The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  Chapter 21

  “Lieutenant?”

  Claudia jumped, startled from a concentration so fierce that she’d locked out everything around her but the notes she was writing. Her last stroke ran in a flat line off the edge of the paper.

  “What are you doing here, Booey? It’s Sunday.” She checked her watch. “And it’s early.”

  “Not for me. I usually get up at five. I hit the shower first thing. By five-thirty I’m already having cereal with skim milk. Then I—”

  “Admirable, Booey. Very healthy. How’s your uncle doing, anyway?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it! He’s like a new man, laughing a lot, full of energy. It’s like a miracle—that’s what Aunt Jeannie says. She dragged him to church this morning. Told him he had a lot to be grateful for and he should let God know he is.”

  Claudia smiled. She wondered how long it would take Suggs to sneak a chili dog. “You know when they’ll be back? I need to fill him in on some things.”

  “Probably by eleven o’clock.”

  She saw his eyes dart to her desk. They narrowed with the strain of trying to read her notes upside down. She almost laughed out loud. “Don’t hurt yourself there, Booey.”

  He looked away guiltily.

  “I’m just having some fun with you. Go on, have a seat. I’ll bring you up to speed.”

  The chief should hear about the developments first, but Booey was here now, and he’d been in on everything else so far. Besides, he had a squirrelly way of thinking that every now and then produced surprising insights. The whole time she talked his feet thrummed against the floor as fast as a hummingbird’s wings, which she knew by now meant his brain was turning, but when she finally finished he shook his head apologetically. No neurons firing today. They both looked at the evidence bag on her desk.

  “So what did bring you in here today, Booey? You never actually said.”

  He slid three pages across her desk. “I found this online, from the archives of Rail and Whistle Journal. It’s a magazine similar to Model Railroader or Finescale Railroader.”

  She nodded as if she were familiar with them.

  “This particular article is a profile on Henry Becker from two and a half years ago. It’s mostly about how he got started in model railroading, plus details on some of his models, but the writer also talked to Barbara Becker a little.”

  Claudia glanced at the pages. The magazine had published a spread on Becker, plus a brief sidebar on his wife. The main article included a tightly cropped picture of Becker, holding up a model locomotive, plus a wider photo showing one of his layouts. Claudia realized this was the first time she’d seen a picture of Becker alive. If Barbara Becker kept photographs of her husband in their house, she hadn’t put them on public display.

  “He looked like a kind man, didn’t he?” said Booey.

  Even in health, Becker was thin, with fine features in a narrow face that combined to give him something of a patrician appearance. But it was his eyes that drew Claudia in, for they radiated lively intelligence and an undeniable enthusiasm. Without a hint of the Alzheimer’s that would doom him, he looked like he could’ve lived to be one hundred. She agreed that he looked kind—a person she might have enjoyed knowing.

  But it was Barbara Becker that surprised her. For the picture that accompanied the sidebar, the photographer had captured her beside a window in an unguarded moment, her mouth open and her head thrown back in laughter. Her expression reflected a warmth and lack of self-consciousness that made Claudia want to laugh along with her. But she wondered if Barbara Becker had been horrified by the picture when the article came out. Her hair showed serious gray and the window light was unflattering, revealing her age in a wrinkled neck and a network of feathery lines on her face—everything she worked so diligently to conceal with heavy makeup.

  “What’s interesting,” said Booey, “is that in the sidebar Mrs. Becker says she loves model railroading almost as much as her husband. And in the main article? One of their friends is quoted as saying the same thing. But Mrs. Becker told us she didn’t like his trains, or didn’t share his passion for the hobby—something like that. Here, look.”

  Booey popped from his chair and moved around the desk to stand beside Claudia. He jabbed a finger on a paragraph. Claudia read: “Sharon Drake, a long-time friend of the couple, described the Beckers as ‘proverbial lovebirds’ who can’t take their eyes off each other unless it’s to look at a new model train.”

  Claudia skipped a paragraph in which the writer described one of Becker’s newest acquisitions, then read Drake’s concluding comment: “Whenever I call Barbara, I have to let the phone ring a dozen times because it takes so long for her to pry herself away from Henry, or his trains, or both.” The author of the article had asked her whether that might be an exaggeration, and Drake had laughed and replied, “If it is, then it’s only a small one.”

  While she read the rest of the story, Booey fidgeted at her side. There wasn’t a lot else to learn. The author had effectively captured a man and his hobby, making more of technical details than Claudia cared to know. The sidebar on Barbara Becker was a respectful nod to the wife, a device she knew was intended to flesh out Henry’s character more than anything else.

  “Why would she not be honest about her interest in Mr. Becker’s trains?” Booey asked.

  Claudia wondered the same thing. She looked at Booey. “Do some of your magic for me,” she told him. “Get me a phone number for this Drake woman. Let’s see if we can put this into some kind of context.”

  He was halfway out the door when she stopped him. “Hey, Booey? Nice job.”

  “It was nothing, really. I was just trolling online. You would’ve—”

  “Look, this is as good as it gets from me, so stop fishing.” She smiled. “You found something good. We don’t know why it’s good yet, but we will.”

  He beamed, then pivoted into the multipurpose room, in pursuit of an unoccupied computer. Claudia went back to her notes.

  * * *

  After she talked to Suggs, Claudia drove into Flagg and dropped the evidence bag off at the crime lab, with little optimism that what it contained would produce anything worthwhile. The evidence clerk who logged it in chided her for not bringing it in earlier, but Claudia barely listened. She was thinking about Sharon Drake. Booey had come through with a phone number for the woman in record time, but Claudia elected not to leave a message on the answer machine when it picked up. She wanted to catch Drake cold, though she wondered now if fatigue was beginning to interfere with her judgment. She was going nowhere fast with the Becker case, and she worried that waiting for the right moment to catch Drake might be less a tactical move than an indication of inertia, which she knew could strike any investigator when a case got bogged down.

  Claudia yawned and aimed her car toward the gourmet grocery store in Feather Ridge. After she picked up a sandwich for herself and Booey, she’d call again. If Drake didn’t answer, she’d leave a message. End of story.

  Milo Aggastino spotted her before she saw him, and interrupted a conversation with a stock boy to boom out a greeting. “Detective Hershey! Looks like I’m not alone in working a Sunday.” He said something else to the stock boy, clapped him on the back and strode to meet her. “What can I get you? And please don’t tell me a bagel and cream cheese. That’s all anybody seems to want on a Sunday, and it’s no substitute for real food.”

  Claudia smiled. “I need two sandwiches to go. Something mildly sinful. Surprise me.”

  “Done and done,” said Aggastino. “Give me one second.”

  True to his word, the grocer was back shortly. He handed Claudia two fat packages. “You’ll like these,” he said. “I can’t take credit for them—they’re the work of a new deli guy I hired—but I watched what he did and if you’re disappointed then I’m in the wrong line of work. How about coffee to go with them?”

  “No thanks. I’m pretty much tanked out on caffeine for now.”

  A
ggastino patted his vast belly. “You ought to put some weight on. You’d be surprised how much you could absorb of anything.” He followed her toward the checkout lanes. “I should apologize for not calling you after your last visit here. I did ask around about the cat lady—casually, of course—but none of the employees had more than a vague recollection of seeing her here and there. She seemed to have about as much staying power with them as last night’s dream.”

  “Wanda Farr was invisible to most people.”

  “Maybe that’s just the way things are these days.” Aggastino waited for Claudia to pay, then walked her toward the door. “The old people, they’re dropping like flies lately.”

  She looked at him curiously.

  “Okay, not dropping like flies, exactly, but—do you read the obituaries? No? Well, I do.” He laughed at her expression. “It sounds more gruesome than it is. I keep up so that if one of my customers dies I can send the family a small fruit basket. It’s part of a cradle-to-grave philosophy my father handed down to me. ‘Milo,’ he’d say, ‘shake hands when new customers come into your store. Send fruit when old ones die.’ I’ve always done that.”

  “Sounds like your father had good business sense.”

  “He did. But just lately, I wish he’d been less insistent I follow the obits. In the last ten days I’ve lost five customers. I didn’t hear about the cat lady from the obituaries, of course, but she was the first. Mrs. Lakely and Mrs. Sapperstein—both went from sudden heart attacks. Then there was Mr. Becker and just this Friday, Mr. Torres. He had—”

  “You knew Henry Becker?”

  Aggastino shrugged and held open the door. “I knew him like I knew most of my customers, which is to say not much. And with Mr. Becker, it was even harder to know him because he had some kind of dementia, or at least that’s what I heard. He—I’m sorry, was he a friend of yours?”

  “No, but I knew of him,” Claudia said quickly, surprised and grateful that for once the town’s rumor mill was running on empty.

  “I guess everybody did. With those long walks of his, he was becoming something of a fixture in the neighborhood. Anyway, he didn’t have a lot to say and he always looked a little lost to me. But he was nice enough and I was sorry to hear he’d died.”

  “So he was one of your regulars?”

  “Oh, he didn’t always buy anything, but he wandered in here most days, usually by himself. Now and then he was with some woman, a flashy young thing who I took to be his nurse. That’s not unusual here. Most of the Feather Ridge people can afford private nurses when they need them. Anyway, she’d sashay in like she owned the place and ignore Mr. Becker while she played to the crowd—or at least that’s how it looked to me. She’d buy groceries and a fistful of lottery tickets, and she’d flirt with the stock boys. Poor Mr. Becker, he’d just sort of stand around and go ‘Barbara? Barbara? Where’s Barbara?’ This woman would roll her eyes and say ‘I’m right here, sugar plum.’ But it was like she was annoyed with him.”

  “That’s our Babs,” Claudia murmured.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I take it you didn’t think much of her.”

  “Let’s just say she could’ve been a little more respectful.”

  “What about Mrs. Becker?”

  “Her I never met.”

  They’d reached Claudia’s car. Huge clouds shaped like mushrooms scuttled east across a sky so blue it almost looked fake. She watched a plane shoot through one of them.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” said Aggastino. He smiled. “My theory is that when God decided to create the heavens and the earth, he started right here. There isn’t another state in the union that displays it all so perfectly.”

  “You might be onto something there,” Claudia replied. She unlocked her car door and threw the sandwiches on the passenger’s seat, then slid behind the wheel. “Thanks for the personal treatment.”

  “Any time.”

  She started up the car. “One last thing? If anything else occurs to you about Mr. Becker—if you remember anything more, anything at all—would you get in touch?”

  Aggastino’s jaw dropped. “I . . . a second ago we were talking about clouds. Now we’re back on Mr. Becker? I can’t believe that’s not by design. Are you saying that his death wasn’t an accident?”

  “You’ve still got my business card, right?”

  “My afternoon just went down the toilet.” The grocer leaned toward Claudia’s window. “I suppose your whole day has been there. If . . . sure. I’ll call.”

  “And—”

  “Yes, that too. I’ll be discreet.”

  Claudia thanked him and waved as she pulled away. He didn’t wave back. She understood. The grocer liked her just a little less. She could hear it in his voice, see it in his expression—all familiar territory. Some people sprinkled fairy dust wherever they went. Not her. She powdered the world with toxic information and they would look at her and they would wonder . . . does she like this? They would wonder, doesn’t she see the beauty all around her?

  A pickup burdened with a frayed couch and loveseat belched gray exhaust in front of her. Nothing was tied down. The taillights didn’t work. Someone ought to pull that guy over, but not her, not today. She did have a life and she didn’t live it all in the dark.

  When the road widened into four lanes, Claudia sped around the vehicle. It was Sunday. She would check messages, eat at her desk and go home, maybe spruce the place up. If she couldn’t reach Drake from the station, then she would do that from the house, but that was it. She did so know the clouds were beautiful. Did so, did so, did so.

  Chapter 22

  Sharon Drake didn’t get it. She thought Claudia was making a courtesy call to inform her that her friend’s husband had died. She didn’t get that Claudia was talking about murder, and she didn’t get it because she was too drunk to get anything except a fresh twist of lime for her gin and tonic. She told Claudia that much without prompting, and she told her a whole lot more in a phone call that should’ve topped out at fifteen minutes but ballooned into thirty.

  Claudia threw a load of whites into the washer while she considered their conversation. Her left ear was still numb from the press of the phone. She imagined Drake was merely numb all over. If it was five o’clock in Florida, then it was four o’clock in Chicago, which meant Drake must’ve started drinking seriously by two o’clock or earlier. But her “newly acquired fondness for liquor,” as she’d put it to Claudia, played no role in the disintegration of her friendship with Barbara Becker.

  “Honey,” she’d said in a Texas drawl she hadn’t quite erased, “After Barbara moved south she turned into a hermit or she turned into a bitch, or she turned into both. She never called me or even returned my messages. She didn’t come to visit and she sure as hell didn’t invite me down. I don’t know what happened and frankly, I stopped caring after she couldn’t be bothered to send so much as a sympathy card when my Bobby died six months ago.”

  Claudia set the washer dial to permanent press and turned it on. So there it was, Barbara Becker caught up in another lie. Her R&R trips to Chicago had nothing to do with former acquaintances. She understood why Drake would feel hurt.

  The two women had been good friends for seven years, almost from the day Drake and her husband had moved to Chicago from Houston. They met at a country club where they played lousy tennis, reasonably skilled bridge, and ate leisurely lunches twice a week.

  “Why Barbara and I hit it off is a mystery,” said Drake, “because our personalities were like night and day. In fact, if anyone would’ve been likely to move to Florida, you’d think it would be me. I’ve detested Chicago since we moved here. Too damned windy. Too damned cold. But Barbara—she loved it. She’d begun to put in a beautiful garden out back, she had season tickets to the theater, she was talking about remodeling the house. Why on earth she up and left I’ll never understand.”

  She hadn’t said ‘understand.’ She’d said ‘unnershtan’, but it was cl
ose enough. Claudia had learned how to distill language from drunks long ago. She had also learned how to put aside impatience and let them ramble, which Drake seemed perfectly content to do.

  “Look, I get that once Henry went and contracted that head disease, that, that . . .”

  “Alzheimer’s?” Claudia supplied helpfully.

  “Yeah, that. Once he got that, life as they knew it was on its way to being over. I am one hell of a lot more sensitive than Barbara, if you care to know the truth, and so I recognized that things were going to change. But from what I could see the man was a long way from being brain dead. He was a little forgetful, and he got moody, and now and then he’d do mildly peculiar things, but he could still carry on a conversation. There was no reason to move him and there was certainly no reason to bring in that trollop who Barbara found in a nursing home.”

  “I thought Henry liked her,” said Claudia.

  “Well, honey, of course he liked her! Just because his brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders didn’t mean the rest of him wasn’t. She’s the kind of woman who can turn men into mush just by batting her eyelashes, which she loved to do. My Bobby was ten years older than Henry and I was afraid he’d have a stroke just by being in the same room with her.”

  Claudia heard ice cubes rattle. “But Henry was devoted to Barbara, no?” she asked. “And she was devoted to him?”

  “Oh, you are naïve.” Drake huffed impatiently. “Being devoted to each other and having a healthy respect for firmer, younger flesh are not mutually exclusive concepts.”

  Of course, she’d asked Drake about the Beckers’ interest in model trains and Drake repeated what she’d said in the magazine article. Henry and Barbara both enjoyed the hobby, though Drake insisted that Barbara’s interest was dependent on Henry’s.

  “If one day he decided he liked bungee jumping, then she’d probably get involved with it, too,” Drake said. “Don’t get me wrong; she genuinely admired the trains and she could practically write a book on what was what with them—that’s how much she knew. But there was an equation there, and if you subtracted out Henry the trains would be less than knickknacks to her. That’s what happened when he got diagnosed with that disease. Her interest in trains plain out flatlined. She’d keep him company while he tinkered with them, but she could’ve cared less.”