Setting the Stage for Murder

by Robert W. Gregg

  “It’s about that murder over at Brae Loch College,” he said. “The man who was killed was someone named Harley Gerlach. You’ve probably heard his name, or read about him in The Gazette. Anyway, there’s a chance he ate over here at The Post now and then. I’d like you to look at his picture and see if you recognize him as someone who’s been in here.”

  “Sure, I’ll give it a try.”

  Barrett brought a folder he’d been carrying up onto the bar and took out a couple of the photos Kevin had removed from Gerlach’s darkroom. Ginny held them up so she could get a better look at the man’s face. There was no hesitation.

  “Oh, yes. I’ve seen him in here a number of times. I don’t remember him sitting at the bar, but he had lunch here fairly often this summer. He liked that table over in the corner.”

  Ginny pointed to the table which Gerlach had apparently favored.

  “The next question is tougher,” Barrett said. “Do you remember if he had lunch here last Tuesday? I mean a week ago Tuesday.”

  “I don’t live here 24/7, Jim,” she said, still examining the photos. “Some days it’s early, but more often I come in at five and work the evening hours. And I really do have the occasional day off. Let me check my schedule for this month.”

  She left the bar and went through a swinging door to what was presumably a small office. She was back in less than a minute.

  “It looks like I was here Tuesday a week. For lunch. But I don’t know whether I could tell you he was here that day. If you’d asked me last week, I’d probably have been able to tell you, but after awhile all the days begin to look alike.”

  Damn! Barrett said it under his breath, but Ginny knew he was disappointed.

  “Can you think of anything that might help me focus on that day?” she asked. “The weather, for example?”

  Barrett wasn’t coming up with anything when Ginny’s face suddenly lighted up.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Did Gerlach have lunch with someone else that day?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the sheriff knows, but she didn’t mention it.”

  “I asked because one day last week Gerlach had lunch with someone. Just a second.”

  Ginny disappeared through the swinging door again, only to reappear seconds later.

  “I’m not thinking straight today,” she said, sounding annoyed with herself. “Don’t know what’s the matter with me. I wasn’t here for the lunch hour on Monday, and Gerlach was killed Tuesday afternoon. So the only day I could have seen him here was Tuesday. And I know he was with somebody last week on the day he had lunch here.”

  Barrett breathed a big sigh of relief. But immediately realized that he now faced another problem. The sheriff would want to know who the other person was, but there were no photos of anyone but Gerlach in his folder.

  “Can you remember what the other person looked like?” he asked hopefully.

  “Let’s see. A man, obviously. Average height and weight. Brown hair, but graying. He wore glasses, wire rims as I remember. He came over to the bar several times to get a refill, so I did get a fairly good look at his face. I’d guess he was in his fifties. He’s probably a businessman or a professional, you know, someone not familiar with manual labor.”

  Ginny’s bar customers were primarily men who could be described as manual laborers of one kind or another, but there was nothing in her voice to suggest reverse snobbery. Barrett was amazed at the mental picture she had drawn of someone she had, in all likelihood, seen only once.

  He didn’t know who Gerlach’s luncheon partner might have been. He had had little contact with members of the opera company, and for all he knew this man had not been involved in that project. If he had been, the sheriff would probably have know who he was from Ginny’s description. Even Bridges might have known. But at least he would be able to report that Gerlach had eaten his meal of spaghetti and meatballs at The Cedar Post. The sheriff could take it from there.

  One other question occurred to him. He knew it was important, but it also gave him another few minutes with The Post’s attractive bartender.

  “Do you remember if Gerlach had much to drink that day?”

  “Indeed he did. He usually drank heavily when he came in. That’s one of the reasons I remember him so well. But last week he really outdid himself. Usually he came to the bar, got his drink, then went back to his table. This time the other man got his drinks. I’m not sure just how many scotches he put away, but it could easily have been five. His partner had something, too, a gin and tonic I think, but just the one.”

  “Did Gerlach act drunk when he left?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention, I’m afraid. I happened to look up as they were on their way out the door, but it was too late to see how he was doing. Not that I cared at the time.”

  “By the way,” Barrett said as he gathered up his change and placed a tip for Ginny on the bar, “do you remember who waited on them?”

  “I’m pretty certain it was Jill Fenton. She’s not in today. Should I tell her you want to talk with her?”

  “That’s probably a good idea. She might have picked up something from their conversation that the sheriff would be interested in.”

  When Barrett left for the trip back to Cumberland, he was pleased with himself. He had a good, solid report for the sheriff, and he’d enjoyed the opportunity to spend half an hour with Ginny Smith. He liked to think that she thought of him as a friend.

  _____

  The sheriff was out having a late lunch when he got back to Cumberland. He could have given his report to Bridges and set off on his routine task of pulling over speeders and otherwise policing the highways of Cumberland County. But he wanted to present the report himself, so he pulled out a chair in a corner of the squad room and turned his attention to a copy of People magazine that had somehow found its way into the building.

  He didn’t have long to wait. Carol came in just ahead of three, her face registering her surprise to find him there, engaged in what didn’t look like official business.

  “Jim,” she said, leaning across the squad room table, “what’s going on?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to get back from lunch so I could fill you in on what I learned at The Cedar Post. I think you’re going to like this.”

  “Gerlach had his meatballs at The Post?”

  “He sure did. And he didn’t dine alone either. According to Ginny Smith—she’s the bartender there—he had lunch with another man and had a helluva lot to drink.”

  Carol knew full well who Ginny Smith was, and was privately amused that Barrett felt it necessary to identify her as The Post’s bartender, as if this would be something only men would know.

  “Who’s the other man?” she asked, addressing the most important revelation in Barrett’s report.

  “She didn’t know.” He sounded slightly defensive on Ginny’s behalf. “But she gave me a pretty good description.”

  He proceeded to describe the man who had lunched with Harley Gerlach. Carol listened intently. Her initial reaction was one of disappointment. There was nothing really distinctive about the man Barrett was describing. He could have been an old friend, a neighbor, any one of dozens of people about whom she would know nothing. He might even have been a member of the opera company, although Carol doubted this in view of the fact that Gerlach had apparently been disliked by everyone in the company. She realized that she had been hoping that Gerlach’s companion would turn out to be somebody who’d been involved in the Gianni Schicchi project.

  Barrett started to provide more details about Gerlach’s consumption of scotch when Carol interrupted him.

  “Wait a minute, Jim. Tell me again what Ginny said about this man. Everything she said, even if it seems irrelevant.”

  Barrett repeated what he had said before. He was sure he had left nothing out.

  This time Carol concentrated on comparing Barrett’s description with the people she had come to think of as prime suspects in Gerlach’s murder
. It could not have been Janet Myers for obvious reasons, and it didn’t sound the least like Paolo Rosetti or Sean Carpenter. Arthur Conklin was another story. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she saw Conklin in Barrett’s verbal portrait.

  Carol knew better than to jump to the conclusion that Gerlach and Conklin had, for whatever reason, lunched together at The Cedar Post the day Gerlach was killed. She’d have to give it more thought, speak with Ginny Smith herself, and eventually have another talk with Conklin. But when Barrett left to patrol county roads and she returned to her desk, Carol had trouble suppressing the feeling that her investigation might have turned a critical corner.

  CHAPTER 43

  It was the time of the year when the Weather Channel typically focused on late summer heat waves and the hurricane season. But on the last Saturday in August, with Labor Day just over a week away, a cold front had passed through New York and New England, dropping temperatures precipitously and threatening to set records in the Finger Lakes region. Carol and Kevin had paid little attention to the forecast, and when they finally crawled into bed around midnight on Friday, they had no inkling of what the morrow would bring.

  Carol was up first, and it was when she ventured out onto the deck to fill her lungs with fresh morning air that she first realized how dramatically the weather had changed. The thermometer told the story. It was a chilly 45 degrees. She was wearing the light summer robe which had served her well since she had moved some of her clothes to the cottage. Not this morning.

  She borrowed a warmer robe from Kevin, and over breakfast they talked about the weather, making the predictable jokes about global warming. They had discussed the new developments in the Gerlach case the previous evening until there was literally nothing more to say. Neither of them was in any hurry to start doing the things they had agreed needed doing, although the list was long. But by the time ten o’clock rolled around, Carol announced that she was going to take a shower.

  “If I don’t get a move on, we might as well kiss today good-bye.”

  “Just when I was thinking about going back to bed,” Kevin said.

  “Well, if you do, you’re not going to have any company. I want to make the rounds of Arthur Conklin’s nurseries and pay a visit to Miss Merriman. What are you going to do for the good of the cause?”

  “I promised to talk to the Helman woman, remember? She’s my candidate for the thief who relieved me of Gerlach’s photo album.”

  “Tell you what. Why don’t you get ready and come with me while I try to find out what Conklin was doing a week ago Tuesday. Then we’ll split up. I’ll take Merriman and you see if Helman swiped the album. Okay?”

  It was, and by eleven o’clock they were on the road.

  “I should have followed up on Conklin’s alibi sooner than this,” Carol said as they turned onto the interlake road east of Yates Center. The closest of Conklin’s nurseries, according to directions they had obtained over the phone, was just over a mile south, next to the Summerwind Winery.

  On the way from the cottage to the nursery they had revisited their tentative conclusion of the night before: It was probably Conklin who had lunched with Gerlach on the day of his death. But why had he done so? And after lunch had he gone on to Brae Loch and strangled Gerlach to death? The trip to the nurseries would not answer the first question, but it might help to answer the second.

  The one question they were quite sure they had answered was who had started to write a note and then crumpled it and tossed it, unfinished, into the wastebasket in the bathroom in Wayne Hall. It had read ‘How about Tuesday noon? We could—’ and then nothing more. They had assumed that the author of the note hadn’t finished it because he—or was it she?—had spotted the person for whom the note was intended before finishing the message, and had simply communicated whatever was on his mind orally. And what had happened on Tuesday noon? Gerlach and somebody, probably Conklin, had met at The Cedar Post. The message would then have read, if finished, ‘How about Tuesday noon? We could meet at The Cedar Post for lunch.’

  All of this had been speculation, of course, but it made sense. What didn’t make sense was why Conklin would want to meet Gerlach for lunch. Or, if the roles had been reversed and it had been Gerlach who wrote the unfinished note, why would Gerlach have wanted to meet Conklin for lunch. Perhaps they would learn something useful at the nursery they were now approaching.

  Neither Carol nor Kevin had done much gardening, at least not in recent years. Carol had had little or no time for it, and Kevin was frankly disinterested. They had not visited any of Arthur Conklin’s three nurseries. If they had, they would have known that these were not your typical nurseries, stocked with the usual assortment of annuals, perennials, and floral arrangements. Instead, Conklin’s Nurseries specialized in what might be called yard and patio design. When they drove into the interlake nursery, they were greeted by an impressive array of outdoor fountains, stone lanterns, a koi pond, and a dry sand and rock garden which Kevin recognized as copied from Kyoto’s famous Ry?an-ji garden. There were, of course, a variety of shrubs, plants, and flagstones of various sizes, but the principal business of this nursery was obviously to create elegant landscapes for upscale customers.

  Carol parked the car and left Kevin to stroll through the artfully arranged display while she sought out the manager. She half expected to find Conklin himself somewhere on the property, but was quickly disabused of that idea when she located a man who appeared to be in charge. He was sitting in a spacious office, the walls of which were covered with beautiful photos of some of the gardens which the nursery had designed. On the wall behind his desk was a framed photo of the owner. It was a good likeness of Arthur Conklin, standing in the midst of a display of bonsai trees and smiling at the camera.

  “Good morning,” Carol said as she approached the desk. “Is Mr. Conklin in, by chance?”

  She hoped he wouldn’t be, for that could make it more difficult for her to get a candid answer to the question of whether he had been at the nursery on the Tuesday afternoon when Gerlach had been killed. But she needn’t have worried.

  “I’m afraid not,” the man behind the desk said. “But I’m his manager, and I’d be glad to help you.”

  “Silly of me to expect him to be here,” Carol said in an apologetic tone. “He’s entitled to his weekend, isn’t he?”

  “Mr. Conklin is hardly ever here at the nursery,” the manager said. “He handles the business; we do the design work and sales. His office is in his home, up in Geneva. Did you need to see him? I could give you his phone number, although I think I’d wait until Monday to call.”

  “No thanks, that won’t be necessary.”

  Carol was considering the information that Conklin could rarely be found at the nursery. And presumably that meant any of the three nurseries.

  “That would explain it,” she added. “I came by last week, I think it was Tuesday, asking for him, but I was told he wasn’t here.”

  “Well, that’s a coincidence,” the manager said. “You just weren’t lucky. He happened to stop by a week ago last Tuesday, first time he’d been here in several weeks. But he was here for only about five minutes. I think he wanted to check the price on a lantern a friend of his had asked him about.”

  “Can you believe it,” Carol said, shaking her head, “we must have just missed each other. When did he stop by?”

  “It must have been around three. Something like that.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel so bad. I came by in the morning.”

  Carol felt a small twinge of guilt that she had once more resorted to a lie. It seemed to be coming more easily to her.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” The manager seemed to have decided that they had devoted enough time to this customer’s unsuccessful efforts to see Mr. Conklin.

  “No, not now. I’m waiting for my partner. He’s been looking at your koi pond. I think someone is already helping him.”

  Another lie. Now they’d
be expecting Kevin to get into a serious discussion of koi ponds, their cost, what happens to the koi during the winter, and so on. She’d better get them out of the nursery and on their way to Geneva and nursery number two.

  The other two nurseries were farther away from Crooked Lake, one on the northern outskirts of Geneva, the other several miles west at a major thruway exit. If Conklin had paid a visit to either one on Tuesday afternoon, no one at either nursery had seen him. The resident manager in each case said essentially what the manager at the interlake road nursery had said: The owner never—well, almost never—stopped by. When he held a meeting with his managers, they occurred at his home in Geneva. Their contacts were almost exclusively by e-mail. He ran a tight ship. Business was good. But he didn’t interfere with the week to week running of the nurseries, and the managers agreed that that was a good thing.

  It was at the second nursery, which like the first had the picture of Conklin and the bonsai trees in the manager’s office, that Carol had an idea.

  “Would you mind if I made a copy of that picture on the wall?” she asked. “I have a friend who always talks about dressing up her place with bonsai. Maybe I could steer her to you people. Could you possibly slip that picture out of the frame for just a minute and make a copy for me?”

  The manager seemed surprised at the request, but could think of no reason why he shouldn’t be obliging. So Carol left the nursery with the picture of Conklin which she intended to show Ginny Smith and the waitress at The Cedar Post. The price she had paid was yet another lie. Three in less than an hour. If it wasn’t necessary to identify Harley Gerlach’s killer, she’d probably be ashamed of herself.

  On their way back to the lake, Carol decided to put Kevin to work.

  “Conklin’s alibi for that Tuesday afternoon is that he was visiting his nurseries. We now know that he rarely visited them, and the only one who could corroborate his alibi was the manager of the interlake road nursery. Let’s find out how many minutes it would take to drive over there from Brae Loch. Then double that, add in five or at most ten minutes at the nursery, and we’d know how hard it would be for Conklin to fit a murder into his afternoon schedule. Or how easy. I’ve got a pretty good idea about the time, but we need to be as precise as we can. So why don’t you take your car and time the trip from Brae Loch to the nursery and back. In fact, why don’t you, while you’re at it, figure the time from The Cedar Post to the nursery and then back to Brae Loch. I’ll try to pin Ginny down on when Gerlach and Conklin left The Post.”