Setting the Stage for Murder

by Robert W. Gregg

“I don’t really know. I’m probably imagining things. But it hasn’t stopped with Mr. Gerlach’s death. She called me yesterday and tried to talk me into transferring to a university over in Ithaca. That’s where she lives. She said she could help me better if we were closer. She even offered to let me share her house—said she had a spare room. She talked about our mutual love of music, but there was something weird about it.”

  By this time, Kevin knew what was on Heather’s mind. He, too, felt awkward talking about it, but there was no use in pretending that he didn’t understand.

  “So I gather that you think she’s been coming on to you. That she might be interested in a lesbian relationship. Is that it?”

  “I guess so. I wish you could tell me that you know she’s not a lesbian, that I’m making all of this up.”

  “I have no idea about Ms. Redman’s lifestyle, Heather. We have never discussed anything except opera, especially Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.” This was a lie, of course, inasmuch as they had had a rather detailed conversation about her relationship with Harley Gerlach only two days earlier. But he didn’t want to be drawn into a discussion with Heather about Mercedes Redman, a discussion in which neither of them had any real idea of who she was other than a teacher of violin who had done a very creditable job of whipping the Brae Loch orchestra into shape.

  “Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.”

  “My advice is pretty much what it is for Carpenter. If you’re uncomfortable with Mercedes, I’d politely tell her you’re happy in school where you are and find ways to be busy when she suggests getting together. She’ll get the message.”

  Kevin doubted that Heather had derived much comfort from his advice, but she thanked him and let him drive her home. The conversation shifted to other things, but on his trip back to the cottage Kevin found himself worrying about her and about what he had learned about two of the other members of the company he had assembled for the stillborn production of Gianni Schicchi.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sam Bridges’ report was not what Carol wanted to hear. She had left to him the task of figuring out who had written the unfinished note found in the backstage bathroom of Wayne Hall. The note had made a cryptic reference to something happening on Tuesday, but did not say what that something was. Nor did it say for whom the note was intended. It did not even specify which Tuesday it referred to, although Sam had assured the sheriff that it had to be the day on which Gerlach had been murdered.

  Carol read the note again, as if repeated readings would make its meaning clearer.

  How about Tuesday noon? We could

  Carol remained doubtful that it was important. But in view of the fact that no one but members of Kevin’s opera company had been using Wayne Hall, and that one of the members of that company had been murdered there on Tuesday, she knew that she would have to make every effort to find out whoever it was that had written the note. Or started to write it.

  Who were ‘we’? What could ‘we’ do? Kill Harley Gerlach? Highly improbable. It was much more likely that the note had to do with the opera, such as practicing a passage that wasn’t going that well.

  But Sam’s report had been unhelpful. All he had had to work with were the cards on which members of the opera company had written their names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails. Carol had congratulated herself on having the cast and orchestra members write this information down themselves when she and Sam had interviewed them. It held out the possibility that the handwriting on the note would look like that on one of the cards she had collected. But according to Sam, there was no match.

  “Nothing close?” Carol asked, her disappointment showing.

  “Depends on what you mean by close. There’s only one that looks remotely possible to me. Her name’s Rachel Berman. Here, take a look for yourself. I don’t think she wrote the note.”

  Carol placed the Berman woman’s card and the note side by side on her desk and studied them carefully for the better part of a minute.

  “No, I see what you mean. They don’t look very much alike to me either. And you say that’s the closest there is to a match?”

  “Definitely. You can look ‘em over yourself, but I’d be surprised if you don’t agree with me.”

  She saw no good reason to spend time doing what she’d asked Sam to do. This was the sort of task where his judgment was pretty certain to be reliable. Maybe better than hers.

  “I wondered why the note didn’t match up with any of their handwriting,” Sam said, “and I think I know why. If, that is, one of them wrote the note. Just look at the paper the note was written on.”

  The small piece of paper, crumpled when it had been fished out of the wastebasket, had now been flattened and smoothed out. It had several dents where the letters were. In two places the dents were actually small holes in the paper.

  “Why would those little dents be there? Do you see how they go in, not out? Tell you what I think. If you write on a piece of paper that’s lying flat on a desk or another hard surface, there won’t be any dents. But if you write on a piece of paper that’s resting on a soft surface, one that gives as you write, your pen pushes the paper down. Sometimes the pen point will actually break the paper. Here, let me show you.”

  Sam took a piece of paper from a pad on the desk and asked Carol to stand up.

  “What I’m going to do is write a note, using your shoulder as my desk.”

  He placed the paper on the padded shoulder of Carol’s jacket and wrote a few words.

  “Okay, now look what we’ve got. The paper gave a bit when I pressed down, leaving those dents. I was careful not to press down too hard, but I still broke through the paper here. And writing the note was awkward, me standing up like that. So it doesn’t look very much like my handwriting, does it?”

  Carol was thoroughly familiar with her deputy’s handwriting, and what she was looking at bore little resemblance to it.

  “What I think,” Sam continued, “is that whoever started to write the note didn’t have a hard surface close by, wasn’t planning on writing a long note anyway, and simply rested the paper on whatever was at hand. And it was a soft surface, the angle was awkward, and the result was a note that doesn’t resemble what he wrote on the card. Remember, we had a clipboard for them to use, and they were sitting down when they wrote.”

  Sam Bridges was no handwriting expert, and his explanation for their problem was of doubtful scientific value. But Carol was impressed. Unfortunately, they were no closer to identifying the person who had written the note. Or started to.

  “Why do you suppose he stopped in mid-sentence?” Sam asked.

  “He or maybe she, Sam. I don’t know, but I’d guess that whoever wrote it wasn’t with the person he was writing it for. Why write a note when you can simply talk to someone? But then the other person walks in, there’s no need to finish the note to him, so you wad it up, toss it out, and simply tell the other person what you were saying in the note.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  “It makes sense to me. Of course he could have changed his mind and decided not to write the note at all—not to do whatever it was he was going to do on Tuesday. But I’d bet on the other scenario.”

  They spent a few more minutes speculating about the note fragment before Sam brought up the matter of fingerprints.

  “I tried to get prints, but I’m afraid we were careless when we were going through that wastebasket.”

  “It happens,” Carol said, knowing that Sam was too experienced to be careless about such things. “But we aren’t about to go around taking prints of all of the people in the opera company anyway. The handwriting was the more logical place to start—it just didn’t work out. If we solve this one, it’s going to be other things, not that damned note, that break the case.”

  Carol hoped that she was right about the note.

  _____

  Later that afternoon when she was leaving the office, she ran into Officer Grieves in the parking lot.
r />   “Another long day,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  It was not a question to be answered, just a matter of being friendly to one of her junior officers. But as she said it, she remembered that Grieves was supposed to be looking for Harley Gerlach’s car. She decided that she was genuinely interested in how he was doing.

  “What can you tell me about the car?” she asked.

  Grieves looked at her with a blank expression.

  “The car?”

  “Yes. Gerlach’s car. Have you found it?”

  “Was I supposed to be looking for it?”

  Carol would have to bring a halt to this aimless game of verbal ping-pong.

  “Come on, Jack. We know Gerlach’s car is over at the Brae Loch campus. We can’t just leave it there. You were going to find it, remember?”

  Jack Grieves was beginning to look uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry, Carol, but no, I don’t remember. I’ll be glad to go get it, but I’m sure you never gave me that assignment.”

  Now it was Carol’s turn to be uncomfortable. Was it possible that she had been so preoccupied with other things, including other issues of the Gerlach case, that she had only intended to give this assignment to Grieves? Or had she asked someone else to take care of the car? In any event, there was no point in criticizing her colleague for failing to do something she might never have told him to do.

  “Never mind. Maybe I gave the assignment to one of the other men. We’ll sort it out at squad meeting on Monday. It’s hardly an urgent matter. I just don’t want to have it towed. The college people wouldn’t know it belonged to Gerlach.”

  “You had me worried there for a minute,” Grieves said. “I like to think I know what I’m doing. Well, most of the time anyway.”

  “I never doubted it, Jack. Have a good weekend.”

  When Carol set off for home, her mind turned away from the frustratingly incomplete note in the Wayne Hall wastebasket and the failed communication about Gerlach’s car. She thought instead about what she hoped would be promising visits to Janet Myers and Mercedes Redman.

  CHAPTER 21

  It was going on six o’clock that same evening, and two old friends were having a beer and a conversation at a pub called Beer and Burgers in Yates Center. One of the men was Ben Robertson, the owner of a small boatyard on the east arm of Crooked Lake known as Ben’s Marina. The other was Bill Parsons, the senior member of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department. Parsons typically spent his days motoring around the lake in a patrol boat, looking for people who were in violation of one or more of the rules governing boating and fishing. His day had been uneventful, but he was tired and welcomed an opportunity to relax a bit with Robertson.

  “Ever feel bored doing your thing?” the marina owner asked.

  “Oh, yes. There are days when it’s the same old, same old. This was one of them. For a change, everybody was behaving. No crazies out there in their personal watercraft, no one fishing without a license. Not even anybody who’d run out of gas in the middle of the lake. It was one of the easier days. But that’s okay. Who knows, tomorrow could bring some kind of accident, and I’d rather be bored than have to rescue somebody.”

  “Ever calculate how much gas you use up in a day?” Robertson was enjoying talking with his friend about his job.

  “Yeah. We’ve got a log where we keep track of how many miles we cover, how much gas we buy. And how much it costs. Prices are on the rise, Ben. I’m sure you know it as well as I do. Bet you hear plenty of griping from your customers. But I haven’t seen any drop-off in boat traffic. Not yet. “

  “Guy was talking about oil last night on TV. Said the price of oil could set a record by Labor Day. He said something about the Feds taking some kind of action to help us. Of course he was thinking about cars and trucks, not boats. But I’m worried about a drop-off in business.”

  “Well, good luck,” Parsons said. “From where I sit, it wouldn’t hurt to cut down on the boat traffic.”

  “I know, Bill, but it’s my bread and butter.” The owner of the marina gave his friend a wry smile. “Anyway, business at my place hasn’t started to tail off. We even had a bit of a brouhaha the other day—people lined up, couldn’t get to the pump.”

  “What happened, you selling it at discount?”

  “No, some stupid guy had tied his boat up at the end of the pump dock. Blocked access. None of my people realized it until a couple of boaters began hollering for service. I went down to the dock myself, and they were right. This little aluminum fishing boat had been parked right where customers had to pull in to get gas. No one had a clue where the owner of the boat had gone.”

  Parsons chuckled.

  “If that’s the worst you have to contend with, you’re in better shape than I am.”

  “I know, but it was a nuisance. We had to untie the boat and pull it up on the beach over where it was out of the way. No idea how long it was there. I never saw anybody come to pick it up, but it was gone when I called it quits for the day.”

  “So you never did see the guy you wanted to take out your anger on. Right?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t angry, just frustrated. And to be perfectly honest about it, I was just a little bit curious. You’d have been curious, too, if someone you didn’t know had just pulled in and left his boat tied up to your dock. Even if it wasn’t anything exciting, which it wasn’t. Just an old Larson with a not very powerful Mercury outboard.”

  “Ever get the guy’s name?”

  “No, and once he’d picked the boat up, it didn’t matter. I was glad to get rid of it, no questions asked.”

  Robertson and Parsons had another beer, after which they went their separate ways. It is doubtful if they would ever have discussed the old Larson fishing boat again if Sheriff Kelleher had not overheard her colleague telling Officer Barrett about it in the squad room the following morning.

  _____

  “When did this happen?” she asked.

  “Sometime recently, I suppose. Why, is it important?”

  “Probably not. But I’m interested in anything out of the ordinary happening close to the college on the day that guy got murdered there. And Ben’s marina is pretty close. What would you say, a mile?”

  Parsons thought about it a moment.

  “It’s got to be less than that. Maybe three-quarters of a mile at most.”

  “Close enough,” Carol said. “I think I’ll go down and talk to Robertson. Maybe he’ll remember the day, give me more details about the boat.”

  “I’m sorry, Carol.” Parsons started to apologize. “It never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with the trouble at Brae Loch.”

  “Odds are it doesn’t. No need to apologize. You haven’t been on the Brae Loch case.”

  Parsons and Barrett went their separate ways, and Carol, after ten minutes spent on paperwork left over from the previous day, took off for Ben’s Marina.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” the owner greeted her as she entered his tiny office. “What brings you down here today?”

  “I could tell you that it’s always a pleasure to see you, Ben,” she said, “but the truth is I need to ask you about something Bill Parsons told me this morning. He says you had some trouble recently with some guy who parked his boat so your customers couldn’t get to the gas pump.”

  Robertson was surprised that the sheriff had paid him a visit the very next day to talk about something so trivial, and he said so.

  “Oh, that. It wasn’t a big deal. More of a puzzle where the guy went to, leaving his boat for all that time.”

  “What I want to know,” Carol said, “is when this happened. Do you remember what day it was?”

  “Sure. It was Tuesday. Why? Do you think you know who it was?”

  “No, but I am interested in the date. Tuesday, that was the day when a man was killed over at the college. You know about that?”

  “Of course. Everybody’s talking about it. You don’t think the guy w
ho did it is the same guy who left his boat here at the marina, do you?”

  It was a logical question, and Carol knew that she wouldn’t be talking to Ben Robertson if the thought had not occurred to her. But it had been only a fleeting thought, not part of any serious attempt to consider the issue of who might be Harley Gerlach’s killer.

  “It’s extremely unlikely,” she said. “But I don’t have the luxury of dismissing something out of hand just because it’s unlikely. As of now, we don’t have any solid leads. So, yes, I’m interested in finding out who parked his boat at your pump dock on Tuesday.”

  “Wish I could help you, but I never saw him and neither did Joel. He was helping me that day, but he’d gone on an errand, picking up some bait.”

  “Do you remember ever seeing the boat before?”

  “Can’t say. Boats like that are a dime a dozen, nothing distinctive about ‘em. And if you’re interested in the registration number, I’m sorry but I can’t help you. We expected whoever had left it to come back right away, so we just pulled it up on the beach and ignored it.”

  “You don’t need to feel sorry, Ben. You had no reason to know I’d be interested. And like I said, it probably isn’t important.”

  But Carol couldn’t let it go.

  “One more question. Was there anything in the boat, anything that might give us some sense of who the guy is? Or maybe it’s a woman. Why do we assume that boaters are men?”

  Robertson didn’t respond to the invitation to discuss the gender of boaters, but he did provide one additional piece of information.

  “There was a fishing pole in the boat. Looked new. I’m not sure it had ever been used. No bait, though. Or tackle box. Nothing, in fact, except the pole. Maybe he planned to pick up some bait here, but he never did.”

  When Carol left the marina she still did not know who had left the fishing boat there the previous Tuesday, much less whether he—or she—had had anything to do with the Brae Loch murder. But her conversation with Ben Robertson had not been a total waste of time, for it had planted a tiny germ of suspicion in her mind. She thought long and hard about that suspicion en route back to Cumberland. When she pulled into the parking lot behind the sheriff’s department, she knew of something she was going to have to do. Sooner rather than later.