The Dirt Peddler

by Dorien Grey

  When she’d gone to get our coffee and tea, Catherine smiled warmly. “It was very nice of you to invite me to lunch. I really should get out more.”

  “I’m glad you could come.”

  She was looking at me closely, still smiling. “And should I guess the reason behind the invitation…other than your natural kindness, of course?” The smile hadn’t changed, so I assumed she wasn’t being sarcastic.

  I’d thought about how I was going to approach all the questions I had, and had decided the direct route was the best.

  “I have reason to believe…” I began, then paused as the waitress brought our coffee and tea and left without asking if we were ready to order—which we weren’t.

  When she left, I continued. “I have reason to believe that your ex-husband’s death may have been something other than an accident.”

  Her expression did not change by so much as the furrowing of her brows.

  “Really? I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “But not surprised.”

  She gave a small shrug. “Some people collect matchbooks,” she said, removing the tea bag from her cup and setting in on the saucer. “Tony had a knack for collecting enemies. I’m sure several people wished him dead, but I can’t imagine anyone actually doing it. And that that unfortunate…young man…had to have been with him.”

  The waitress returned to take our order and we quickly looked at the blackboard. We both chose the spinach quiche and, smiling, the waitress headed for the kitchen. (I know, real men don’t eat quiche…. Sue me.)

  Catherine was looking at me again. “May I ask exactly why you care about all this, Mr. Hardesty? I believe you’d said your professional association with Tony had ended.”

  I took a sip of coffee and nodded.

  “It had. And, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, had it not been for the fact of Randy Jacobs having been in the car with him, I’d have absolutely no incentive to find out what had happened. But if someone did murder your ex-husband, he or she also murdered Randy, and I owe it to him to find out who was responsible and why.”

  She nodded. “I see. And I gather I am included on your list of possible murderers?”

  I got the definite impression she rather enjoyed trying to provoke a reaction, so I tried very hard not to give her one.

  “Well, let’s just say at this stage I’m mainly trying to eliminate possibilities. I’m curious as to why, when I asked if you were in your ex-husband’s will, you said that you had been, but didn’t imagine you were now. You did know he was having a new will drawn up at the time of his death, didn’t you? And that he died before it could go into effect?”

  Our quiche arrived, and she picked a large strawberry out of the small side dish of fresh fruit.

  “Yes. My lawyer…I call him ‘my’ because he had been my family’s lawyer for some time before Tony and I ever met. He drew up the original will…had called me from Chicago to say that attorney O’Banyon had requested a copy. He didn’t say why he wanted it, but two plus two, you know. So I knew I would soon be out. But as you say, the new will was not fully executed before Tony’s death. Pure serendipity.”

  She carefully ate the strawberry, closing her eyes in mock ecstasy at the taste. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me with a bemused expression. “Oh, my, that did give me an excellent reason to kill him, didn’t it? Too bad I never thought of it. Am I at the top of your list, now?”

  You’re getting there, lady, I thought.

  “As I say, I’m not making a list yet.”

  “And what else would you like to know? The fact that none of it is—no rudeness intended—really any of your business shouldn’t keep me from answering. If Tony’s death, and your friend’s, of course, was, as you so delicately put it, ‘something other than an accident,’ I’d be as interested as you—possibly more, considering I was married to the man for thirteen years—to find out who was responsible. I have nothing at all to hide.”

  Now, why do I doubt that? I thought.

  Still, she had opened the door, so I might as well barge right in.

  I waited long enough to have another forkful of quiche—which was delicious—and a small slice of cantaloupe before speaking.

  “I was also curious as to how you might know how far along the second book is if, as you said, he was apparently working on it at the cabin, to which you had returned the key.”

  She paused, fork halfway to her lips, and pulled her head back slightly, giving me a look of feigned surprise.

  “Why Mr. Hardesty,” she said in a tone which reminded me for some reason of Scarlett O’Hara, “I am truly impressed. It must be exciting to be a private investigator!”

  She conveyed the forkful of quiche to her mouth, chewed discretely, swallowed and said, “I told you I had returned Tony’s key. I did not say I didn’t have another one. The day after Tony’s death, I took a drive. I suppose I wanted to see where he had died, for some perverse reason. When I passed by the spot, I kept on driving until I found myself at the cabin. I felt the urge to go inside…to see it for what might be the last time. It was just as Tony had left it, which is to say a shambles. I don’t think Tony had ever picked up after himself in his life. That’s what I, his wife, was for.”

  She gave a small smile. “Anyway, I couldn’t help but notice that beside his typewriter there was a stack of papers which, when I glanced at it, I saw to be a novel. I’ll share the title with you, if you promise not to make it public knowledge.”

  Despite myself, I had to admit I found Catherine Tunderew somehow spellbinding. I was perfectly aware she was playing me like a fiddle, but I rather enjoyed the music.

  “Please.”

  “The title he had given it was No Door to Heaven. It was a very thick stack of paper. I merely thumbed through it quickly, but enough to see that he had completed three hundred and twenty-two pages. From that I gathered that he must have been fairly close to completion.”

  “And did you happen to recognize who the book might be loosely based on?”

  She shook her head and took the last piece of quiche from her plate.

  “No, I only glanced at a paragraph here and a paragraph there. It is, I did note, however, very much in the style of Dirty Little Minds. I didn’t really recognize anyone specifically. There was something there, though, in one paragraph, about a murder.”

  I definitely had the feeling I was part of a puppet show, and I wasn’t the one pulling the strings. She was good.

  A murder, eh? my mind asked.

  “Is there any way I might be able to look at the manuscript? It might give me some solid clue as to who is responsible for his death.”

  She smiled at me sweetly. “Why, Mr. Hardesty!” she said in that Scarlett O’Hara tone. “Of course not! I’ve placed it in a safe deposit box where it will remain until all the details of its disposition can be resolved.”

  “And you have not read it?”

  She looked at me steadily. “No,” she said calmly, “I have not. I never was a fan of Tony’s writing. I don’t really care who it may be…loosely…based on.”

  She took another sip of her tea. “But don’t worry,” she said, consolingly, and I almost expected her to reach across the table and pat my hand. “I’m sure that whoever may have served as the…inspiration, shall we say…for No Door to Heaven has no idea whatsoever that he is about to be immortalized. Tony was very good about keeping his own secrets.” She smiled again and then added, “And of course it is completely a work of fiction.”

  Of course.

  As the waitress came to clear away our dishes and bring me the check, Catherine started to get up from the table.

  “If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’d better go call for a cab.”

  “Please…I’ll be glad to give you a ride home.”

  “I wouldn’t want to put you to the trouble,” she said, though I noticed she was settling back in her chair even as she said it.

  “It’s no trouble at all. Is something wrong w
ith your car?”

  She sighed and nodded. “I made the mistake of leaving it parked on the street when I returned from the cabin Saturday evening, rather than putting it in the garage, and some idiot smashed into it. Of course they didn’t even have the courtesy to leave a note. I didn’t find out about it until I went out Sunday morning to put it in the garage. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but the entire rear end was smashed in. I can’t tell you how angry I was—and still am.”

  There they were: my little sirens and bells sounding in the back of my mind.

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t see any point, really. There was nothing they could do at that point. Luckily, it was driveable and I have insurance.”

  “So it’s in the shop now?”

  She nodded again. “Oh, yes. Fortunately, there is a body shop I’ve dealt with before very near me, so I just drove it over there and left it in their lot. I put the key and a note in their mail slot. They do excellent work, but they take forever. I called yesterday and they said they’re still waiting for parts. I should have known better than to have bought a foreign car.”

  *

  I drove her home, exchanged thanks with her—hers for lunch, mine for her information—and headed back toward the office.

  Almost.

  The street to the south of Catherine Tunderew’s was Harker Blvd., mostly commercial. Since body shops are seldom found on strictly residential streets, I turned at the first corner past Catherine’s apartment building and went down to Harker. Turning left, I drove for three or four blocks looking for an auto repair shop, and found none. I circled around the block back to Harker and headed back in the opposite direction.

  Sure enough, less than two blocks from Catherine Tunderew’s apartment was All-Pro Auto Body. I parked the car and walked over to the chain link fence which surrounded the entire lot. The repair shop itself was rather small—two service bays and a small office. Both service bays were open, and I could see a yellow Cadillac in one and a Dodge station wagon in the other. About four cars, in various stages of obvious distress, stood in a row between the building and the street. One was a late model Ford with the driver’s side front end pushed in almost to the windshield; one a Buick with a smashed passenger’s side door and buckled roof; one an older model, silver Jaguar with missing front bumper, a broken passenger’s side headlight with a missing rim, and a long red-smudged sideswipe scar along the passenger’s side from just behind the front bumper to past the door…aha!…; the fourth, a small brown Renault with nothing visibly wrong with it.

  If a car had been coming down the hill toward Tunderew, made too sharp a correction on the curve and been in Tunderew’s lane…Tunderew might have swerved to avoid it, clipped it long and hard enough to make the scrape, then lost control and gone through the guardrail.

  Good thinking, Hardesty! my mind said admiringly, then had to go and add: But…God, I hate “buts.” But I had no idea if this was Catherine Tunderew’s car; but the car the Jag had tangled with had obviously been red and I didn’t know what color Tunderew’s car was; but the Jag had a broken front headlight with a missing rim and a missing bumper, which almost certainly would have been found on or near the road and weren’t. So even if this was Catherine Tunderew’s car, it was extremely unlikely it could have been the one involved in Tunderew’s death. I’d check on the color of Tunderew’s car, though, just to be certain.

  I noticed a fast-food place directly next to the body shop and decided to walk over and get a Coke. As I was walking down the driveway to the door, I checked out the chain link fence behind the row of damaged cars, and noted that the little brown Renault, which seemed to be unscathed when viewed from the front, had a badly damaged rear-end; the bumper pushed into an inward V, popping the trunk open and crinkling the lid. Both taillights were intact and nothing seemed to have broken off. I walked over for a closer look.

  Now this, I’d wager, was Catherine Tunderew’s car. She didn’t strike me as being the Jaguar type. A Renault, now…

  But…my mind said.

  Sigh.

  A Renault’s a pretty small car. I hadn’t been able to make out either the color or what kind of car Tunderew’s was from the brief shot I’d seen of it on TV, upside down in the creek, but it looked like at least a full-sized sedan. I’d imagine Tunderew would favor something that came close to reflecting his ego, even though they really don’t make cars that big. The accident took place on a straightaway; the skid marks—there was only one set—clearly indicated Tunderew’s car was the one that had done the hitting. A big car hitting a smaller car from behind? Chances are it would have been the smaller car that would have gone out of control. And the bumper’s inverted V-shaped dent suggested it had been hit at an angle rather than straight on. It’s possible Tunderew might have tried to swerve at the last minute, but to be at the angle indicated was a little hard to picture. And how could he have not seen a small car directly ahead of him? Not to mention what would Catherine Tunderew have been doing on that stretch of road at that specific time? Coincidence? Uh…I don’t think so.

  She admitted she’d been to the cabin, but would she have risked going up there if she thought Tunderew might be there? She could have been on her way up there at the time of the accident. But again, I didn’t think so. Catherine Tunderew was a complex lady, but to have been the cause of a fatal accident, then just keep right on driving…? Anything’s possible, but not everything’s likely.

  I went into the fast-food place, ordered a Coke to go, then returned to my car for a pen I kept clipped to the sun visor. Going back to the fence, I wrote the license numbers of both the Jag and the Renault on the napkin I’d grabbed with my Coke. I’d check ’em out.

  *

  All the way back to my office, I couldn’t get my mind off Catherine Tunderew and her late husband’s new book.

  No Door to Heaven, eh? Well, if I hadn’t already been pretty sure who the subject of the book was, that title all but telegraphed it. Interesting enough in its own right, but add to that Catherine’s casual observation…what was it?…ah, yes: There was something there, though, in one paragraph, about a murder. A murder? God, I wanted to get my hands on that manuscript! But Catherine Tunderew had admitted she had the manuscript safely under lock and key somewhere.

  A murder! Where? Here? Or at one of the other New Eden locations? When? Who? Why? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How high is up?

  Jeezus!

  I had the distinct impression that I was standing at the end of a hallway that stretched away nearly to infinity, lined with doors on both sides, and that I had to open every single one of them to find what I was looking for.

  *

  I had a message from Tim waiting on the machine when I returned to the office. He’d made arrangements with his contact at the crematory. Randy would be cremated at the end of the week, and Tim left a number to call to make the arrangements to pick up the ashes. I jotted it down, but thought I’d let Jonathan do the calling. I felt he’d want to.

  Next, I checked my calendar to see if I had anything scheduled for the next day (surprise—I didn’t). I wanted to spend as much of the day as possible at the public library to find out everything I possibly could about the Dinsmores and their various enterprises. I wasn’t even sure how many New Edens there were. I remembered having read the Time article on the Dinsmores when they’d made the cover, but I hadn’t paid all that much attention to it.

  I realized, too, that if I set off at a full gallop in pursuit of a possible/probable Dinsmore connection, I would also have to try to juggle the involvement of the other possible suspects on my list. For some reason, Larry Fletcher came back into my head. What if he was stalking Tunderew as Tunderew had claimed? What if he had somehow seen Tunderew pick up Randy at the bus station? Guys in their forties do not commonly pick up guys in their twenties at the bus station unless they’re a relative in from out of town. Jealousy and be
trayal are nasty emotions individually. In combination, they can be deadly. Take it from a Scorpio.

  So I decided to keep Larry on the list.

  Just above Larry Fletcher, I’d put the Bernadines…most especially Peter Bernadine, who stood to either inherit the family business or watch it go down the tubes. From all I could gather, Bernadine Press had been hanging on by its fingernails, and Dirty Little Minds had all but kept the company from bankruptcy. It needed another blockbuster to put it back on solid footing. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but the elder Bernadine had mentioned something about being in negotiations with their bank—which meant they’d applied for a loan. And I’d bet that they were using the fact of having a solid contract for Tunderew’s second book as a form of implied collateral. They’d given Tunderew his big break and had every right to expect something in return. Tunderew, being the jerk that he was, of course had neither a sense of loyalty nor any discernible scruples about biting the hand that had fed him. No second blockbuster, perhaps no loan. Murder is admittedly a pretty drastic solution to any problem, but the very existence of Bernadine Press was at stake.

  And then we come to Catherine Tunderew who, despite her feigned indifference to her ex-husband, had everything to gain and nothing to lose by his death. Hell hath no fury, etc. (Wasn’t someone just talking about there being truth within clichés? Oh, yeah, me.)

  I certainly wouldn’t have to worry about running out of clues to follow up on. Now, if somebody were just paying me for all this….

  *

  Over the years, I’d managed to cultivate a number of friends and acquaintances in various governmental offices who were able to provide me with information I might otherwise have found it difficult to come by. There was our good friend Tim Jackson at the coroner’s office, Mark Richman and Marty Gresham at the police department, Mollie Marino at the City Clerk’s office, and Bil (that’s the way he spelled it, for some reason) Dunham at the D.M.V. I called on them as infrequently as possible so as not to make a pest of myself, but it was nice to know they were there when I needed them. Some, like Mollie Marino, had been satisfied clients who helped me out of gratitude. And while it might sound a little calculated on my part, I have to admit I wasn’t above going out of my way for a client in one way or another specifically because I knew I might be able to use their services in the future. Bil Dunham at the D.M.V. was one of the latter. I’d handled a fairly simple case for him some time before and because he’d been pretty financially strapped, I’d made a direct deal with him—I’d cut my rate in half if he’d do some occasional license information checking for me. He agreed, and it worked out well for both of us.