We got an APB on net” Shark was one of those types who always mutters threateningly no matter what he is saying, only he could adjust the mutter to carry over a mountaintop.

“Don't tell me,” I said to Earl. “You knew it all along.”

His neck jutted, pushing his face halfway across the deck. “Now you look here Mr. Wise Guy. We gonna get somethin’ straight and we gonna get it straight right now. This here, right here,” he slapped the desk, “is the law in this town. When the sheriff ain't here, I'm in charge. You got business here, you come and speak it to me or the sheriff. Now that's the first thing you ought to remember. The second thing is we don't like strangers like you showing up on the doorstep of our private citizens askin’ a lot of questions. We ask the questions around here and people like George McDermott know that and like it. Now if you don't like it we got ways of makin’ you like it. The fact of the matter is that we got out own ways of doin’ just about everything. And that's why we got law and order in this county and people that like law and order.” He sat back like he'd just made the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I can see that you keep your boys busy and in shape, though.” He either didn't get it or let it pass. He just sat there looking like he didn't understand anything, which I decided was his way of being tough. “Look, Deputy, I wasn't trying to cut you boys out of the action. For all I know there won't be any. I may be in the wrong part of Florida. The woman may have come from Miami and just liked to visit the beach areas around here. All I know is she had an aunt who died and who she was close to and that she liked Gulf Breeze. So I thought I'd take a trip down here and check out the records for inheritances over the past couple of months. Maybe the aunt owned a house around here and left it to the McDermott woman. Only trouble is I got here a little too late to do much checking. Sure, it's a shot in the dark, but what does anyone have to go on? The woman's holed up somewhere and this is as good a place to start looking as any.”

“What makes you think you're more efficient than the New Orleans Police Department?” he asked.

“Nothing. I just like to finish what I start. Detective Lieutenant Roderick Rankin knows I'm working on this case. You can check that out with a phone call.”

More blank stare and then: “And just how did you get started on this case?”

“I found the body.” He didn't seem moved. “Go ahead, check it out,” I said gesturing at the phone.

Apparently I wasn't going to rate high on the popularity polls no matter what. Saying nothing, Earl got up and strolled over to Shark's desk where something like a powwow went on. He came back and shoved a blank piece of paper in front of me and clicked the ballpoint open. Handing me the pen he said, “Write Rankin's number and yours underneath.” I put them down and passed the paper to him. He picked up the phone and leaned back, cradling the receiver in his neck.

“This here's Dep'ty Slade,” he said after a moment. “I want to make a person-to-person call to Detective Lieutenant Rankin.” He reeled off the number There was a pause. “Now hold on a minute, sweetheart. I want you to charge that call to another number.” He glanced at me with something like amusement and then he gave my office number to the operator. I made a gesture of helplessness that was the first thing I'd done since I'd been there that was appreciated. After a longer pause and a lot of clicking coming from both the phone and the pen, Earl straightened up in the chair, put the pen down, and held on tight to the receiver. With an ingratiating smile widening his mouth, he spoke.

“Lieutenant Rankin, this's Dep'ty Earl Slade, Santa Rosa County, Florida. We got a dick here says he's Neal Rafferty. Says he's working with you on the Stanley Garber murder You know him? I see,” Earl said. Uncle Roddy was probably setting him straight about how close we were working together. Earl handed the phone to me with three fingers over the mouthpiece. “He wants to talk to you,” he said.

I took the phone. “Greetings, Lieutenant.”

“What the hell are you doing now, Neal?” he bellowed.

“Well, there hasn't been much action, Lieutenant. Just thought I'd do some checking on Lucy McDermott's dead aunt.” I smiled nicely at Earl.

“What dead aunt?” he shrieked. I'd never heard him so excited.

“Yes, Lieutenant, I was sure Catherine Garber had mentioned to you that Lucy McDermott left town a couple of months back to attend her aunt's funeral,” I said, intimating that Uncle Roddy knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Nobody mentioned nothin’ of the kind to me.” I didn't say anything. He went on. “Nobody tells the cops nothin’. We don't have time to get cozy with all the principals in a case,” he said. “Did she say the aunt died in Florida?”

“No.”

“Well, then, what the hell are you doing there? We
got
an APB out.”

“So I heard. Anyway, that could take a long time if she's holed up waiting for the heat to subside. I thought the aunt might go along with that passion for Florida I told you about. Maybe she left Lucy a house or something.”

He sighed. “It's your time, Neal.”

“Sure thing, Lieutenant,” I said pleasantly, and handed the phone back to Earl.