Late Checkout

by Carol J. Perry

Pete and I have learned to work pretty well together in my kitchen. I cleared the albums off the table, gave it a squirt of cleaner, wiped it down, and arranged three place settings of Fiestaware, while Pete transferred the wonderful-smelling contents of the distinctively shaped cartons into serving dishes. “Crab Rangoon, vegetable spring rolls, white rice, shrimp fried rice, beef chow mein, fried noodles,” he recited, “and some egg rolls and other stuff. I guess I was hungry.”

  I put three wineglasses on the table. “I think we can handle it. Plus the ice cream cake I bought for dessert. Aunt Ibby says she has something to tell us and I’ve found a few things too. It might be a long dinner.”

  “I have a one or two items to contribute too.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Chief got a court order to open that Wallace Williams post office box number you gave us.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I’ll tell you when your aunt gets here.”

  Chapter 39

  I begged a little, even whined a bit, but Pete wouldn’t budge on sharing whatever it was he’d found out about Wallace Williams. It was okay, though. I wanted to wait for her myself, visualizing a kind of snoop sisters tag team, the two of us bombarding him with fact after fact, clue after clue, photo after photo. It was a delicious thought.

  O’Ryan dashed for the kitchen cat door and bolted out into the upstairs hall seconds before my aunt tapped and called, “Hello, Maralee, it’s me.”

  Pete let cat and aunt in, receiving a hug and an ankle rub simultaneously. “Perfect timing, Ms. Russell,” he said. “I hope you’re hungry.”

  She put a manila folder on the counter and took her usual seat at the table. “I am. It smells wonderful and looks so pretty.”

  I uncorked the wine—a nice Pinot Grigio—and glanced over at the folder. “That the results of the library digging you mentioned?”

  “It is,” she said. “I can hardly wait to show it to you.”

  “Pete has something to share too, don’t you Pete?”

  “Egg roll, Ms. Russell?” He passed the platter. “Lee’s been pestering me to tell her, but I wanted to wait for you.”

  “Thank you, Pete. I appreciate that. I know how persuasive Maralee can be when she wants something. I think I’ll have one of those wings, too.”

  “I’ve found out a few new things.” I poured wine into the three glasses and sat in the chair in front of the window. O’Ryan positioned himself beside Aunt Ibby, knowing she’d undoubtedly sneak him a shrimp or a bit of crabmeat. “Shall we do ‘show-and-tell’ during dinner,” I asked, “or wait until after dessert?”

  “Mine will keep,” Pete said, reaching for the chow mein. “How about yours, Lee?”

  “Mine involves pictures,” I said, “and I wouldn’t want anyone to spill duck sauce on them. Aunt Ibby?”

  “Papers. Transcripts. Unfounded rumors. Let’s wait until after-dinner coffee.” Wise old owl face. “Of course, that doesn’t preclude anyone dropping a hint here and there during the entrée.”

  And so it went. It was almost as if we’d invented a new game, making up the rules as we went along. Pete started by telling us that as soon as I’d given him the Wallace Williams post office box number, he’d passed it on to Chief Whaley and the chief actually woke up a judge to get a court order.

  “No kidding. It was that important?”

  Pete didn’t elaborate, but instead deferred to Aunt Ibby, as he passed the crab Rangoon in her direction. It’s her favorite. “Did the library yield any secrets today, Ms. Russell?”

  “Thank you. Yes. Larry Laraby produced collectibles shows in cities all over the country and dealers paid several hundred dollars for a single six-foot display table. Maralee? Your turn.”

  “Hitchhiking on your hint, Aunt Ibby, I found that one of those tables at one show at least was used by Howard Templeton Senior. Pete?”

  “Good work, Lee,” he said. “There were several pieces of mail in Wallace Williams’s post office box, and one of them was from Howard Templeton Senior. I think we’re getting somewhere! What have you got, Ms. Russell?”

  “Do the hints have to be in any particular order?” she asked.

  Pete and I each assured her that they didn’t. “Just toss in any hint you’ve got,” he said.

  “Okay. Tyler found this one. William Wallace applied for a library card on the day he got killed.”

  “Wow. Good one, Aunt Ibby. He must have been planning to check out a book. On sports. Now I’ve lost track,” I said. “Whose turn is it?”

  “Your turn, babe,” Pete said.

  “Okay. Katie the Clown, I mean Agnes Hooper, has a trunk full of costumes from the old days at WICH-TV. They’re in an outdoor utility room and the door is never locked.” I helped myself to a spring roll. “Looks like anybody could have grabbed the old lady costume.”

  “Including the gloves,” Pete said. “We ‘re thinking along those lines too. No fingerprints.”

  I spoke out of turn. “Mrs. Blatherflab’s wig is made of high-quality human hair. Human gray hair. Agnes says she washes it frequently and”—I paused for effect—“she regularly sets it with ‘old lady pin curls.’”

  Pete caught on right away. “Curly gray hair. Young Pamela saw a man with curly gray hair.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” my aunt said. “Here I’ve been thinking the old woman and the bearded man were in cahoots. What if they’re both the same person?”

  “And Pamela caught that person in the middle of transforming from one to the other. From bearded man to old woman!” I was excited. “He’d already put on the curly gray wig. What do you think, Pete?”

  Serious cop voice. “It makes a certain amount of sense. He—or she—could have been a bearded man who left the stacks through the emergency exit—then on the way down the stairs, into the old kitchen, and out the side door, changed costumes and became an old woman. What young Pamela saw was a person who’d removed the beard and put on the wig.” He nodded. “Yes. You ladies may have something there.”

  “Now we just have to figure out who’s under the wig and behind the beard,” my aunt said. “Ideas, Maralee?”

  “I hate to say it,” I admitted, “but lately I’ve been having some suspicions about Dave.”

  “Dave?” My aunt’s eyebrows went up. “Certainly not Dave. Why would you say that?”

  “Well, he’d fit into the old lady outfit for one thing. He knows where the costumes are kept, has keys to everything in the library, knew all about the Honus Wagner card, and he’s big and strong enough to have killed Willie.”

  “Pete?” Aunt Ibby clearly didn’t like my reasoning. “The police don’t suspect Dave, do they?”

  He sighed. “This is one of those situations where no one is a suspect, so everybody is a suspect, Ms. Russell. We’ve checked Benson’s background. So far, he looks clean.”

  “Thought so,” she said. “Is Rob Oberlin on your list too?”

  “He is, but he won’t fit into your one-person-playing-both-parts scenario. He’d fit into the old lady suit, but he’s too heavy to be the bearded guy we have on video.”

  “How about the others from the old shows? Agnes and Jerry Mercury?” I wondered.

  “Agnes is too small and too old to have killed Willie by herself,” he said. “Mercury is a possibility, but as you’ve said, virtually everybody in town has access to those costumes and a lot of people had reason to hate Willie.”

  “Is there anything in Mercury’s background?” I pressed for more information.

  “Can’t discuss the background checks,” he said. “Confidential, you know. Got any more hints?”

  I’d almost forgotten about our game. “Jerry Mercury told me he thinks Rob killed Willie,” I said, “because Rob hated the way Willie had abused horses.”

  “I’ve got something new about Willie and horses,” Aunt Ibby said. “I found a little article in the Palm Beach Post dated a couple of years ago, mentioning a William Wallace, a rodeo clown, who rescued a young boy w
ho’d fallen from the stands. No picture or further description though, so maybe it wasn’t our William Wallace.”

  “A rodeo clown, hmmm? Palm Beach, Florida, you said?” Pete pulled out his notebook for the first time that evening. Apparently, Pete found that small bit of information particularly interesting—which made it particularly interesting to me, too.

  Chapter 40

  We played the hint game for a little while longer, Aunt Ibby giving some statistics on the waning popularity of collectibles shows nationally, and a list of the top ten collectible sports items. I tossed in the fact that the straw man on Agnes’s porch wore Jerry Mercury’s Abraham Lincoln costume. Pete reported that the people next door to the library had turned over their videotapes for the past two weeks, but that he hadn’t personally viewed them yet. Even with all the conversation going on, we’d managed to dispose of virtually every bit of our bounty.

  I cleared the table and set out dessert plates, ice cream cake, and three fortune cookies, while Pete loaded the dishwasher and started a pot of coffee. O’Ryan, having enjoyed both shrimp and crab tidbits, had already retired to the bedroom. Repeated glances in the direction of the large book on the counter revealed that all three of us were clearly anxious to get into that second photo album.

  “If we put three chairs in a row on one side of the table, we can all see the photos at the same time,” my aunt suggested. “Do you have three magnifying glasses, Maralee?” I admitted to having only two. “There’s a nice big one on my office desk,” she said. “I’ll attend to these dishes when we’re through if you’ll run down and get it.”

  I pushed my chair back. “I think I’ve had enough cake,” I said. “I’ll open my fortune cookie when I come back.”

  “I already opened mine,” Pete said. “It says, ‘Smile more often and think positive thoughts.’”

  “Good advice for everybody,” my aunt said, opening hers. She glanced at it then laughed. “It says, ‘The fortune you seek is in another cookie.’”

  I was still smiling about that one as I hurried down the front stairs, across the foyer, through the living room, and into her office. I clicked on the overhead light. The magnifying glass, as she’d said, was in a Chinese vase along with assorted pens, pencils, and a ruler on her neat cherrywood desk.

  Carrying the glass, I returned to the darkened foyer. I paused by the front door and as I often do, peeked out onto Winter Street through one of the tall side windows. There’s not usually a lot of traffic on our street at that time of night, so the slow-moving car caught my attention. The silhouette of the compact car with its distinctive lines stood out against a streetlamp’s glow. A Subaru, no doubt, dark colored. Was it green? I didn’t know. I looked away and told myself once again that it’s a popular make and model and that there were undoubtedly hundreds of them in Salem. This is not even worth mentioning to Pete or Aunt Ibby. I climbed the stairs, trying to think about something else.

  Back in my own kitchen, the table had been cleared, the chairs lined up as my aunt had suggested, the album opened to the first page. Our coffee cups and my fortune cookie were neatly arranged just above the album and my two magnifying glasses awaited us. I put Aunt Ibby’s beside her cup, and took my seat beside Pete. “Are we ready?” I asked.

  “Open your cookie,” Pete said, “and we’re all good to go.”

  I did, and read aloud. “ ‘Your dearest wish will come true.’ ” I shrugged, rolled it into a little ball and picked up my magnifying glass. “I didn’t know I even had a dearest wish.”

  Other than occasionally bumping elbows as we examined the pages, we worked pretty well together. We must have been an odd-looking group though, with the three of us on one side of the table, all trying to study the same photos, none of us sure exactly what we were looking for in the first place. Many of the pages were similar to the one where O’Ryan had found the Templeton table, showing a variety of display tables at various venues around the country. I glanced occasionally at the open bedroom door, wondering if the cat might join us, but he’d apparently lost interest in the project.

  After we were more than halfway through the album it appeared that O’Ryan was right. Nothing of particular interest had shown up at all. I even found myself stifling a yawn here and there.

  “I need to stand up and stretch for a minute,” my aunt declared. “These old bones are starting to protest.”

  “Me too,” Pete said. “How about a short break? More coffee, babe?”

  “Okay,” I said, moving a little closer to the open album when Pete left his chair. The photos on these pages showed crowds of show-goers. “That Laraby was quite a promotor. He had to be drawing hundreds of people to every show. Maybe thousands.”

  “He advertised a lot,” my aunt offered. “Our newspaper microfiche showed full-page ads at every city on that schedule you showed me. Plenty of news coverage too. All with pictures of the glass case and the security guard.”

  “Yes. Dave told me he got his picture taken a lot at those shows.” I put my magnifying glass down and accepted the coffee cup. “Are you two through with this page? I don’t see anything unusual here. Mind if I turn to the next one?”

  They each voiced agreement and I turned the page.

  “Holy cow!” I breathed softly. “Look at this.” It was a two-page spread of those old-time, deckle-edged, five-inch-square snapshots. “Pete, are these pictures like the one Sharon Stewart is missing?”

  “Exactly,” Pete said, returning to his chair and picking up his own magnifying glass. He lifted the corner of the page and peeked at the next one. “There are more.” He riffled the edges of the remaining pages. “They go all the way to the end. He must have used professional photographers to record the events most of the time, then used his own camera for these.”

  By then Aunt Ibby had joined us, and newly energized, we returned to our examination of each photo. These weren’t as sharply focused as the professional shots, but they weren’t bad. Laraby had taken some close-up shots of various individual items, and had printed a few words of description under most of them in black marker, sometimes—but not always—including a price. Many of the prices noted were in the thousands of dollars.

  “I think these were things he offered for sale to special customers, probably by mail,” Pete said, “since they didn’t have eBay or Craigslist in those days.”

  “And those were nineteen-seventies or nineteen-eighties prices,” my aunt said. “Think of what they’d bring in today’s dollars. Did you know Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves from the Floyd Patterson fight brought one point one million?”

  “It’s so handy, having a research librarian for an aunt,” I said. “You’re a wonder.”

  “It seems that Wee Willie may have been doing about the same thing Larry Laraby did.” Pete spoke slowly, cop voice engaged. “Some of the contents of that P.O. box appear to be bids.”

  “Do you know what they were bidding on?” I asked.

  “Yeah. A baseball card. And the bids were high.”

  “Can we assume that Willie was accepting bids on the Honus Wagner?” My aunt lifted the corner of the next page. “Maybe even before he had it?”

  Pete shrugged. “That might be a reasonable assumption, I guess.”

  “Maybe Howard Templeton Senior made a bid on that card,” I said, almost thinking out loud. “And maybe that won Wally Williams an invitation to the Halloween party.”

  “The invitation was in the post office box too, Lee,” Pete said. “And I may take you up on that offer to escort you to the party after all. Chief thinks it would be a good idea for me to be there. I’ll be undercover security of course, so I can’t promise to be with you all the time.”

  “That’s okay. Thought about a costume at all?”

  “I guess I can’t go as a cop, huh?”

  “You’ll both need to decide on something pretty soon,” my aunt said. “If the Witches’ Ball is tomorrow, Buffy’s party is the day after that. So you have only a couple of days to throw s
omething together.”

  “I don’t want to make a big fuss over it,” I said. “Something simple and comfortable. No high heels or sequins. He hasn’t said anything yet, but I’ll bet Mr. Doan is expecting me to treat this more like an assignment than a party. I bet he’ll send Francine or Marty with camera and mics.”

  “You’re probably right,” Aunt Ibby said. “Why don’t you dress as a fictional cowgirl? One of the Bad Girls, maybe. Cody Zamora or Lilly Laronette.”

  “Bad Girls?” I asked.

  “Sure. Bad Girls.1994. Twentieth Century Fox. Andie MacDowell was in it. Drew Barrymore too. You looked so cute in your boots and jeans and checked shirt when we went to visit Rob Oberlin. Add your old hat and a neckerchief and you’re good to go.”

  I’d never argue about old movies with Aunt Ibby. “Good idea,” I said. “Pete, want to be a cowboy?”

  “Not especially. I guess I’ll just rent something from Chris Rich’s store.”

  My aunt and I had put down our magnifying glasses during the costume conversation, but Pete hadn’t. He’d continued inspecting each square photo on the page slowly and carefully. “Mind if I turn the page, ladies?” he said—as he turned the page.

  We hastily—and a little guiltily—picked up our magnifying glasses and leaned toward the album. The next few pages were similar to the first ones we’d noticed. Individual sports-related things, some marked with prices—mostly in the one- to five-thousand-dollar range—some with brief descriptions, and many showing the same item from varied angles.

  There were only a few more pages left to view in that second album when the photo we’d been looking for appeared. We all spotted it at once. We all pointed at once—yelled at once. We even woke O’Ryan, who appeared, stretching, in the bedroom doorway.

  It was just as Sharon Laraby Stewart had described it to Pete. Laraby, with a cigar clenched in his teeth, held a book in his right hand. The title of the book was plainly legible: The Boys of Summer. Like some of the photos of expensive collectibles, there were several photos of Laraby in this pose, taken from slightly different angles.