TheCart Before the Corpse (32 page)

“I know.”

“So does Ken Whitehead. Hiram made a note in his log book that he’d sent copies of the reports to Ken with a cover letter telling him politely to back off, or he’d go public.” I sat on the sofa and pulled my legs up. “Those are Hiram’s copies. Did he kill Hiram to shut him up?”

“Possibly.”

“And Jacob?”

“Possibly.”

“Why?”

“Maybe blackmail,” he said. “What else have you found, and don’t hide anything. I am not feeling charitable toward you at the moment.”

“There’s the box, here are the log books for this year and last. Knock yourself out. Don’t you dare remove a single piece of paper. I intend to watch you.”

Actually, I fell asleep on the sofa again. I was exhausted, but I also felt the release of tension as though by delivering the box to Geoff I had delegated the responsibility of finding Hiram’s killer to him.

When I woke, he was gone and I was snuggled under the quilt off the bed. Falling asleep on the man was getting to be a habit. I probably slept with my mouth open and snored. Not the best advertisement for a possible hookup when this was over.

At which point he’d go back to Atlanta and I’d never see nor hear from him again. Nuts. Long distance relationships never worked out.

What the heck, this one was never going to get off the ground.

He did leave me a note and a slip of paper marking a page in Hiram’s log book.

Lackland bought carriage with provenance from Darnell for two thousand dollars. See notation. Tom Darnell lying.

Suddenly I was wide awake. I settled down to read the log book and check the paperwork in the box.

All the information I needed about Hiram’s operation was right here. I now knew who the two Dutch warmbloods belonged to and could discuss their future with their owner. I had copies of board bills, vet bills, feed bills, bank statements, brokerage statements—everything for the last two years.

I read Hiram’s notation of his purchase of the carriage with proof of provenance, but neither the original sales slip nor the provenance was in the box. Odd. Everything else was.

One of the bank statements listed a charge for a safety deposit box. Probably where Hiram had stashed his most important papers, possibly including that sales slip and provenance.

Why on earth would he consider a puny two thousand dollar sales slip and an old provenance valuable enough to put in a safe deposit box?

*

Friday no media waited for us. We could drive Heinzie down to the road and maybe some distance along it. Saturday Dick would arrive and he and Peggy could practice driving the vis-à-vis on the road as they would do on Easter.

While I watched Don Qui. “The only thing I can figure,” I said, “is that he throws his body against the stall door until he jars the latch loose, then somehow gets his nose or his hoof into whatever space he’s created and shoves until he has room to squeeze through.”

“An animal that smart deserves to get loose,” Peggy said. “He’s not really doing any damage.”

“We
cannot
take him to Mossy Creek. We just can’t. I’m going to put a halter and lead line on him and physically hold him inside his stall this morning.”

“He’ll kill you.”

“Then I’ll shut the front and back doors of the stable and let him run free inside.”

“He’ll destroy everything.”

“I swear you’re on his side,” I said.

“Maybe. I like him.”

“I don’t dislike him, although he seems to have taken a major dislike to me. He’s driving me nuts is all. Okay, you win. I’ll shut him in his stall as usual. If he gets out, so be it.”

Chapter 32

Friday

Geoff

Friday morning, the Bigelow County medical examiner’s office called Geoff before he’d even taken his shower. “Agent Wheeler?” said a young female voice. “You asked us to call as soon as the autopsy results were in.”

“Blunt force trauma, right?” He held the phone against his shoulder while he poured coffee from the coffee maker on his bureau and took it back across the room.

“The blows to the head would have killed him, but maybe not right away. Somebody made sure. After the killer shoved him face down in the manure, he put a forty-five slug into his skull, right in the middle of the blood.”

Geoff sat down hard on the edge of his bed. “You find the bullet?”

“Uh-huh. I’m amazed that it didn’t go straight through his forehead and into the manure pile, but it was old ammunition that hasn’t been used in thirty years. Maybe the powder was unstable.”

He’d barely finished shaving when Amos called. Geoff brought him up to speed on the autopsy report. “You know anyone with an old forty-five hanging around?”

“Not off hand,” Amos said, “Everybody around here has guns. I called to tell you that Whitehead has a solid alibi. He was in Atlanta all weekend.”

“If he’s telling the truth, he didn’t shoot Jacob personally.”

“Think he hired somebody to do it?” Amos asked.

“He’s smarter than that. Beat somebody up, maybe. Put himself in a killer’s power? I don’t think so.”

“I’ll have Sandy check gun permits in his name.”

“Unlikely Whitehead would keep old bullets.”

“Tom Darnell would. He doesn’t have any permits, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any guns.”

“Give me twenty minutes to grab a sweet roll and I’ll pick you up. I assume you want to go with me to talk to Darnell,” Geoff said.

The two men found Tom Darnell in his office. When he looked up from his desk and saw them, his face flamed, and his shoulders tightened. “What do you want?” he whispered. “You can’t just walk in here . . . ”

“Sure we can,” Geoff said. “Any place private we can talk?”

“Or we could take you back to Mossy Creek,” Amos said with a smile.

“You can’t arrest me. I didn’t do anything.”

“Who said anything about arrest?” Amos said, still smiling. “Couple of questions. Simple. Five minutes, tops.”

“My boss . . . ”

“Will understand you’re helping us to fight crime,” Geoff said. He didn’t smile.

Darnell’s eyes swept the office. The four other people went back to their computers and acted uninterested, but they were obviously dying to hear what was happening. He stood up. “We have a break room down the hall.”

“Perfect.”

The Darnell that led them down the acid green hall was not the cocky, argumentative Darnell from the funeral. He was scared.

The small break room was set with three beat-up Formica tables, a dozen chairs, and three vending machines, one drinks, one candy, one snacks. At nine-thirty in the morning it was empty.

The three men sat at the table closest to the machines.

“Why don’t you people leave me alone?” Darnell straightened his shoulders tried to sound truculent. It didn’t work.

“We’d like to borrow your forty-five,” Amos said.

“I don’t have a forty-five. I don’t keep guns in the house. Darlene would kill me. Not with the kids.” He started to add something, then stopped and caught his breath.

“So you keep it out at your mother’s house.”

He shook his head. “She . . . no.”

Geoff sat back. “Easy for you to borrow and put back without her knowing.”

“I didn’t! It was my daddy’s gun from Korea. I haven’t seen it since Daddy died. She probably sold it.”

“You ever buy ammunition for it?”

“I told you, no. ”

Amos and Geoff looked at one another. Amos nodded almost imperceptibly.

“When did the pair of you drive out to Lackland’s? Sunday night? Monday morning before work?”

“You’re crazy. I didn’t drive her anyplace except church on Sunday morning. Why would I drive her out to Lackland’s place? He’s dead and that lawyer says Momma can’t get her carriage ‘til the will is probated.”

“Who else might have driven her?”

“Nobody! She lives too far out of the way for those funeral ladies. Most of the time I have to tote her.” He dug a cigarette out of a beat up pack and lit it from a book of matches.

Amos grabbed his wrist and took the matchbook from him, careful to touch only the edges of the book.

“Hey! Give that back. We can smoke in here. It’s the only place we
can
smoke.”

“Not at the moment,” Amos said. He raised an eyebrow at Geoff who shrugged.

“Could be,” Geoff said. “Your mother smoke?”

Tom laughed. It turned into a cough. After he recovered, he said, “Made my daddy smoke in the yard. She’d kill me if she knew
I
smoked.”

“So why are you so anxious to get that carriage back?” Amos asked.

“It’s no secret. She knows I want to move her into that retirement home. Got to have money for that. She can’t stay out at the home place alone any longer. I’m spending a fortune on gas, not to mention time waiting on her hand and foot. Nobody else will put up with her temper. Lord knows what else she’s got in that old barn. The minute I move her out I’m having one hell of an estate sale.”

“How does she feel about that?” Geoff asked.

The smile Darnell gave him made his skin crawl. “The old bitch wants to die at the home place. I wish to God she would.”

Amos said. “If anybody in that family has a temper, it’s you, not your mother.”

Abruptly Darnell stood, went to the drink machine, fed in quarters until he got a Coke. When he came back and popped the lid, his hands were shaking. “When I was little and did something she didn’t like, she used to make me cut my own switch so she could switch my legs.”

“Yeah,” Geoff said. “You learn real fast not to pick the thin ones. They hurt worse.”

Darnell looked up at him gratefully. “I think my daddy died to get away from her. With strangers like y’all, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but when she gets mad, she goes flat crazy.”

“You said she didn’t drive. Could she have borrowed your car?”

“Listen, she
can’t
drive. She’s not touching my keys and I’ve got hers. I’m the only one drives her car. Got to keep the battery charged, don’t I? If she ever lets me sell the thing, it’s got to run.”

The two men froze. “She has a car?”

“Probably get a thousand dollars for it. It’s twelve years old, not but thirty-five thousand miles on it.”

“Where does she keep it?”

“In the barn of course, along with a hundred years of junk. That’s why I never thought that old carriage was worth anything.” He made a sound. “Now she swears it’s worth twenty thousand bucks to one of those fools put on Civil War uniforms and act like they’re fighting.”

Amos leaned forward. “Why does she think it’s worth that kind of money? I’ve seen it. It’s a mess.”

Tom took a deep breath and said as though he were explaining the ABC’s to a very small child, “It’s a family heirloom is why. One of Momma’s great-uncles was a doctor. Bought it from another doctor along with a journal proving it’s the carriage Dr. Mudd drove when he went to set John Wilkes Booth’s leg after he shot Lincoln. Don’t know why that would make it so damned valuable. It’s still just an old carriage. She says Lackland took the journal when he took the carriage to restore. She’s got to have ’em both back to sell the thing.”

*

Back in Geoff’s car and headed for Imogene Darnell’s farm, Geoff said, “Some of those re-enactors are rich doctors who like to act like they’re running a field hospital. With proof Dr. Mudd drove that carriage it might well be worth twenty-thousand.”

“If Hiram Lackland bought the carriage and the journal from Mrs. Darnell outright for a couple of thousand bucks . . . ”

“If she thought he tricked her . . . ”

“And if she really can drive and had another set of keys . . . How would she find out how much it was worth?”

“If she has her husband’s gun, why not shoot him? Why hit him with that carriage shaft and lay him out like that?” Amos asked. “Would she have the strength?”

“Adrenaline does great things. I doubt she went out there to kill him, but Darnell says she’s got a temper. Maybe she hit him and wanted to cover it up, so she tried to make it look like an accident.”

“If we’re right, she damn near succeeded, but my Lord, the woman’s seventy if she’s a day,” Amos said.

“And could probably still work the average field hand under the table. You see that garden of hers? I never even considered her, but now . . . ”

They pulled into her driveway and walked up on the porch. Someone had stapled an orange sheet of paper to her front door. It was headed, “Notice of Tax Sale.”

“Says here if she doesn’t pay her delinquent taxes before the end of the month, the county’s going to put the place up for auction,” Amos said.

“Now, that’s a motive for murder,” Geoff said. He twisted the bell several times and listened to the squawk inside. The two men waited, but no one came. After five minutes, he said, “She’s not going to answer. Let’s check out that car. If she drove it to Lackland’s place, we ought to be able to find pea gravel in the tire treads.”

“If we’re lucky, the tread will match that cast we took from the grass.”

The barn was unlocked, but the two halves of the wide door were pulled shut. “We don’t have a warrant,” Amos said.

“If the car’s there, we can always go get one,” Geoff said.

Amos nodded and swung the nearest panel open far enough to shine his light through, then pulled it the rest of the way.

“Whew!” Geoff said. “No wonder Tom Darnell forgot about that carriage! This place is stuffed to the rafters with junk.”

“Except in the middle,” Amos said. An oblong empty space in the center was large enough to hold a big car. He turned his light onto the dirt floor. “Tire tracks.”

“And an oil slick about where the oil pan on an old car would be.”

The two men looked at one another. Geoff said, “No telling how long she’s been gone or where, but we better take a run out to Merry’s farm in case she’s gone out there to try to get her carriage back.”

“You think Sheriff Campbell would arrest me if I used my siren in his jurisdiction?”

Chapter 33

Friday

Merry

Peggy and I were nearly ready to start down the drive with Heinzie when I heard a car chugging up the hill toward us. A moment later a big old maroon Mercury gunned into view over the brow of the hill, nearly sideswiped Heinzie and the carriage and came to rest in a cloud of dust beside my truck.