Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (14 page)

Chapter
17

We grabbed a quick bite for
dinner, then snuggled in for the night with the gas fire lit against the
bone-chilling damp. Louisa found a comedy on the television but I couldn’t
concentrate, even with the canned laughter interrupting every few seconds. I
spent a restless night, still torn by the pull of going home.

The next morning at breakfast I
brought up the subject with Louisa.

“Don’t go, Charlie. You’re the
only one who can possibly find out what really happened to Dolly. The
authorities have closed the file. Archie is a mess—poor man can’t even think
straight.”

“You don’t actually believe that
some supernatural presence killed her, do you?”

She rearranged the toast on her
plate. “Well, of course, not in so many words. But Dolly was a strong woman. I
can’t see that she would kill herself because she became frightened.”

I had to agree with that.
Although I’d seen Dolly pretty shaken up, she always came back by either
brushing off the scare or charging through in spite of it.

“She would have simply moved her
shop when the disturbances became too much bother,” Louisa said, “or she’d have
seen her doctor if she didn’t feel well.”

Probably true on both counts.
Either the coroner was correct or there was only one other possibility. Someone
had killed her.

The police would normally look at
the family members. I’d watched enough investigations up close to know that. So
if there were any reason to suspect Archie, they would surely be questioning
the heck out of him. Plus, just looking at the man yesterday—he was genuinely in
shock.

So, who else might have it in for
Dolly?

Well, let’s see . . . At least a
dozen complaints had been lodged against her. Among that group, someone must
have taken his or her problem much more seriously than the police did. I
supposed I could ask a few more questions, just see where it might lead.

Louisa sat across the table from
me, sending a hopeful gaze my direction.

“Okay, I’ll stay. I can ask some
questions.”

“Bethany is back at work and I’ve
taken the rest of the week off. I’ll help you,” she said with a delighted
smile.

There wasn’t much way of
dissuading her as she bustled around the house, gathering some notebooks and
pens, a flashlight, a magnifying glass and an antique walking stick with a
dagger-like concealed tip.

“No idea what we need,” she said,
“so I’m bringing it all.”

“I think just the paper and pens
will handle it,” I told her. I really didn’t want to mention that I carry a
pistol at home, or that more than a few of my investigations have put me face
to face with killers. I had no intention of letting this case go that far. We
would ask a few questions. If we found any real evidence at all . . . I would
immediately bring the authorities into it.

While Louisa dressed I jotted
down the few names I remembered from the police blotter. We should probably go
back there first and obtain a complete listing of all the complaints. When she
came downstairs—in tweeds and sturdy walking shoes—I suppressed a smile and
gave her a short briefing.

“We’ll get the names and
addresses,” I said. “There are quite a few so we should divide the list. Just
engage each person in conversation. Do
not
represent yourself as working
for the police.” I could see us getting into big trouble that way. “Find out if
they had seen Dolly recently, and when. If it was within, say, the last month
or so before she died ask about the circumstances of the encounter. Was there
any problem, that sort of thing.”

“Got it.”

“If you run across anyone at all
who was extremely angry with her, just back away. We’ll give their name to the
police. I don’t want to end up in an English jail for our efforts.”

“Right,” she said as we walked
out the door. “At least it couldn’t be nearly as awful as the one in
Marrakech.”

I stared at the back of her tweed
jacket as she locked the front door. Marrakech? Seriously?

She chatted about how lucky we
were that the weather had warmed up again, while I thought about all the family
surprises I had in store for Ron when I got home.

We got a printout of the
complaints from the same clerk, Smith, who’d been behind the desk on my first
visit. It was printed in sequence with the more recent complaints at the top of
the list. Out on the sidewalk, I strategically tore the page and handed my aunt
the half with the oldest of the reports. Surely she wouldn’t encounter anyone
with fresh anger among those names. I’m used to trouble following me, but my
place in family history would definitely have a black mark next to it if I let
her get into serious danger during my visit. I was learning that she had a
knack for that, all on her own.

We took our lists, notebooks and,
in my case, a map of the town and split up outside the courthouse. It was nine
o’clock and we agreed to meet at the Angel Hotel for lunch at twelve and
compare notes.

I watched Louisa head up the
block with a jaunty step before I gave serious attention to my list. Some of
the street addresses were vaguely familiar to me after days of walking this
part of town. I spotted a coffee house with tables outside and took a few
minutes to sit down and fortify myself while I made a few marks on my handy
little map. Some of the streets were nowhere to be found, so I assumed they
were on the outskirts of town or somewhere in the outlying countryside. For
now, I would find the most obvious ones, which were mainly businesses.

The Banyan Tree was a ladies
clothing boutique that favored styles with a tropical and Eastern flair. I
stuck my notes into my purse and went inside. Sally Darcy introduced herself as
the owner and I noted a young woman of Asian descent with dark hair stylishly
cut. I flipped through a rack of bright print blouses.

“A lady recommended this shop,” I
said when she asked if there were anything she could help me to find. “Dolly
Jones. She has the knit shop.”

Sally’s face did a series of
little moves, ending with a smile.

“You remember her? I gathered
that she shopped here quite a lot.” I continued to scoot hangers along the
rail, keeping one eye on Sally as I did so.

“Dolly used to shop here.” She
was sizing me up every bit as much. “Is she a good friend of yours?”

Establish some common ground with
your subject. “Oh no, not really. I’ve only met her a few times. She seemed
fairly hard to please.”

“If you work in a shop, you’ll
soon see that side of her.” The polite veneer was slipping.

“Oh, I know. Once I heard her get
into a terrible argument with a clerk.”

“Nearly every time,” Sally said.
“She did it all over town, but I finally had to invite her not to shop here
anymore. Could not please the woman. Well, you see our style here. It’s not the
sort of thing traditional English women of her age usually buy. But she would
spot something pretty and buy it without trying it on. Then she would return
it, inevitably. The last time she tried to return something she’d obviously
worn and washed. I wouldn’t take it back. She threw the dress at my shop helper
and kept yelling in the poor girl’s face. I had to pick up the phone and call
the police before she would leave. She walked out the door saying she would
never shop here again.”

“I’ll bet your poor employee was
really upset.”

Sally chuckled. “She let loose
with some choice words as Dolly left the shop, but she got over it very
quickly. We joked that we were glad to see the last of her.”

“Did she ever come back?”

“No, and good riddance. I don’t
need customers like that.”

Two women that I guessed to be in
their twenties came in just then and Sally put her sales face back on. While
she showed them toward a rack of new jackets I murmured a polite ‘thank you’
and left.

Obviously, Sally Darcy was no fan
of Dolly’s but she certainly didn’t seem the type who would stalk the woman and
make her life miserable, much less follow through and slip her a lethal dose of
something. I scratched through her name on the printout.

Since the
friend-recommended-your-shop ploy had worked so well with Sally at The Banyan
Tree, I tried it on a few other stores even though their names weren’t on the
list. At the bookstore the face of the young clerk went blank at my question
and even though I wandered into a different department in hopes of finding a
manager, that person didn’t seem to recognize Dolly’s name either. In a small
housewares shop I got a completely different reaction.

“I’m frankly not at all sad that
she’s dead.”

The store owner was a woman in
her fifties, who had greeted me with a warm smile and offered complimentary
coffee and cookies when I walked in. As with Sally Darcy, Amanda Tremain
quickly checked me out to be sure I wasn’t a close friend of Dolly’s before
succumbing to the temptation to speak freely.

“I’d say that she was thoroughly
disagreeable,” Amanda said, “but that’s not how she presented herself. She’d
come across all sticky-sweet at first, do you a few nice turns . . . liked to
curry favor with anybody important. Oh, my, she catered to the mayor’s wife,
loved to tell how she’d been to a party at their home. While her husband was
manager at the sugar factory, she flaunted that around town a lot. It’s one of
the bigger employers, you know.”

I sipped slowly at my coffee,
nodding at her comments, giving her time and encouragement to tell all.

“You didn’t want to let her do
you a favor though.” Amanda’s eyes narrowed. “You just never knew when you’d
get the knife in the back. I got tired of having her come here to shop, then
criticize the merchandise. Practically ruined my business, she did. Telling
people my products were inferior, gossiping about me, saying I’d snubbed her
because I wouldn’t give her a big discount on account of us being such dear
friends and all. I had my fill of her.”

“How recently did she cause all
this trouble?”

“Oh, it went on until about a
year ago. Once Archie lost that job of his Dolly had to come down a peg. Tried
to make out that it was her life’s dream to have that knit shop, but I know
they moved there to make ends meet. Thought she had so many friends in this
town, she did, and that everyone would come running to buy from her. Not that
one—she’d burned too many bridges.”

I decided to take a chance. “Do
you know of anyone who would have been mad enough to harm her?”

“Is that what they’re saying?
That somebody killed her?”

Uh-oh. Amanda could be just as
big a gossip as Dolly and this story might be making the rounds of the town
before noon.

“No, not at all,” I hastened to
say. How to soften this? “I’d heard that there were some odd incidents at her
shop, pranks that left her shaken up. No, the coroner definitely isn’t saying
anyone killed her.”

Amanda looked as if the news
disappointed her, but I got no sense that she had personally done anything to
Dolly. She, like the other business owners in town, just seemed happy to have
her out of their lives. Before Amanda could get wound up with more stories, I
changed the subject, ended up buying a small coffee press, and said goodbye.

I still had thirty minutes before
I needed to meet Louisa. A utility truck at the curb caught my attention, and I
checked my list. Sure enough, it belonged to Raintree Plumbing. I approached
the man who was in the process of pulling some lengths of pipe from the cargo
area.

“Joshua Raintree?” I asked

“That’s me.” He set the pipe down
and hitched up his pants.

“I understand that you had a
complaint against Dolly Jones for nonpayment of a bill?”

“It’s about time,” he said. “I
filed that complaint at the police station weeks ago. Thought you would never
get around to investigating it.”

He wiped his hands on a rag in
the back of the truck, obviously hoping I’d brought the payment to him.

“Oh, sorry, I’m not with the
police department.”

He studied my face for a moment.
“Well, if you’re with the court and need information about it, I can tell you
exactly what happened.”

I pulled out my notepad and kept
my mouth shut.

“The lady—Mrs. Jones—called me.
Said there was a leak in the cellar of her shop. Stone flooring was all wet.
How much would I charge, she wanted to know. I told her my hourly rates and
said I’d come by the place and take a look. Then I write her out a bid after I
see the damage. It weren’t cheap—had to get special tools to lift that heavy
square of stone flooring—but my price was reasonable. And she agreed to it.” He
punctuated that last statement with a jabbing index finger. “I do the work,
then
she says it’s too high and refuses to pay. In fact, refused to pay the whole
bill, not only the part she said was too much.”

Funny that Dolly hadn’t mentioned
any of this. She made it sound like Archie handled the whole thing. “So what
did you do?”

“What choice did I have? I’d
lifted the access cover way under the dirt, crawled in there, fixed a section
of pipe, put it all back. Well, except for the stone floor section. Told her
the dirt should have some time to dry out first. I told her I’d come back and
put the stone back when she had my money ready. And not before.”

I made notes, for the sake of
appearances.

“You know what I think?” he said.
“I think she just got pissed because I tracked mud across that shiny wood floor
in the shop. With me boots.” He lifted a foot to show me that he wore treaded
work boots. “Not like I could help it. Working down there in the mud, you
know.”

Had Dolly built that incident
into something far more? Twisted the story of the tracks on the shop floor to
somehow implicate this man?

“So, what’ll happen now?” he
asked. “About my money.”