“Hi,” I said, sitting down on the visitor chair in front of his desk. Then, deciding that ignoring his condition would be ludicrous, I added, “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” He leaned back in his chair. “What’s up?”
Okay, I thought. I can take a hint as well as the next person. We’re pretending like it didn’t happen. “Did you eat lunch?” I asked, trying to lighten the room’s tense atmosphere.
“Yes.”
“Tomato soup through a straw?” I inquired with a smile, trying to get a laugh.
He didn’t return it. “Benni, I know you think this is funny, but I personally find it humiliating. I’m very busy. Why are you here?”
“Sorry,” I said contritely, thinking I certainly deserved to have my nose bitten off when I couldn’t even take my own advice to Sam and Emory. “I’ve discovered something important about Shelby’s and Kip’s murders.”
“What?”
I opened my purse and set the miniature cassette tape on his desk. “He called yesterday, but I didn’t listen to my messages until about an hour ago.”
He pulled a small tape recorder from his desk and listened to Kip’s words. I shifted in my seat, feeling helpless and angry again that I hadn’t been able to help Kip. After listening to it five times, Gabe leaned back in his chair and rested his chin in his palm.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I’ll send it over to John,” he said. “Kip hasn’t really given us much to go on. Sounds like Shelby might have seen something ... a crime perhaps. Or possibly found out about some illegal activity.”
“Maybe she tried to blackmail someone!” I added eagerly, “And they killed her to keep her quiet. She must have let Kip in on it, and they got him, too. Did you notice he used the word ‘they’? That must mean there’s more than one, right?” I scooted forward in my chair.
He came around the desk. “I don’t know what it means, and it’s not my case anyway. Or yours, I might add, though I know that’s a waste of time.”
“Hey,” I said, standing up and poking him in the chest. “The minute I heard this, I scurried right over here like a good little citizen. Six months ago I wouldn’t have told you for days.”
Taking my finger and shaking it, he laughed, grimacing at the pain. “Yes, sweetheart, I know, and I’m very proud of you.”
I sighed deeply. “If only I’d listened to my messages sooner...”
“Stop it,” he said. “I don’t want you feeling guilty over something that wasn’t your fault. Frankly, I’m glad you weren’t able to meet him.”
“I’m not. I might have kept him from getting killed.”
He smoothed down the top of my hair. “Or gotten killed yourself.”
“Well, I just want credit for bringing this right to your desk with no sidetracking.”
“Credit given. What are you doing the rest of the afternoon?”
This time I grimaced. “Elvia finally extracted her revenge on me. Apparently one of the ladies in the fashion show tomorrow night is in the hospital, and I have to take her place. I’m going by the costume shop downtown for a fitting.”
“You’re in the fashion show!” He laughed out loud. “Good for Elvia. What decade are you?” Gabe had managed to finagle wearing a classic forties suit and hat. Not a huge departure from his normal mode of dress. He’d threatened Elvia with a boycott if she made him wear a seventies leisure suit.
“Eighteen eighties,” I grumbled. “They have me wearing a peacock blue ball gown. I haven’t actually seen it yet.”
He grinned. “Didn’t women wear corsets back then? And bustles?”
“Very funny,” I said, holding up a fist to him. “I could give you matching eyes, you know.”
He bent over and kissed my fist, wincing as he did. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Don’t forget, we have the fish egg—eating party at the mayor’s tonight. Seven o‘clock.”
“And you can practice having some class right now. It’s called caviar.”
“Ha! Etiquette lessons from a man who brawls before brunch.”
“Get lost,” he said good-naturedly.
I felt better about his sunnier mood as I drove downtown to be fitted for my dress. Maybe the fight cleared everything out of his and Wade’s testosterone-filled systems, and we could concentrate now on the real problem—who killed Shelby and Kip? I wondered if Isaac found anything helpful at Shelby’s apartment. I glanced at my watch after I parked the truck in the five-story parking structure. Five minutes past four. I had to meet Isaac in less than an hour, and the only new information I had for him was about Kip’s missed phone call. The bartender at the Frio Saloon hadn’t shed any new light on the subject except to say that possibly Bobby could have ambushed Kip later. I headed for the costume shop downtown, where the Historical Society was storing all the clothes for the fashion show. After giving my name to the female clerk sporting three nose rings, I was directed to the back fitting room where Helen Berrymore, fund-raising chairman for the Historical Society, was flipping through hanging clothing bags and marking off things on a dark brown clipboard. Helen and Dove were longtime friends who had a once-a-year date to put up pickles together.
“Hi, Helen. Sorry I’m late,” I said, immediately sneezing twice. The room was warm and smelled of mothballs and Helen’s White Shoulders perfume.
“My goodness. God bless you, Benni.” She blinked her round, pale blue eyes rapidly, patting me on the back as if I were choking, not sneezing.
“I think I’m supposed to get fitted for something.” I rubbed my nose and sat down on a stool next to a full set of armor.
She flipped through her clipboard. “That’s right, Maribelle’s appendix burst on her. Looks like you’ll be the belle of the ball tomorrow night.”
“Oh, lucky me,” I said. “So where’s my costume?”
She turned and unzipped a wine-colored clothing bag hanging behind her. The dress seemed impossibly small, and a distant ray of hope started to glow within me.
“I couldn’t possibly fit in that dress,” I said cheerfully, slipping down off the stool. “Too many tri-tip sandwiches and moonpies. Guess you all will have to find someone else.”
She peered at me over her Ben Franklin spectacles. “Albenia Harper, you are a size seven, am I not correct?”
“Well ...” I hedged. “I honestly haven’t bought any clothes for a long time. I’m sure I’m much heavier. You know how getting married puts the weight on you.” I pouched out my stomach slightly and patted it.
She scanned me with a critical eye. “Take off those jeans, young lady, and we’ll just see. Elvia called before you came and said you’d try to wiggle out of this. Where’s your community spirit? For heaven’s sake, you’d think I was asking you to strip naked and do the frug.”
That picture certainly shut my mouth. “The frug?” I managed to say after a few seconds.
“A dance from the sixties,” she said, taking the dress off the padded satin hanger. “Been learning all sorts of useless trivia since I agreed to be in charge of the costumes and write the program.”
Resigned to my fate, I stood in my bra and underwear and held out my hand for the ballgown.
“This first,” she said and handed me the corset. “Otherwise that wide waist of yours will never fit in this dress. I swear, Benni Harper, you are as straight up and down as a boy.”
I held the underwear contraption in front of me. “How do I work this thing?”
She turned me around and within a few minutes, after some enthusiastic pulling on her part, I was being punished for every bad thought and deed I’d ever done or would do in the next ten years. “Oh, man,” I moaned. “I’m going to kill you, Elvia.”
“She’s the toastmistress,” Helen said as she strapped the basketlike bustle around my waist.
“Good. That’ll give me a clear shot at her up there on the podium. Tell me, does this come with a matching pearl-handled revolver?”
She gestured a
t me to bend over as she slipped the dress over my head. With the help of the torturous undergarments squeezing my insides into Brunswick Stew, it fit perfectly.
“Turn around and let me button you up,” Helen said.
Since there were about two million buttons, it gave us time to catch up on local news.
“Heard on the radio this morning about that hand of yours getting killed out at the Frio Saloon last night,” she said. “Suck in some air, honey. I’m having trouble with these middle ones.”
I breathed in and wondered briefly how in the world women survived in the 1880s. No wonder they were fainting all the time. They never got a clear lungful of oxygen. “Yeah, people are a bit upset out at the ranch.”
“They’re thinking Wade did it, I heard.”
“He didn’t. I don’t know who did, but he sure as heck didn’t.”
I heard her cluck under her breath. “Now there I agree with you, Benni. I’ve known that boy a long time. He’s no killer.” She turned me around and nodded her head in approval. “Why, you look like a fairy tale princess. There’s a little torn place on the hem there, so as long as I got you here, I’ll sew it up. Step up on this box here. So, you going to find out who killed those two kids and prove your brother-in-law’s innocence?”
“My former brother-in-law,” I said, avoiding her question so I wouldn’t be forced to lie.
“What’s this world coming to? We have certainly had our fair share of murders these last few years.”
I made a sympathetic noise in my throat and decided to change the subject before Gabe’s name worked its way into the conversation. “So, who else has been in here getting fitted?” Since I hadn’t been involved in the fashion show and not gone to any rehearsals, I had no idea who was in it.
Helen rattled on about who was wearing what and what they felt about it, people’s scars and stretch marks, who caused her a headache with having to alter their costumes because of weight gains, and how shocking she found that new thong underwear. “Why, we used to throw out panties that rode up like that!”
I let my mind wander as she talked, thinking about what exactly my next move should be in at least steering the suspicion of Shelby’s and Kip’s deaths away from Wade. The mention of Greer’s name brought me back to Helen’s conversation.
“What was that about Greer?” I asked.
“Wake up, missy. I was just saying that when Greer came in here the other day to be fitted for her costume—she’s wearing a 1930s rose-colored tea dress with the prettiest lace inserts—she was talking on one of those fancy phones people carry now.”
“A cellular phone.”
“That’s it. Bob wants me to get one and I told him that, thank you very much, there isn’t anybody in this world I need to talk to so badly they can’t wait till I get home. She didn’t know I was in that room over there.” She pointed to a small alcove behind the racks of costumes that contained a sewing machine and a wall-to-ceiling shelf filled with various tailoring tools. “She was really giving someone the riot act, if you know what I mean. Said she didn’t care one whit about Shelby Johnson, that she was alive and she wanted what was due her. That’s what she said, wanted what was due her.” Helen’s voice sharpened in disapproval. “I was surprised at her, to tell you the truth. Sounded a bit cold to me. Not at all what I expected from Greer. Why, her mother was head volunteer at the Red Cross for years before her arthritis crippled her up. But I didn’t let on I heard a thing.” She patted my shoulder. “All done now. The shoes and such are in that bag there. Now you be careful with that dress. It’s a genuine antique.”
Her words about Greer echoed in my head as I carried the dress to my truck. I couldn’t help but agree with Helen’s disapproval of Greer’s attitude. Actually, all the artists were starting to get on my nerves—Olivia’s anger at the pictures Shelby took of Bobby, Parker’s obsession with her public persona, Roland’s determination to make as much money off this tragedy as possible, and now Greer’s insistence on her so-called “rights” as a featured artist. Everyone seemed to have forgotten—or didn’t care—that a young woman and a young man were dead. I was disappointed in their self-centered attitudes and in the calculating and uncaring commercial side of the art world.
I had about five minutes to get to Blind Harry’s to meet Isaac. I wished I had more than Kip’s phone call to tell him. Maybe he found some clue in her apartment that the police missed.
He was sitting at a back table and had a cafe mocha waiting for me. He stood up and pulled out my chair for me.
“Thanks. How did it go?”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his dark eyes. A strand of white hair had escaped his ponytail and hung next to his weathered cheek. “Fine. I think I might have found something.”
I swiped a finger across the mound of whipped cream topping my drink and stuck it in my mouth. “What?”
He pushed a black three-ring notebook across the table to me. I pushed my drink aside and opened it. It held about fifty or sixty plastic pages holding strips of negatives. I glanced back up at him. “I don’t get it. Did you find some incriminating pictures or something?”
“No, nothing that obvious, which is why the police probably missed it. It occurred to me that if she was killed because of something she saw, she most likely took a picture of it.”
“That seems logical. I never saw her go anywhere without her camera.”
His smile was wistful. “I know. It’s hard to believe we weren’t genetically related.”
“So, what did you find that the police missed?”
“I’m sure they looked through her negatives and took any that contained people. But it occurred to me that maybe what she saw didn’t have anything to do with people, that there was something else she photographed that caused someone to kill her.”
I lifted my drink and took a sip. “And?”
“Look at this.” He pointed at a strip of negatives. I opened the binder and took them out, holding them up to the overhead lighting in the coffee house. They were of a barbed-wire fence in the woods somewhere, some oak trees, the edge of a wooden building—a barn or shed maybe.
I lowered the strip and shrugged. “I don’t recognize where that is. It could be anywhere in the county.”
“Look at this one.” He tapped his big finger on the strip in the section below the one I’d pulled out. I held up that one. More trees, a hawk, the edge of a metal corral, another corner of a building.
I looked at him in question, still not getting what he was trying to convey.
“Look at the numbering on the side of the strips.”
I peered down at the almost indecipherable numbers. The first strip was numbered one through four. The second, nine through twelve. I looked up at him. “A strip is missing!”
“Exactly. Remember what I said—that what you leave out of a photograph is almost as important as what you allow in? The police were looking for something that was there, not for something that wasn’t.”
“So, what do you think was on this strip? And more important, where do you think it is?”
“Good questions, and I have no idea about the answers to either. You know this area. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”
I studied the negatives again. They looked vaguely familiar but they could have been any of ten or twenty places I knew. “Can you have these made into prints?” I asked. “Maybe I’ll see something I recognize then.”
“Absolutely. I’ll have them done this afternoon and give them to you at the party tonight.” He leaned back in his chair. A deep weariness seemed to flood his broad, lined features, and he looked every minute of his seventy-nine years.
“This is hard for you,” I said softly.
“Yes, it is.”
We were both silent for a moment. The buoyant laughter and conversation of the surrounding tables seemed loud and almost unbearable.
“I only have a couple of things.” I quickly told him about the message Kip left on my answering machine at the mu
seum and what little I’d learned from the lady at the Frio Saloon. “It does fit into your theory that they knew something. Something someone felt was important enough to kill for.”
“Something Shelby most likely photographed. What could she photograph out in the woods that would be worth killing her over?”
I shrugged. “Could be anything these days. Drugs, cattle rustling, toxic waste dumping, smuggling. There’s not a ranch in San Celina County that hasn’t experienced all of those things to one degree or another.”
“Cattle rustling?” He smiled, slightly amused. “Maybe we should round up a posse.”
“Hey, it still happens and it’s very sophisticated now. There was one group of rustlers they caught a few years ago who had the inside of an RV gutted and made into a small rendering operation. It would pull up to a fence that borders a side road—or sometimes even a main one if it was late at night—shoot the steer, and drag it into the pseudo-RV. In less than a half hour that steer would be steaks and roasts that they’d drive up the coast and sell black market to different restaurants. Daddy and I have unexplained cattle losses every year, and they aren’t all to coyotes and mountain lions.”
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the oak table. “Do you think she might have taken a picture of that?”
I sighed. “I don’t know, Isaac. Like I said, there’s also drug labs, toxic waste dumping. I even read recently that they caught some people smuggling counterfeit CDs on a fishing boat in Morro Bay. And I’m sure the Sheriff’s Department could tell you even more illegal things that take place out in the boonies. One time Daddy and I were riding fence and way at the back of our property found some rusty leg irons locked to a tree with one old tennis shoe nearby and a bunch of empty pork-and-bean cans. It still makes me shudder to think about what that might have been about.”
Isaac shook his head. “Makes a person think twice about traipsing off in the wilderness by themselves, doesn’t it?”
“No kidding. Did you go through everything in her apartment? Maybe she hid them somewhere.”
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